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.

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• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This was obvious in the new secular state of Turkey. After the First World War, the Ottoman empire, which had fought on the side of Germany, was defeated by the European allies, who dismembered the empire and set up mandates and protectorates in the old Ottoman provinces. The Greeks invaded Anatolia and the old Ottoman heartland. From 1919 to 1922, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) had led Turkish nationalist forces in a war of independence, and had succeeded in keeping the Europeans out of Turkey and in setting up a sovereign state, run on modern European lines. This was an unprecedented step in the Islamic world. By 1947, Turkey had acquired an efficient bureaucracy and a capitalist economy, and had become the first multiparty secular democracy in the Middle East. But this achievement began with an act of ethnic cleansing. Between 1894 and 1927, successive Ottoman and Turkish governments had systematically expelled, deported, or massacred the Greek and Armenian inhabitants of Anatolia to get rid of these foreign elements, who comprised about 90 percent of the bourgeoisie. Not only did this purge give the new state a distinctively Turkish national identity, but it gave Atatürk the chance to create a wholly Turkish commercial class which would cooperate with his government in creating a modern industrialized economy.78 The massacre of at least one million Armenians was the first act of genocide in the twentieth century, and showed that, as Rabbi Kook had feared, secular nationalism could be lethal and certainly as dangerous as the crusades and purges conducted in the name of religion. Atatürk’s secularization of Turkey was also aggressive. He was determined to “Westernize” Islam and reduce it to a private creed, without legal, political, or economic influence. Religion must be made subordinate to the state. Sufi orders were abolished; all the madrasahs and Koran schools were closed; Western dress was imposed by law; women were forbidden to wear the veil, and men the fez. Islam made a last-ditch stand, when Shaykh Said Sursi, head of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, led a rebellion, which Atatürk crushed swiftly and efficiently in two months. In the West, secularization had been experienced as liberating; it had even, in its early stages, been regarded as a new and better way of being religious. Secularism had been a positive development that had led, for the most part, to greater tolerance. But in the Middle East, secularization was experienced as a violent and coercive assault. When later Muslim fundamentalists claimed that secularization meant the destruction of Islam, they would often point to the example of Atatürk.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  A paranoid conspiracy fear developed of a mysterious cabal called the “Bavarian Illuminati” who were atheists and Freemasons and were plotting to overthrow Christianity in the United States. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president in 1800, there was a second anti-deist campaign which tried to establish a link between Jefferson and the atheistic “Jacobins” of the godless French Revolution. 66 The Union of the new states was fragile. Americans nurtured very different hopes for the new nation, secularist and Protestant. Both have proved to be equally enduring. Americans still revere their Constitution and venerate the Founding Fathers, but they also see America as “God’s own nation”; as we shall see, some Protestants continue to see “secular humanism” as an evil of near-satanic proportions. After the revolution, the nation was bitterly divided and Americans had an internal struggle to determine what their culture should be. They conducted, in effect, a “second revolution” in the early years of the nineteenth century. With great difficulty and courage, Americans had swept away the past; they had written a groundbreaking Constitution, and brought a new nation to birth. But this involved strain, tension, and paradox. The people as a whole had still to decide the terms on which they were to enter the modern world, and many of the less privileged colonists were prepared to contest the cultural hegemony of the aristocratic Enlightenment elite. After they had vanquished the British, ordinary Americans had yet to determine what the revolution had meant for them. Were they to adopt the cool, civilized, polite rationalism of the Founders, or would they opt for a much rougher and more populist Protestant identity? The Founding Fathers and the clergy in the mainline churches had cooperated in the creation of a modern, secular republic, but they both still belonged in many important respects to the old conservative world. They were aristocrats and elitists. They believed that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead the nation from above. They did not conceive of the possibility of change coming from below. They still saw historical transformation being effected by great personalities, who acted rather like the prophets of the past as the guides of humanity and who made history happen. They had not yet realized that a society is often pushed forward by impersonal processes; environmental, economic, and social forces can foil the plans and projects of the most coercive leaders. 67 During the 1780s and 1790s, there was much discussion about the nature of democracy. How much power should the people have? John Adams, the second president of the United States, was suspicious of any polity that might lead to mob rule and the impoverishment of the rich. 68 But the more radical Jeffersonians asked how the elite few could speak for the many. They protested against the “tyranny” of Adams’s government, and argued that the people’s voice must be heard.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Thus, religion played a key role in the creation of the first modern secular republic. After the Revolution, however, when the newly independent states drew up their constitutions, God was mentioned in them only in the most perfunctory manner. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson disestablished the Anglican church in Virginia; his bill declared that coercion in matters of faith was “sinfull and tyrannical,” that truth would prevail if people were allowed their own opinions, and that there should be a “wall of separation” between religion and politics. 