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 90 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Shunned (2018)

  That’s just some self-righteous assholes’ way of scaring people into action. I’m not interested in sitting around all day, listening to somebody else tell me what’s right and what’s wrong. I have enough sense in my head to figure that out myself. You can believe that if you want to. Everyone needs something to believe.” I imagined one of the faceless riders—maybe even Jehovah God himself—watching from heaven, shaking his head and jotting down a few notes. “I would love to spend the day with you kids,” he said in a softer voice, “but your mother gets her way when it comes to these assemblies. Next weekend will be different. Don’t worry, Lindy. I’m not going anywhere. What could be safer than being here at home?” He toggled my chin with genuine affection, then resumed loading film into the camera. He was as clear and resolute as my mother had been moments earlier. Mom rushed into the room, a flurry of black-and-white-checked chiffon, holding her Bible and songbook. “Okay, everyone, let’s hurry, or we’ll be late. Dad’s going to take a picture of you outside, in front of the rhododendron. It’s in full bloom, and everyone looks wonderful.” I felt light-headed and woozy. No one else sensed the danger at hand, but the only choice laid out for me was to fall in line. Preparing for our pose on the lawn, Lory clutched her hands behind her, leaning slightly forward in her new heels. The massive purple blooms of the rhododendron fanned out behind us in all directions. Randy smiled pensively, pulling each side of his bow tie. Dad came at me with a spidery hand to tickle my belly. “Come on, I know there’s a smile in there somewhere,” he said. My forced laughter released some of the pressure. I managed a smile, aware of my mother’s advice. After Dad snapped a few photos, Lory, Randy, and I jumped into the Impala. Dad walked Mom to her side of the car and kissed her on the cheek before she got in. “We’ll be home around five o’clock and have something easy, like fish sticks, for dinner,” she said. Dad stood in the driveway and watched us pull back into the street. Mom honked the horn as she put the car in gear and accelerated forward. We all waved to Dad, but he didn’t see us. He’d already turned to walk up the front porch. [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] I felt Ross’s arm lift off my shoulder where it had been resting at the back of the seat. He opened his Bible and raised his hand to comment. We waited for an attendant to walk up the aisle to bring him the microphone. We were on the last paragraph of that day’s Watchtower . I had reminisced through the whole lesson. “We must never forget that Satan wants to use the futility of life in this world to discourage us and make us give up,” Ross said.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Muslims, therefore, must resist the Westernized forms of government imposed upon them by the colonial powers, since such governments constitute a rebellion against God and usurp his authority. 7 Once human beings hubristically seized control, there was danger of evil, oppression, and tyranny. It is a liberation theology that sounds bizarre to a confirmed secularist, but it is in the nature of an ideology that its insights cannot be appreciated by opponents. Mawdudi had imbibed and shared the values of the current zeitgeist; he believed in liberty and the rule of law, which he also saw as a device to prevent corruption and dictatorship. He just defined these ideals differently and gave them an Islamic orientation, but this would be impossible for somebody with the “false consciousness” of secularism to understand. Mawdudi also believed in the value of an ideology. Islam, he declared, was a revolutionary ideology that was similar to Fascism and Marxism, but there was an important difference. 8 The Nazis and Marxists had enslaved other human beings, whereas Islam sought to free them from subjection to anything other than God. A true ideologist, Mawdudi saw all other systems as irredeemably flawed. 9 Democracy led to chaos, greed, and mob rule; capitalism fostered class warfare and subjected the whole world to a clique of bankers; communism stifled human initiative and individuality. These were the usual ideological oversimplifications. Mawdudi skirted over details and difficulties. How would Islamic shurah differ in practice from Western-style democracy? How would the Shariah, an agrarian law code, cope with the political and economic difficulties of the modern industrialized world? An Islamic state, Mawdudi argued, would be totalitarian, because it subjected everything to the rule of God; but how would that differ in practice from dictatorship, which, Mawdudi rightly insisted, was condemned by the Koran? Like any ideologist, Mawdudi was not developing an abstruse scholarly theory, but issuing a call to arms. He demanded a universal jihad , which he declared to be the central tenet of Islam. No major Muslim thinker had ever made this claim before. It was an innovation required, in Mawdudi’s eyes, by the current emergency. Jihad (“struggle”) was not a holy war to convert the infidel, as Westerners believed, nor was it purely a means of self-defense, as Abdu had argued. Mawdudi defined jihad as a revolutionary struggle to seize power for the good of all humanity. Here again, Mawdudi, who developed this idea in 1939, shared the same perspective as such militant ideologies as Marxism. Just as the Prophet had fought the jahiliyyah , the ignorance and barbarism of the pre-Islamic period, so all Muslims must use all means at their disposal to resist the modern jahiliyyah of the West. The jihad could take many forms.