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.

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

  and they were impressed by the intense and personal piety they encountered, itself owing much to the preaching and writing of English Puritans who had become dissatisfied with or had been ejected from the Church of England. In many areas of Germany, particularly large cities, Lutherans were also confronted with an influx of French Huguenot refugees whose plight was directly the result of their steadfastness in Reformed religion back home.From its earliest days, Pietism was intimately bound up with education. Thoughtful scholars and students — backbone of the parish clergy — were frustrated with the collection of northern universities which served the Protestant Churches. Protestantism in both its Lutheran and its Reformed identities had rather quickly channelled its early bursts of energy into forms which could be taught to prospective ministers in the theology faculties of existing universities. Often these universities shaped their curriculum using the medieval scholastic methods which Martin Luther himself had come to scorn, and Pietists scorned them too. They did their best to recapture the initial excitement and urgency of the Reformation, the sense of personal and public conflict which had so galvanized popular Protestant enthusiasm in the 1520s and again in the 1560s. Yet these were orderly folk: they found themselves trying to cope with the strains of a Protestant European society which was in the middle of rapid change, and they sought ways of channelling and disciplining the enthusiasm which they themselves were inciting. It was a difficult balancing act, which bequeathed enduring tensions. Crucial to Pietist formation were two Lutheran pastors, Philipp Jakob Spener and his younger contemporary August Hermann Francke. Spener, who left his native Alsace before its takeover by Louis XIV, and became successively pastor in Frankfurt am Main and the Hohenzollern capital Berlin, was alarmed by the rapid growth of such population centres and the strains that this placed on the parish clergy. His solution was to seek out the most energetic and serious layfolk in the parishes and treat them as partners in ministry, gathering people outside servicetime to meet for Bible-reading, prayer and hymn-singing in what he called collegia pietatis. Under his influence, in 1694 the Hohenzollern Elector Friedrich of Brandenburg founded a new university for his territories in the city of Halle, which was to prove a major source for disseminating a new spirit in Lutheranism. Spener’s genius, and that of the other leaders of the movement, was for detailed organization, plus strategic alliances with sympathetic rulers and nobility, and although Spener met opposition which eventually crushed his spirit, Francke consolidated his work in spectacular fashion. Pietism, with its varied Protestant roots and openness to crossing the Lutheran—Reformed divide, was always going to get a sympathetic hearing from the monarchs of the

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  When asked by the Maharishi why he was departing, Lennon said, “Well, if you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.” Later that month, student activists occupied five buildings at Columbia University, took a dean hostage, and issued a series of demands. Among other things, the students insisted that the university end its association with a military think tank and halt its plan to build a gymnasium in Harlem on the site of a park used by lower-income residents. Columbia officials resisted, only growing more entrenched as the students smashed furniture and shattered windows, destroyed academic research, and hung posters of Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X on the walls. For a week, the university administration tried to wait out the protesters. Finally, they asked police to remove them. At 2:20 A .M . on April 30, a thousand officers, many carrying flashlights and billy clubs, stormed the occupied buildings. Some students resisted passively, others by punching, biting, or throwing bottles and batteries. Many police officers used force, some of it brutal, to pull out the protesters and gain control. To some who watched, a class distinction could be seen in the collision of weathered boots with fresh faces, a working-class force smashing into private-school privilege. The confrontation lasted past dawn. When it was over, more than seven hundred people had been arrested and nearly one hundred fifty injured, including twelve police. Shocked parents and other citizens looked at the photos of the aftermath and wondered what had become of their country. —Down Broadway from Columbia, a new musical was opening. Hair told a story of hippies, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and the sexual revolution in 1960s America, and it featured drug references and group nudity. The sixty-seven-year-old reviewer John Chapman of the Daily News in New York called the show “vulgar, perverted, tasteless, cheap, cynical, offensive, and generally lousy” and recommended that “everybody connected with it should be washed in strong soap and hung up to dry in the sun.” But even octogenarians who saw the musical had a hard time not singing along to the hit songs Hair produced, including “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In.” In May, CBS television aired a special in prime time, Hunger in America, which told of the growing problem of malnutrition in the world’s richest country. According to the documentary, there were ten million hungry people in the United States, a figure that stunned viewers. The filmmakers even showed footage of a dying, malnourished newborn. But perhaps the most memorable moments came in an exchange with a fourteen-year-old black student named Charles from Hale County, Alabama, who told a doctor he went hungry during the school day because he didn’t have twenty-five cents to pay for lunch: Dr. Wheeler: Well, what do you do while the other children are eating? Charles: Just sit there. Dr. Wheeler: How do you feel toward the other children who are eating when you don’t have anything? Charles: Be ashamed. Dr. Wheeler: Are you ashamed?