60 The bill was supported by the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of Virginia, who resented the privileged position of the Church of England in the state. Later the other states followed Virginia’s lead, and disestablished their own churches, Massachusetts being the last to do so, in 1833.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning, and even satanic to a fundamentalist. If a patient brought such paranoid, conspiracy-laden, and vengeful fantasies to a therapist, he or she would undoubtedly be diagnosed as disturbed. The premillennial vision, which views some of the most positive institutions of modernity as diabolic, harbors genocidal dreams, and sees humanity as rushing toward a horrific End, is a clear indication of the dread and disappointment that modernity has inspired in many Protestant fundamentalists. We have seen the nihilism that can inform the fundamentalist program. It is impossible to reason such fear away or attempt to eradicate it by coercive measures. A more imaginative response would be to try to appreciate the depth of this neurosis, even if a liberal or a secularist cannot share this dread-ridden perspective. Second, it is important to realize that these movements are not an archaic throwback to the past; they are modern, innovative, and modernizing. Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible in a literal, rational way that is quite different from the more mystical, allegorical approach of premodern spirituality. Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih was a shocking and revolutionary overturning of centuries of Shii tradition. Muslim thinkers preached a liberation theology and produced an anti-imperialist ideology that was in tune with other Third World movements of their time. Even ultra-Orthodox Jews, who seemed resolutely to turn their backs upon modern society, found that their yeshivot were essentially modern, voluntarist institutions. They adopted a novel stringency in their observance of the Torah and learned to manipulate the political system in a way that brought them more power than any religious Jew had enjoyed for nearly two millennia. Throughout we have seen that religion has often helped people to adjust to modernity. Shabbateanism, Quakerism, Methodism, and Islamic mysticism helped Jews, Christians, and Muslims prepare for major change, and gave them a context in which they could approach the new ideas. Americans who had no time for the deism of the Founding Fathers of the republic were prepared for the revolutionary struggle by the Great Awakening. Muslims also developed an appreciation for such modern ideals as the separation of religion and politics by means of the dynamic of their own spirituality. Indeed, in Europe, too, secularism and scientific rationality were both at first seen as new ways of being religious. Some of the more recent movements we have considered have also been modernizing. Hasan al-Banna, Shariati, and even Khomeini all sought to bring Muslims to modernity in an Islamic setting that was more familiar to them than the imported ideologies of the West. Only thus could they “return to themselves” and help those who had perforce been left out of the modernizing process to make sense of such institutions as representative government and democratic rule.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They foresee the imminent destruction of the federal government, which they call ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), which is dominated by Satan and Jews, and dedicated to the destruction of the Aryan nation. Some have formed themselves into militant groups in remote corners of the northwestern United States, where they learn survival techniques, collect guns and ammunition, and prepare for the last war. Some make paramilitary raids on ZOG, killing state officials. Others bomb and set fire to abortion clinics. 132 It is this type of ideology that inspired Timothy McVeigh’s bomb attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It is difficult to chart the activities and ideals of Christian Identity, which is not a monolithic movement but a constellation of affiliated organizations. Their numbers are small; there are probably no more than 100,000 members, and could be as few as 50,000. 133 But as a trend, Christian Identity is worrying. Like fundamentalists, they have retreated from the world in contempt and fear, and plan to take it over. Like the most extreme types of fundamentalists, members see conspiracy everywhere and cultivate a theology of rage and resentment. But they have outdone the fundamentalists in their overtly fascist ideology, their pure hatred of the United States government, and the extremity of their withdrawal from modern life. No longer concerned with problems of doctrine and biblical inerrancy, the Identity groups want to carve out for themselves a separate Aryan state in America. Christian Identity has developed an ideology of alienation and terror unparalleled in American history. Like Reconstructionism, this loose confederation of Identity communities is a small but disturbing indication of the way religion could be used to articulate helplessness, disappointment, and discontent in the future. The secularist establishment and mainstream denominations may feel that the fundamentalist threat is receding in the United States, but as far as some Christians are concerned the war is still on, the federal government must be destroyed, and the conflict will certainly continue into the twenty-first Christian century. Religion did not disappear after all, and in some circles it has become more militant than ever. In all three of the monotheistic faiths, fundamentalists have reacted angrily to attempts to privatize or to suppress religion, and have, as they believe, rescued it from oblivion. It has been a hard struggle and in the course of it, the faith has often been distorted; this represents a defeat for religion. But fundamentalism is now part of the modern world. It represents a widespread disappointment, alienation, anxiety, and rage that no government can safely ignore.