Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 85 of 447 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Faced with the universal-ism of modern society, some people instinctively retreated into tribalism. This type of conspiracy fear, which makes people feel that they are fighting for their lives, can easily become aggressive. Jesus was no longer the loving savior preached by Dwight Moody. As the leading premillennialist, Isaac M. Haldeman, explained, the Christ of the Book of Revelation “comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love.… His garments are dipped in blood, the blood of others. He descends that he may shed the blood of men.” 14 The conservatives were ready for a fight, and, at this crucial moment, the liberal Protestants went on the offensive. The liberals had their own difficulties with the war, which challenged their vision of a world progressing inexorably toward the Kingdom of God. The only way they could cope was to see this as the war to end all wars, which would make the world safe for democracy. They were horrified by the violence of premillennialism, and its devastating critique of democracy and the League of Nations. These doctrines seemed not only un-American but a denial of Christianity itself. They decided to attack, and, despite their Gospel of love and compassion, their campaign was vicious and unbalanced. In 1917, theologians at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, the leading scholastic institution of liberal Christianity in the United States, began to attack the Moody Bible Institute on the other side of town. 15 Professor Shirley Jackson Chase accused the premillennialists of being traitors to their country and of taking money from the Germans. Alva S. Taylor compared them to the Bolsheviks, who also wanted to see the world remade in a day. Alfred Dieffenbach, the editor of the Christian Register , called premillennialism “the most astounding mental aberration in the field of religious thinking.” 16 By linking the devout teachers of the Moody Bible Institute with foes who were not only their political enemies but whom they regarded as satanic, the liberals had hit below the belt. The conservatives struck back, hard. The editor of the Moody Bible Institute Monthly and president of the Institute, James M. Gray, retorted that it was the pacifism of the liberals which had caused the United States to fall behind Germany in the arms race, so it was they who had jeopardized the war effort. 17 In The King’s Business , a premillennial magazine, Thomas C. Horton argued that it was the liberals who were in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism which they taught in their Divinity School had caused the war and was responsible for the collapse of decent values in Germany. 18 Other conservative articles blamed rationalism and evolutionary theory for the alleged German atrocities.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet the failure of fundamentalist faith is most plainly demonstrated in the rage and hatred that the televangelists displayed toward one another during the scandal. When Swaggart got wind of Bakker’s sexual relationship with Jessica Hahn, he “took on Jim Bakker like a pit bulldog taking on a French poodle,” one of Swaggart’s former aides recalled. “Just ripped him to shreds, destroyed the man.”119 Next, Bakker turned on Jerry Falwell, who had come to the rescue of PTL, and accused him of exploiting the situation to get control of the network. Falwell retaliated by calling a press conference where he produced sworn affidavits by men who claimed to have had homosexual relations with Jim Bakker, together with a note from Tammy Faye listing what she wanted from PTL in return for going quietly: $300,000 a year for Jim, and $100,000 for herself; royalties on all PTL records and books; their $400,000 mansion, two cars, security staff, legal fees, plus the fees of the accountants who were trying to sort out the Bakkers’ highly irregular finances. The grand fundamentalist enterprise seemed to have ended in a barren, unedifying cul-de-sac. The year before the scandals, Falwell had been full of confidence. He had renamed the Moral Majority “the Liberty Federation,” and declared that many of its members would be running for office in the 1988 elections at the local, state, and federal levels. But after the PTL debacle, Falwell resigned on November 4, 1987, from the presidency of the Moral Majority and the Liberty Federation and announced that his political career was over. He would never again work for a candidate as he had for Ronald Reagan, and never again lobby for legislation. In the wake of the scandals, the income from his own Old Time Gospel Hour had declined, and Falwell felt compelled to return to his private Gospel ministry.120 He would still surface from time to time to fulminate about the nation’s ills, but he could no longer look forward to the imminent creation of a coalition of religious conservatives that would take America by storm. When Pat Robertson’s bid for the presidency failed, the fundamentalist offensive, which had started in 1979 with such great hopes, seemed to have failed. The New Christian Right, discredited, appeared to have ignominiously fizzled out, and though Christians would individually continue to lobby and try to bring voters to the polls, it was generally assumed by secularists that the fundamentalist threat was over.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  21 But it is not impossible that these violent assaults are an attempt to kill a buried yearning and attraction in their own hearts. These anti-Zionist Haredim constitute a small minority: there are only about ten thousand of them in Israel, and several tens of thousands in the United States. But their influence is considerable. 22 Even though most of the ultra-Orthodox are a-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, the Neturei Karta and other radicals, such as the Satmar Hasidim, confront them with the dangers of cooperating too closely with the state. Their determined withdrawal from the State of Israel reminds the less zealous Haredim, who often feel a lack of integrity and authenticity in their cooperation with the Jewish state, that no matter how powerful and successful Israel has become in worldly terms, Jews are still in a state of existential exile and can take no legitimate part in the political and cultural life of the modern world . This Haredi refusal to accept Israel as anything but a satanic creation amounts to an act of constant rebellion against the state in which many of them live. When they stone cars on the Sabbath or tear down posters displaying scantily clad women advertising swimwear, they are rebelling against the secularist ethos of the Jewish state in which the only criterion for a course of action is its rational, practical utility. Fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths are in revolt against