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

  account of his homeland’s Church was printed in 1540 within a widely popular Latin description of Ethiopia by a Portuguese, Damião de Goís.50 Yet the Jesuits thereafter dissipated the advantage, despite zestful and heroic wanderings which may have led them to be the first Europeans to see the source of the Blue Nile, a century and a half before the Scotsman James Bruce.51 Contemporary Catholic battles with Protestants created a blind spot in the missionaries. Just as with the Dyophysite Christians of India, the Society was much less prepared to make allowances for local custom in fellow Christians than it was for other world faiths such as Hinduism, Shintoism or Confucianism. Ethiopian public immersion baptisms in which both priest and candidates were entirely naked were something of a shock. There was also a fatal reminiscence of Iberia’s cultural wars: Jesuits violently criticized the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for what they saw as Judaizing deviations — celebration of the Sabbath, male circumcision and avoidance of pork. Eventually the Ethiopians were infuriated into retaliation: brutal expulsion of the Jesuits, including some executions, followed in the 1630s, together with an emphatic reassertion (and perhaps a little invention) of authentic Ethiopian custom and theology. The missionaries left behind them some evocatively Mediterranean church ruins and a paradoxically large amount of new iconographic themes in Ethiopian art: Christ with his crown of thorns, European-style compositions of the Virgin and Child, and even motifs deriving from engravings by Albrecht Dürer. The Ethiopians clearly enjoyed the Jesuits’ pictures more than their theological instruction.52 So Africans made their choices when confronted with Western Christianity. They still made choices when choice had apparently been taken away from them, in the vast diaspora throughout the Spanish and Portuguese (and latterly French) plantation cultures in America. They brought to America a mass of memories of religious belief and practice. Particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slave masters made an effort to split up groups related to each other, but that became less easy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as restrictions began to bear down on the slave trade and more coherent groups survived from particular areas of Africa in a new setting. Given endemic warfare in Benin and Nigeria, which sent great numbers of captives to the slave markets of the coast, West African religions dominated. So much of it was difficult to sustain, tied as it was to place and group identity, both now lost. So ancestor cults were replaced, and familiar deities given new honour by drawing on the Catholicism which surrounded the people imported to the colonial world. The Catholic Church allowed slaves confraternities and, as everywhere else in Catholic societies, confraternities proved to have a life which it was not necessarily easy for officialdom to control. Out of this subculture of Catholicism

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

  same time on the other side of the Atlantic, the authorities in the established Congregational Church of Massachusetts also began to notice the phenomenon of gender-skewed church attendance. It is likely that a disproportionate number of women joined the English voluntary congregations because they had more room to assert themselves than in the established Church. This assertion was at its greatest among new radical groups such as the early Quakers: in the 1650s, Quaker women could enjoy prophetic roles reminiscent of those in the early days of some radical groups in the 1520s and 1530s, and just as in sixteenth-century radicalism, the male leadership of the Quakers over subsequent decades steadily moved to restrict women’s activism.49 By the early eighteenth century, the appeal of the Quakers to women may have changed because the ethos of the Quakers changed: the quiet waiting on the Lord which now characterized the worship of the Friends resonated with a traditional and predominantly female form of spirituality. The collegia pietatis of Pietism (see pp. 739–40) developed a spirituality which likewise emphasized an inner encounter with the divine, although in this case the devotional group took its place alongside Lutheran public worship. It is interesting that these Pietists were among the few people to take an interest in the writings of women activists from the earliest days of the Lutheran Reformation, like those of an outspoken noblewoman of the 1520s and 1530s then otherwise long forgotten, Argula von Grumbach.50 The phenomenon of gender-skewed congregations was already noticed in the late seventeenth century, and it contributed to new Christian reflections on gender. The English clergyman and ethical writer Richard Allestree and the leading Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather agreed in finding women more spiritual than men, who were slaves to passions: ‘Devotion is a tender Plant’, said Allestree, ‘that … requires a supple gentle soil; and therefore the feminine softness and plyableness is very apt and proper for it … I know there are many Ladies whose Examples are reproaches to the other Sex, that help to fill our Congregations, when Gentlemen desert them’. That Protestant Oxford don even regretted the Reformation’s abolition of nunneries. Mather felt that women had a greater moral seriousness than men because of their constant consciousness of death in childbirth.51 Whether he was right or not, such notions were a striking turnaround from traditional medical talk of humours and a continuous spectrum of gender, or of Augustine of Hippo’s disparaging theological comments on women’s uncontrolled natures.52 As women apparently showed themselves more devout than their menfolk (and perhaps more gratifyingly appreciative of the clergy’s efforts), the ancient Christian stereotype of women as naturally more disordered than men and more open to Satan’s temptations began to look

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

  Overnight, outside a handful of redoubts of traditional musical excellence (plus the pope’s Sistine Chapel), the acoustic guitar became the dictator of musical style in Catholicism, with the same suddenness and thoroughness that the Geneva psalm had achieved in Reformation England. Not merely plainsong but the whole heritage of Catholic musical composition centred on the Mass was relegated to the liturgical sidelines, and such music was now probably more frequently and effectively performed by Anglicans than by Catholics.15 Although the hurt extended a good way beyond theological conservatives, the defiant and semi-clandestine celebration of the old Mass and its music became a catalyst for a slow gathering of fury among traditionalist Catholics, which in some places led to schism. Others, including Josef Ratzinger, who was appointed Archbishop of Munich in 1977 and whose elder brother at Regensburg Cathedral was one of German Catholicism’s leading church musicians, swallowed their anger and bided their time.16 CATHOLICS, PROTESTANTS AND LIBERATION Another momentous development for the Church came entirely independent of the Vatican: a worldwide theological movement which has come to have an increasingly tense relationship with central Catholic authority. A huge shift in the membership of global Catholicism from north to south transformed the priorities of laity, clergy and religious in settings where the two-century-old confrontation of Church and French Revolution, or even the Russian Revolution, no longer seemed the most urgent struggle. Instead it was the fight against sheer wretched poverty in the lives of millions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Academic theology in the earlier part of the century had not said much about poverty, apart from being against it: rather like slaves in earlier centuries, the poor had been, with sadness, taken for granted. Now certain theologians, especially those working closely with the poor, began considering the implications of the Christian doctrine of Providence: the Father cares for humans as much as he clothes the lilies of the field.17 They looked again at the furious debates on poverty generated by the friars in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and listened again to the angry comments by friars like Bartolomé de las Casas on the early stages of Spanish colonization in America (see p. 692). They listened also to what socialism and Marxism had drawn out of the French Revolution and Christian tradition in the nineteenth century. They even listened to their congregations, humble folk like those who had fought for the Church as Cristeros in the Mexico of the 1920s (see pp. 934–5). They christened what they