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This was the position of some of the most discontented Jews, Christians, and Muslims by the 1960s and 1970s. In order to counter what they regarded as the rational fantasies of the modern establishment, they would have to challenge ideas which had once been radical and revolutionary but had now become so authoritative and pervasive that they seemed self-evident. They were all in a weak position and all convinced, sometimes with reason, that the secularists and liberals wanted to annihilate them. In order to create a religious ideology, they would have to reshape the myths and symbols of their tradition in such a way that they became a persuasive blueprint for action that would compel the people to rise up and save their faith from extinction. Some of these religious ideologues were deeply imbued with the spirituality of the conservative age. They were mystics and had a deep appreciation of myth and ritual, which made them acutely aware of the reality of the unseen. But there was a difficulty. In the premodern period, myth had never been intended to have a practical application. It was not meant to provide a concrete plan of action; on occasions when people had used myth as a springboard for political activity, the results had been disastrous. Now, as they planned their counterattack on the secular world, these religious radicals would have to turn their myths into ideology. In Egypt, Islam had come under sustained ideological attack during the 1960s. Nasser was at the height of his popularity, and had called for a “cultural revolution” and the implementation of what he called “scientific socialism.” In the National Charter of May 1962, he reinterpreted history from a socialist perspective; it was an ideology that “proved” that capitalism and monarchy had both failed, and that socialism alone would lead to “progress,” defined as self-government, productivity, and industrialization. Religion was regarded by the regime as irredeemably passé. After the destruction of the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser no longer bothered to use the old Islamic rhetoric. In 1961, the government castigated the ulema for their timorous adherence to their old medieval studies, and for the “defensive, reserved and rigid attitude” of the Azhar, which made it impossible to “adapt itself to contemporary times.” Nasser had a point. The Egyptian ulema had indeed closed ranks against the modern world and would continue to resist reform. 2 They were making themselves an anachronism and losing all influence over the modernizing sectors of Egyptian society. Similarly, the immoral, injudicious terrorism of a fringe group of the Muslim Brotherhood had been largely responsible for the destruction of the Society.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The commandments of the Law had reminded them that the world was not theirs to do with as they chose. Modern human beings now prized autonomy and freedom so greatly that the idea of an omnipotent divine legislator was abhorrent to them, and this development marked a great advance in human dignity. But the Holocaust and the Gulag show what can happen when people cast off all such restraint or make the nation or polity the supreme value. New ways of teaching human beings to respect the sacredness of life and the world would have to be found that would not compromise modern integrity with inadequate symbols of the “supernatural.” 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 1930 S and 1940 S 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)

  Others, however, argue simply that, like it or not, the word “fundamentalism” is here to stay. And I have come to agree: the term is not perfect, but it is a useful label for movements that, despite their differences, bear a strong family resemblance. At the outset of their monumental six-volume Fundamentalist Project, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby argue that the “fundamentalisms” all follow a certain pattern. They are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back and attempt to resacralize an increasingly skeptical world.2 To explore the implications of this global response to modern culture, I want to concentrate on just a few of the fundamentalist movements that have surfaced in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three monotheistic faiths. Instead of studying them in isolation from one another, I intend to trace their development chronologically, side by side, so that we can see how deeply similar they are. By looking at selected fundamentalisms, I hope to examine the phenomenon in greater depth than would be possible in a more general, comprehensive survey. The movements I have chosen are American Protestant fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Muslim fundamentalism in Egypt, which is a Sunni country, and Iran, which is Shii. I do not claim that my discoveries necessarily apply to other forms of fundamentalism, but hope to show how these particular movements, which have been among the most prominent and influential, have all been motivated by common fears, anxieties, and desires that seem to be a not unusual response to some of the peculiar difficulties of life in the modern secular world.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —IN the meantime, Karlstadt, having been forced out of Orlamünde and a series of south German cities, had ended up more than 250 miles to the southwest, in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where he was living in hiding. The city was surrounded by a peasant army and one day, when he went on a stroll outside the city, he came upon a group of illiterate peasants, who ordered him at gunpoint: “Are you a brother, then read the messenger’s letters. If you are not a brother, we will have you give account of yourself.” In fear for his life, Karlstadt complied. Indeed, “one of the peasants wanted very much to knife me; another would have liked to run me down,” he later recalled.31 He had then wandered from place to place for some weeks, although on which side of the peasant lines remained less clear. As it turned out, both the peasants and the lords rejected him: “the spiritual lords chased me as if I were game, and the peasants imprisoned me and would have devoured me, had not God protected me.”32 In June, with the peasants defeated, Karlstadt took the humiliating step of writing to Luther for help. Addressing him as “Gevatter,” he begged forgiveness for “all I sinned against you, moved by the old Adam.”33 Astonishingly, Luther took him in and