the pragmatic logos that dominates modern society to the exclusion of the spiritual, and which refuses the restraints imposed by the sacred. But because the secular establishment is so powerful, most have to confine their revolt to small symbolic acts. Their sense of weakness and tacit acknowledgment of their dependence upon the state in times of war, for example, can only increase the fundamentalists’ rage. The vast majority of Haredim confine their protest to a determined retreat from the secular state and to the establishment of a counterculture which challenges its values at every turn. The alternative society of the Haredim is motivated by a desire to fill the void created by the modern ethos. For Jews after the Holocaust this void is horribly graphic. Those who survived feel impelled to rebuild the Hasidic courts and Misnagdic yeshivot in Israel and the United States. It is an act of piety to the millions of Haredim who died in Hitler’s camps, and an act of rebellion against the forces of evil. They believe that by giving their Haredi institutions a new lease on life and making that dead world not only live again but become more powerful than ever, they are striking a blow for the sacred.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Edah Haredis, the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, had been vehemently opposed to Zionism long before the Balfour Declaration. It was a small group, which had attracted only 9000 out of the 175,000 Jewish residents of Palestine by the 1920s.4 Immersed in their sacred texts, the community had no idea how to organize themselves politically, but they would soon be joined by members of Agudat Israel, who had learned to play the modern political game. Agudat was still ideologically opposed to Zionism, but members had tried to balance the influence of the secularists by founding their own religious settlements in the Holy Land, where young people studied modern subjects along with Torah and Talmud. This concession appalled the more rigorous of the ultra-Orthodox, who believed that Agudat had gone over to the “Other Side.” From this intra-Orthodox conflict, a fundamentalist movement was born, inspired in the first instance, as so often, by a quarrel between coreligionists. The chief spokesman of this rejectionist Orthodoxy was Rabbi Hayyim Eleazer Shapira of Munkacs (1872–1937), one of the most eminent Hasidic leaders of Hungarian Jewry, who began a vehement campaign against Agudat in 1922. In his view, Agudat members were collaborating with the Zionists and infecting the minds of innocent schoolchildren with the “poisonweed and wormwood” of the goyische Enlightenment, as well as “songs that speak of the settlement of the Land, and the fields and the vineyards of Eretz Israel—just like the Zionist poets.”5 They were defiling the Holy Land, which was intended only for prayer and sacred study, by tilling its sacred soil. At a meeting in Slovakia, the most radical of the Haredim agreed with the Munkaczer rebbe, and signed a ban on any association with Agudat. Their view of Agudat, which had come into existence precisely to oppose Zionism, was inaccurate; the group was also aware that they were at odds with the vast majority of the Orthodox in eastern and western Europe, who disapproved of Zionism but regarded Shapira’s ban on Agudat as too extreme. Nevertheless, they felt justified in this separatist policy by their instinctive horror of Zionism. One of the first of the Haredim to sign the ban was the young Rabbi Joel Moshe Teitelbaum (1888–1979), who would later become the leader of the Hasidim of Satmar, Hungary, and the most vigorous of all the Haredi opponents of Zionism and the State of Israel.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The founder, an early-twentieth-century evangelist, was no intellectual, but wanted to found what he called a “safe” school, which would help young people preserve their faith while they prepared to fight the atheism which, he believed, now pervaded the secular universities. 42 Students were taught “common sense Christianity” alongside the liberal arts. Everybody was obliged to take at least one Bible course each semester, to attend chapel, and to adhere to a “Christian” lifestyle, with strong rules governing dress, social interaction, and dating. Disobedience and disloyalty were, Bob Jones insisted, “unpardonable sins” and were not tolerated. 43 Staff and students alike had to conform. Bob Jones University was a world unto itself: it made the difficult decision not to seek academic accreditation, believing any such compromise with the secular establishment to be sinful. 44 This sacrifice enabled the university to exert tighter control over admissions, curriculum, and library resources. This discipline was essential, for BJU students knew that they were at war. As a recent undergraduate catalog explains, the school is against “all atheistic, agnostic and humanistic attacks upon the Scripture”; all “so-called Modernist,” “Liberal,” and “Neo-Orthodox” positions, and the “unscriptural compromise of the ‘New Evangelicals’ and the unscriptural practices of the ‘Charismatics.’ ” 45 Students and staff retreated from the world to protect their faith from the assaults of these enemies. This “separation,” according to Bob Jones’s son (Bob Jones II), was “the very foundation and basis of a fundamental witness and testimony.” 46 From this bastion of faith, students would militantly defend “biblical authority and infallibility” by attacking “the enemies of the faith.” 47 BJU had little influence on American academia, but great influence on the Christian nation. Bob Jones University has become the largest supplier of fundamentalist teachers in the country; graduates are known for their self-discipline and self-motivation, if not for their broad education. The Bible colleges and the fundamentalist universities created during these years were, like the Haredi yeshivot , separatist citadels. Fundamentalists felt that their faith was imperiled; they had been displaced from the center of American life, and were taught to regard themselves as “outside the gate.” 48 The militancy expressed deep anger. This surfaced in the utterances of the more extremist Christians in these years, who voiced many of the fears, hatreds, and prejudices of the most marginalized sectors of the population. Gerald Winrod, a Baptist who organized the Defenders of the Christian Faith to combat the teaching of evolution during the 1920s, traveled in Nazi Germany during the 1930 S and returned determined to expose the “Jewish menace” to the American people. At the same time, he denounced Roosevelt’s “Jewish New Deal” as satanic. With Carl McIntyre and Billy James Hargis, Winrod condemned every “liberal” trend in the United States.