Machiavelli's revolutionary polemics against Christianity as a (corrupt) set of institutions and as an (effete) view of the world obscure his own very substantial debt to Christianity, which will be discussed briefly in this chapter. There is another dimension to Machiavelli's civil-religion theorizing that is much less obvious than his celebration of Roman paganism in Discourses, I: 11–15, but that is of considerable importance in grasping the full contours of his relationship to Christianity. This comes to light in his crucial discussion of refounding, which, as we saw in Chapter 2, he discusses in connection with the efforts of St. Francis and St. Dominic to refound Christianity itself. In order for refounding to work, there must be a profound, soul-shattering, “shock and awe” effect on the civic population. Christianity was able to provoke this kind of “shock and awe” effect in relation to Judaism, and Machiavelli hopes in effect to replicate this within the domain of secular politics. Machiavelli asks this: How can one replicate the kind of unqualified commitment that Christianity manages to elicit from its adherents, and redirect this commitment toward the political sphere? It would require in this sense a civil religion to displace Christianity and render it irrelevant to the same extent that Christianity displaced Judaism and paganism and rendered them irrelevant. (Is Islam a civil religion in this sense, and is that why Islam looks so attractive to later Machiavelli-inspired theorists such as Rousseau and Nietzsche?)

In Discourses III.1, Machiavelli writes, “it is a thing clearer than light that these bodies [republics and sects] do not last if they do not renew themselves. The mode of renewing them is…to lead them back toward their beginning.” What does it mean to lead religions and republics back to the beginning? As Leo Strauss rightly says, “Machiavelli's return to the beginning means return to the terror inherent in man's situation, to man's essential unprotectedness. In the beginning there was terror.” Although the fundamental narrative of biblical religion is one of God's providence and loving (but also just) care for human beings, reflection on the examples of founding and refounding in the Discourses reminds us that there is also terror in the Bible. The common thread running through the stories to which Machiavelli gives greatest emphasis in the chapters on founding and refounding (Discourses I.9, III.1, III.3, and III.22) links up in an important way with biblical narratives and, one might say, tries to replicate in the souls of citizens the effect that these biblical narratives have on the souls of believers. Machiavelli himself draws attention to the parallel between politics and religion by referring explicitly to religion in the title of Discourses III.1, and by devoting an important section of the chapter to the monastic refounding of Christianity. Following Augustine (City of God, XV.6), Machiavelli, in I.9 of the Discourses, highlights the origins of civil life in the founder's crime, in particular, the crime of fratricide committed by Romulus: “[N]or will a wise understanding ever reprove anyone for any extraordinary action that he uses to order a kingdom or constitute a republic. It is very suitable that when the deed accuses him, the effect excuses him.” Machiavelli insists that Romulus's fratricide was not a tyrannical act because it was a necessary condition for the establishment of “a civil and free way of life.” Founders and refounders of civil and religious orders must resort to the extraordinary; reliance on ordinary laws or ordinary norms will not suffice. The distinction between the ordinary (normal politics) and the extraordinary (the politics of founding and refounding) is amplified in the discussion of the contrast between Manlius Torquatus and Valerius Corvinus in Discourses III.22: