Fear

Passages

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

Page 272 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The creation of a special, unique identity was a natural response to the modern experience. The newly industrialized northern cities were a melting pot. By 1890, four out of every five New Yorkers were either new immigrants or the children of new immigrants.31 At the time of the Revolution, the United States had been an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. Now the WASP identity seemed about to be obliterated by the “Papist” flood. Unfortunately, the quest for a distinct identity often goes hand-in-hand with the development of a terror of the stereotyped “other” against whom people measure themselves. A paranoid fear of conspiracy would continue to characterize the response to the upheavals of modernization, and would be especially evident in the fundamentalist movements created by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all of which would cultivate a distorted and often pernicious image of their enemies, who were sometimes depicted as satanically evil. American Protestants had long hated Roman Catholics, and had also feared conspiracies of deists, Freemasons, and Mormons, who were all, at one time or another, believed to be undermining the Christian fabric of society. In the late nineteenth century, these anxieties flared again. In 1887, the American Protective Association was formed and became the nation’s largest anti-Catholic body, with a membership that may have reached 2,250,000. It forged “pastoral letters,” supposedly from American Catholic bishops, urging their flocks to murder all Protestants and overthrow the heretical government of the United States. In 1885, Josiah Strong published Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, which listed the “Catholic threat” as the most destructive danger faced by the nation. Giving Catholics the vote would make America vulnerable to satanic influence; already the United States had suffered an immigration of Romanists that was twice as large as that of the invasion of the Goths and Vandals which had brought down the Roman empire in the fifth century. Americans were cultivating fantasies of utter ruin; paranoid conspiracy theories enabled them to pin their nameless and amorphous dread onto concrete enemies and thus helped to make it manageable.32

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  107 There were 600 humanist senators, congressmen, and cabinet ministers, some 275,000 in the American Civil Liberties Union. The National Organization for Women, trade unions, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations, and all colleges and universities were also “humanist.” Fifty percent of the legislators were committed to the religion of secular humanism. 108 America, which had been founded as a Bible-based republic, had now become a secular state, a catastrophe, John Whitehead (president of the conservative Rutherford Institute) attributed to a gross misreading of the First Amendment. Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was designed, Whitehead believed, to protect religion from the state, not vice versa. 109 But now the humanist judges had made the state an object of worship: “The state is seen as secular,” he argued, but “the state is religious, because its ‘ultimate concern’ is the perpetuation of the state itself.” Secular humanism, therefore, amounted to a rebellion against God’s sovereignty, and its worship of the state was idolatrous. 110 Not only had the conspiracy completely infiltrated American society, but it had also conquered the world. For the fundamentalist writer Pat Brooks, the secular humanists formed “a huge conspiratorial network” which was “fast approaching its goal of bringing in a ‘new world order,’ a vast world government that would reduce the world to slavery.” 111 Like other fundamentalists, Brooks saw the enemy as omnipresent, and pursuing its objective relentlessly over a long period. He saw it at work in the Soviet Union, on Wall Street, in Zionism, in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve System. The cabal that was masterminding this international conspiracy included the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Kissinger, Brzezinski, the shah, and Omar Torrijos, the former Panamanian dictator. 112 This terror of secular humanism was as irrational and as ungovernable as any of the other paranoid fantasies we have considered, and sprang from the same fear of annihilation. The Protestant fundamentalists’ view of modern society in general and of America in particular was as demonic as that of any Islamist. For Franky Schaeffer, for example, the West was about to ente r an electronic dark age, in which the new pagan hordes, with all the power of technology at their command, are on the verge of obliterating the last strongholds of civilized humanity. A vision of darkness lies before us.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Suez Canal had given Egypt a wholly new strategic importance, and the European powers could not allow its total ruin. To safeguard their interests, Britain and France imposed financial controls on the khedive, controls which threatened to become political. Muhammad Ali had been correct in his fear that the Canal would jeopardize Egyptian independence. European ministers were appointed to the Egyptian government to supervise its financial dealings, and when Ismail dismissed them in April 1879, the chief powers of Europe—Britain, France, Germany, and Austria—united against him, and put pressure on the sultan to dismiss the khedive. Ismail was succeeded by his son Tewfiq (1852–92), a well-meaning young man, but it was obvious that he was a mere puppet of the powers. Hence he was unpopular with both the people and the army. When the Egyptian officer Ahmad bey Urubi (1840–1911) staged a revolution in 1881, demanding that Egyptians be appointed to more senior posts in the army and government, and managed to gain administrative control of the country, Britain stepped in and established a military occupation. Ismail had dreamed of making Egypt part of Europe; he managed only to make it a virtual European colony. Muhammad Ali had been cruel and utterly ruthless; his successors were naive, greedy, and shortsighted. But, in fairness, they were pitting themselves against insuperable odds. First, the type of civilization they were attempting to emulate was something entirely new. It was not surprising that these men, with their very limited experience of Europe, were slow to grasp that a few military and technological reforms would not suffice to make them a “modern” nation. The whole of society would have to be reorganized, an independent industrial economy set on a sure footing, and the traditional conservative spirit replaced by a new mentality. Failure would be expensive, because Europe was by this time too powerful. The powers could force Egypt to finance the building of the Suez Canal and yet deny it ownership of a single share. The so-called “Eastern Crisis” (1875–78) had already shown that one of the great powers of Europe (Russia) could penetrate to the heart of Ottoman territory and be checked only by a threat from other European countries, not by the Turks themselves. Even the great Ottoman empire, the last stronghold of Muslim power, no longer controlled its own provinces. This became painfully apparent in 1881 when France occupied Tunis, and in 1882 when Britain occupied Egypt. Europe was invading the Islamic world and beginning to dismantle the empire. Further, even without the disastrous mistakes of the Egyptian rulers, these weaker Islamic countries could not become “modern” in the same way as the Europeans or the Americans, because the modernizing process in these non-Western lands was fundamentally different.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There was a new urgency. People felt that true religion was being destroyed. If Christians did not fight back, there might not be another generation of believers. During the 1970s, more parents than ever before removed their children from the public schools to Christian establishments, where they could be instructed in Christian values and were given Christian role models, and where all learning was conducted within a biblical context. Between 1965 and 1983, enrollment in these evangelical schools increased six-fold, and about 100,000 fundamentalist children were taught at home.102 The Independent Christian School movement began to mobilize. Hitherto, fundamentalist schools had been scattered and isolated, but during the 1970s they began to form associations to monitor legislation on educational matters, create insurance packages, organize teacher placement, and act as lobbying groups at the state and federal levels. These have continued to grow. By the 1990S, the American Association of Christian Schools had 1360 member schools, while the Association of Christian Schools International had 1930.103 Like many of the other schools, colleges, and educational establishments we have considered, there was a desire for a “holistic” education, where everything—patriotism, history, morality, politics, and economics—could be seen from a Christian perspective. Spiritual and moral training were considered to be as important as academic achievement (though this, in general, compared well to education in the public sector). It was a “hothouse” atmosphere to form committed and, if need be, militant Christians prepared to fight the secularization of life in the United States. They studied the Christian history of America, for example, and examined the religious credentials of such figures as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, read only that literature and philosophy that “pretty much” agreed with the Bible, and stressed biblical “family values.”104 As we have seen, in order to mobilize effectively, a group needs an ideology with a clearly defined enemy. During the 1960S and 1970S, Protestant fundamentalist ideologues defined the enemy as “secular humanism.” Unlike the Islamists and the Kookists, who could decry the secular culture of “the West,” the American Protestants, who were fiercely patriotic, had no such easy target. They had to fight “the enemy within.” Over the years, “secular humanism” became a portmanteau term into which fundamentalists threw any value or belief that they did not like. Here, for example, is the definition of secular humanism given by the fundamentalist “Pro-Family Forum” (n.d.). It: Denies the deity of God, the inspiration of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus Christ. Denies the existence of the soul, life after death, salvation and heaven, damnation and hell. Denies the Biblical account of Creation. Believes that there are no absolutes, no right, no wrong—that moral values are self-determined and situational. Do your own thing, “as long as it does not harm anyone else.” Believes in the removal of distinctive roles of male and female. Believes in sexual freedom between consenting individuals, regardless of age, including premarital sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, and incest. Believes in the right to abortion, euthanasia, and suicide.