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When the Kingdom comes, there will be no more separation of church and state; the modern heresy of democracy will be abolished, and society reorganized on strictly biblical lines. This means that every single law of the Bible must be put literally into practice. Slavery will be reintroduced; there will be no more birth control (since believers must “increase and multiply”); adulterers, homosexuals, blasphemers, astrologers, and witches will all be put to death. Children who are persistently disobedient must also be stoned, as the Bible enjoins. A strictly capitalist economy must be enforced; socialists and those who incline to the left are sinful. God is not on the side of the poor. Indeed, as North explains, there is a “tight relationship between wickedness and poverty.” 124 Taxes should not be used in welfare programs, since “subsidizing sluggards is the same as subsidizing evil.” 125 The same goes for the Third World, which has brought its economic problems on its own head because of its addiction to moral perversity, paganism, and demonology. Foreign aid is forbidden by the Bible. 126 While waiting for victory—which, North admits, may be some time off—Christians must prepare to rebuild society according to God’s blueprint and must support government policies which approximate to these strict biblical norms. The Dominion envisaged by North and Rushdoony is totalitarian. There is no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom. The chances of this theology’s achieving much popularity in the United States are, to be sure, remote; but it has been suggested that in the event of an environmental or major economic catastrophe, an authoritarian state church could replace the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. Christianity, after all, was able to adapt to capitalism, which was alien to many of the teachings of Jesus. It could also be used to back a fascist ideology that, in drastically changed circumstances, might be necessary to maintain public order. 127 Some of the more conservative Pentecostalists have shown an interest in Reconstruction theology, even though Rushdoony regards Pentecostalism with distaste. Pat Robertson seems to be a transitional figure. He is a Baptist with leanings toward Pentecostalism and revivalism. Like North, he believes that the Second Coming may be far off—a belief which separates him from traditional premillennial fundamentalism. 128 Meanwhile, Christians, Robertson believes, should try to win positions of power to build a society based on biblical norms. 129 He changed the name of his university in Virginia Beach to Regent University; a regent, he explained, is someone “who governs in the absence of a sovereign.” The purpose of the college is to prepare its seven hundred students to take over when the Kingdom arrives. 130 Fundamentalism has changed in America since the publication of The Fundamentals (1910–15).

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It has exhibited postmodern, antinomian tendencies on the one hand, and a more hard-line, totalitarian vision on the other. Fundamentalism is not going to disappear. In America, religion has long shaped opposition to government. Its rise and fall has always been cyclical, and events of the last few years indicate that there is still a state of incipient war between conservatives and liberals which has occasionally become frighteningly explicit. In 1992, Jerry Falwell, who still adheres to the old-style fundamentalism, announced that with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Satan had been let loose in the United States. Clinton, Falwell thundered, was about to destroy the military and the nation by letting “the gays” take over. Executive orders permitting abortion in federally funded clinics, research on fetal tissue, the official endorsement of homosexual rights, were all signs that America “had declared war against God.” 131 In 1993, the war claimed casualties. On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms stormed David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, because he was said to be stockpiling arms. In fact, though like many Texans the Branch Davidians (an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists) had an impressive arsenal, they seemed to have no plans for revolutionary action against the government. The offensive was designed to demonstrate the power and legitimacy of the United States government, but it backfired. It led to the compound’s being besieged by the FBI, the burning of the Davidian buildings, and the deaths of eighty men, women, and children. What had actually been demonstrated was the government’s ignorance of the sect, its powerlessness before the besieged Davidians, and its tragic inability to control events. On their side, more extreme Christians are certainly preparing to fight the secular government. Christian Identity, a fascist group, has not been mentioned in this book because it has left fundamentalism far behind, and, indeed, disapproves of fundamentalism. Members of Identity hate the idea of Rapture, which they believe has emasculated American religion: they want to be there to fight the forces of evil during Tribulation. Viciously anti-Semitic, they hate the fundamentalists’ support for Zionism, which they regard as a great sin. In their view, the Jews have usurped the title of Chosen People from the Aryan race, and now they have stolen the Holy Land, which should have remained under a British mandate. They do not believe that the wars of the Last Days will be fought in the Middle East, but in America. They predict a new holocaust in which the white race and the United States will be annihilated.

• From Action (2014)

  After that dude and I boned, he made a belabored point of telling me how “crazy” it was that I was “so thin” now. “Your boobs used to be so big that it looked uncomfortable for you. You look much better” = A REAL THING THAT CAME OUT OF HIS MOUTH! About extreme weight loss that was based in poor health! I was incensed. I had had my fill of being gawped at, heft-or-lack-thereof-wise. I read him the riot act, telling him it was totally impolite of him to talk to me like that, and could he please just keep any unwelcome commentary in that vein to himself? “All I meant was that you look really pretty… and skinny!” OH. All I mean is, there’s the door, wad. Be similarly unwavering with anyone who tries to tell you something contrary to your good looks. WELCOME HOME [image file=image_449.jpg] Including even Graceland, the myriad Taco Bell outposts across the nation, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, my bedroom is my favorite place on earth. I have lived here for five years, and it is the only place I’ve ever felt was my secure, for-sure home. Upon moving in, I spangled it thickly with tons of the beloved trash I’d collected prior (mementos like sea glass, old playing cards, faded paper wristbands, etc.). Now, I can see everything I consider important, meaningful, beautiful, and/or cool tacked up right on the walls—or, let’s