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

  the nationalist revolutions of 1848 revealed his confusion, which readily tipped into his horrified opposition to Italian unification, not least because it would involve an end to the Papal States. By 1864, after a series of humiliating losses of territory to a new Italian monarchical state based on the once devoutly papalist House of Savoy, Pius reacted in frustration by issuing an encyclical letter to which was attached a Syllabus of Errors, hastily gathered from a series of recent papal pronouncements. Some were uncontroversial, but they included a series of peevish statements which among other things condemned socialism and the principle that non-Catholics should be given freedom of religion in a Catholic state. They culminated in the proposition that it was wrong to believe that the Pope ‘can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilization’.13 There were many in Catholic Europe to applaud the Pope: those with memories of the atrocities inspired by that parent of liberalism and modern civilization, the French Revolution, and those still witnessing Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Latin American anticlerical liberals – even Swiss liberals – continuing to close convents and seize schools from the Catholic Church. In Spain, between 1829 and 1834, liberals forced the King to disband that faithful guardian of Spanish Catholic identity, the Spanish Inquisition. What did that say about the Spanish patriotism of liberals? Catholics could also readily link such destructive fruits of liberalism to that curious offspring of the Scottish Reformation, Freemasonry (see pp. 771–2). By the eighteenth century, Freemasonry had become the adopted son of the Enlightenment, just as so many eighteenth-century Protestant Scots had done more generally; long before the French Revolution, Freemasonry’s leading figures came to sound more like Voltaire than John Dury or Johann Heinrich Alsted. Now especially in Catholic countries in southern Europe, Central and South America and the Caribbean, in the absence of any popular Protestant alternative to the Catholic Church, the Masonic Lodge became a rallying point for all who loathed ecclesiastical power. Here Freemasonry often did indeed become the chief force within liberal politics: a rival to that other closed male caste, the Catholic clergy, complete with Masons’ own engrossing (though a good deal less public) ritual life. A remnant of this survived to our own age in that time-warped and embattled island, Fidel Castro’s Cuba. A promenade around the cheerfully shabby towns and villages of Cuba at the turn of the second and third millennia would reveal an unexpected (and interestingly little- remarked) feature of this determinedly anti-Catholic state with its opportunistic version of Communism. Alongside the local Communist Party headquarters, one of the best-kept buildings on the street was the hall of the local Masonic Lodge,

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

  the mood: ‘no event … could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution’.114 The Northern soldiers’ spontaneously composed verses about John Brown’s body, with their unforgettably jaunty camp meeting tune, were turned during the course of the war towards the Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe’s more decorous but still stirring ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, in which her words about Christ might be reapplied to Brown: ‘As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.’115 During the course of the war, a presidential proclamation declared slavery abolished (though only in the Confederate States fighting the Northerners), a move ratified and extended throughout the Union by Congress after the final defeat of the South, in the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution. The suddenness of the change in Southern society, the freeing of four million human beings, was a deep trauma to add to the sheer destructiveness and death of the war itself: the end of an institution which in 1861 had seemed to be flourishing and even expanding. After the Confederate surrender, many angry defeated Southerners took revenge on black Christians, even though they shared their Evangelical faith. They still saw them as inferior beings to whites, and still used the old biblical and Enlightenment arguments to justify themselves. They also viewed their own plight as that of an endangered victim culture. For the prominent Southern Baptist pastor in South Carolina and Alabama E. T. Winkler, that sense justified his defence of the Ku Klux Klan to Northern Baptists in 1872 as an example of necessary ‘temporary organizations for the redress of intolerable grievances’. It was unlikely that he would apply the same argument to any temporary organizations which threatened blacks might form.116 White control of the South and the allotting of second-class status to African-Americans were not effectively challenged until the 1950s, and much of the challenge arose from the black Churches, which now remained the only institution through which African-Americans could have any effect on politics. The scars persist in American society to this day. Yet in the decades after the Civil War, movements arose which eventually gathered together all the varied strands of American religion and culture into a new force: Pentecostalism. Pentecostals take their name from the incident described in the Book of Acts when, at the Jewish feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles and they ‘began to speak in other tongues’, so that the huge variety of pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem could all hear them speaking in every language represented in the crowds.117 Their roots are in the extraordinary variety of American Protestant religion and they have no single origin. Echoing in Pentecostalism are the jerking, barking, running ‘exercises’ of the Kentucky camp meeting, which had their precedent in the extrovert emotion