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

  Sassanians seized power.72 A confrontation became more and more likely as Christian numbers in the Sassanian Empire grew, just as they were growing in the Roman Empire through the third century. Refugees crossed the frontier from the Roman Empire, fleeing the imperial persecutions, and there were also huge groups of prisoners from successful Sassanian military campaigns; a mixture of Greek-speakers and Syrians in numbers running into thousands, so that the shah settled them in newly built cities. One of these places, Gondeshapur (in south-west Iran, also anciently known as Beit Lapat), developed a school of higher education where the medium of instruction was Syriac. This was destined to become a major centre of Christian scholarship (see p. 246). By around 290 there was a bishop based in the Sassanian capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, very near the modern Baghdad, whose successors increasingly took on the role of presiding bishop in the East beyond the Roman frontier. These bishops faced a problem in uniting two different language groups of Christians under a single authority. Tensions developed between Greek- and Syrian-speaking Christians, and they underlined the fact that the Sassanians could easily treat both groups as an alien threat to their rule. That tension became acute after Constantine established his alliance with Christian bishops at the beginning of the fourth century. Now it was easy for successive shahs to see Christianity as a fifth column for Rome. In the third century the Sassanian shahs had occasionally put some of their Christian subjects to death, although in that era the Sassanians were even more hostile to the newly developing religion of the Manichees.73 In the fourth century the Church faced much greater trials. From the beginning of the 340s Bishop Simeon (Shem’on) of Seleucia-Ctesiphon led opposition to separate taxation for the Christian community in the Sassanian Empire, and that provoked Shah Shapur II to a massacre of the bishop and a hundred of his clergy. The Shah’s anger and fear persisted in a persecution whose atrocities outdid anything that the Romans had achieved in their third-century attacks on the Church. There was a sickening attention to prolonging individual suffering which has rarely been equalled in the history of persecuting Christians until the concentrated Japanese persecutions of the early seventeenth century (see pp. 707–9). The situation was so dire that the bishopric in the Sassanian capital remained vacant until the beginning of the fifth century.74 When we consider the astonishing acts of ascetic self-destructiveness by western Syrian monks in the fourth century and later (see pp. 206–9), it is worth remembering that they would be acutely aware of the grotesque sufferings inflicted on countless Christians over the border in the Sassanian Empire during these grim years. To the north of Syria lay the kingdom of Armenia, protected over the