be realistic, pinned and mounted with Band-Aids or some political button reading, like, “SOCIALISM IS FOR EVERYONE” from my IDEALISTIC UNDERGRAD DAZE (hee—like I don’t still feel that way, what with that implied maturity and distance). These adhesive methods are indicative of my general attitude toward home decor: My apartment isn’t remarkable because it’s tastefully organized, kitted out with even tangentially matching furniture, or otherwise aesthetically astounding. I have no idea how interior design works. Or maybe, thanks to my Band-Aids, I’m an iconoclastic master of the medium? Still deciding, but either way, I love my home because posting up on my bed feels like hanging out inside the antechamber of my brain. My brain is sometimes a mess, though. When I’m working fifteen-hour days, my room reflects that: My dresser upchucks clothing onto the floor; errant fake eyelashes snar into tumbleweeds; rugs become thatched with hair extensions; my bed develops osteoporosis under the burden of ten thousand volumes of pompous New York School poetry. I’m not assigning too much of a stigma to that state of upheaval—it’s just that, when your sheets are cram-packed with bar matchbooks and matching faux-fur separates, there’s barely room to slot your own body, let alone another person’s, in the spaces between all that flotsam.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  enhanced historical enjoyment of the period.6 Justinian’s rebuilding of Hagia Sophia resulted from a political upheaval which nearly ended his rule only five years after his accession. His lavish expenditure and his vigorous pursuit of frontier wars, and the attendant taxation to pay for them, had united the active citizens of Constantinople in fury against him. In 532 the sporting factions of Greens and Blues, who played a leading part in city politics because they organized public entertainment in the capital’s stadium, the Hippodrome, suspended their normal rivalry in an effort to overthrow Justinian, pushing one of his nephews into claiming imperial power. The crowds’ shouts of ‘Victory’ (Nika) filled the city as they set fire to major buildings. Procopius maintained that, amid the blaze and panic, it was only Theodora’s steely declaration to her husband that ‘Royalty is a fine burial shroud’ that steadied his nerve, pulled him back from flight and dispatched troops to slaughter the Nika rebels and hack their way to the submission of the city.7 Around the shaken Emperor, much of the city lay in ruins, not least the two-centuries-old basilica of Hagia Sophia next to the Hippodrome and the palace. Justinian now revealed his passion for building. With extraordinary speed he commissioned his architect to obliterate the remains of the old church. Its replacement would serve as cathedral of the city and symbol of unity in his empire, as well as a perpetual warning to future unruly crowds as it loomed over the Hippodrome. The overall design, completed and dedicated after only five years, outdid all previous precedents. It abandoned the basilican plan of its predecessor church and showcased a feature of imperial architecture which previously had rarely been more than a subsidiary theme in Christian building: the dome, a recreation of the canopy of Heaven. From the time of Constantine, domes had been used to roof circular or centrally planned Christian buildings which spoke primarily of the route to Heaven in death – mausoleum-churches for the burial of prominent people or baptisteries which witnessed Christians’ death to sin (see p. 293). Here, the aim was different, creating a congregational space for emperor, patriarch and people which felt as if it encompassed the long east-west axis of a conventional basilica. This was achieved by building a dome of breathtaking width and height, pierced around its base by a row of windows through which shafts of light transfixed the church interior below; the dome seemed to float on two half-domes to east and west. They climaxed at the east in the altar, housed beyond them in a central semicircular (apsidal) sanctuary; that apse was topped by yet another half-dome. One sixth-century poet, Paul the Silentiary, tried to capture the effect: it ‘is a great helmet, bending over on every side, like the radiant heavens … like the firmament that rests upon air’.8

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  congregation in the city of Hippo Regius (now Annaba in Algeria), the most important port of the province after Carthage. The bishop, an idiosyncratic but shrewd old Greek named Valerius, encouraged his flock to bully this brilliant stranger into being ordained priest and soon Augustine was coadjutor (assistant) bishop in the town. From Valerius’s death until his own in 430, he remained Bishop of Hippo. All his theological writing was now done against a background of busy pastoral work and preaching for a Church in a world in collapse; much of it was in the form of sermons.34 The next period in his life was dominated by the problem posed by the Donatists, in terms not just of politics but also of the challenges that their theology posed to the Catholics. Proud of their unblemished record in time of persecution, they proclaimed that the Church was a gathered pure community. Augustine thought that this was not what ‘One, Holy and Catholic’ meant. The Catholic Church was a Church not so much of the pure as those who tried or longed to be pure. Unlike the Donatists, it was in communion with a great mass of Christian communities throughout the known world. The Catholic Church was in fact what Augustine was not afraid to call ‘the communion of the emperor’.35 In 398 the Donatists’ run of luck ended when imperial troops destroyed Gildo’s regime; now the Catholics found themselves in a position to dictate terms again. Over the previous decade, Augustine had done much to prepare for this moment, in cooperation with Aurelius, the statesmanlike Bishop of Carthage; now he tried to bring the Donatists back into the Catholic fold by negotiation. A series of conferences failed; the old bitterness lay too deep. Faced with government hostility and orders to conform, the Donatists remained defiant, and the behaviour of both sides began deteriorating in a miserable cycle of violence.36 By 412 Augustine had lost patience and he backed harsh new government measures against the Donatists. He even provided theological reasons for the repression: he pointed out to one of his Donatist friends that Jesus had told a parable in which a host had filled up places at his banquet with an order, ‘Compel them to come in’.37 That meant that a Christian government had the duty to support the Church by punishing heresy and schism, and the unwilling adherence which this produced might be the start of a living faith. This was a side of Augustine’s teaching which had much appeal to Christian regimes for centuries to come. At the same time, Augustine was faced with the