A Great Jewish Scholar’s Rediscovered Lecture on Civil Religion and the American Constitution

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the German-born scholar of political philosophy Leo Strauss gave a series of lectures for Jewish students at the University of Chicago’s Hillel House. These talks focused primarily on what Strauss called the theological-political problem: the question of how to reconcile the demands of God with the demands of secular citizenship. In “Religion and the Commonweal,” which he delivered in 1963, Strauss expounded on the nature of the civil religion, beginning with such thinkers as Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes, but then addressing the problem of church and state in the American founding and thereafter. Samuel Goldman explores this essay, which was only recently published. (Interview by Will Lombardo and Bradley Davis. Audio, 85 minutes. A recording of Strauss’s lecture can be found here.)