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

  tells us most of what we know about these turbulent years, and revising his previous positive account of Licinius, he now had an excuse to portray Constantine’s former colleague as the last great enemy of the Christian faith in the tradition of Valerian and Diocletian.3 Certainly Licinius’s defeat and murder in 324 ended any immediate possibility of a new violent assault on the Church. The crisis which had begun in 303 with Diocletian’s persecution was now decisively resolved. Over the century and a half from Constantine’s military victory in 312, emperors, armies, clergy, monks and excited mobs of ordinary Christians all contributed to a complex of decisions on which version of Christian doctrine was to capture the allegiance of the rulers of the world in the West and in Constantinople. The culmination of this process was a great council of Church leaders at Chalcedon in 451, under the control of a Roman emperor and his wife. We have already seen mainstream Christianity based on a series of exclusions and narrowing of options: Jewish Christians, gnostics, Montanists, Monarchians were all declared outside the boundaries. Chalcedon was to mark a new stage in this process of exclusion. As a result, after 451 many Christians who owed their allegiance to the Church of Antioch, that same Church where Bishop Ignatius had first used the word ‘Catholic’, were to find themselves on the wrong side of the line. We will meet these excluded folk in Chapters 7 and 8, but first we will see how the new imperial Church asserted itself as the one version of Christian truth for the world to follow, and, in the process, created a great deal of that truth for the first time. What lay behind the Church’s remarkable reversal of fortune in the Roman Empire? Constantine has often been seen as undergoing a ‘conversion’ to Christianity. This is an unfortunate word, because it has all sorts of modern overtones which conceal the fact that Constantine’s religious experience was like nothing which would today be recognized as a conversion. It is worth remembering Septimius Severus, that other unscrupulous military commander who turned emperor a century earlier. Severus had promoted the cult of Serapis, encouraged the idea that Serapis represented a single supreme deity and then reaped the benefit by identifying himself with that God as a way of strengthening his monarchy. Constantine had learned enough about the jealous nature of this God not to make the mistake of trying to merge imperial and divine identities, but their association was still intimate. Most obviously, and for reasons which will probably remain hidden from us, the Emperor associated the Christian God with the military successes which had destroyed all his rivals, from Maxentius to Licinius. For Constantine, this God was not gentle Jesus meek and mild, commanding that enemies should be loved and forgiven seventy