problem of explaining the Roman world’s catastrophe. How could God’s providence allow the collapse of the manifestly Christian Roman Empire, especially the sack of Rome by barbarian armies in 410? Naturally, traditionalists in religion were inclined to say that Rome’s flirtation with the Christian Church was at the root of the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Luther’s independently minded colleague in Wittenberg University Andreas Bodenstein of Karlstadt had already started to push the logic of what Luther had said, in regard to these same questions. As Luther immediately failed to find common ground with Karlstadt, and eventually got him expelled from Wittenberg, it was not surprising that he failed to reach agreement with the reformers of the faraway Swiss city when he found that they were making similar statements. It was Zwingli’s friend Leo Jud, pastor of St Peter’s across the river from the Grossmünster, who in a sermon of 1523 pointed out quite rightly that the Bible ordered the destruction of images in no less prominent a setting than the Ten Commandments. Jud (as that nickname ‘Jew’ indicated) was a distinguished Hebrew scholar: he noticed the significant oddity, forgotten by most of the Western Church, that there were two contrasting ways of numbering the Commandments, and that the system to which Augustine of Hippo had long ago given his authority conveniently downplayed the command against images. So Jud was reopening the question of images which had nearly brought the Byzantine Empire to ruin in the eighth and ninth centuries (see pp. 442–53), and which had been only briefly and partially reopened by John Wyclif and the avengers of Jan Hus a century before – Wyclif had noted that same numbering anomaly in the Ten Commandments. Now Zürichers started pulling down images from churches and from the roadside. This frequently involved disorder, and disorder has never enthused Swiss society. The city council took action: in October 1523 it arranged a further disputation, leading to the first official statement of doctrine produced anywhere in the Reformation. First, images were systematically removed from churches in June 1524 and then, in April 1525, the traditional form of the Mass itself was banned in the city. Until that latter moment, astonishingly, Zürich still remained in communion with its traditional ally the Pope, who had let politics blind him to the seriousness of what was happening there, and who never made any official condemnation of the man who was steering events in the city. On the matter both of images and of the Eucharist, Luther was less inhibited than the Pope, and strongly and publicly disagreed with Zürich. Thanks to Karlstadt he had already faced image-smashing in Wittenberg in 1522, when he was alarmed enough by the disorder to hurry back from the Wartburg to preach against it, standing in the pulpit pointedly dressed in a brand-new monk’s habit of his Augustinian Order.20 After that bruising episode, Luther decided that the problem of sacred art was no problem at all. Once the most obviously absurd images had been removed in orderly fashion, destroying sacred art was actually a form of idolatry: it suggested that images had some power, and in fact they had

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  things Spanish, including Catholicism; they involved savage revenge attacks on the Spanish settler population and were naturally suppressed with equal cruelty. In 1562, Franciscan missionaries in Yucatan discovered that some of their converts were continuing secretly to practise pre-Conquest religious rites. It was bad enough to find that people had been burying figures of the old gods next to crosses so that they could go on publicly worshipping them undetected, but those questioned reported cases of human sacrifice, some including crucifixions, staged with satirical blasphemy during the Christian solemnities of Holy Week. The Franciscan provincial Diego de Landa set up a local Inquisition which unleashed a campaign of interrogation and torture on the Indio population. A newly appointed bishop, horrified at zeal gone wild, abruptly stripped de Landa of his authority, and put a stop to the atrocities, but the Maya had already paid a terrible price.18 The effect of such disappointments was that Spanish clergy radically limited their trust in the natives. Indigenous people might become assistants in the liturgy, but never principals – catechists, sacristans, cantors and instrumentalists, not priests. At first, native men were not even allowed to enter religious orders. A problem arose which has remained constant for the Catholic Church entering new cultures (see p. 884): compulsory celibacy for the priesthood, restated with renewed vigour in the Counter-Reformation, was an alien idea in most cultures. Only in the eighteenth century did significant numbers of indigenous men become priests, at a time when consciously non-Christian religious practice in peoples under Spanish control had long ceased.19 There were even serious debates throughout the sixteenth century as to whether natives should be banned from receiving the eucharistic Host when they came to Mass – after all, European laity only did so once a year, while these people were barely fit to be considered full Christians.20 In South America, first under Portuguese rule in Brazil and then in the southeastern Spanish territories, Jesuits treated their hunter-gatherer converts almost as children, organizing them into large settlements to protect them against the greed and exploitation of the other colonists, but always in a benevolent European-led dictatorship of estates, the ‘Reductions’. When the Jesuits were forcibly expelled from the Americas in 1767, they left their natives without any experience of leadership, and the carefully structured communities in the Reductions quickly collapsed. Only in Bolivia did priests of supposedly pure Spanish blood (Creoles) manage to carry on similar work after the Jesuits had left.21 Within this framework, the Church did achieve a remarkable degree of synthesis between Christianity and what it allowed to survive from native culture. Naturally friars and Jesuits worked with the languages which they

