Anxiety

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 The Battle for God (2000)

  As Charles Hodge had argued fifty years earlier, the Darwinian hypothesis was repugnant to the Baconian mind-set of the fundamentalists, who still clung to the scientific outlook of early modernity. Intellectuals and sophisticates might follow these new ideas with enthusiasm in Yale and Harvard and in the big eastern cities, but they were alien to many small-town Americans, who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist establishment. Yet the campaign against evolution might still never have replaced the Higher Criticism as the chief fundamentalist bugbear had it not been for a dramatic development in the South, which had hitherto taken little part in the fundamentalist battle. There had been no need for southerners to become fundamentalists. The southern states were much more conservative than the North at this point, and there were too few liberals in the southern denominations to warrant a fundamentalist campaign. But southerners were worried about the teaching of evolution in the public schools. It was an example of the “colonization” of their society by an alien ideology, and bills were introduced in the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas to ban the teaching of Darwinian theory. The anti-evolution laws in Tennessee were particularly severe, and to put them to the test and strike a symbolic blow for freedom of speech and the First Amendment, John Scopes, a young teacher in the small town of Dayton, confessed that he had broken the law when he had once substituted for his school principal in a biology class. In July 1925, he was brought to trial, and the new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist lawyer and campaigner Clarence Darrow (1857–1938). At the request of Riley and other fundamentalist leaders, William Jennings Bryan agreed to support the law. Once Darrow and Bryan became involved, the trial ceased to be simply about civil liberties, and became a contest between God and science. The Scopes Trial was a clash between two utterly incompatible points of view. 31 Both Darrow and Bryan were defending crucial American values; Darrow was for free speech, and Bryan for the rights of the ordinary people, who had long been leery of the influence of learned experts and specialists. Bryan’s political campaigns had all championed the common man. A review of In His Image (1922), Bryan’s answer to Darwin, claimed that he was “the spokesman for a numerically large segment of the people who are for the most part inarticulate. In fact, he is almost the only exponent of their ideas who has the public ear.

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

  Divine, and the hesitant reception of his Book of Revelation into the New Testament may reflect ecclesiastical worries about this recurrent theme of prophecy among Christians in Asia Minor. Like so many converts, Montanus passionately proclaimed his enthusiasm for his new-found faith, but that extended (at a date uncertain, but probably around 165) into announcements that he had new revelations from the Holy Spirit to add to the Christian message. It was not so much the content of these messages that worried the existing Christian leadership of the area as the challenge which they posed to their authority. By what right did this man with no commission, in no apostolic succession, speak new truths of the faith and sweep crowds along with him in his excitement?What made matters worse was that Montanus was accompanied by female prophetesses who spoke in states of ecstasy. The position of women leadership in the Church had steadily diminished over the previous century, and this combination of female assertiveness and prophecy seemed dangerously reminiscent of the female seers at ancient cultic centres: the worst possible resonance for a cult seeking to demonstrate its separation from other religions. So the Church in Asia was riven: was Montanus a blessing or a danger? Both sides appealed to other Churches around the Mediterranean, and to the great distress of the Montanists, they found themselves condemned by Eleutherius, the Bishop of Rome. As is often the case, opposition and hostility drove them into ever wilder statements about their own mission; their total and final exclusion from the Catholic Church by a council of bishops was sadly inevitable after this. Elsewhere in the Christian world, only in North Africa, which came to have a tradition of high-temperature Christianity, did their passionate commitment to the Holy Spirit find a lasting sympathy among prominent Christian activists, especially the distinguished early-third-century Christian writer Tertullian (see pp. 144–7). Yet in their Phrygian homeland, the Montanists persisted obstinately until at least the sixth century. Then in 550 the morale of the proud descendants of the ‘New Prophecy’ was finally broken when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian sent in his troops to wreck their great shrine of the founder-prophets in the now-venerable Montanist stronghold at Pepouza. Eventually even Pepouza’s whereabouts were forgotten and only recently has the enthusiasm of researchers revealed its probable site.68 Yet less than a century after the imperial vandalism at Pepouza a new ‘New Prophecy’ began tearing at the fabric of the Byzantine Empire, as Muslim armies swept north from Mecca and beat at the frontiers of Asia Minor. Maybe there were still Montanists in Asia Minor to welcome the fervour of the new arrivals. While the Montanists early on became firmly convinced that they were about