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  who were dragged to the revival or bribed by their mothers to come stopped elbowing one another and listened. Brother Terrell had started over again on the first verse when a high, reedy laugh made its way up from the audience. Goose bumps popped up on my arms. The spirit sometimes moved people to wail when Brother Terrell sang a sad song, but never to laugh. Up on the platform, my mother half-stood at the organ bench looking for the source of the laughter. She gave Brother Cotton a look that meant someone ought to do something. He nodded and left the platform. The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had started and was replaced by a low burble of words and sounds. I scrambled up in my chair and scanned the back of the tent for a better look. Laverne pulled at my hand, but I ignored her. The women in front of us inched to the edge of their seats and craned their necks to see. Others turned in their seats and looked around. Brother Terrell continued to sing and sway, eyes closed. They shall walk, but not be weary They shall stumble But not fail . . . Brother Cotton hurried toward a group of people, mostly men, who stood in a little clutch in the middle section of the crowd. Someone, a girl, broke free of the group and ran up the aisle toward the platform. She passed so close to where we sat I could have reached out and touched her pale, puffy arms or felt the strands of her long blond hair whip against my fingers. She was barefoot and wore a sleeveless flowered shift that rode up her thighs as she ran. She flung herself against the sides of the prayer ramp below where Brother Terrell sat. She reached up and grabbed the railing that ran along the outside edge of the ramp and shook it. She whinnied, “David Ter-rell, David Terrell,” in the same high, eerie voice that had laughed aloud. Perched on the edge of the stage above her, Brother Terrell sang on, his black shoe tapping out the time. Brother Cotton, Dockery, and Red converged on the girl, pulling at her from behind. Dockery pried one of her hands off the ramp and pinned her arm behind her. She twisted away from him and ran back toward the congregation. Brother Cotton and Red grabbed her around the waist, but she flipped like a fish from their hands. The congregation stood and prayed aloud, “Blood of Jesus, blood of Jesus, blood of Jesus.” Men and women left their seats and walked toward the girl with their arms outstretched in her direction. Someone ululated, “Lelelelelelelelelelele.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Poland had recently annexed much of what is now Ukraine, where peasants formed cavalry squads to organize their own defense. These “cossacks” hated both Poles and Jews, who often administered the lands of the Polish nobility as middlemen. In 1648 the cossack leader Boris Chmielnicki led an uprising against the Poles which attacked Polish and Jewish communities alike. When the war finally came to an end in 1667, the chronicles tell us, 100,000 Jews had been killed and 300 Jewish communities destroyed. Even though these numbers were probably exaggerated, the letters and stories of the refugees filled Jews in other parts of the world with terror. They spoke of massacres in which Jews were cut to pieces, of mass graves in which Jewish women and children had been buried alive, of Jews being given rifles and commanded to shoot one another. Many believed that these events must be the long-awaited “birth pangs of the Messiah,” and turned in desperation to the rites and penitential disciplines of Lurianic Kabbalah in an attempt to hasten messianic redemption. 44 When news of the Chmielnicki massacres reached Smyrna in what is now Turkey, a young Jew who was walking and meditating outside the city heard a heavenly voice telling him that he was “the Savior of Israel, the Messiah, the Son of David, the anointed of the God of Jacob.” 45 Shabbetai Zevi was a scholarly young man and a Kabbalist (though not, at this point, versed in Lurianic Kabbalah), who would share his insights with a small band of followers. He had an appealing personality, but when he was about twenty he began to exhibit symptoms that we would today call manic-depressive. He used to hide away for days, sunk in misery in a dark little room, but these depressed phases would be succeeded by frenzied periods of “illumination,” when he was restless, unable to sleep, and felt that he was in touch with higher powers. Sometimes he would feel impelled to violate the commandments of the Torah, publicly uttering the forbidden Name of God, for example, or eating nonkosher food. He could not explain why he committed these “strange acts,” but felt that God had for some reason inspired him to do so. 46 Later he became convinced that these antinomian acts were redemptive: God “would soon give him a new law and new commandments to repair all the worlds.” 47 These transgressions were “holy sins”; they were what Lurianic Kabbalists would call acts of tikkun . It is likely that they represented an unconscious rebellion against the customary observances of Jewish life and expressed a confused desire for something entirely new.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As a result, army officers would often become the natural leaders and rulers, and modernity would acquire a military emphasis that was different—again—from that of the West. The army was Muhammad Ali’s chief concern. He needed it if he was to achieve his objectives, since throughout his career he had to hold his own against the British on the one hand and the Ottoman Turks on the other. The only way the Turks could tolerate Muhammad Ali’s creation of a semi-autonomous state was by calling on his superior fighting machine in Ottoman campaigns: against the Wahhabis in Arabia, or to quell the Greek revolt (1825–28). But in 1832, his son Ibrahim Pasha invaded the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Palestine, inflicting crushing defeats on the Turkish army and creating for his father an impressive imperium in imperio . The Egyptian army had, of course, been built on the French model. Muhammad Ali had tried to imitate the discipline and efficiency he had observed in Napoleon’s army, and he had indeed created a force that was able to cut through a numerically superior army with ease. But this achievement also involved a brutal assault upon his subjects. At first, Muhammad Ali had recruited and trained some 20,000 conscripts from the Sudan, whom he had housed in a vast barracks in Aswan. But the Sudanese simply could not adapt. Many turned their faces to the wall and died, despite the best efforts of the army doctors (trained in Muhammad Ali’s medical school in Abou Zabel) to save them. The pasha was thus forced to conscript the fellahin , dragging them from their homes, families, and fields. They usually had no time to make adequate arrangements, and their families were often left destitute, the women forced into prostitution. The possibility of conscription to an utterly alien military life filled many of the fellahin with such terror that they frequently resorted to self-mutilation, cutting off their own fingers, pulling out teeth, and even blinding themselves. 41 An efficient fighting force was created, but at a terrible human cost. Not only were the fellahin themselves damaged by conscription, but agriculture suffered when the men were torn away from the land. Every positive reform had a downside. Muhammad Ali’s economic policies encouraged European trade to penetrate Egypt, but at the expense of local industry. By becoming the sole monopolist in Egypt, the pasha virtually destroyed the indigenous merchant class. 42 He invested a great deal on much-needed irrigation works and water communications, but the working conditions of the laborers in the corvée were so bad that 23,000 are said to have died.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Dominion envisaged by North and Rushdoony is totalitarian. There is no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom. The chances of this theology’s achieving much popularity in the United States are, to be sure, remote; but it has been suggested that in the event of an environmental or major economic catastrophe, an authoritarian state church could replace the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. Christianity, after all, was able to adapt to capitalism, which was alien to many of the teachings of Jesus. It could also be used to back a fascist ideology that, in drastically changed circumstances, might be necessary to maintain public order.127 Some of the more conservative Pentecostalists have shown an interest in Reconstruction theology, even though Rushdoony regards Pentecostalism with distaste. Pat Robertson seems to be a transitional figure. He is a Baptist with leanings toward Pentecostalism and revivalism. Like North, he believes that the Second Coming may be far off—a belief which separates him from traditional premillennial fundamentalism.128 Meanwhile, Christians, Robertson believes, should try to win positions of power to build a society based on biblical norms.129 He changed the name of his university in Virginia Beach to Regent University; a regent, he explained, is someone “who governs in the absence of a sovereign.” The purpose of the college is to prepare its seven hundred students to take over when the Kingdom arrives.130 Fundamentalism has changed in America since the publication of The Fundamentals (1910–15). It has exhibited postmodern, antinomian tendencies on the one hand, and a more hard-line, totalitarian vision on the other. Fundamentalism is not going to disappear. In America, religion has long shaped opposition to government. Its rise and fall has always been cyclical, and events of the last few years indicate that there is still a state of incipient war between conservatives and liberals which has occasionally become frighteningly explicit. In 1992, Jerry Falwell, who still adheres to the old-style fundamentalism, announced that with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Satan had been let loose in the United States. Clinton, Falwell thundered, was about to destroy the military and the nation by letting “the gays” take over. Executive orders permitting abortion in federally funded clinics, research on fetal tissue, the official endorsement of homosexual rights, were all signs that America “had declared war against God.”131