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Iranian Revolution was not merely political. Certainly, the cruel and autocratic regime of the shah and the economic crisis were crucial: there would have been no uprising without them. Many secularist Iranians who did not experience this spiritual malaise would eventually join the ulema simply to get rid of the shah, and without their support, the Revolution would not have succeeded. But it was also a rebellion against the secularist ethos which excluded religion and which many ordinary Iranians felt was being imposed upon them against their will. This was most graphically expressed in the depiction of the United States as the Great Satan. Rightly or wrongly, many believed that if he had not been so warmly supported by the United States, the shah would not have behaved as he did. They knew that Americans were proud of their secular polity, which deliberately separated religion from the state; they had learned that many Westerners thought it praiseworthy and necessary to focus exclusively on the zahir. The result, as far as they could see, was the empty, hedonistic nightlife of North Tehran. Iranians were aware that many Americans were religious, but their faith seemed to make no sense. The “inside” and “outside” of Jimmy Carter were not “the same.” They could not understand how the President could continue to support a ruler who by 1978 had started to murder his own people. “We didn’t expect Carter to defend the shah, for he is a religious man who has raised the slogan of defending human rights,” Ayatollah Husain Montazeri told an interviewer after the Revolution. “How can Carter, the devout Christian, defend the shah?”61 When Carter visited the shah on New Year’s Eve, during the sacred month of Muharram, to boost his regime, he could not, if he had tried, have cast himself more perfectly as the villain. During the next turbulent year, the United States came to seem the ultimate cause of Iran’s spiritual, economic, and political problems. Street graffiti identified Carter with Yazid, and the shah with Shimr, the general dispatched by Yazid to massacre Husain and his little army. In one series of street drawings, Khomeini was depicted as Moses, the shah as Pharaoh, while Carter was the idol adored by the Pharaoh/shah.62 America, it was thought, had corrupted the shah and Khomeini, now increasingly bathed in a Shii light, came to stand as an Islamic alternative to the present unholy dictatorship.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Everything is seen from the perspective of Jewish suffering, and vengeance for that suffering. The State of Israel was not a blessing for Jews but God’s revenge on the gentiles: God created this state not for the Jew and not as a reward for his justice and good deeds. It is because He, be blessed, decided that He could no longer take the desecration of His Name and the laughter, the disgrace, and the persecution of the people that were named after Him, so He ordered the State of Israel to be, which is a total contradiction of the Diaspora. 98 God’s name was desecrated every time a Jew was beaten or raped by a gentile: “When the Jew is humiliated, God is shamed! When the Jew is attacked—it is an assault upon the Name of God!” But the opposite was also true. Violent retaliation was kiddush ha-Shem , a sanctification of God’s name: “A Jewish fist in the face of the astonished gentile world that has not seen it for two millenniums, this is kiddush ha-Shem .” 99 This ideology inspired a Kahanist, Baruch Goldstein, to shoot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the festival of Purim, February 25, 1994. He acted to avenge the massacre of the fifty-nine Jews murdered by Palestinians on August 24, 1929. This act of revenge led to an escalation of Islamically inspired terror in the territories and in Israel itself. The Palestinians had not been caught up in the religious renewal that had seized the Muslim world after 1967. Their response to the Arab defeat was political, secularist, and nationalist. Yasir Arafat reorganized the Palestine Liberation Organization and initiated a campaign of guerrilla action, terrorism, and diplomacy to find a solution to the Palestinian problem. This was a decisively secular movement. But after the PLO nationalists were suppressed in the Gaza Strip by Ariel Sharon in 1971, Sheikh Ahmed Yasin founded an Islamic movement which he called Mujamah (“Congress”), which initiated the type of welfare program that was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1987, Mujamah had established a charitable empire in the Strip, consisting of clinics, drug-rehabilitation programs, youth clubs, sporting facilities, and Koran classes, supported by zakat (the Islamic tax), by the oil-rich Gulf states, and by Israel, which hoped to undermine the PLO by supporting Mujamah. For Yasin at this point was not interested in armed struggle against Israel. He was a reformer, who wanted to bring the fruits of modernity to the refugees of Gaza in an Islamic setting. He was also contending for the soul of Palestine against the nationalists: the cultural identity of the Palestinian people, he believed, should be Muslim rather than secular. The popularity of Mujamah showed that many Palestinians agreed.

• From Action (2014)

  • “You were okay with it last time.” • “I forgot you weren’t into that.” • “This is the only way it feels good for me.” All of these are real-life garbage sentences, uttered by real-life garbage people in response to my protestations about some dubious piece of the “action” we were getting. Sometimes these people were also actual rapists (because, straight-up, anyone who disregards your not wanting to have sex, or coerces you into it after you say no, fits this description). Though these phrases were deployed in different scenarios/for ostensibly different reasons, each one means, “I don’t care what you want, even though you just directly told me that it isn’t what is happening, and I don’t respect you as a person more than I do my own horniness in this one moment.” To operate under that mindset when someone has trusted you with the privilege of feeling all up on them is wholly unacceptable, and not only because you’re trying to make that person feel bad for your own repugnant behavior. (Not, you know, “you,” but some hypothetical Alex-from-next-to-the-jukebox-style garbaggio-fuck, whom I’m now itching to destroy in vengeance of your honor even though he’s technically made up.) Any person who exercises this selfishness has bought into the set of false promises made to them by male-violence-dominated societies, aka that victims of sexual assault are responsible at least in part for the harm done to them, so the aggressors don’t have to feel like it’s their fault. This is untrue putrescence. I know you (real you, this time) wouldn’t be the kind of solipsistic cretin who thinks that way, but if you find yourself in a situation where someone is reciting a passage that sounds plagiarized from one of the above excerpts from the RoBZP, please understand that your decisions are sound and worth respecting, even though said scum is trying to make you feel guilty about the fact that they’ve decided it’s okay for you to feel unhappy/uncomfortable/unsafe as long as they’re feeling sexual pleasure. The idea of even the potential of that happening to you makes me want to mail a congressperson a stink bomb and yell obscene, hideous things at a beautiful phenomenon of nature—ideally a canyon, but definitely a majestic, centuries-old sycamore, at least (in addition to my previous crimes against fictional “Alex”-type pred-nesses).

