Pierre Manent is one of our time’s most incisive political thinkers, and Paul Seaton has done a great service to all students of democracy by translating and editing The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times. In this anthology, Seaton has collected some of Manent’s most important essays, lectures, and interviews on the theme of religion and politics in the contemporary West. Taken together, these writings provide the reader with a broad understanding of both Manent’s hopes and his worries for Western democracies today.

Seaton centers the question of what Manent calls “The Religion of Humanity” as he guides the reader through the philosopher’s thinking over the past few decades. As Seaton sees it, Manent is insistent that the greatest peril to the modern West is that it will succumb to a secular humanism that would erase traditional political borders, along with theological claims and established customs. 

Manent writes from and chiefly about Europe, but it is easy to see why Seaton reads him as commenting on the Western world inclusive of the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, we do see a dilution of Christianity’s explicit influence on society. In both Europe and North America, support for abortion rights, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage has skyrocketed recently, while church attendance and a reverence for ecclesiastical authority have waned. 

Writing in 2012, Manent argues the point this way: “The Church will not regain its courage unless it rediscovers faith in the goodness and friendship of God. The Catholic Church … has no other political task.” In 2020, Manent responded to the way Pope Francis interpreted the parable of the Good Samaritan earlier that year in Fratelli tutti. The Pope exhorts Christians to commit more deeply to international cooperation, while Manent worries that such an attitude will come at the cost of articulating fundamental Christian teachings. He explains, “The Samaritan is none other than Jesus Christ. There is no Christianity outside of Jesus Christ. Christians, and no doubt many non-Christians, expect the Church to teach about Jesus Christ.” 

Turning to one of the volume’s more theoretical pieces, we can see that this concern is not limited to particular critiques of an individual churchman, or even a denomination. In a 2009 Milan lecture titled “How to explain, or understand Religion?” Manent forcefully argues that Westerners ought to return to prioritizing a political frame of analysis and remove what he calls the sociological approach to human understanding from its place of primacy. Those studying religion and those hoping to save its place of importance in the Western world need to think of it as a “human association and government.” He argues that this political approach (he also calls it the Aristotelian method of inquiry) is best positioned to put the most relevant questions in one’s mind and to provide the best hope of answering them more fully. Put another way, he believes Christians in today’s Western world have ceded the fundamental philosophical ground to the nonreligious. They cannot possibly hope to win a fight for souls if they won’t contend honestly and fully. 

The volume aims mostly to survey Manent’s thoughts regarding religion and politics, but it also includes lengthy passages on a few specific issues about which the philosopher is deeply concerned. One of them is immigration in today’s world. Specifically, Manent highlights the tension Western Europe faces today in accepting large numbers of migrants. His most basic complaint is that the contours of public debate now focus on moral questions nearly exclusively. Writing in 2021, he laments the way that the debate has become polarized. On one side, there are those who argue that more prosperous countries have a duty to accept as many incoming migrants as possible. On the other, there are those who assert a nation’s right to regulate immigration as a matter of basic sovereignty, without any regard to the moral question of how incoming migrants will fare. 

Instead of engaging an argument between two fixed and fundamentally opposed viewpoints, Manent asks us to think about the practical, that is the political, reasons that mass migration usually happens. Only then might we be able to devise solutions that could address the fundamental problems pushing people out of their native countries. He cites state failure, civil wars, and foreign interventions gone awry as chief drivers of migration. The thing most migrants have in common, he posits, is that their homelands are politically fragile. There may be economic or climate factors pushing them away as well, but fundamentally, they are escaping problems that can only be solved by politics: new leaders, new laws, better law enforcement, and improved political norms. He cites Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and states in west Africa as examples. We might also add Venezuela, Haiti, and Somalia to this list. Manent’s argument here is a pragmatic one. Stable, wealthy states do not have a moral duty to solve the political problems of states in crisis. If, though, Europe and the United States are going to get serious about slowing the influx of refugees then the richer countries will have to help solve the root political problems of the poorer countries.

His focus on migration connects to the other issue of chief concern in this volume. He worries about imprudent foreign policy. Specifically, Manent fears that a zealotry for intervention in the name of universal human rights often has dire consequences. In his view, the Christian West ought to be concerned for its neighbors, but it ought not to crusade, even for a good cause, because the end result is almost certain to be a worse situation. 

Writing what he straightforwardly called “A Critique of Contemporary Humanitarianism” in 2009, Manent used the Iranian nuclear program as an example. He makes clear that he supported the Western campaign to use ordinary diplomatic “carrots and sticks” to try and prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Beyond that, though, he worried that bombastic moralizing rhetoric on behalf of Western leaders was dangerously misguided and demonstrated a level of naivety that could lead to recklessness. That Western leaders deployed an absolutist moral language with “geometrical purity” demonstrates that they viewed themselves as fighting for the ideal of justice, rather than seeking to achieve the concrete but limited gains that realistic statesmen know is the best we can do in this fallen world. Rather than thinking of ourselves as “simply human beings,” Westerners ought to rededicate themselves to the traditional idea of being citizens of both an earthly country and the City of God. The task is “to be a citizen and a Christian.”

Manent’s great gift is that he cuts through the messiness of the world with clarity and nuance. We ought to think of him as writing in the tradition of Augustine, Luther, Madison, and Niebuhr. Taken in this light, Paul Seaton’s work of translation in this volume is an important contribution to students of politics who do not read French. 

This work is not perfect, however. It leaves the reader wanting more, either in the form of additional essays to round out Manent’s thought on the relationship between religion and politics in the contemporary West or in the form of introductions that more closely match Manent’s writing. Put another way, Seaton does a great job in translating and setting up these pieces, but he emphasizes the wrong fundamentals of Manent’s thought. For instance, Seaton seems to believe that Manent’s ultimate worry is that secular liberalism will trample the church in public affairs. The deepest concern I see Manent developing, though, is that traditional Christianity will fail to ensure its own relevance to the political life of the West, not through nefarious actions undertaken by the anti-religious, but through the mistakes and incompetence of the church itself. 

This slight difference of emphasis is an important one. In Seaton’s reading, Manent is worried chiefly about a Western church that is being overrun by its political enemies. My reading of this volume, though, is that Manent’s real worry is that the church is slowly allowing its own witness to be diluted to the point of irrelevance in today’s world. Manent wants the church to reassert its traditional teachings and, he believes, in the process it would regain its cultural power. 

Seaton admits in the introduction that these works do not constitute Manent’s full corpus on core issues. That’s fair enough, but we could better understand Manent if we saw more of his writings on immigration, interventions, and papal pronouncements. At times this work feels like it seeks to illuminate Manent on both the broadest philosophical questions and the most specific policy problems. It could have felt more coherent as a work had it focused on only one approach.

All in all, this is a valuable work that provides readers the chance to think alongside one of the foremost academic minds of our time as he muses on some of the most important topics we face in our public life. We live in a fast-changing time when it comes to technology, politics, and social norms in the West. The pace and depth of change can make it difficult to find throughlines, and Manent is able to do that.