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect, is not an original thinker. His ideology is based almost entirely on that of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian fundamentalist whose ideas are discussed in chapter eight of this book. Using Qutb’s terminology, bin Laden proclaimed that the events of September 11 showed that the world was divided into two hostile camps: one for God and the other against Him. But the world had long been split into two camps, if not in the way that bin Laden described. For decades, those who enjoy and appreciate the benefits of modernity and those fundamentalists who recoil from modern society with visceral disgust gazed at one another over an abyss of incomprehension. The September 11 atrocity simply revealed how deep that fissure of understanding was and how dangerous this division had become. This was not a clash of civilizations. Fundamentalism had always been an intra-societal dispute. As if to underline this fact, the American Christian fundamentalists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson almost immediately proclaimed that the tragedy had been a judgment of God for the sins of the secular humanists in the United States—a viewpoint that was not far removed from that of the Muslim hijackers. In the afterword of this book, I pointed out that fundamentalism was not going to disappear; that it was part of the modern scene, and that it was a reality we had to learn to deal with. The history of fundamentalism shows that this militant piety does not fade away if we ignore it. It is no good pretending that the fundamentalist threat does not exist, or dismissing fundamentalism with secularist disdain as the preoccupation of a few deluded crazy people. History also shows that attempts to suppress fundamentalism simply make it more extreme. It was clear that we had to learn how to decode the fundamentalist imagery so that we could understand what fundamentalists in all three faiths were trying to express, because these movements expressed an anxiety and disquiet that no society could safely ignore. Since September 11, it has become more urgent than ever to comprehend the fundamentalist movements that in many parts of the world are becoming more extreme.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But it has been hard for some Westerners, who no longer think in a religious way, to appreciate this resurgence of faith, especially when it has expressed itself violently and cruelly. Frequently, modern society has become divided into “two nations”: secularists and religious living in the same country cannot speak one another’s language or see things from the same point of view. What seems sacred and positive in one camp appears demonic and deranged in the other. Secularists and religious both feel profoundly threatened by one another, and when there is a clash of two wholly irreconcilable worldviews, as in the Salman Rushdie affair, the sense of estrangement and alienation is only exacerbated. It is an unhealthy and potentially dangerous situation. Fundamentalism is not going away. In some places it is either going from strength to strength or becoming more extreme. What can the liberal, secular establishment do to build bridges and avert the possibility of future battles? Suppression and coercion are clearly not the answer. They invariably lead to a backlash and can make fundamentalists or potential fundamentalists more extreme. Protestant fundamentalists in the United States became more reactionary, intransigent, and literal-minded after their humiliation at the Scopes trial. The most extreme forms of Sunni fundamentalism surfaced in Nasser’s concentration camps, and the shah’s crackdowns helped to inspire the Islamic Revolution. Fundamentalism is an embattled faith; it anticipates imminent annihilation. Not surprisingly, Jewish fundamentalists, be they Zionist or ultra-Orthodox, are still haunted by fears of holocaust and anti-Semitic catastrophe. Repression has bitten deeply into the souls of those who have experienced secularization as aggressive, and has warped their religious vision, making it violent and intolerant in its turn. Fundamentalists see conspiracy everywhere and are sometimes possessed by a rage that seems demonic. And yet, attempting to exploit fundamentalism for secular, pragmatic ends is also counterproductive. Sadat courted the Muslims of Egypt and wooed the jamaat al-islamiyyah to give legitimacy to his regime and build his own power base. Israel supported HAMAS initially, as a way of undermining the PLO. In both cases, the attempt to manipulate and control recoiled tragically and fatally on the secularist state. A more just and objective appraisal of the meaning of these religious movements must be sought.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The death camp and the mushroom cloud are icons that we must contemplate and take to heart so that we do not become chauvinistic about the modern scientific culture that so many of us in the developed world enjoy. But these icons can also give us an insight into the way that some religious people regard modern secular society, in which they also experience the absence of God. Some fundamentalists see modernity as equally hubristic, evil, and demonic; their vision of the modern city or the secular ideology fills them with something of the same dread and helpless rage as overtakes the liberal secularist who gazes into the darkness of Auschwitz. During the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths were beginning to retreat from the mainstream society to create countercultures that reflected the way they thought things ought to be. They were not simply withdrawing out of pique, but were often impelled to do so by horror and fear. It is important that we understand the dread and anxiety that lie at the heart of the fundamentalist vision, because only then will we begin to comprehend its passionate rage, its frantic desire to fill the void with certainty, and its conviction of ever-encroaching evil. Some Jews had begun to see the modern world as demonic long before the Holocaust. Indeed, the Nazi atrocity only confirmed them in their conviction that not only was the gentile world irredeemably evil, but most modern Jews were horribly culpable too. Until the 1930s, most Orthodox Jews who wanted nothing to do with modern culture could immerse themselves in the life of the yeshiva or the Hasidic court. They had neither the desire nor the need to migrate to the United States or Palestine. But the convulsions of the 1930S and 1940S meant that survivors had no choice but to flee from Europe and the Soviet Union. Some of the Haredim went to Palestine and came face-to-face with the Zionists, who were now engaged in a desperate struggle to create a state that would save Jews from the coming catastrophe.