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Problems ranged beyond the activities of the crusaders themselves. The growing claims of the papacy to universal monarchy were offensive not merely to the Oecumenical Patriarch, but to any Eastern churchman, since the East had remained closer to the older idea of the collective authority of bishops throughout the Church. With considerable justification, Easterners saw Westerners as innovators, while Latin diplomats raked up previous bombastic claims to authority from Rome all the way back to Pope Hormisdas in the sixth century (see p. 326). When a delegation of Greeks to the Holy Roman Emperor broke their journey at the Abbey of Monte Cassino in 1137, they observed to the monks that the Bishop of Rome behaved more like an emperor than a bishop.8 At about the same time that the Western canon lawyer Gratian was compiling a law code which looked to the pope as the Universal Bishop, the greatest canon lawyer of the Eastern Empire, Balsamon (supplanted in his see of Antioch by a patriarch who owed allegiance to Rome after appointment by Latin crusaders), wrote bitterly about Western Christians in his own law compilation. He expanded words from Psalm 55: ‘Their words are smoother than oil, Satan having hardened their hearts’.9 One symptom of the growing insecurity in the empire which went right back to the death of Basil II in 1025 was a new-found intolerance of any dissidence to the imperial Church. This contrasted with the more pragmatic attitude of the Macedonian imperial dynasty during the ninth century, but it was also a logical development of the urge to define and catalogue which had also characterized Orthodoxy under Macedonian rule. The first symptom of the new mood was a fatal weakening of the imperial policy of tolerance for Miaphysites in the eastern frontier provinces after Basil’s death; when the new emperor abruptly ended tolerance in 1028 and did not restore it, the long-term consequences for the frontiers under Seljuk pressure were dire. We have already encountered the burning of the Bogomil Basil in the Hippodrome around the time of the First Crusade (see p. 456), and in the same era there occurred trials for heresy in Constantinople involving leading scholars of literature and theology, Michael Psellos and his student John the Italian (Italos). Psellos in the end escaped serious consequences, but Italos was not so fortunate; after repeated hearings of the case against him, from 1082 he was silenced and ended his days obscurely in a monastery. There were political dimensions to the trials of Italos, since he was associated with the faction opposed to the Komnenos family’s usurpation of the throne, and the collapse of Byzantine power in southern Italy rendered suspect his Italian background and links to the Normans in Sicily: the Emperor Alexios’s daughter Anna Komnena, passionate partisan for her father and gifted historian of his

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  demons’.12 The balance he struck represented a tension between a wish to keep the gatherings of Christians exclusive and a wish to keep the new religion’s frontiers open in order to make more converts. This undercurrent of instability remained through the centuries during which the Church was identified with all society and has never wholly disappeared from Christian consciousness. Paul’s acceptance of the secular status quo had especial implications for two groups whose liberation has over the last quarter-millennium sparked conflict worldwide, but especially within Western Christianity: slaves and women. One short letter of Paul from a Roman prison to a fellow Christian called Philemon is undoubtedly genuine, since it contains no useful discussion of doctrine and can only have been preserved for its biographical information about the Apostle. It centres on the future of Onesimus, a slave to Philemon. He had recently been serving Paul in imprisonment and the letter contains a none-too-subtle hint that Paul would appreciate continuing to enjoy the benefit of Onesimus’s service. There is no suggestion that he should be freed, only that now he could be ‘more than a slave’ to Philemon; and certainly there is no question of consulting Onesimus about his own wishes. The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.13 Slavery was, after all, an indispensable institution in ancient society. A Christian writer from a generation later than Paul, who bore the name of Jesus’s disciple Peter but who is unlikely to have been the same man, wrote a miniature treatise which became one of the epistles accepted into the New Testament. It told house-slaves to compare their sufferings to the unjust sufferings of Christ, in order that they should bear injustice as Christ had done. That did not say much about the writer’s expectations that Christian slave owners would be better than any others, and it followed a strong command to ‘be subject to every human institution’.14 In the early second century, when the Church’s leadership was beginning to be concentrated in the hands of single individuals styled bishops (see pp. 130–37), Bishop Ignatius of Antioch observed in a letter to his fellow bishop Polycarp of Smyrna that slaves should not take advantage of their membership in the Christian community, but live as better slaves, now to the glory of God – and his opinion was that it would be inappropriate to use church funds to help slaves buy their freedom. By the fourth century, Christian writers like Bishop Ambrose of Milan or Bishop Augustine of Hippo were providing even more robust defences of the idea of slavery than non-Christian philosophers had done before them – ‘the lower the station in life, the more exalted the virtue’, was Ambrose’s rather unctuous opinion.15 If the coming of Christianity thus made little significant difference to the position of slaves, there are plenty of signs that Christians began by giving

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet the failure of fundamentalist faith is most plainly demonstrated in the rage and hatred that the televangelists displayed toward one another during the scandal. When Swaggart got wind of Bakker’s sexual relationship with Jessica Hahn, he “took on Jim Bakker like a pit bulldog taking on a French poodle,” one of Swaggart’s former aides recalled. “Just ripped him to shreds, destroyed the man.” 119 Next, Bakker turned on Jerry Falwell, who had come to the rescue of PTL, and accused him of exploiting the situation to get control of the network. Falwell retaliated by calling a press conference where he produced sworn affidavits by men who claimed to have had homosexual relations with Jim Bakker, together with a note from Tammy Faye listing what she wanted from PTL in return for going quietly: $300,000 a year for Jim, and $100,000 for herself; royalties on all PTL records and books; their $400,000 mansion, two cars, security staff, legal fees, plus the fees of the accountants who were trying to sort out the Bakkers’ highly irregular finances. The grand fundamentalist enterprise seemed to have ended in a barren, unedifying cul-de-sac. The year before the scandals, Falwell had been full of confidence. He had renamed the Moral Majority “the Liberty Federation,” and declared that many of its members would be running for office in the 1988 elections at the local, state, and federal levels. But after the PTL debacle, Falwell resigned on November 4, 1987, from the presidency of the Moral Majority and the Liberty Federation and announced that his political career was over. He would never again work for a candidate as he had for Ronald Reagan, and never again lobby for legislation. In the wake of the scandals, the income from his own Old Time Gospel Hour had declined, and Falwell felt compelled to return to his private Gospel ministry. 