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Princeton reliance upon reason alone put it in line with modernity, but its claims were at variance with the facts. “Christianity makes its appeal by right reason,” Warfield contended in a later article. “It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet.” 17 A cursory glance at Christian history shows that, as in all premodern religion, reason had been exercised only in a mythical context. Christianity had relied on mysticism, intuition, and liturgy rather than “right reason,” which had never been the “sole” appeal of Christian faith. Warfield’s militant imagery, which looks forward to confounding the “enemies” of the faith by reason, probably reflects a buried insecurity. If Christian truth was really so clear and self-evident, why did so many people refuse to accept it? There was desperation in Princeton theology. “Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” Charles Hodge declared in 1874. 18 It was clearly worrying to Christians who took their stand on scientific reason when the theories of natural scientists seemed to contradict the literal meaning of the Bible. That was why Hodge wrote What Is Darwinism? (1874), the first sustained religious attack on the evolutionary hypothesis. For Hodge, the Baconian, Darwinism was simply bad science. He had studied the Origin carefully and could not take seriously Darwin’s suggestion that the intricate design of nature had come into being by chance, independently of God. He revealed thereby the closed mind-set of the emergent Protestant fundamentalism: Hodge simply could not imagine that any belief that differed from his own was viable. “To any ordinarily constituted mind,” he insisted, “it is absolutely impossible to believe that the eye is not the work of design.” 19 Human beings had the duty to oppose “all spectacular hypotheses and theories”—such as Darwin’s—“which come into conflict with well-established truths.” It was a plea for “common sense”; God had given to the human mind “intuitions which are infallible,” and if Darwin contradicted these, his hypothesis was untenable and had to be rejected. 20 The scientific Christianity that was being developed at Princeton fell between two stools. Hodge was trying to put a brake on reason in the old conservative way, and refused to allow it the free play that was characteristic of modernity. But in reducing all mythical truth to the level of logos, he was flying in the face of the spirituality of the old world. His theology was bad science and inadequate religion. But Princeton was not typical.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  20 Nevertheless, the prominence of the ulema gave Egyptian society a distinctly religious character. Islam gave the people of Egypt their only real security. 21 Security was at a premium in the Middle East by the late eighteenth century. The Ottoman state was now in serious disarray. The superb efficiency of its government in the sixteenth century had given way to incompetence, especially on the peripheries of the empire. The West had begun its startling rise to power, and the Ottomans found that they could no longer fight as equals with the powers of Europe. It was difficult for them to respond to the Western challenge, not simply because it occurred at a time of political weakness, but because the new society that was being created in Europe was without precedent in world history. 22 The sultans tried to adapt, but their efforts were superficial. Sultan Selim III (ruled 1789–1807), for example, saw the Western threat in purely military terms. There had been abortive attempts in the 1730s to reform the army along European lines, but when he ascended the throne in 1789 Selim opened a number of military schools with French instructors, where students became acquainted with European languages and Western books on mathematics, navigation, geography, and history. 23 Learning a few military techniques and a smattering of modern sciences, however, would not prove sufficient to contain the Western threat, because Europeans had evolved an entirely new way of life and thought, so that they operated on entirely different norms. To meet them on their own ground, the Ottomans would need to develop a wholly rational culture, dismantle the Islamic structure of society, and be prepared to sever all sacred links with the past. A few members of the elite might be able to achieve this transition, which had taken Europeans almost three hundred years, but how would they persuade the masses, whose minds and hearts were imbued with the conservative ethos, to accept and understand the need for such radical change? On the margins of the empire, where Ottoman decline was most acutely felt, people responded to the change and unrest as they had always done—in religious terms. In the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92) managed to break away from Istanbul and create a state of his own in central Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. Abd al-Wahhab was a typical Islamic reformer. He met the current crisis by returning to the Koran and the Sunnah, and by vehemently rejecting medieval jurisprudence, mysticism, and philosophy. Because they diverged from this pristine Islam, as he envisaged it, Abd al-Wahhab declared the Ottoman sultans to be apostates, unworthy of the obedience of the faithful and deserving of death. Their Shariah state was inauthentic. Instead, Abd al-Wahhab tried to create an enclave of pure faith, based on the practice of the first Muslim community in the seventh century.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1917, British and Russian troops overran the country. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russians withdrew, but the British moved into the areas they had vacated in the north of the country, while holding on to their own bases in the south. Britain was now eager to make Iran a protectorate. Oil had been discovered in the country in 1908, and the concession had been granted to a British subject, William Knox D’Arcy; in 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed, and Iranian oil fueled the British navy. Iran was now a rich prize. But the Majlis held out against British control. There were anti-British demonstrations throughout the country in 1920, the Majlis appealed for help from Soviet Russia and the United States, and Britain was forced to abandon this plan. But Iranians were miserably aware that they had managed to retain their independence only by appealing to other great powers, who had their own designs on Iranian oil. Iran now had a constitution and representative government, but this was useless, since the Majlis had no real power. Even the Americans noted that the British constantly rigged the elections and that Iranians were “prevented from public expression of opinion or giving vent to feelings in any manner by the existing martial law and controlled press.” 94 The prevailing mood of dissatisfaction made it relatively easy for a small group, under the leadership of Seyyid Zia ad-Din Tabatabai, a civilian, and Reza Khan (1877–1944), the commander of the shah’s Cossack brigade, to overthrow the government. In February 1921, Zia ad-Din became prime minister, with Reza Khan as his minister of war. The British acquiesced because Zia ad-Din was known to be pro-British, and they hoped that his election would further their plans for a protectorate, which they had not abandoned entirely. But Reza Khan was the stronger of the two leaders, and he was soon able to force Zia ad-Din into exile, form a new cabinet, and become sole ruler. Reza at once began to modernize the country, and, because the people were so frustrated and ready for any change, he was able to succeed where his predecessors had failed. Reza had no interest in social reform and no concern for the poor. His objective was simply to centralize the country, strengthen the army and the bureaucracy, and make Iran function more effectively. Any opposition was ruthlessly cut down. From the very beginning, Reza courted Soviet Russia and the United States in order to rid the country of the British, granting an oil concession to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in return for American technical advice and investment. In 1925, Reza was in a strong enough position to force the last Qajar shah to abdicate.