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Six Day War had confirmed the Kookists in their vision and led to a couple of settlement ventures, but their movement did not really take wing until after the shock of the war of Yom Kippur. An article by the Kookist rabbi Yehuda Amital expressed the new militancy. In “The Meaning of the Yom Kippur War,” Amital demonstrated that deep fear of annihilation that lies at the heart of so many fundamentalist movements. The October assault had reminded all Israelis of their isolation in the Middle East and shown that they were encircled by enemies who seemed dedicated to the destruction of their state. This raised the specter of the Holocaust. Now Amital declared that the old Zionist policy had been discredited. The secular state had not solved the Jewish problem; anti-Semitism was worse than ever. “The State of Israel is the only state in the world which faces destruction,” he argued. There was no way that Jews could be “normalized,” becoming like all the other nations, as the secular Zionists had hoped. But there was another Zionism, that preached by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, which declared that the redemptive process was now far advanced. Instead of seeing the war as yet another Jewish catastrophe, it should be regarded as an act of purification. The secular Jews, whose Zionism had been so lamentably inadequate that it had brought the nation to the brink of catastrophe, had tried to fuse Judaism with the empirical rationalism and democratic culture of the modern West. This foreign influence must be eliminated.95 Amital was articulating a theory which had much in common with the fundamentalism that was then emerging in Egypt and Iran. God had permitted the Yom Kippur War to warn the Jews to return to themselves. It had been a reminder of true values to “West-toxicated” Israel. As such, it was part of the messianic process, a holy war against Western civilization. But the tide had turned. The war also revealed that it was not just the Jews who were struggling to survive. In this life-or-death conflict, Amital believed, the gentiles were also fighting their final battle. The revival and expansion of the Jewish state had shown them that God was in control, that there was no room for Satan, and that Israel had succeeded in turning back the forces of iniquity. Israel had conquered the Land; all that remained to be done before the Redemption was to purge the last relics of the Western secular spirit from the souls of Jews, who must return to their religion. The war had sounded the death knell of secularism. The Kookists were now ready to mobilize and become more politically active in the struggle—a struggle against the West which sought to restrain Israeli expansionism, against the Arabs, and against the secularism which the West had spawned in Israel.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet, paradoxically, the emergence of reason as the sole criterion of truth in the West coincided with an eruption of religious irrationality. The great Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which raged through many of the Protestant and Catholic countries of Europe and even made a brief appearance in the American colonies, showed that a cult of scientific rationalism cannot always hold darker forces at bay. Mysticism and mythology had taught men and women to deal with the world of the unconscious. It may not be accidental that at a time when religious faith was beginning to abandon this type of spirituality, the subconscious ran amok. The Witch Craze has been described as a collective fantasy, shared by men, women, and their inquisitors throughout Christendom. People believed that they had sexual intercourse with demons, and flew through the air at night to take part in satanic rituals and perverse orgies. Witches were thought to worship the Devil instead of God in a parody of the Mass—a reversal that could represent a widespread unconscious rebellion against traditional faith. God was beginning to seem so remote, alien, and demanding that for some he was becoming demonic: subconscious fears and desires were projected upon the imaginary figure of Satan, depicted as a monstrous version of humanity.28 Thousands of men and women convicted of witchcraft were either hanged or burned at the stake before the Craze burned itself out. The new scientific rationalism, which took no cognizance of these deeper levels of the mind, was powerless to control this hysterical outburst. A massive, fearful, and destructive un-reason has also been part of the modern experience.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Paradoxically, however, by the middle of the nineteenth century the new secularist United States had become a passionately Christian nation. During the 1780s, and still more during the 1790s, the churches all experienced new growth62 and began to counter the Enlightenment ideology of the Founding Fathers. They now sacralized American independence: the new republic, they argued, was God’s achievement. The revolutionary battle had been the cause of heaven against hell.63 Only ancient Israel had experienced such direct divine intervention in its history. God might not be mentioned in the Constitution, Timothy Dwight noted wryly, but he urged his students to “look into the history of your country [and] you will find scarcely less gracious and wonderful proofs of divine protection and deliverance … than that which was shown to the people of Israel in Egypt.”64 The clergy confidently predicted that the American people would become more pious; they saw the expansion of the frontier as a sign of the coming Kingdom.65 Democracy had made the people sovereign, so they must become more godly if the new states were to escape the dangers inherent in popular rule. The American people must be saved from the irreligious deism of their political leaders. Churchmen saw “deism” as the new satanic foe, making it the scapegoat for all the inevitable failures of the infant nation. Deism, they insisted, would promote atheism and materialism; it worshipped Nature and Reason instead of Jesus Christ. A paranoid conspiracy fear developed of a mysterious cabal called the “Bavarian Illuminati” who were atheists and Freemasons and were plotting to overthrow Christianity in the United States. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president in 1800, there was a second anti-deist campaign which tried to establish a link between Jefferson and the atheistic “Jacobins” of the godless French Revolution.66

