Hobbes & Secularization: Christianity and the Political Problem of Religion

Leviathan (1651) marks an important turning point in Hobbes's thinking about religion. For the first time he becomes fully aware of what may be called the political problem of religion. Already in the De Cive (1642) Hobbes had dedicated one third of his book to that topic, the last section entitled "Of religion." But in the De Cive the treatment of the question remains, to a large extent, superficial. The political difficulties surrounding religion are not seen in their full theoretical depth and Hobbes will, at times, refuse to address some issues because they are, he claims, too obscure (231). In the De Cive the analysis of the problem remains shallow and the solution proposed is overall inadequate. There, Hobbes conceives of the problem as the difficulty of following both the law of God and the laws of men should they come to contradict each other. His solution consists in asserting that both laws rarely contradict each other and that when they do, the subject should patiently endure the harsh rale of his temporal master. Such a "solution" has often suggested that Hobbes could not be sincere, that he had no understanding of religion and considered it little more than a bothersome complication in his purely rational scheme of politics. His writings on religion, seen from this