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Until the seventeenth century, Islamdom was the greatest world power. But this political, intellectual, and artistic endeavor had been conducted within a mythological context which would be alien to the values of the new Western culture that had been developing in Europe. Many of the ideals of modern Europe would be congenial to Muslims. We have seen that their faith had encouraged them to form attitudes that would be similar to those promoted by the modern West: social justice, egalitarianism, the freedom of the individual, a humanly based spirituality, a secular polity, a privatized faith, and the cultivation of rational thought. But other aspects of the new Europe would be difficult for people shaped by the conservative ethos to accept. By the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims had fallen behind the West intellectually, and, because the Islamic empires were also politically weak at this date, they would be vulnerable to the European states which were about to make their bid for world hegemony. The British had already established themselves in India, and France was determined to create its own empire. On May 19, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for the Middle East from Toulon with 38,000 men and 400 ships to challenge British power in the Orient. The French fleet crossed the Mediterranean and on July 1 Napoleon landed 4300 troops on the beach at Alexandria and took the city shortly after dawn the following day. 57 He thus achieved a base in Egypt. Napoleon had brought with him a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a scientific laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The new scientific, secularist culture of the West had invaded the Muslim world, and it would never be the same again. 5. B attle L ines ( 1870–1900 ) B Y THE END of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the new society which had finally come to fruition in the West was not quite the universal panacea that some had imagined. The dynamic optimism that had inspired Hegel’s philosophy had given way to perplexing doubt and malaise. On the one hand, Europe was going from strength to strength; there was confidence and an exultant sense of mastery as the industrial revolution brought some of the nation-states more wealth and power than they had ever achieved before.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Intellectuals tried to fight the regime with ideas. They were disturbed by the malaise in the country, and could see that modernization had been too rapid and had resulted in widespread alienation. The brilliant philosopher Ahmed Fardid (1912–94), who became a professor at the University of Tehran in the late 1960 S , coined the term gharbzadegi (“West-toxication”) to describe the Iranian dilemma: the people had been poisoned and polluted by the West; they must create a new identity for themselves. 37 This theme was amplified by the secularist and onetime socialist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69), whose Gharbzadegi (1 962) became a cult book for Iranians during the 1960s. This “rootlessness” and “Occidentosis” was “a disease from without, spreading in an environment susceptible to it.” It was the plight of a people “having no supporting tradition, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation.” 38 This plague could devastate Iran’s integrity, eradicate her political sovereignty, and destroy the economy. But Al-e Ahmad was himself torn both ways: he was influenced by such Western writers as Sartre and Heidegger, and attracted by the Western ideals of democracy and liberty; but he did not see how they could be successfully transplanted in the alien soil of Iran. He expressed what has been described as the “agonized schizophrenia” of the Western-educated Iranians, who felt pulled in two directions, 39 and though he could articulate the problem memorably, he had no solution to propose—though it appears that, toward the end of his life, he was beginning to see Shiism as an authentically Iranian institution that could provide a basis for a genuine national identity and become a healing alternative to the Westernizing disease. 40 The Iranian ulema were quite unlike the Egyptian clergy. Many were aware that they would have to modernize themselves and their institutions if they were to support the people. They were increasingly distressed by the shah’s autocratic rule, which offended fundamental Shii principles, and his obvious indifference to religion. In 1960, even Ayatollah Borujerdi, the supreme Marja, who had forbidden the clergy to take any part in politics, was moved to condemn the shah’s Land Reform Bill. It was a pity that he chose this issue, because it made the ulema , many of whom were landowners, seem selfish and reactionary. In fact, Borujerdi’s intervention probably sprang from an instinctive feeling that this could be the thin end of the wedge. 41 The Land Reform contravened Shariah laws of ownership, and Borujerdi may have feared that to deprive the people of rights guaranteed by Islamic Law in one sphere could lead to worse abuses in other areas.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The experience of the Sephardic Jews was an extreme form of the uprooting and displacement that other peoples would later experience when they were caught up in an aggressive modernizing process. We shall see that when modern Western civilization took root in a foreign environment, it transformed the culture so drastically that many people felt alienated and disoriented. The old world had been swept away, and the new one was so strange that people could not recognize their once-familiar surroundings and could make no sense of their lives. Many would become convinced, like the Sephardics, that their very existence was threatened. They would fear annihilation and extinction. In their confusion and pain, many would do what some of the Spanish exiles did, and turn to religion. But because their lives were so utterly changed, they would have to evolve new forms of faith to make the old traditions speak to them in their radically altered circumstances. But this would take time. In the early sixteenth century, the exiled Jews found that traditional Judaism did nothing for them. The disaster seemed unprecedented, and they found that old pieties no longer worked. Some turned to messianism. For centuries, Jews had waited for a Messiah, an anointed king of the house of David, to bring their long exile to an end and return them to the Promised Land. Some Jewish traditions spoke of a period of tribulation immediately before the advent of the Messiah, and it occurred to some of the Sephardic exiles who had taken refuge in the Balkans, that the suffering and persecution that had befallen themselves and so many of their fellow Jews in Europe could only mean one thing: this must be the time of trial foretold by the prophets and sages, and called the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” because out of this anguish deliverance and new life would come.9 Other peoples who have felt that their world has been destroyed by the onset of modernity would also evolve millennial hopes. But messianism is problematic, because, until now, every single messianic movement that has expected an imminent Redeemer has been disappointed. The Sephardic Jews avoided this dilemma by finding a more satisfying solution. They developed a new mythos.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet during the early stages of this transformation of Western society this was not the case. Many of the explorers, scientists, and thinkers at the cutting edge of change believed that they were finding new ways of being religious rather than abolishing religion altogether. We shall examine some of their solutions in this chapter and consider their deeper implications. But it is important to be clear that the men who became the spokesmen of the modern spirit did not themselves create it. By the sixteenth century, a complex process was at work in Europe and, later, in its American colonies which was transforming the way that people thought and experienced the world. Change would occur gradually and often unobtrusively. Inventions and innovations, none of which seemed particularly decisive at the time, were occurring simultaneously in many different fields, but their cumulative effect would be conclusive. All these discoveries were characterized by a pragmatic, scientific spirit that slowly undermined the old conservative, mythical ethos and made an increasing number of people receptive to new ideas about God, religion, the state, the individual, and society. Europe and the American colonies would need to accommodate these changes in different political arrangements. Like any other period of far-reaching social change, this was a violent era. There were destructive wars and revolutions, violent uprooting, the despoliation of the countryside, and hideous religious strife. In the course of three hundred years, Europeans and Americans had to employ ruthless methods to modernize their society. There was bloodshed, persecution, inquisition, massacre, exploitation, enslavement, and cruelty. We are witnessing the same bloody upheavals in countries in the developing world which are going through the painful modernizing process today.