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  26 His instinctive response, in sum, was to retreat. But other traditionalists felt it necessary to take a more creative stand against the danger of secularizing, rationalizing influences. In 1803, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, took a decisive step that would transform traditional Jewish spirituality, when he founded the Etz Hayyim yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania. Other new yeshivot were founded in the course of the century in other parts of eastern Europe: in Mir, Telz, Slobodka, Lomza, and Novogrudok. In the past, a yeshiva (a word that derives from the Hebrew for “to sit”) had simply been a series of small rooms behind the synagogue where students studied Torah and Talmud. It had usually been administered by the local community. Volozhin, however, was something entirely different. Here, hundreds of gifted students came from all over Europe to study with internationally famous experts. The curriculum was demanding, the hours were long, and admission to the yeshiva far from easy. Rabbi Hayyim taught Talmud according to the method he had learned from the Gaon, analyzing the text and stressing the importance of logical consistency, but in a way that yielded a spiritual encounter with the divine. It was not simply a matter of learning about the Talmud; the process of rote learning, preparation, and lively discussion was just as important as any final conclusion reached in class, because it was a form of prayer, a ritual that gave the students a sense of the sacred. It was an intense existence. The young men were isolated in a quasi-monastic community, their spiritual and intellectual lives entirely shaped by the yeshiva . They were separated from their families and friends and immersed wholly in the world of Jewish scholarship. Some of the students were permitted to spend a little time on modern philosophy or mathematics, but such secular subjects were secondary, regarded as stealing time from the Torah. 27 The purpose of the new yeshivot had been to counter the threat of Hasidism; the yeshivot were distinctively Misnagdic enterprises, designed to reinstate the rigorous study of Torah. But as the century progressed, the Jewish Enlightenment came to be perceived as more of a threat, and Hasidim and Misnagdim began to join forces against the Maskilim, whom they saw as a sort of Trojan Horse, bringing the evils of secular culture within the walls of Jewish communities. Gradually, therefore, the new yeshivot became bastions of orthodoxy, whose primary task was to ward off this insidious danger. Only the study of Torah could prevent the extinction of true Judaism. The yeshiva would become the defining institution of the ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism that would develop in the twentieth century.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There was no such person as a “secular Jew,” and even the goyim had a potential for holiness. Toward the end of his life, convinced of the imminence of the Last Days, the Rebbe began a mission to the gentiles of America, which, he acknowledged, had been good to Jews. The Lubavitch had suffered greatly in the modern period and had even faced extinction, but the Rebbe trained them not to see the Galut in a wholly demonic light, not to nurture fantasies of hatred and revenge, but to see the world as a place to which they could reintroduce the divine. 40 P ROTESTANT FUNDAMENTALISTS in the United States would eventually launch a counteroffensive against the modernity that had defeated them, but during the period currently under discussion, they concentrated, like Haredi Jews, on creating their own defensive counterculture. After the Scopes trial, Protestant fundamentalists retreated from the public arena and withdrew to their own churches and colleges. The liberal Christians assumed that the fundamentalist crisis was over. By the end of the Second World War, the fundamentalist groups seemed marginal and insignificant, and the mainstream denominations drew most of the believers. But instead of disappearing, the fundamentalists were putting down strong roots at the local level. There was still a considerable number of conservatives within the mainstream denominations; they had lost all hope of expelling the liberals, but they had not relinquished their belief in the “fundamentals” and held aloof from the majority. The more radical formed their own churches, especially the premillennarians, who believed it to be a sacred duty, while waiting for Rapture, to separate themselves from the ungodly liberals. They began to found new organizations and networks masterminded by a new generation of evangelists. By 1930, there were at least fifty fundamentalist Bible colleges in the United States. During the Depression years, another twenty-six were founded, and the fundamentalist Wheaton College, in Illinois, was the fastest-growing liberal arts college in the United States. Fundamentalists also formed their own publishing and broadcasting empires. When television arrived during the 1950s, the young Billy Graham, Rex Humbard, and Oral Roberts began their ministries as “televangelists,” replacing the old traveling revivalist preachers. 41 A huge, apparently invisible broadcasting network linked fundamentalists together all over the nation. They felt themselves to be outsiders, pushed to the periphery of society, but their new colleges and radio and television stations gave them a home in a hostile world. In the counterculture that Protestant fundamentalists were creating, their colleges were safe, sacred enclaves amid the surrounding profaneness. They were attempting to create holiness by means of segregation. Bob Jones University, founded in 1927 in Florida, and moving to Tennessee before finding its final home in Greenville, South Carolina, epitomized the ethos of the new fundamentalist institution.