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

  steadily less convincing. That probably contributed to the growing elite distaste for hunting down witches. Women alert to the change in atmosphere began seeking their own reconstructed place in the Church. Mary Astell was a celibate High Church Anglican Tory with a lively interest in contemporary philosophy, and her Toryism made her a clear-eyed critic of the limitations of Whig proponents of a renewed Christianity like John Locke, who seemed to talk much of freedom for men, but not for half the human race (or indeed more than half, given Locke’s attitude to enslaved Africans). During the 1690s she began publishing her own vision, which amounted to a new Christian feminism: ‘That the Custom of the World has put Women, generally speaking, into a State of Subjection, is not denied; but the Right can no more be prov’d from the Fact, than the Predominancy of Vice can justify it.’ She was indignant that girls were deprived of decent education in favour of boys, and seized on what Allestree and other sympathetic commentators were saying, making their arguments her own, with a certain added sarcasm: ‘One wou’d … almost think, that the wise disposer of all things, foreseeing how unjustly Women are denied opportunities of improvement from without, has therefore by way of compensation endow’d them with greater propensions to Vertue, and a natural goodness of Temper within.’53 Much of this feminism would be absorbed into the Evangelical movements, which benefited from its activist enthusiasm and provided its chief outlet in Western culture right into the twentieth century (see pp. 828–30); but Evangelical Protestantism was ultimately not able to set boundaries to the feminism of Western culture, as will become apparent. ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The history of the Enlightenment, a story usually associated with the eighteenth century, therefore saw virtually all its elements in place by 1700. Many of its assumptions derived from the Old and New Testaments and the two religions which had created this literature, Judaism and Christianity. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe produced two apparently contrary but actually deeply entangled movements, both of which were destined to affect a world far beyond their original settings in countries around the North Sea. The Enlightenment bred an open scepticism as to whether there can be definitive truths in specially privileged writings exempt from detached analysis, or whether any one religion has the last word against any other; in its optimism, commitment to progress and steadily more material, secularizing character, it represented a revulsion against

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

  most celebrated example was the kingdom of Buganda, part of what is now the Republic of Uganda, where Anglicans fought off vigorous competition for established status from Roman Catholicism and Islam. In the process they gained a set of martyrs whose fiery deaths for refusing the orders of their Kabaka (king) to commit sodomy have left the Anglican Church in Uganda particularly sensitive to recent shifts in Western sexual mores.57 In the end, Buganda’s identification between Crown and Church was so great that when in 1953 the British Governor of Uganda exiled the Kabaka of Buganda for political reasons, the Mothers’ Union of the Anglican Church was loud among the chorus of furious protest. They complained that the Kabaka’s exile endangered all Christian marriage in the kingdom, since the Anglican Bishop of Uganda had presided over the marriage of the Kabaka to his people when he bestowed a ring on him at his coronation.58 Another powerful African kingdom, on the island of Madagascar (now Malaghasy), likewise weighed up which varieties of Christianity (if any) to persecute or encourage. Eventually in 1869 Queen Ranavalona II settled not on Anglicanism but on English Congregationalism: an analogous triumph to Methodism’s in Tonga and a tribute to the astuteness and persistence of the London Missionary Society.59 So Congregationalism had a new taste of state establishment after its recent American losses, albeit this time under an absolute monarch, but the end of the story was very different from Tonga’s. The colonial power which overthrew the monarchy, late in the colonial process in 1895, was not Britain but France, and for decades a further paradox afflicted Madagascar, as anticlerical French republican governments allowed Catholic clergy a free hand they would not have tolerated at home, actively repressed Protestant congregations and confiscated Protestant churches and schools, all in aid of promoting francophone against anglophone culture.60 This was a rather curious example of colonialism and Christianization going hand in hand, although the Congregationalists survived repression and still have a substantial presence on the island. Elsewhere, the inglorious end of Samuel Crowther’s episcopate encouraged the formation of African-initiated Churches; the late nineteenth century saw the rise of leaders asserting their charisma as Old Testament prophets had once done against the Temple priesthood. One of the classic figures, whose influence is still felt all through West Africa, was William Wade Harris (1865–1929), a product of both Methodism and American Anglicanism. As a native Liberian of the Grebo people, marginalized therefore by the African-American Liberian elite, his career began in political agitation against their misgovernment which aimed to hand Liberia over to British rule, an interesting tribute to British colonialism.

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

  the same hymns was split three ways: a white grouping (with its strength in the Northern States) repeated the arguments of eighteenth-century abolitionists with increasing anger; an equally angry defence of white Southerners’ slaveholding recycled all the arguments that the Bible and the Enlightenment had provided; and lastly African-American Churches, which served both the enfranchised and the enslaved, made common cause with white Northern abolitionists. Among Southern whites, the defence of slavery slid into a defence of white supremacy, since that was a useful way to unite the white population behind a coherent ideology; most Southerners did not actually own slaves, and had no necessary interest in defending that institution alone.110 Some American Churches split over the issue, including the largest, the Methodists and the Baptists, in the 1840s.111 The border was very clearly marked out by state boundaries, with the Quaker fountainhead of abolitionism, Pennsylvania, next to slaveholding Maryland. The tensions exploded into fighting between the Federal government and the Confederate Southern States in 1861, ostensibly not about slavery but about individual states’ rights to make decisions on slavery for themselves. The Republican president who led the Federal war effort, Abraham Lincoln, was a rationalist Unitarian who had left behind his childhood strict Calvinist Baptist faith for something more like the cool creeds of the most prominent Founding Fathers, but that did not lessen his commitment to the war as a profoundly Christian moral cause.112 Already the rhetoric of the struggle had been cast in terms of Christian moral crusade, thanks to the barely sane actions of a fervent Calvinist from a family long committed to the abolitionist cause, John Brown. Brown came from the same generation as Joseph Smith, and he remains just as controversial a figure, though nature endowed him with more potential than Smith for looking like an Old Testament prophet (see Plate 64). Proud of a New England Puritan heritage but unusual among abolitionists in embracing violence for the cause amid the rising tide of violence in the Midwest, he reversed the dictum of the High Priest Caiaphas on the death of Jesus, proclaiming that ‘it was better that a score of bad men should die than that one man who came here to make Kansas a Free State should be driven out’. Accordingly in 1856 he was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five pro-slavery activists, but despite that hardly defensible crime, his Northern canonization as an abolitionist martyr came as a result of his seizure of an undefended Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry three years later.113 When the raid failed to arouse a black insurrection, Brown sat tight in the arsenal and waited to be martyred, which the Commonwealth of Virginia duly did, for the moment casting oblivion over the crazy character of his campaign. A Massachusetts newspaper editorial picked up

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On February 8, a melee broke out during a student rally on the SCSU campus; panicked police fired into the crowd. The gunfire lasted just ten seconds or so, but when it was over, at least thirty people had been shot, and three black teenagers died. One of them, Delano Middleton, was a high school student whose mother worked on campus. At the hospital, Delano told her, “You’ve been a good mama, but I’m going to leave you now.” The next day, Governor Robert McNair called the episode “one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina,” but he blamed the violence on “Black Power advocates.” At a time when hundreds of Americans were dying every week in Vietnam, the Orangeburg Massacre, as it would be called, soon faded from the headlines. But the future it foretold for 1968 was only just starting to crystallize. —During a background briefing ten days into the Tet Offensive, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk erupted at reporters who were pressing him with tough questions. “Whose side are you on?” Rusk demanded. The press was offended that Rusk would challenge their loyalties, but the reality was that the country was deeply divided about the war. Much of the difference in opinion fell along generational lines; older people tended to trust the government, younger people tended to question everything. (In fact, by 1968, a common expression among the counterculture was “Never trust anyone over thirty.” And it was around that age that political opinions seemed to divide.) Thousands of roadside billboards admonished BEAUTIFY AMERICA, GET A HAIRCUT . By late February, the Tet Offensive had ended. By all accounts, it was a resounding American military victory. Yet that was not the message delivered by Walter Cronkite to the nation during his February 27 newscast. The CBS anchor had traveled to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive to see things for himself. Cronkite rarely offered his opinion. Now, he spoke candidly, and viewers hung on every word: “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion…it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. “This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.” When President Johnson saw the broadcast, he is said to have told those around him, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.” On the same day that Cronkite addressed the nation, twenty-five-year-old Frankie Lymon was found dead on the floor of his grandmother’s New York City apartment. Lymon had been a teenage singing sensation, part of the doo-wop group the Teenagers, and had been the angelic lead voice on songs like “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” which he’d helped write at age thirteen. As his boyish voice deepened, he faded from public favor.

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

  Communion’. Its bishops worldwide first met after an informal invitation to Lambeth Palace in 1867, hoping to solve the problem of the South African bishop John William Colenso, who had made the mistake of challenging the comfortable consensus of the English Church on interpreting the Bible.66 The mood of ecclesiastical self-assertion encompassed the other established Church in the British Isles, in Scotland, and there it had far more catastrophic effects than the Tractarians achieved in England. Devout members of the Church of Scotland who valued their Reformed heritage, and the theology of Presbyterian Church order within it, had grown increasingly outraged that, thanks to past compromises with the English government, parish congregations could not choose their own ministers, and were forced to accept the decisions of patrons who treated that right as a piece of property. Evangelicals found this particularly offensive. In protest at the lack of reform of this scandal after years of agitation, in 1843 no fewer than a third of the parish ministers walked out of the Church of Scotland and took most of their congregations with them. Providing one of the most remarkable demonstrations of Protestant energy in nineteenth-century Europe, they founded a complete alternative ‘Free Church of Scotland’ – not a dissenting Church, but an essay at an alternative established Church in waiting. They covered Scotland with a network of new parish churches, clergy houses and organizations alongside the old ones – a tribute not merely to Scotland’s continuing consciousness of its Reformation principles, but to the large amount of surplus wealth which its industrial revolution had generated. The schism was not healed until a reuniting of most of the parties concerned in 1929, by which time the problem of patronage had long been solved in the old established Church. Now it seems incredible that such an issue could have so dominated a major national Church and split it down the middle. Christian preoccupations move on. In England, the Oxford Movement had aesthetic and emotional advantages to sustain it. The Church of England commanded a heritage of thousands of beautiful medieval church buildings inherited from the pre-Reformation Church, over three centuries much altered in cheerfully miscellaneous ways to adapt them to Protestant use. In a society still saturated with Romantic love of the medieval, the impulse to restore their architectural beauty could combine with a High Church desire to develop a liturgy drawing on the buildings’ medieval functions. That endeavour might not lead straight to Rome, but to an enhanced dignity and solemnity in Anglican worship, which even those not styling themselves Anglo-Catholics might savour in moderate measure. And after initial wide public disapproval – even riots against the ‘Popery’ of Anglo-Catholic liturgy – there came the realization that High Church clergy

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

  taught in the network of educational institutions maintained by the Jesuits. The wild scenes at St-Médard are remarkably reminiscent of the crowd phenomena in the revivals which were about to sweep through Protestantism in Britain and North America, as well as of those associated with recent ‘prophets’ among the repressed Huguenot communities of southern France; yet it is significant that Jansenist lawyers who trooped to the cemetery linked their oppositionist politics to their religious enthusiasm. The Jansenist disputes created continuing bitterness and schism in a Church which was also fighting on other fronts. The French Church was an unstable mixture of triumphalism and disarray. It aspired to a stricter Counter-Reformation control of society than any other part of the Catholic Church in Europe, fitfully backed by coercion from the monarchy and yet encouraged by Jansenist campaigns for purity and austerity in everyday life. Its confrontation with the secular stage, for instance, reached levels equalling that of English Puritans in the 1650s, and tipped over into the tragically absurd. In the 1690s, the Archbishop of Paris banned his clergy from presiding over the weddings of anyone connected with the theatre, and actors remained banned from receiving the last rites, which meant that they could not be buried in consecrated ground.62 It was not surprising that when reaction came, it was in the name of a wider freedom of life. Attacks on the Church establishment came from angry Jansenists, lawyers and repressed Protestants as well as Freemasons and actors who wanted a wife; soon scepticism or hatred of the Church moved on to become what we would define as atheism. The battle had its self-appointed generals in a group of intellectuals who all knew each other (though were not all necessarily friends) and who had no hesitation in styling themselves philosophes: a label which would have done them no favours in an anglophone society, but which has continued to command respect in France. Two of them, Voltaire and Rousseau, were to achieve a secular form of sainting in the new France of the Revolution, when the former showpiece city church, Ste- Geneviève, rebuilt at the expense of France’s penultimate monarch in the old regime, was transformed into the ‘Pantheon’, a giant holding pen for the corpses of the specially honoured heroes of a self-consciously renewed and secularized society. There they still lie in great solemnity, their bones brought to the former church in the 1790s amid a welter of non-Christian pageantry. The most famous publicist for the French Enlightenment was the writer François-Marie Arouet, usually known by his pen name, Voltaire. Not an especially profound writer, without any formal university training, but equipped with charm, immensely quick wit and a genius for making money which gave him the chance to live independently and write what he wanted, he was perhaps

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

  everything else. Its plan was to create a national Church like that in England, but Catholic in doctrine and without the faults evident in the English Church. Gallican Catholics in France had long sought such arrangements, and indeed since the fifteenth century the monarchy had episodically done much to encourage such an outcome. Yet what was proposed took the most extreme form – it would be a national Church indeed, because bishops would be elected by the entire male population, including the newly emancipated Protestants and Jews.76 Church lands were confiscated, and the rural labouring classes watched in growing anger as wealthy merchants, office-holders and former officials flush with compensation for lost jobs all used their cash to build up new landholdings. The ‘Civil Constitution of the Clergy’, passed by the Assembly in 1790, left the Pope with no power, merely a formal respect. The fact that its passage paid no attention to what the Pope might think horrified many clergy who had gone along with reform so far. Recklessly the Assembly forced all clergy to take an oath of obedience to the Civil Constitution in January 1791. About half refused – and in the countryside that was particularly serious, because parish priests refusing were liable to carry their congregations with them. So now large sections of the population were cast as opponents of the Assembly: a fatal moment for the Revolution and the Church. Resistance was much strengthened when the Pope officially condemned the Civil Constitution that spring.77 The King, a devout Catholic, was increasingly identified with this opposition, and when he failed in an attempt to flee the country later that year, he was deprived of all power. It was more or less inevitable as events swept on that the Assembly should declare war on the traditional great powers of Europe, beginning in 1792 with the bulwark of the old system, the King’s brother-in-law the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope was one of those enemies: the lynching of a tactless Jacobin envoy in Rome, Nicolas Jean Hugon de Basseville, only cemented that impression in the minds of the government in Paris. War had a terrible effect on the Revolution. In 1792, spurred by provincial rebellions in the name of Catholic Christianity and the King, the State had begun large-scale executions of its aristocratic and clerical enemies in Paris. The numbers were at first small scale by modern standards of State terror, but they were horrifying at the time, particularly since they included nearly all available members of the French royal family, the King and Queen among them – the King died a week after de Basseville. At Nantes there were mass drownings of prisoners, beginning with priests, and the massacres in the Catholic Vendée set standards for later European atrocities in dehumanizing victims in order to make mass slaughter easy and virtuous. Europe’s first single-party dictatorship in the name of the

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

  European Protestants, but the Prussian enthusiasts had totally misunderstood the delicate political situation in the contemporary Church of England. Despite the fact that the plan provided for the bishop in Jerusalem always to be in Anglican orders, English High Churchmen were outraged (see pp. 841–2). The joint venture eventually lapsed; a conventionally conceived Anglican bishopric remains in Jerusalem, today making its own sterling contribution to ecumenical and inter-faith endeavours in that troubled region.47 More long-lasting, and of genuinely worldwide significance, was another segment of the same enterprise which shared its focus on Palestine: an Evangelical Alliance linking British and German Evangelical Protestants, founded in 1846. One of the Alliance’s concerns was to return Jews to Palestine and convert them there. This was an unprecedentedly practical attempt to hasten on the Last Days, that recurrent Protestant preoccupation. Most supporters of the Jerusalem bishopric project had viewed that enterprise in the same light, much excited by the fact that the first man chosen as bishop, Michael Solomon Alexander, was an English convert from Judaism and former rabbi. Alexander had demonstrated in his own person that the conversion of the Jewish people was imminent – an essential preparation for the End Times. The Evangelical Alliance found many other battles to fight as new threats to the Evangelical world view repeatedly emerged, but its first close association with Jerusalem projects was a precocious sign that international Evangelical Protestantism was going to link itself to the fate of the land of Palestine, even before many Jews began to share that concern (see pp. 992–3).48 It was with this triumphalist Protestant ideology in the background that the architect of the Second Reich, the Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, launched in 1871 what one of his severest Protestant critics, Rudolf Virchow, Berlin’s independent-minded Professor of Pathology, usefully christened the Kulturkampf – the clash of cultures. What cultures were these? Liberalism and Protestant Germany in alliance against international and conservative Roman Catholicism. Bismarck was hoping to yoke the new power of the Protestant imperial state to the horror of liberals at Pope Pius IX’s various dogmatic statements leading up to the declaration of infallibility – he could also draw on German nationalist contempt for and fear of Polish Catholics, whose dismembered nation lay partly within the Reich. The Chancellor was attempting nothing less than a permanent shift in the balance of power within the new empire, to eliminate Catholicism as a significant political force in northern Europe. He did not succeed: by 1887 he was forced to abandon the policy, having achieved little permanent beyond some enhanced government interference in Catholic education and clergy appointments. Partly Bismarck was