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

  letters to Church communities in Paul’s tradition, hence their common collective designation as the ‘Pastoral Epistles’. What is striking in this literature is the way in which the idea that the end is at hand, so prominent in Paul’s letters, has faded from view. The author of Ephesians is prepared to talk about ‘the coming ages’, which seems to mean a long time on this earth.21 Nowhere is this shift more perceptible than in one feature of these documents, also to be found in the first of the two epistles attributed to Peter, which also takes many cues from Ephesians: sets of rules for conducting a human household, which in the sixteenth century Martin Luther styled Haustafeln, ‘tables of household duties’. What is particularly remarkable about the Haustafeln is that they include commands to children ‘that they may live long in the land’: the Church must now consider the next generation and its earthly future.22 Indeed, the writer to Timothy tells women that their salvation comes from having children (not a text to find favour with countless generations of women in the monastic life in later centuries).23 These lists repeat the commonplace Hellenistic wisdom of their day, but they give it a gloss from Paul’s argument that the relationship of husband to wife is like Christ’s relationship to his Church: ‘[T]he husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Saviour.’24 Now the various gradations of status and authority to be found in the world are to shape the way in which Christians conceive their faith. And there is an extra consideration, connected to the Pastoral Epistles’ insistence that Church leaders must be beyond reproach outside the community as well as inside it.25 The Church is worried about its public image and concerned to show that it is not a subversive organization threatening the well-being of society, ‘that the word of God may not be discredited’.26 As we have seen (see pp. 103–5), the only dissident voice against this frank quest for respectability is to be found in that very unusual entrant into the Christian New Testament, the Book of Revelation. In just two respects are the first Christians recorded as having been consciously different from their neighbours. First, they were much more rigorous about matters of sex than the prevailing attitudes in the Roman Empire; they did not forget their founder’s fierce disapproval of divorce. Although with Paul’s encouragement Christians did move to make some exceptions to Jesus’s absolute ban (see pp. 90–91), their concerns to restrict such exceptions are in sharp contrast to the relative ease with which either party in a non-Christian Roman marriage could declare the relationship to be at an end. Likewise, abortion and the abandonment of unwanted children were accepted as regrettable necessities in Roman society, but, like the Jews before them, Christians were insistent that these practices were completely unacceptable. Even those Christian writers who

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Zunz could appreciate the crucial importance of cult, which alone made the myths and beliefs of religion comprehensible. Frankel could also see the importance of ritual in helping people to create the correct spiritual attitudes. He feared that the Reformers were becoming so rational that they were losing touch with their feelings. Reason alone could not satisfy the emotions or produce the joy and delight that traditional Judaism, at its best, had always been able to inspire. It was wrong to abolish the complex, ancient rites of Yom Kippur or to omit all mention of a messianic return to Zion, because these images had shaped Jewish consciousness and helped Jews to cultivate a sense of awe and find hope in intolerable circumstances. 25 Some change was certainly necessary, but the Reformers often seemed insensitive to the role of emotion in worship. Zunz and Frankel were alert to the essentially mythical component of religion and did not subscribe wholly to the modern tendency to see reason alone as the gateway to truth. Geiger, for his part, was an out-and-out rationalist, and in favor of sweeping reforms. Yet, over the years, Reform Jews have recognized the wisdom of Zunz’s and Frankel’s concerns, and have reinstated some of the traditional practices, finding that without an emotive, mystical element, faith and worship lose their soul. Both the Reformers and the scholars of the Science of Judaism were preoccupied with the survival of their religion in a world that seemed, however benevolently, bent on destroying it. As they watched their fellow Jews rushing to the baptismal font, they were deeply concerned for the future of Judaism and were desperate to find ways of ensuring that it continued to exist. We shall find that many religious people in the modern world have shared this anxiety. In all three of the monotheistic faiths, there has been recurrent alarm that the traditional faith is in deadly danger. The dread of annihilation is one of the most fundamental of human terrors, and many of the religious movements that have arisen in the modern world have sprung from this fear of extinction. As the secular spirit took hold and as the prevailing rationalism became more hostile to faith, religious people became increasingly defensive and their spirituality more embattled. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, traditional Jews—whom the Reformers called Altglaubigen , “old believers”—had certainly begun to feel beleaguered. Even after emancipation, they continued to live as though the ghetto walls were still in place. They immersed themselves totally in the study of Torah and Talmud, and insisted that modernity was to be shunned. gentile studies were, they believed, incompatible with Judaism. One of their leading spokesmen was Rabbi Moses Sofer of Pressburg (1763–1839). He was opposed to any change or accommodation to modernity—God, after all, did not change; he forbade his children to read Mendelssohn’s books and refused to allow them a secular education or to participate in modern society in any way.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Karim Khan was convinced that this progressive revelation was about to be completed. Human nature would shortly achieve perfection. He was clearly responding to the changes that the Europeans were bringing to Iran. Karim Khan was no democrat; like all premodern philosophers, he was an elitist and an absolutist; impatient with the differences of opinion among the mujtahids, he intended to impose his own vision on the people. Nevertheless, he was one of the first Iranian clerics to acquaint himself with the new ideas of Europe. Where the orthodox ulema simply opposed the commercial encroachments of the British and Russians, Karim Khan was prescient enough to be more concerned about the new science and secularism of the West. In his spare time, he studied astronomy, optics, chemistry, and linguistics, and prided himself on his knowledge of science. During the 1850s and 1860s, when very few Iranians had firsthand knowledge of Europe, Karim Khan already realized that Western culture posed a grave threat to Iranian civilization. This was a period of transition, and he could see that new solutions must be found to meet this unprecedented challenge. Hence his evolutionary theology, which allowed for the possibility of something fresh, and his intuitive expectation of imminent, radical change. The Shaykhi movement was, however, rooted in the old world, with its elitist vision of knowledge. Feeling the impact of the industrialized West, it was also defensive. Karim Khan was bitterly opposed to the new Dar al-Funun, the first free high school in Tehran, founded by the reforming minister Amir Kabir. Staffed mainly by Europeans, it taught, with the aid of interpreters, natural science, higher mathematics, foreign languages, and the art of modern warfare. Karim Khan saw the school as part of a plot to extend European influence and destroy Islam. Soon the ulema would be silenced, he argued, Muslim children would be educated in Christian schools, and Iranians would become fake Europeans. He could see the dangers of alienation and anomie that lay ahead, and in the face of increasing European encroachment, his stance was rejectionist and separatist. His mystical ideology can be seen as an attempt to open the minds of Iranians to a wholly new solution, but, for better or worse, the Western presence in Iran was a fact of life and no reform movement that was unable to accommodate it could succeed. There were rumors that Karim Khan was about to establish his own religious government; he was summoned to court and kept under surveillance for eighteen months. During the 1850s and 1860s, he gradually retired from public life, kept his opinions to himself, and died, defeated and embittered, on his estate.62

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The New Light Presbyterian seminary at Princeton, New Jersey, became the bastion of this scientific Protestantism.15 The term “bastion” is appropriate, because the campaign for rational Christianity often used militant imagery, and seemed chronically on the defensive. In 1873, Charles Hodge, who held the chair of theology at Princeton, published the first volume of his two-volume work Systematic Theology. Again, the title reveals its scientific bias. The theologian’s task was not to look for a meaning beyond the words, Hodge insisted, but simply to arrange the clear teachings of scripture into a system of general truths. Every word of the Bible was divinely inspired and must be taken seriously; it should not be distorted by allegorical or symbolic exegesis. Charles’s son, Archibald A. Hodge, who took his father’s chair in 1878, published a defense of the literal truth of the Bible in The Princeton Review, with a young colleague, Benjamin Warfield. The article became a classic. All the stories and statements of the Bible were “absolutely errorless and binding for faith and obedience.” Everything the Bible said was absolute “truth to the facts.” If the Bible said it was inspired, it was inspired,16 a circular argument that was anything but scientific. Such a view had no rational objectivity, was closed to any alternative, and coherent only within its own terms. The Princeton reliance upon reason alone put it in line with modernity, but its claims were at variance with the facts. “Christianity makes its appeal by right reason,” Warfield contended in a later article. “It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet.”17 A cursory glance at Christian history shows that, as in all premodern religion, reason had been exercised only in a mythical context. Christianity had relied on mysticism, intuition, and liturgy rather than “right reason,” which had never been the “sole” appeal of Christian faith. Warfield’s militant imagery, which looks forward to confounding the “enemies” of the faith by reason, probably reflects a buried insecurity. If Christian truth was really so clear and self-evident, why did so many people refuse to accept it?

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

  Jerusalem after the death of Jesus and his removal from earthly life. As we have noted (see p. 98), the most important among these leaders was at first James the brother of Jesus. When the Jewish authorities executed James in 62 CE on charges of breaking the Jewish Law, his place was taken by another ‘kinsman’ of the Lord, Simeon. If the gathering of Christ-followers in Jerusalem had intended to become the mainstream expression of Judaism, they had failed, because they remained a minority grouping on the edge of the religious life in the city and in Palestine generally. Nevertheless, among the emerging Christ-followers they had a good deal of prestige because of their leaders’ intimate connection with Jesus. Paul was constrained to admit when writing to the Corinthians that these men had experienced Resurrection appearances of the Lord before his own, in an order which he is careful to make clear – first Peter, then James.76 Indeed, Paul repeatedly urges the Churches to whom he writes around the Mediterranean to send funds to the Jerusalem Church, in the same way that Jews made a contribution to the Temple. This implies that the institution of the Jerusalem Church was beginning to take the place of the old Temple in the esteem of Christ’s followers, and it is not surprising that Paul would have to respect it. Yet he represented the growing number of communities which placed their trust in Christ as Lord far away from Jerusalem around the Mediterranean world: communities which had grown in circumstances which will probably always remain obscure, despite the brilliant flashes of light or apparent light which illuminate their origins in Paul’s epistles and the Book of Acts. The separate inspiration of much of Paul’s message (a matter which, as we have seen, he himself emphasized) was bound to bring tensions with the Jerusalem leadership, and in fact there were bitter clashes hinted at even in the emollient prose of the Book of Acts. A furious passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians reveals the real seriousness of the quarrel, as Paul accused his opponents, including Jesus’s disciple Peter, one of the original Twelve, of cowardice, inconsistency and hypocrisy.77 At stake was an issue which would trouble Christ-followers for 150 years: how far should they move from the Jewish tradition if, like Paul, they preached the good news of Christ’s kingdom to non-Jews? Questions of deep symbolism arose: should converts accept such features of Jewish life as circumcision, strict adherence to the Law of Moses and abstention from food defiled by association with pagan worship (that would include virtually all meat sold in the non-Jewish world)? Paul would allow only that Christians should not eat food which they knew had been publicly offered to idols, and otherwise not make much of a fuss about wares on sale in the market or about the dishes at a non-believer’s table.78 One might have expected that the result of this would be the development of

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  the rare event is overweighted by a factor of 4. The certainty effect at the other end of the probability scale is even more striking. A 2% risk of not winning the prize reduces the utility of the gamble by 13%, from 100 to 87.1. To appreciate the asymmetry between the possibility effect and the certainty effect, imagine first that you have a 1% chance to win $1 million. You will know the outcome tomorrow. Now, imagine that you are almost certain to win $1 million, but there is a 1% chance that you will not. Again, you will learn the outcome tomorrow. The anxiety of the second situation appears to be more salient than the hope in the first. The certainty effect is also more striking than the possibility effect if the outcome is a surgical disaster rather than a financial gain. Compare the intensity with which you focus on the faint sliver of hope in an operation that is almost certain to be fatal, compared to the fear of a 1% risk. The combination of the certainty effect and possibility effects at the two ends of the probability scale is inevitably accompanied by inadequate sensitivity to intermediate probabilities. You can see that the range of probabilities between 5% and 95% is associated with a much smaller range of decision weights (from 13.2 to 79.3), about two-thirds as much as rationally expected. Neuroscientists have confirmed these observations, finding regions of the brain that respond to changes in the probability of winning a prize. The brain’s response to variations of probabilities is strikingly similar to the decision weights estimated from choices. Probabilities that are extremely low or high (below 1% or above 99%) are a special case. It is difficult to assign a unique decision weight to very rare events, because they are sometimes ignored altogether, effectively assigned a decision weight of zero. On the other hand, when you do not ignore the very rare events, you will certainly overweight them. Most of us spend very little time worrying about nuclear meltdowns or fantasizing about large inheritances from unknown relatives. However, when an unlikely event becomes the focus of attention, we will assign it much more weight than its probability deserves. Furthermore, people are almost completely insensitive to variations of risk among small probabilities. A cancer risk of 0.001% is not easily distinguished from a risk of 0.00001%, although the former would translate to 3,000 cancers for the population of the United States, and the latter to 30. When you pay attention to a threat, you worry—and the decision weights reflect how much you worry. Because of the possibility effect, the worry is not proportional to the probability of the threat. Reducing or mitigating the risk is not adequate; to eliminate the worry the probability must be brought down to

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Conservative religion had not usually been hysterical in this way. Its rituals and cult had been designed to attune people to reality. Bacchanalian cults and frenzied ecstasy had certainly occurred but had involved the few rather than the majority. Mysticism was not for the masses. At its best, it was a one-to-one process, in which the adept was carefully supervised to make sure that he or she did not fall into unhealthy psychic states. The descent into the unconscious was an enterprise demanding great skill, intelligence, and discipline. When expert guidance was not available, the results could be deplorable. The crazed and neurotic behavior of some of the medieval Christian saints, which was often due to inadequate spiritual direction, showed the dangers of an undisciplined cultivation of alternate states of mind. The reforms of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had been designed precisely to correct such abuses. When mystical journeys were undertaken en masse, they could degenerate into crowd hysteria, the nihilism of the Sabbatarians, or the mental imbalance of some of the Puritans. Emotional excess became a feature of American religious life during the eighteenth century. It was especially evident in the First Great Awakening, which erupted in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734 and was chronicled by the learned Calvinist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Before the Awakening, Edwards explained, the people of Northampton had not been particularly religious, but in 1734 two young people died suddenly, and the shock (backed up by Edwards’s own emotive preaching) plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. People stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. Within six months, three hundred people in the town had experienced a wrenching “born-again” conversion. They alternated between soaring highs and devastating lows; sometimes they were quite broken and “sank into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.” At other times they would “break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping.”38 The revival was just burning itself out when George Whitefield (1714–70), an English Methodist preacher, toured the colonies and sparked a second wave. During his sermons, people fainted, wept, and shrieked; the churches shook with the cries of those who imagined themselves saved and the groans of the unfortunate who were convinced that they were damned. It was not only the simple and unlearned who were so affected. Whitefield had an ecstatic reception at Harvard and Yale, and finished his tour in 1740 with a mass rally where he preached to 30,000 people on Boston Common.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They also showed the quintessentially WASP orientation of the New Christian Right. America was to be white and Protestant. Like the Jewish and Muslim activists, the Christians of Moral Majority were fighting to extend the domain of the sacred, to limit the advance of the secularist ethos, and to reinstate the divine. Their victories might seem small and insignificant, but the Christian Right had learned how to conduct themselves in the political arena; they had re-enfranchised themselves, and, to an extent, resacralized American politics in a way that never ceases to amaze the more secular countries of Europe. The liberal organization People for the American Way, which took on the Gablers in the Texas case, pointed out that the conservatives have only won 34 out of 124 similar conflicts. The liberals began to create their own organizations and fight back. Progress was, therefore, slow, and this worried fundamentalists who believed that time was running out, that Rapture was nigh, and that an omnipotent God was active in history, upholding the righteous with his might. Some fundamentalists believed that their leaders were selling out. In 1982, for example, instead of campaigning for the total abolition of abortion, Falwell moved to the more pragmatic objective of limiting its availability. During his presidential campaign, Pat Robertson spoke guardedly but politely about the mainstream denominations, even though fundamentalist orthodoxy demands that the apostate churches be attacked at every available opportunity. During these early years of the Protestant resurgence, Falwell and Robertson both learned that modern politics demands compromise. Absolute policies cannot succeed in a democratic context, where the contest for power entails bargaining, and giving some ground to opponents. This is difficult to square with a religious vision which sees certain principles as inviolable, and, therefore, nonnegotiable. In the world of secular politics, where fundamentalists are forced to contend, whether they like it or not, nothing is sacred in this way. To achieve any measure of success, Falwell and Robertson had to make concessions to enemies whom they regarded as satanic. There was a tension: by entering the modern political world, fundamentalists found that they not only had to sup with the devil but were tainted by some of the evil influences that they had entered the political lists to fight. This was just one of their difficulties. During the last two decades of the century, some of the solutions to which fundamentalists felt driven meant a defeat for religion itself. 7. C ounterculture ( 1925–60 ) E VER SINCE Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of God, modern people had, in various ways, become aware of a void at the heart of their culture.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Our country, our Islam are in danger. What is happening, and what is about to happen worries and saddens us. We are worried and saddened by the situation of this ruined country. We hope to God it can be reformed.45 The following morning, Khomeini was arrested again, and this time the lid blew off. When they heard the news, thousands of Iranians went out onto the streets in protest in Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Kashan, and Varamin. SAVAK forces were given orders to shoot to kill; tanks surrounded the mosques in Tehran to stop people from attending Friday prayers. In Tehran, Qum, and Shiraz, prominent ulema led the demonstrations, while others called for a jihad against the regime. Some put on white shrouds to show that, like Imam Husain, they were willing to die in the war against tyranny. University and madrasah students fought side by side, laymen alongside mullahs. It took SAVAK days to suppress the uprising, which revealed the immense tension and resentment that had been smoldering under the surface. When order was finally restored on June 11, hundreds of Iranians had died.46 Khomeini himself narrowly escaped execution. Ayatollah Muhammad-Kazim Shariatmadari (1904–85), one of the most senior mujtahids, saved his life by promoting Khomeini to the rank of Grand Ayatollah, which made it too risky for the regime to kill him.47 After his release, Khomeini became a hero to the people. His photograph appeared everywhere as a symbol of opposition. He had put himself on the line and given voice to the aversion that many more inarticulate Iranians had come to feel for the shah. Khomeini’s vision was flawed by the usual fundamentalist paranoia. Constantly in his speeches, he referred to a conspiracy of Jews, Christians, and imperialists, a fantasy that for many Iranians seemed credible because of the association of the CIA and Mossad with the hated SAVAK. It was a theology of rage.48 But Khomeini enabled Iranians to express legitimate grievances in terms that they could understand. Where a Marxist or liberally inspired critique of the shah would have left the vast majority of unmodernized Iranians unmoved, everybody could understand the symbolism of Kerbala. Unlike the other ayatollahs, Khomeini did not speak in remote, academic language; his speech was direct and down-to-earth, addressed to ordinary people. Western people tended to see Khomeini as a throwback to the Middle Ages, but in fact much of his message and developing ideology was modern. His opposition to Western imperialism and his support of the Palestinians were similar to other Third World movements at this time; so was his direct appeal to the people.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The First World War was very disruptive for Iran and left many Iranians longing for strong government. In 1917, British and Russian troops overran the country. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russians withdrew, but the British moved into the areas they had vacated in the north of the country, while holding on to their own bases in the south. Britain was now eager to make Iran a protectorate. Oil had been discovered in the country in 1908, and the concession had been granted to a British subject, William Knox D’Arcy; in 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed, and Iranian oil fueled the British navy. Iran was now a rich prize. But the Majlis held out against British control. There were anti-British demonstrations throughout the country in 1920, the Majlis appealed for help from Soviet Russia and the United States, and Britain was forced to abandon this plan. But Iranians were miserably aware that they had managed to retain their independence only by appealing to other great powers, who had their own designs on Iranian oil. Iran now had a constitution and representative government, but this was useless, since the Majlis had no real power. Even the Americans noted that the British constantly rigged the elections and that Iranians were “prevented from public expression of opinion or giving vent to feelings in any manner by the existing martial law and controlled press.”94