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

  15 Russia: The Third Rome (900-1800) A NEW THREAT TO CHRISTENDOM: NORSEMEN, RUS’ AND KIEV (900-1240) At the other extreme of ninth-century Europe from Constantinople, somewhere in southern England, perhaps at the Court of King Alfred of Wessex, a scribe sat puzzling his way through the task of translating into Anglo-Saxon a popular fifth-century Latin text about past world calamities: the History against the Pagans by Augustine of Hippo’s Spanish admirer Paulus Orosius (see p. 305). Repeatedly in his text he found the concept of universal Christianity, and wondered how to translate it; he came up with a new Anglo-Saxon word, ‘Cristendom’.1 Our scribe was inventing a term which his readership could use to express their part in the universality of a continent-wide culture focused on Jesus Christ. It had survived repeated disasters: the scribe took comfort from the fact that Orosius’s Christendom had not been extinguished despite the calamities which the Spanish priest had experienced, and in fact he made his translation more determinedly cheerful than the original. In Orosius’s day, various barbarian peoples had dismantled the Christian Western Empire and sacked Rome itself; now the scribe’s optimistic tone defied the fact that Wessex was facing new barbarians, apparently intent on destroying everything that Christendom meant for England. The perpetrators sailed across the North Sea from Scandinavia, and in England they were called Norsemen, Danes or Vikings. They murdered kings, raped nuns, torched monasteries – one of their tortured and butchered victims, King Edmund of East Anglia, became such a symbol of those terrible times that he was long regarded as England’s patron saint. Christendom from west to east was united in its suffering at the hands of these people. Far to the east, the people of Constantinople also encountered Norsemen or Vikings, but knew them by a different Scandinavian word: Rus’ or Rhos.2 There too the word began as a name of terror; the Rus’ were part of a single Scandinavian movement of restlessness, plunder and settlement which both sent the Norsemen to England and impelled these peoples into the plains of eastern

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  We shall find a similar alliance of religious and secularist idealism in the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978–79), which was also a declaration of independence against an imperialist power. During the first decade of the revolutionary struggle, people were loath to make a radical break with the past. Severing relations with Britain seemed unthinkable, and many still hoped that the British government would change its policies. Nobody was straining forward excitedly to the future or dreaming of a new world order. Most Americans still instinctively responded to the crisis in the old, premodern way: they looked back to an idealized past to sustain them in their position. The revolutionary leaders and those who embraced the more secular Radical Whig ideology drew inspiration from the struggle of the Saxons against the invading Normans in 1066, or the more recent struggle of the Puritan Parliamentarians during the English Civil War. The Calvinists harked back to their own Golden Age in New England, recalling the struggle of the Puritans against the tyrannical Anglican establishment in Old England; they had sought liberty and freedom from oppression in the New World, creating a godly society in the American wilderness. The emphasis in the sermons and revolutionary rhetoric of this period (1763–73) was on the desire to conserve the precious achievements of the past. The notion of radical change inspired fears of decline and ruin. The colonists were seeking to preserve their heritage, according to the old conservative spirit. The past was presented as idyllic, the future as potentially horrific. The revolutionary leaders declared that their actions were designed to keep at bay the catastrophe that would inevitably ensue if there was a radical severance from tradition. They spoke of the possible consequences of British policy with fear, using the apocalyptic language of the Bible. 50 But this changed. As the British clung obstinately to their controversial imperial policies, the colonists burned their boats. After the Boston Tea Party (1773) and the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) there could be no going back. The Declaration of Independence expressed a new and courageous determination to break away from the old order and go forward to an unprecedented future. In this respect, the Declaration was a modernizing document, which articulated in political terms the intellectual independence and iconoclasm that had characterized the scientific revolution in Europe. But the majority of the colonists were more inspired by the myths of Christian prophecy than by John Locke. They would need to approach modern political autonomy in a mythological package which was familiar to them, resonated with their deepest beliefs, and enabled them to find the psychological strength to make this difficult transition.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Westerners were understandably horrified when they heard that Khomeini told parents to denounce children who were hostile to the regime, and that Iranians who made fun of religion were declared apostates and judged worthy of death. This violated the ideal of intellectual freedom, which had become a sacred value in Europe and America. But Western people were also forced to note that Khomeini never lost the love of the masses of Iranians, especially the bazaaris, the madrasah students, the less-eminent ulema, and the poor.16 These people had not been included in the modernization program of the shah and could not understand the modern ethos. Where Western secularists had come to see defiance of tradition as Promethean and heroic, Khomeini’s followers still saw the sovereignty of God as the highest value and did not yet see the rights of the individual as absolute. They could understand Khomeini but not the modern West. They still spoke and thought in a religious, premodern way that many Westerners could no longer comprehend. But Khomeini was not giving himself papal airs. He insisted that his “infallibility” did not mean that he did not make mistakes. He would become impatient with followers who took his