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There was one important difference, however. Where the Europeans imagined everybody enduring the ordeal of the next great war, Darby provided the elect with a way out. On the basis of a chance remark of St. Paul’s, who believed that Christians alive at the time of Christ’s Second Coming would be “taken up in the clouds … to meet the Lord in the air,”10 Darby maintained that just before the beginning of the Tribulation, there would be a “Rapture,” a snatching-up of born-again Christians, who would be taken up to heaven and so would escape the terrible sufferings of the Last Days. Rapture has been imagined in concrete, literal detail by premillennialists. They are convinced that suddenly airplanes, cars, and trains will crash, as born-again pilots and drivers are caught up into the air while their vehicles careen out of control. The stock market will plummet, and governments will fall. Those left behind will realize that they are doomed and that the true believers have been right all along. Not only will these unhappy people have to endure the Tribulation, they will know that they are destined for eternal damnation. Premillennialism was a fantasy of revenge: the elect imagined themselves gazing down upon the sufferings of those who had jeered at their beliefs, ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized their faith, and now, too late, realized their error. A popular picture found in the homes of many Protestant fundamentalists today shows a man cutting the grass outside his house, gazing in astonishment as his born-again wife is raptured out of an upstairs window. Like many concrete depictions of mythical events, the scene looks a little absurd, but the reality it purports to present is cruel, divisive, and tragic.

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

  They developed into the rediscovery of good news which has come to be called the Protestant Reformation, but which called itself, to begin with, an ‘evangelical’ movement. That remains the official self-description of the Lutheran Churches, in a use of this word which has separate connotations for English-speakers with their own historical references to an anglophone Christian history. What happened in the years after Luther’s first lectures on Romans was a turnabout in the whole Western Christian scheme of salvation (soteriology) which had constructed that great theological success story, the doctrine of Purgatory, with all its attendant structures of intercessory prayer for the dead – chantries, gilds, hospitals – that comforting sense that through divine mercy we humans can busy ourselves doing something to alter and improve our prospects after death. In the end, for Luther and all who came to accept his new message, the problem was that it was not divine mercy upholding this system, but a lie told by clergymen. Yet to begin with, Luther did not see this; nor did he object to Purgatory. In fact he continued to accept Purgatory’s existence until around 1530, when he finally realized that his soteriological revolution had abolished it (his change of mind demanded a certain amount of re-editing of some of his earlier writings).9 Instead, he seized on a lesser problem within the system: the sale of indulgences. Indulgences, the Western Church’s grants remitting penitential punishments, could be seen as a practical demonstration that God loved sinners, and that God’s love was channelled through the power of the Church. Yet many loyal church people and theologians had seen the commercialization of the system as vulgar and needing reform, whatever they thought of the principles behind it. Now Luther was provoked to confrontation with the Church hierarchy by a particularly reprehensible campaign, backed by Pope Leo X himself. It raised funds from the German faithful to finish rebuilding St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, in a deal which also looked after the financial needs of the great Hohenzollern prelate Albrecht, Archbishop of Magdeburg. The preaching campaign for the indulgence was headed by an extrovert Dominican, Johann Tetzel, who was capable of urging his hearers, ‘Won’t you part with even a farthing to buy this letter? It won’t bring you money but rather a divine and immortal soul, whole and secure in the Kingdom of Heaven.’10 The squalid implications of this, an insult to the Apostle Paul’s view of grace and salvation, led Luther to announce (probably with a notice on the Castle Church door) that he proposed a university disputation on ninety-five theses, taking a decidedly negative view of indulgences. He enclosed these theses in a letter of 31 October 1517 to that same Albrecht, who happened to be his own archbishop. Luther’s protest was quickly turned into an act of rebellion because powerful