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

  Protestant Unionists were an unstable coalition, particularly in northeastern Ireland. Here the traditional ‘Anglo-Irish’ elite of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland had to make common cause with a truculently independent Ulster-Scots Presbyterianism, which shaded into a revivalism strongly linked to the fervour of the American Awakenings. Nevertheless, shared Protestant anger at British government concessions on Home Rule led significant numbers in 1914 to threaten to defend themselves by force, and when thousands of Protestant Ulstermen subsequently joined up for the British Army, their eyes were on the defence of Ulster as much as of the empire. Their slaughter in horrific numbers in the trench warfare of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, a particular holocaust of Irish regiments, only strengthened the determination of Ulster Protestants to give no ground. As Irish nationalist support grew and shouldered aside earlier more moderate Home Rule politicians, island-wide violence mounted. Partition became inevitable, though the decision led to a further vicious civil war in the south between nationalists who accepted and those who rejected the partition deal on offer from the British government. The British Isles ceased to be a United Kingdom in 1922, although southern Ireland ungraciously accepted an increasingly threadbare figleaf of monarchical authority until 1949. Northern Ireland consolidated itself into a state where majority Protestant rule would be entrenched – not least because both Catholics and Protestants resisted the attempt of the Westminster government to create truly non-sectarian education at primary school level; thanks to the Catholic Church’s firm instructions, Catholic parents overwhelmingly boycotted state secondary schools, leaving them to Protestants.23 Amid the crisis of Northern Ireland’s birth in 1920–23, Presbyterian society was electrified by a series of revivals conducted by a classic representative of extrovert Ulster-American fundamentalism, William P. Nicholson: hardbitten, ebullient, contemptuous of nuance – full of Gospel fire, others might say. Nicholson is a problematic figure. He has been credited with saving Ulster from all-out war by turning ‘born-again’ gunmen away from violence, but equally, as with previous Ulster revivalists, he could be seen as confirming the siege mentality of working-class Ulster Protestantism. In later life, he gave his blessing to one in a new generation of populist Presbyterians who was destined to spend much of a long and politically charged ministry amid a further Ulster civil war. Ian Paisley, founder of a self-styled Free Presbyterian Church, reminisced that Nicholson prayed that Paisley might be given a tongue as sharp as a cow’s in the service of the Gospel. Paisley if not God hearkened to that prayer, and despite the remarkable turnaround which crowned and then swiftly

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

  Catholics, but saw to the demolition of its dome on the grounds that it was unacceptably ‘eastern’ – it was in fact modelled on St Peter’s in Rome.60 That incident illustrates that the Poland which Wojtyla represented was a very different country from the pluralist Commonwealth of the early modern age. Its Jews had been wiped out, its Protestantism reduced to the margins and its Catholic Church had long forgotten the sturdy conciliarism and suspicion of Rome which had characterized the medieval kingdom.61 The Pope’s very rock- like strength, so precious an asset in confronting tyranny, became less unambiguously valuable in dealing with the nuances of other cultures and societies. He took to a passionate, joyfully reckless extreme the bleak commitment expressed by Paul VI: ‘my duty is too plain: decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd’.62 John Paul II had a liking for the word ‘magisterium’, which, though not in the repertoire of biblical writers, had since the nineteenth century stealthily acquired a technical theological meaning as ‘authoritative teaching’, particularly thanks to Pius XII’s propensity to deploy it. Now it peppered Vatican pronouncements; John Paul used it in a way which almost suggested that magisterium was a person, like the Holy Spirit.63 The Pope was determined to teach Catholics what Catholicism was about, and was also determined to stop anyone else telling them something different. So within a year of John Paul’s enthronement, the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, exponent of a dynamic development of the teaching of Vatican II, was deprived of his licence to teach as a Catholic. Küng’s former university colleague Josef Ratzinger, his own explorations of such views long behind him, arrived in the Vatican in 1981 as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – a title which was a further creative rebranding of the Roman Inquisition. The Pope’s instinctive anti-Communism made him react with hostility towards liberation theology, whose expression he had encountered directly at the Puebla episcopal conference early in his papacy in 1979. He had difficulties even with those Latin American clergy who had found themselves drawn, through their pastoral experiences, to campaigning for the poor. One of the most difficult cases was that of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, a priest of conservative instincts who nevertheless had come into increasingly bitter confrontation with the authoritarian and exploitative regime of El Salvador, to the point that he excommunicated members of the government after the murder of priests and nuns. There were representations to the Vatican from El Salvador, and Romero was about to be moved elsewhere when, in 1980, a right-wing gunman murdered him while he was celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel. The Pope could hardly ignore this outrage, so parallel to the fate of the