every word as a divinely inspired pronouncement. “I may have said something yesterday, changed it today, and will again change it tomorrow,” he told clerics on the Council of Guardians in December 1983. “This does not mean that simply because I made a statement yesterday, I should adhere to it.”17 Nevertheless, “unity of expression” was a limitation and, some would say, a distortion of Islam. Jewish and Christian fundamentalists also insisted, in their different ways, on dogmatic conformity, asserting—sometimes stridently—that only their version of the faith was authentic. Khomeini’s “unity of expression” reduced the essentials of Islam to an ideology; by giving so much prominence to Khomeini’s own theories, it ran the risk of idolatry, the raising of a purely human expression of divine truth to absolute status. But it also sprang from Khomeini’s sense of danger. For years he had been fighting an aggressively secularizing regime which had been destructive to religion; he was now fighting Saddam Hussein, and was acutely aware of extreme international hostility to the Islamic Republic. “Unity of expression” was a defensive device. In making Iran an Islamic country once again, Khomeini was building a new, giant sacred enclave in a Godless world that wanted to destroy it. The experience of suppression, the perceived danger, and the knowledge that he was fighting against the grain of an increasingly secular world made for an embattled spirituality and would produce a contorted version of Islam. The experience of suppression had been scarring, and had resulted in a repressive religious vision.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But in the early days of the intifadah, a new organization was formed which gave the Palestinian struggle a disturbingly nihilistic Islamic dimension. The leadership of the intifadah was secularist, but some members of Mujamah founded HAMAS (Haqamat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah: Islamic Resistance Movement), which fought both the Israeli occupation and the Palestine nationalist movement. They were fighting the secularists for the Muslim soul of Palestine, and young men joined HAMAS in droves. Many came from the refugee camps, but others were middle-class and white-collar workers. It was a violent movement that, yet again, was born of oppression. HAMAS terrorism escalated after the killing of seventeen Palestinian worshippers on the Haram al-Sharif on October 8, 1990. Impelled by a fear of annihilation, HAMAS also attacked Palestinians whom they judged to be collaborators with Israel. “Our enemies are trying with all their might to obliterate our nation,” a spokesman explained in 1993, so any cooperation with Israel was “a terrible crime.”102 Like Islamic Jihad, HAMAS saw the Arab-Israeli conflict in religious terms. The Palestinian tragedy had, members believed, come about because the people had neglected their religion; Palestinians would only shake off Israeli rule when they returned to Islam.103 HAMAS believed that the success of Israel was due to Jewish faith, and that Israel was dedicated to the destruction of Islam.104 They claimed, therefore, to be fighting a war of self-defense. After Baruch Goldstein massacred Palestinian worshippers at Hebron, HAMAS vowed to take a life for a life. Activists waited until after the forty-day mourning period and then a suicide bomber killed seven Israeli citizens not in the occupied territories but in Afula, in Israel proper. A week later, on April 13, 1994, another suicide bomber killed five Israelis on an Egged bus in Hadera. Violence had bred new violence. These suicide bombings made many Israelis wary of the Oslo Accords signed the previous year, by which the PLO recognized Israel’s existence within its 1948 borders, and promised to put an end to violence and terror. In return, Palestinians were offered limited autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza for a five-year period, after which final status negotiations would begin on such issues as the Israeli settlements in the territories, compensation for Palestinian refugees, and the future of Jerusalem. But the suicide bombings in Israel indicated that Arafat could not control the Islamic militants opposed to his secularist regime, and some Israelis, especially those on the right of the political spectrum, accused Rabin of having jeopardized Israeli security at Oslo.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were either killed or wounded in the sanctuary. It was not surprising that many Iranians came to fear secularization as a lethal policy, designed not to free religion from the coercive state (as in the West) but to destroy Islam. 98 This was exactly the kind of atmosphere in which a fundamentalist movement was likely to thrive. It did not happen during this period, but four things did occur which foreshadowed later developments. The first was the creation of a counterculture. In 1920, Shaykh Abd al-Karim Hairi Yazdi (1860–1936), an eminent mujtahid , was invited to settle in Qum by the mullahs there. He was determined to put Qum back on the Shii map, because he feared for the future of the shrine cities of Kerbala and Najaf in Iraq, which had become the intellectual center of Iranian Shiism during the eighteenth century. Shortly after Shaykh Hairi’s arrival in Qum, the British did indeed exile some of the leading ulema from Iraq and two of the most learned, one of them the “constitutionalist” mujtahid Naini, came to settle in Qum. The city began to revive. The madrasahs were refurbished, and distinguished scholars started to teach there, enabling them to attract better students. One of the newcomers was the scholarly and unworldly Ayatollah Sayyid Aqa Husain Borujerdi (1875–1961), who became the Marja-e Taqlid, the Supreme Model of the Shiah, and attracted still more scholars to Qum. 99 Gradually Qum began to replace Najaf and, in the 1960s and 1970s, it would become the religious “capital” of Iran, and the center of the opposition to the royal capital in Tehran. But in these early years, the mullahs of Qum adhered to the Shii tradition of holding aloof from politics; any political activism would have incurred the wrath of the shah, and the revival in Qum would have been crushed in its infancy. The second fateful incident was the arrival in Qum in 1920 of the man who would become Iran’s most famous mullah. Shaykh Hairi Yazdi had brought some of his pupils with him when he moved to Qum from western Iran, and one was the young Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1902–89). At first, however, Khomeini seemed a rather marginal figure. He taught fiqh at the Fayziyah Madrasah, but later he would specialize in ethics and mysticism (irfan) , which were, compared with fiqh , definitely “fringe” subjects. Moreover, Khomeini practiced the mysticism of Mulla Sadra, upon which the establishment had long tended to look askance. He seemed interested in political questions, and this again was not calculated to advance his clerical career, especially after Ayatollah Borujerdi, who adhered strictly to the old Shii quietism and forbade the ulema to take part in politics, became the Marja. These were turbulent years in Iran, but despite his obvious political concern, Khomeini did not become an activist.