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

  manuscripts reveal that they shared the common devotion of eastern Mediterranean Christianity to St George, a shadowy figure who may have died in persecutions of the late fourth century, but who gained huge popularity as a Christian martyr who was also a soldier.11 In an age when the frontiers of the various great powers were increasingly unstable and life was insecure and frightening, the thought of a military protector in Heaven was a particular comfort. A further triumph for the Miaphysites came on the eastern border of the empire in Syria, where an Arab people known as the Ghassānids had migrated from the south of the Arabian peninsula and set up a formidable independent kingdom. This stretched all the way from southern Syria along the borders of the Holy Land to the Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) at the north-eastern end of the Red Sea, and its military strength made it a crucial buffer state for Byzantium against the Sassanians, though the relationship was troubled and often fractured, because the Ghassānids, on their initial conversion to Christianity, set their faces firmly against the decrees of Chalcedon.12 When the Ghassānid ruler Arethas demanded bishops to organize a Church for his people, once more the Empress Theodora took an active but clandestine role in supplying clergy ordained by Bishop Theodosius to minister to them. One of these clergy was a charismatic eastern Syrian called Jacob Baradeus, who had already achieved spectacular missionary success in remote parts of Asia Minor, and whose Latinized second name comes from a no doubt originally jocular reference to his incessant travelling: it means ‘the man who has a horse- cloth’.13 While the Empress was alive, she contained the threat of Miaphysite confrontation with the imperial authorities. After her death, in 548, despite Justinian’s continuing efforts to find a formula to heal the splits in the Church, Miaphysite defiance of the Court became systematic: Jacob and other Miaphysites sought to create an alternative episcopal hierarchy both among the Ghassānids and elsewhere.14 Travelling often in disguise, Jacob undertook a prodigious programme of ordinations and consecrations of bishops which extended across the imperial border into Ghassānid territory and further into the Sassanian Empire. He created a Syrian Miaphysite Church which is often called Jacobite in acknowledgement of his founding energy, but which also insists on Orthodoxy in its official title, the Syriac Orthodox Church.15 Its eucharistic liturgy is named after St James of Jerusalem, brother of the Lord, embodying the proud claim of the Church to reach back to the Semitic fountainhead of Christianity. At the heart of the liturgy, the prayer of consecration celebrates the first three General Councils of the Church, Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus, and name-checks an impressive array of orthodox Fathers of the Church before