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  overnight; tensions had been building since the start of the year, one that was shaping up to be among the worst in the nation’s history. Already, ten thousand or more young Americans had been killed in Vietnam, and 1968 wasn’t nearly over. Antiwar demonstrations had erupted around America, racial tension had led to riots, student protests had turned bloody. In a nine-week span, between early April and early June, two of the country’s most inspirational figures—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy—had been assassinated. Swaths of the population no longer trusted government or authority or institutions. Even music seemed more political—and angry—than before. Now all of the year’s turmoil seemed to be coming to a head in Chicago. As the crew of Apollo 8 prepared to resume training after a weekend at home, two thousand demonstrators massed in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Many had nowhere else to sleep, but the city’s curfew required them to disperse at 11 P.M. When the hour struck, police outfitted in gas masks and helmets moved in, firing tear gas canisters into the remaining crowd, clubbing and kicking whomever they could reach. The convention opened the next day. Protesters marched on police headquarters, then redirected to Grant Park. At the convention, Daley promised, “As long as I’m mayor of this town, there will be law and order in Chicago.” On television, 89 million Americans tuned in to see the direction the country might take. On August 28, the Democratic Party voted against adopting an antiwar plank to its platform. The peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, refused on principle to address the convention, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the nomination. A crowd of ten thousand rallied in Grant Park. Tempers flared, and soon billy clubs and boots were flying. Rennie Davis, one of the organizers of the demonstrations, was beaten unconscious. Thousands began to march to the site of the convention, but they were turned back by National Guardsmen, some brandishing automatic weapons and grenade launchers. That left the protesters outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, where they remained into the night. By the thousands, they shouted epithets and profanities at police, delegates, politicians—anyone in charge—and to many it no longer sounded like free speech or the expression of opinion, it sounded like America had burst, and the bile

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

  Baroness Juliane von Krüdener which seemed to be an accurate prediction of his own pivotal role in defeating the Emperor Napoleon; he was less impressed by her advocacy of Greek revolutionary independence, which triggered an irreparable breach between them.72 For Alexander, religion was a necessary component of absolute power. That led him in 1815 to conclude a so-called ‘Holy Alliance’ with the Catholic Emperor of Austria and the Protestant King Friedrich William III of Prussia – the British government kept its distance from any public commitment to this unprecedented exploration of ecumenical despotism. The alliance formally died with Tsar Alexander, but his successor, Nicholas I, possessing not a mystical bone in his body, nevertheless saw the usefulness of the principles that his elder brother had established. Russian identity was to be founded on a triangle of Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. Whatever the personal religious quirks of Nicholas’s successors, that threefold foundation remained up to 1917. It was liable to stigmatize any subject of the tsar not included within it, particularly in European Russia, where alternative religious identities might be identified with nationalist dissidence. Jews and Greek Catholics suffered the worst from this attitude, the latter losing the legal existence and property of their Church to the Orthodox Church in 1839, and the former undergoing repeated bouts of murderous persecution, tolerated and often encouraged by the tsarist government. One of the most pernicious offshoots of official Russian anti-Semitism was a work of propaganda published in 1903, the brainchild of an agent of the tsarist secret police based in France, Matvei Golovinskii: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This picture of an imaginary worldwide Jewish conspiracy has sustained a malign life among the worst sort of conspiracy theorists down to the present. It was one of three books found in the room of the last tsarina in Ekaterinburg, just after her murder by the Bolsheviks in 1918.73 Beyond Jews and Greek Catholics, a host of Old Believers and sects of undoubtedly foreign inspiration provoked constant official suspicion and fitful harassment; in turn, they built up a head of anger against the regime, which fed into its eventual collapse.74 The autocracy was increasingly despised even by some of the best and most conscientious Orthodox laypeople and clergy. A deeply symbolic issue after 1896 was temperance, that preoccupation alike of Eastern and Western nineteenth-century Christian reformers. The Orthodox Church was at the forefront of a powerful temperance movement throughout the empire, yet it was well aware that the state made polite noises in support of such efforts while squeezing maximum profits out of a newly proclaimed imperial monopoly on the sale of alcohol.75 At many different levels, despite the moral and political damage wrought by the tsars’ jealousy of its power, the Russian Church did its best to guide its flock

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Born in 1928, Jim grew up in the teeth of the Depression, but his father had work and the family didn’t want for much. All of that changed around the time Jim reached fifth grade; his parents separated, and not long after, his father died in an automobile accident. Needing to support herself and her young son, Blanch Lovell moved to be near her brother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and took a job as a secretary for modest wages. By 1940, she and Jim were living in a tiny one-room apartment, their kitchen jammed into a closet, using a single toilet shared by everyone who lived on the floor. In 1940, an American kid could hardly walk into a drugstore without seeing a new kind of flying machine streaking across magazine covers: the rocket. Jim couldn’t get enough of the fins and flames and faraway planets painted in full color by the magazine’s visionary artists, or the stories of what these machines could do. Rockets didn’t just take a person from point to point, like airplanes. They flew into the future. Jim wanted to fly there, too. Soon he was reading books by the founding father of rocket engineering, Robert Goddard. The idea that these machines could reach beyond Earth’s atmosphere lit up Jim’s dreams. He read Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon, and its sequel, Around the Moon, which tell of three adventurers who build a nine-hundred-foot space cannon that launches them in a projectile around the Moon. During their journey, the men avert a deadly asteroid strike, jettison a dead dog out the window, and succumb to a mysterious force that causes them to dance and sing. They also glimpse the far side of the Moon, a view unavailable from Earth. Now, seventy-five years after Verne had penned his science fiction masterpieces, rocket engineers were saying that an actual trip to the Moon might be possible. Jim paid attention to that. By the time he began at Milwaukee’s Juneau High School, Jim had determined to learn all there was to know about rocketry. He discovered a report written by Goddard and published in 1919, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, and was fascinated by the vision in Goddard’s mathematical calculations and his thinking about rocket fuels. The New York Times had ridiculed Goddard for suggesting that a rocket could operate in the vacuum of space or carry payloads to the Moon. “He only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” the newspaper wrote. Goddard responded by saying, “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.” To fourteen-year-old Jim Lovell, Goddard had more than vision. He had courage. In June 1944, the summer after his sophomore year, Jim took a job baling hay on a farm in Plymouth, Wisconsin, an hour north of Milwaukee.