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  National politics aside, it is also true that some of the greatest victories of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s were at the local level. In 1974, for example, Alice Moore, wife of a fundamentalist minister in Kanawa County, West Virginia, led a campaign against the “secular humanist slant” of school textbooks, which implied that the Bible was a myth, were critical of authority, and presented Christianity as hypocritical and atheism as intelligent and attractive. Christians withdrew their children from the schools, and picketed them. Moore displayed the long American Protestant tradition of distrust of the experts. Who should control the schools in Kanawa County: “the people who live here, or the educational specialists, the administrators, the people from other places who have been trying to tell us what is best for our children?”103 In January 1982, the local Christians of St. David’s, Arizona, managed to get books by William Golding, John Steinbeck, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain banned from their schools. In 1981, Mel and Norma Gabler began a similar campaign to “get God back into the schools” of Texas. They objected to the present “liberal slant,” which could be seen in: open-ended questions that require students to draw their own conclusions; statements about religions other than Christianity; statements that they construe to reflect negatively on the free enterprise system; statements that they construe to reflect positive aspects of socialist or communist countries (e.g., that the Soviet Union is the largest producer in the world of certain grains); any aspect of sex education other than the promotion of abstinence; statements which emphasize contributions made by blacks, Native American Indians, Mexican-Americans, or feminists; statements which are sympathetic to American slaves or are unsympathetic to their masters; and statements in support of the theory of evolution, unless equal space is given to explain the theory of creation.104 The courts ruled against the Gablers, but the publishers were so alarmed by the prospect of damage to the big Texas market, where the state chooses textbooks for all the schools, that they amended the books themselves. The campaigners had revealed all the worries that had long plagued fundamentalists about modern culture: the fear of colonization, of experts, of uncertainty, of foreign influence, of science and sex. 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.

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

  homeland of Asia Minor – Rhum), but they did so in Greek: they were Rhomaioi. They also lost the inclination to enjoy literature in Latin, until much later, at a time of renewed cultural contacts in the thirteenth century, they found new Greek translations of Latin poetry and philosophy to read.13 The draining of what was Roman or non-Christian from New Rome was one of the irreversible effects of Justinian’s reign and its aftermath: in the century and a half from his death in 565, a new identity was created for society in the Eastern Empire which can be described as Byzantine. It was not merely that Justinian’s military campaigns brought ruin to traditional Roman society in his new conquests in Italy and North Africa (see p. 320); he also undermined much of what remained from the past in the East. In 529 the Emperor closed the Academy of Athens, which in the great days of the ‘Second Sophistic’ at the height of Roman imperial self-confidence (see pp. 140–41) had been a self-conscious refoundation of the ancient Academy of Aristotle, and which still upheld the tradition of Plato. It was also during Justinian’s time, in 550–51, that another institution of higher education in Berytus (Beirut) was closed after a major earthquake devastated the city; only Alexandria was left as a centre of ancient non-Christian learning until the Islamic conquest. With such losses, education became more and more the property of Christian clergy and reflected their priorities. Books were otherwise scarce, and one new sort of book became increasingly common: florilegia, which were collections of short extracts from complete works which would act as guides to a subject, particularly in religion. Usually they were gathered with some particular theological agenda in mind. Another sort of new book flourished too: in the model of the life of Antony of Egypt (see pp. 205–6), hagiographies (biographies of saints, their miracles and the wonders associated with their shrines) became the staple fare of Byzantine reading.14 This was natural enough. The world felt increasingly out of human control, and the best hope seemed to be found in the hairline cracks between Heaven and earth provided by sacred places and holy people. The later sixth century saw the Byzantine Empire increasingly on the defensive on all fronts, with major losses in the western Mediterranean territories that Justinian had won and the seizure of imperial territory in the Balkans by Slavs and Avars. In 613 a Persian army encamped within sight of the city across the waters of the Bosphorus. In 626 came the greatest crisis yet, when a joint force of Avars, Slavs and Persians besieged the city. In the absence of the Emperor Heraclius on campaign, the Patriarch called together a procession of the whole civilian population bearing icons. During the siege, a woman, identified as the Virgin Mary herself, was reputedly seen leading the defenders: it was a major stimulus for the already