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

  Last Days. They heard Jesus say, ‘I have come not to bring peace, but a sword’ (Matthew 10.34), and they wanted to help God fulfil his political programme in the Book of Revelation. So in the early 1530s, groups from the Low Countries began joining with other radicals in converging on the western German city of Münster. They arrived in thousands; they took over Münster’s civic Reformation, which had begun in conventionally Lutheran mode, and their charismatic leaders proclaimed the new Jerusalem. A joint force of Lutherans and Catholics besieged them. Under pressure, with the city running short of food, the radicals’ revolution turned to nightmare. Their final leader, a young Dutchman, Jan Beuckelszoon (‘John of Leyden’), lived as their king in insane luxury, surrounded by his harem, as his followers starved and died defending him. In the end, the besiegers breached the defences in 1535 and Münster Anabaptists were sadistically suppressed. Radicalism thereafter turned from militancy to quiet escapes from ordinary society, tolerated by some rulers who recognized that such gathered communities were actually industrious and honest-dealing. Yet Münster remained as a constant dark memory: peaceable, inoffensive Anabaptists were burned and harried because of what John of Leyden had done.25 The challenge of radicalism to Western Christianity was in fact more long term and subtle than this.26 Perhaps basic to all of it was a newly negative view of the Emperor Constantine I – ‘the Great’, as he had so long been called. It was a general conviction among radicals that over the previous millennium the Church had made a grave error in entering into alliance with the powerful, after a decisive wrong turn in Constantine’s alliance with Christianity. Radicals noted that a very great deal of the Church’s doctrine had been formulated by agreements of councils in that tainted period after Constantine’s seizing of the doctrinal reins at Nicaea in 325 (see pp. 214–15), and if that was so, all such doctrine was ripe for reassessment. If one looked at the Bible with fresh eyes, where were some of the central doctrines of traditional Christianity which the Church said were there, such as the Trinity? Obstinately, many Bible readers continued to fail to find infant baptism mentioned in its pages. Some went further and came to the conviction that the Bible was not the ultimate guide to divine truth: they called it a ‘paper Pope’, and affirmed that God spoke to the individual as he (or even she) pleased through ‘inner light’. If so, it was unlikely that there was any one normative perception of truth, un-Christian to coerce any beliefs and even undesirable that there should be one single Church. The radicals in the Reformation may posthumously claim success, for something of all these notions can now be found in Churches which are the heirs of the magisterial Reformation, and even within the Church of Rome.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  So did the theology of hatred that had erupted during the Seven Years War. In rather the same way as Iranians would later call America “the Great Satan” during their Islamic Revolution, British officials were portrayed as being in league with the devil during the revolutionary crisis. After the passing of the notorious Stamp Act (1765), patriotic poems and songs presented its perpetrators, Lords Bute, Grenville, and North, as the minions of Satan, who were conspiring to lure the Americans into the devil’s eternal Kingdom. The Stamp was described as the “mark of the Beast” that, according to the Book of Revelation, would be inscribed on the damned in the Last Days. Effigies depicting the British ministers were carried alongside portraits of Satan in political processions and hung from “liberty trees” throughout the colonies.57 In 1774, King George III became associated with the Antichrist when he granted religious freedom to the French Catholics in the Canadian territory conquered by England during the Seven Years War. His picture now adorned the liberty trees alongside pictures of the Papal Antichrist and the Devil.58 Even the more educated colonists fell prey to this fear of hidden cosmic conspiracy. The presidents of Harvard and Yale both believed that the colonists were fighting a war against satanic forces, and looked forward to the imminent defeat of popery, “a religion most favourable to arbitrary power.” The War of Independence had become part of God’s providential design for the destruction of the Papal Antichrist, which would surely herald the arrival of God’s millennial Kingdom in America.59 This paranoid vision of widespread conspiracy and the tendency to see an ordinary political conflict as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil seems, unfortunately, to occur frequently when a people is engaged in a revolutionary struggle as it enters the new world. This satanic mythology helped the colonists to separate themselves definitively from the old world, for which they still felt a strong residual affection. The demonizing of England transformed it into the antithetical “other,” the polar opposite of America, and thus enabled the colonists to shape a distinct identity for themselves and to articulate the new order they were fighting to bring into being.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  While he was living in Paris during the 1880s, he encountered the new scientific racism in the work of the philologist Ernest Renan (1823–92), and the two men debated the place of Islam in the modern world. Renan believed that the Semitic languages Hebrew and Arabic were corrupt and an example of arrested development. They lacked the progressive, developmental qualities inherent in “Aryan” linguistic systems, and could not regenerate themselves. In the same way, the Semitic races had produced no real art, commerce, or civilization. Islam was especially incompatible with modernity, as witness the obvious inferiority of the Muslim countries, the decadence of their governments, and the “intellectual nullity” of the Muslims themselves. Like the peoples of Africa, the population of the Islamic world was mentally incapable of scientific rationalism, and unable to form a single original idea. As European science spread, Renan confidently predicted, Islam would wither away and would, in the near future, cease to exist. 64 It is not surprising that Afghani feared for the survival of Islam, or that he tended to overemphasize the scientific rationality of the Muslim vision. A new defensiveness had crept into Muslim thought, in response to a very real threat. The stereotypical and inaccurate view of Islam in the work of such modern thinkers as Renan would justify the colonial invasion of the Islamic countries. Colonialism sprang from the needs of Europe’s expanding capitalist economy. Hegel had argued that an industrialized society would be compelled to expand “in order to search around outside itself among other peoples … for consumers and thereby for the necessary means of subsistence.” This quest for new markets would “also provide the soil for colonization toward which the fully developed bourgeoisie is pushed.” 65 By the end of the century, the colonization of the Middle East was well under way. France had conquered Algeria in 1830, and Britain, Aden nine years later. Tunisia was occupied in 1881, the Sudan in 1889, and Libya and Morocco in 1912. In 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the territories of the moribund Ottoman empire between France and England, in anticipation of victory in the First World War. This colonial penetration was a severe shock, which meant, in effect, the destruction of the traditional lifestyle of those countries, which were reduced immediately to secondary status. The colonized country produced raw materials for export, which were then fed into the European industrial process. In return, it received cheap manufactured Western goods, which meant that local industry suffered.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They would “save” society. But that meant that they had to submit to the fundamentalist ethos: the faculty must subscribe to the articles of faith; all students had to complete a “Christian service assignment” in the parish each semester; there was to be no drinking or smoking; students must wear Sunday-best clothes at all times, and attend services at Thomas Road thrice weekly. Unlike Bob Jones, Falwell sought academic accreditation and was thus able to attract nonfundamentalist students, whose parents approved of the sobriety of the campus and its good academic standards. Falwell had charted a middle course. Liberty provided an alternative to the permissive liberal arts colleges of the sixties and seventies, on the one hand, and to the mediocre standard of some of the old Bible colleges on the other. Despite its doctrinal emphasis, the campus was open to serious debate of intellectual and social issues; this would enable students to engage with the secular world on its own terms, and initiate its reconquista . 127 Falwell was planning an offensive, and was doing so in modern terms. His industrious regime in the college, church, and radio station was an attempt to reach out to a lost and dying world. There were no gimmicks and no wild antics on his station; the Old Time Gospel Hour eschewed the extravagances of Roberts, Swaggart, and the Bakkers. A literalist as a broadcaster as in theology, he had his services screened and recorded exactly as performed, with no concessions to the camera and its love of spectacle. Lynchburg stood for restraint, capitalism, and the Calvinist work ethic. Falwell modeled his empire on the new shopping malls, which offered a combination of services. As Elmer Towns, his chief theological adviser, explained, Falwell believed that he could win souls with similar entrepreneurial expertise. Business, Falwell judged, was at the cutting edge of innovation, and “the Thomas Road Baptist Church believed that the combined ministeries of several agencies in one church can not only attract the masses to the Gospel, but can better minister to each individual who comes.” 128 During the 1960 S and 1970 S , Thomas Road seemed to prove the Godly viability of capitalism, adding one ministry after another, with continued growth and expansion. When secular power brokers were looking around for somebody to lead a right-wing resurgence in the 1980s, Falwell was their man. He clearly understood the dynamic of modern capitalist society and would be able to engage with it as an equal. Yet for all Falwell’s apparently hardheaded approach, the fundamentalists who responded to him were filled with fear. It was no use arguing with Falwell, LaHaye, or Robertson in the hope of convincing them that there was no secular humanist conspiracy. This paranoid fear of annihilation and destruction, which they shared with Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, would add urgency and conviction to their campaign.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As often happens after a revolution, the new regime appeared to become as autocratic as its predecessor. Beset by enemies, Khomeini began to insist upon ideological conformity, like other, modern secularist revolutionary ideologues; but in Islamic terms, this represented a new departure. Like Judaism, Islam had demanded uniformity of practice, but never doctrinal orthodoxy. Shiis had been supposed to imitate (taqlid) the religious behavior of a mujtahid, but were not expected to conform to his beliefs. Now Khomeini insisted that Iranians accept his theory of Velayat-e Faqih, and quashed all opposition. “Unity of expression,” he told the hajj pilgrims in 1979, was the “secret of victory.”13 The people would not achieve the spiritual perfection he desired for them unless they adopted the right ideas. There could be no democracy of opinion; the people must follow the Supreme Faqih, whose mystical journey had given him “perfect faith.” They would then walk in the path of the Imams.14 But this did not mean dictatorship. Muslims needed unity if they were to survive in an inimical world. “Today Islam is confronted with the enemy and with blasphemy,” he told a delegation from Azerbaijan. “We need power. Power can be obtained by turning toward God, the exalted and blessed, and through unity of expression.”15 Muslims could not afford infighting, if they were to stand up to the superpowers. Desperate measures were necessary if Iran, long divided into “two nations” as a result of the modernization process, was to be reunited and brought back to the Islamic ideal.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Fundamentalism was becoming a religion of rage, but, as in Haredi Judaism, this rage was rooted in deep fear. This was evident in the premillennialism that became a hallmark of the movement during this period. By the Second World War, only premillennialists still called themselves “fundamentalists”; other conservative Christians, such as Billy Graham, preferred to call themselves “evangelicals”: the duty of saving souls in this rotten civilization demanded some degree of cooperation with other Christians, whatever their theological beliefs. Fundamentalists proper, however, insisted on separatism and segregation.50 The war years seemed to prove that the postmillennial optimism of the liberals had been deluded; fundamentalists regarded the new United Nations in as negative a light as they had the old League of Nations. It would prepare the world for the dictatorship of Antichrist and the ensuing Tribulation. There could be no world peace. “The Bible contradicts such a utopian dream,” wrote Herbert Lockyear in 1942. “This is not to be the last war. Present horrors are but the spawn to produce still more terrible anguish.”51 This was a vision diametrically opposed to the view of the liberal establishment. There were “two nations” in America, unable to share each other’s vision of the modern world. The premillennial vision endorsed the fundamentalists’ feeling of utter helplessness. The atomic bomb, they believed, had been foretold by St. Peter, who had predicted that on the last day, “with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burnt up.”52 There was no hope of averting the final holocaust, David Grey Barnhouse reflected in Eternity magazine in 1945: “the divine plan moves forward to its inevitable fulfillment.” In his best-seller The Atomic Age and the Word of God (1948), the fundamentalist author Wilbur Smith argued that the bomb proved that the literalists had been right all along.53 The exact predictions of the atomic explosion in Scripture showed that the Bible was indeed inerrant and must be read according to its plain sense. Yet this fatalistic scenario also gave the fundamentalists, who felt despised and ostracized by the mainstream culture, a sense of confidence and superiority. They had privileged information, denied to the secularist or liberal Christian, and knew what was really going on. The catastrophic events of the twentieth century were really heading toward Christ’s final victory. Moreover, the atomic holocaust would not affect the true believers, since, as we have seen, they were convinced that they would be raptured up to heaven before the End. It was only the apostates and unbelievers who would suffer those final tortures. Premillennialism was, therefore, fueling the resentment experienced by fundamentalists by allowing them to cultivate fantasies of revenge that were quite out of keeping with the spirit of the Gospels. There was contradiction too in their apparently positive vision of the new State of Israel.