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

  centre of Christian gravity westwards. The military crisis caused by the late- sixth-century wars between the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, and the short- sighted destruction by those war-locked empires of the various Christian buffer states along their borders (see pp. 253–4), gave a perfect opportunity for the armies to sweep first north out of Arabia, then east and west into Byzantine and Sassanian territory. Christianity’s internal divisions made the task easier: there were plenty of Miaphysite or Dyophysite Christians who had no especial affection for the Chalcedonian rulers in Constantinople, and equally, plenty of Christians who had little time for Zoroastrian Sassanians, and who did not defend them against the new masters. In Egypt, for example, excavations at one of its greatest international Christian shrines, that of St Menas at Abū Mīnā, have revealed how suddenly Greek documents disappeared from the life of the community when the Muslim armies arrived. The last Greek receipts for the wine harvest scribbled on pottery are precisely for the invasion year of 641, and from then on the Coptic Church was entirely in charge at the shrine.10 The Muslim conquerors did little to explain their faith to their new subjects or to convert them to it. It might have been possible for Christians initially to regard these newcomers as a peculiar sort of Arian Christian sect, while Dyophysites would note with approval that they gave honour to the Virgin Mary without tolerating a cult of her. So the sudden irruption of the Muslims might be a catastrophe, but it could be endured for the time being, particularly if it brought quieter times than the campaigns of Heraclius. The result was one of the most rapid shifts of power in history.11 Between 634 and 637, three battles crippled the armies of Byzantium and the Sassanians. In February 638, only eight years after the Emperor Heraclius had triumphantly restored the True Cross to Christian Jerusalem, the city fell to Muslim forces after a year’s siege; it was in any case a shadow of its former self, devastated only a quarter-century earlier by the Sassanian Shah Khusrau II. Sophronios, the Melchite or Chalcedonian Patriarch of Jerusalem, insisted on making the surrender in person to the Caliph Umar. Umar entered the city in deliberate humility in plain robes, riding on a camel, and he treated the new conquest with equally deliberate forbearance. He knew that he was fulfilling the design of the Prophet in doing so, because the conquest of Jerusalem was no incidental military victory. Umar signified the triumph of Islam on the vacant site of the Temple by building a mosque above the ruins. In doing so, the Caliph achieved what the Emperor Julian the Apostate (see p. 217) had planned long before: to restore honour and splendour to this long-desecrated sacred site which Christians had deliberately spurned, and whose memory had been so vital for Muhammad. In the early 690s the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik outdid