120 He would still surface from time to time to fulminate about the nation’s ills, but he could no longer look forward to the imminent creation of a coalition of religious conservatives that would take America by storm. When Pat Robertson’s bid for the presidency failed, the fundamentalist offensive, which had started in 1979 with such great hopes, seemed to have failed. The New Christian Right, discredited, appeared to have ignominiously fizzled out, and though Christians would individually continue to lobby and try to bring voters to the polls, it was generally assumed by secularists that the fundamentalist threat was over. However, fundamentalism was not dead; it had, in fact, entered a new and more extreme phase in America. On November 28, 1987, Randall Terry, a born-again Christian from upstate New York, led three hundred “rescuers” to an abortion clinic in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. They held a service on what Terry described as “the doorstep of hell” for almost eleven hours, praying, singing psalms, and preventing women and staff from entering the clinic.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  and wine of the Eucharist; why otherwise had Cyril’s much-revered predecessor Athanasius fought so hard for an equality of Persons in the Trinity? Encouraged by a theological work which he thought was by Athanasius but (disastrously) was actually by Apollinaris of Laodicea, Cyril could see no reason to make a distinction between two words which for him both referred to the ‘person’ and ‘nature’ of Jesus Christ: these were the term used by the Cappadocian Fathers for ‘person’, hypostasis, and a word for ‘nature’, physis.84 By contrast, and offensively to Cyril’s ears, Theodore and those who thought like him spoke of two physeis in Jesus Christ, and made a distinction between those two natures and the one person, the theatrical mask, prosōpon.85 The Bishop of Alexandria was particularly outraged when Nestorius aggressively promoted his Antiochene views by attacking a widely popular title of honour for the Virgin Mary: Theotokos, or Bearer of God. Devotion to Mary was now becoming prominent throughout the Roman Empire: enthusiasts for the Nicene settlement of doctrine encouraged it, as a way of safeguarding Christ’s divinity against Arianism, since it emphasized the unique favour granted his earthly mother. It was true that such Marian enthusiasm had developed in the Syrian Church precociously quickly (see pp. 182–3), but Nestorius’s concern to distinguish the two natures of Christ outweighed this in his desire to be clear about what her role should be and how it should be described. Provoked in his new home of Constantinople by hearing a devotional sermon on Mary which he regarded as fatuous, he snappily responded that talk of Theotokos was nonsense: ‘The Word of God is the creator of time, he is not created within time’. He was in effect saying that the title could only be used if one simultaneously balanced it by calling Mary Anthrōpotokos, Bearer of a Human, and he insinuated that those who overpraised Mary were reviving the worship of a mother-goddess.86 Even many educated in the Antiochene tradition blanched at his reckless precision. Various victims of Nestorius’s sharp tongue and reforming zeal rallied to the cause, and with grim satisfaction Cyril exploited a groundswell of devout indignation against his rival bishop.87 The ensuing row once more plunged the entire Eastern Church into a bewildering welter of intrigue and complication which drew in the Eastern emperor, in sheer self-defence, to stop his empire being ripped apart. After a council at Ephesus in 431 and negotiations over the next two years, Theodosius II forced a compromise on the opposing sides. It vindicated the title Theotokos, ruined Nestorius’s career for good and left ‘Nestorian’ theology permanently condemned, but it also left many supporters of Cyril’s theology outraged that their own theology had not been fully vindicated with the full triumphalism that they would have wished. The death of Cyril in 444 did nothing to diminish their

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Church in the world with the Heavenly City.41 Ironically, much of the influence of The City of God over the next thousand years came from the eagerness of medieval churchmen to expand on this identification in their efforts to make the Church supreme on earth, equating the earthly city with opponents of ecclesiastical power like some of the Holy Roman Emperors. Yet another side of Augustine’s energies was occupied in the same years with a fierce controversy over the teachings of a British monk called Pelagius.42 Upper-class circles in Rome, newly Christianized at the end of the fourth century, were anxious for spiritual direction and a number of ‘holy men’ hastened to supply the demand. After the abrupt departure of Jerome in 384, Pelagius had few major rivals. A central concern for him and his spiritual charges was to deal with the new established status of Christianity: were the affluent people among whom Pelagius ministered simply joining the Church as an easy option, without any real sense that they must transform their lives in the process?43 Pelagius was particularly concerned at what he read of the earlier works of Augustine: Augustine’s preoccupation with God’s majesty seemed to leave humankind helpless puppets who could easily abandon all responsibility for their conduct. Augustine and other like-minded contemporaries followed thoughts of Tertullian two centuries before and talked of humankind being wholly soiled by a guilt inherited from Adam which they termed ‘original sin’. This likewise seemed to Pelagius to provide a false excuse for Christians passively to avoid making any moral effort. He was determined to say that our God-given natures are not so completely corrupt that we can do nothing towards our own salvation: ‘That we are able to see with our eyes is no power of ours; but it is in our power that we make a good or a bad use of our eyes … the fact that we have the power of accomplishing every good thing by action, speech and thought comes from him who has endowed us with this possibility, and also assists it.’44 The consequence was that Pelagius believed that the nature of a ‘Holy Church’ was based on the holiness of its members: exactly what the Donatists said about the Church, and so particularly liable to arouse Augustine’s fury.45 As the controversy developed, Pelagius’s followers pushed the implications of this further, to insist that although Adam sinned, this sin did not transmit itself through every generation as original sin, but was merely a bad example, which we can ignore if we choose. We can choose to turn to God. We have free will. Pelagius’s views have often been presented as rather amiable, in contrast to the fierce pessimism in Augustine’s view of our fallen state. This misses the point that Pelagius was a stern Puritan, whose teaching placed a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of every human being to act according to the