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

  and already then well-established tendency of German to pile syllable on syllable in conglomerations of compound notions. Singers of Luther’s hymns can revel in strong words of one or two syllables, like his famous ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, Ein gute Wehr und Waffen’. Almost certainly Luther also wrote its tune, which has become the universal anthem of Lutheranism. The words still provide a glimpse of how his genius seized on the fears of ordinary folk in a world full of evils and terrors, and helped his congregations roar away these terrors in song. Americans will probably know it in English translation as ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, but British hymn-singers will be more familiar with the vastly superior translation made by the Victorian historical writer Thomas Carlyle, who had a feel for craggy men of action like Luther, and captured far better the breezy directness of his German: A safe stronghold our God is still, A trusty shield and weapon; He’ll help us clear from all the ill That hath us now o’ertaken. The ancient prince of hell Hath risen with purpose fell; Strong mail of craft and power He weareth in this hour; On earth is not his fellow. And were this world all devils o’er, And watching to devour us, We lay it not to heart so sore; Not they can overpower us. And let the prince of ill Look grim as e’er he will, He harms us not a whit; For why? – his doom is writ; A word shall quickly slay him. Inevitably in the storm now spreading throughout the continent, Erasmus was urged to confront Luther, and he needed to do so in order to refute the charge that his own delicate sarcasm at the Church’s expense had spawned this monstrous rebel. Erasmus chose his question carefully. The choice reflected his own distaste for the Augustinian theology which meant so much to Luther: has