housed him secretly in the monastery in Wittenberg for about eight weeks, together with his wife and child. Karlstadt meanwhile wrote an Apology, which was printed at Wittenberg, including a preface by Luther himself.34 He told the story of his wanderings, and while he was certainly trying to minimize the extent of his involvement with the peasants, he was no doubt honest when he insisted that he was not a peasant leader. In the preface, Luther declared that “[i]n matters of doctrine, Dr. Karlstadt is my greatest antagonist and we have clashed so fiercely in these matters that all hope for reconciliation or for further dealings has been dashed.”35 But perhaps aware of the unfairness of his equation of Karlstadt and Müntzer back in Jena, Luther demanded that Karlstadt ought to be allowed to prove that his was not “a rebellious spirit,” and given a hearing. This intervention was probably enough to save Karlstadt’s life. Had Luther not given him shelter or had he persisted in condemning him as a “rebellious spirit,” he might well have been executed, as many other priests were.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In the Wartburg, Luther began to suffer from severe constipation, which had first affected him at Worms. As he wrote to Spalatin, “the Lord strikes me in my posterior with serious pain.” The pains were his own special “relic of the Cross,” he quipped.9 He went for four, sometimes even six days without a bowel movement and the excrement was so hard that it caused bleeding. “Now I sit in pain like a woman in childbirth, ripped up, bloody and I will have little rest tonight,” he wrote.10 Just as he was in isolation from the outside world, so his body also seemed sealed off, unable to “flow”—the process humoral medicine considered fundamental to physical health. The condition lasted until the autumn and must have added to Luther’s sense of physical discomfort, with a different diet, a sedentary lifestyle, and clothing that constantly constricted the body. But perhaps, after the fevered rush of the period leading up to the Diet of Worms, the constipation reflected his own turning inward, entering a period of inactivity as essential as it was difficult, before he could become creative again.11 He also experienced attacks of the Devil. The story that was to become famous, of Luther throwing an inkpot at the Devil—the stain still visible today on the wall of his castle room—almost certainly rests on a misreading of Luther’s remark that he would fight the Devil with ink: that is, the printed word. But there was a new urgency about the Devil’s attacks, partly because without his friends and colleagues to talk to, Luther’s inner world loomed larger. “In this leisurely solitude” he was “exposed to a thousand devils,” he wrote. In one sense he was a monk because he was alone, he told Spalatin, and yet “I am not actually a monk [that is, a hermit, alone], because I have many evil and astute demons with me; they ‘amuse’ me, as one says, but in a disturbing way.”12 What were these attacks of the Devil about? During his time in the Wartburg, Luther had to come to terms with his body in new ways. “I sit here like a fool and hardened in leisure, pray little, do not sigh for the church of God, yet burn in a big fire of my untamed body. In short I should be ardent in spirit, but I am ardent in the flesh, in lust, laziness, leisure and sleepiness.”13 It was not just constipation that made him painfully aware of the flesh; nor was Luther describing sexual lust alone. As the monastery in Wittenberg gradually emptied, he knew that he had to change and give up the life of a monk. Gone was all the discipline, the importance of keeping time, the collective eating, the disruption of sleep patterns for services in the night, the structure of daily life. The transformation of Luther was as much physical and emotional as it was theological.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. T HERE WAS a similar readiness among Protestant fundamentalists in the United States. The chaos of the 1960s, with its permissive youth culture, sexual revolution, and the promotion of equal rights for homosexuals, blacks, and women, seemed to shake the very foundations of society. Many were convinced that this cataclysm, plus the tumult in the Middle East, could only mean that Rapture was nigh. Ever since the Revolution, American Protestantism had been divided into two warring camps, and for some forty years, the fundamentalists had been creating their own separate world, which rejected the modern ethos of secularists and liberal Christians alike. They saw themselves as outsiders, but in fact they represented a large constituency of Americans who resented the cultural hegemony of the eastern, secularist establishment, and who felt more at home with the conservative religion of the fundamentalists. They had not yet mobilized to form a political movement to redeem American society, but by the end of the 1970s, the potential was there, and fundamentalists were becoming conscious of their power.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Khomeini was convinced that the Revolution had been a rebellion against the rational pragmatism of the modern world. The people had shown that they were willing to die in order to achieve a polity with transcendent goals. “Could anyone wish his child to be martyred in order to obtain a good home?” he asked an audience of craftsmen in December 1979. “This is not the issue. The issue is another world. Martyrdom is meant for another world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By 1972, Kiryat Arba had grown to a small town with a population of about five thousand settlers. For the Kookists, it represented a victory in a holy war that pushed against the frontiers of the “Other Side” and liberated an important area of the Holy Land for God. Otherwise, however, Kookists made little progress. To their exasperation, redemption seemed to have stalled. The Labor government did not annex the occupied territories, and, though they built military settlements there, there was still talk of exchanging land for peace. The victory of 1967 had led to an Israeli complacency, which was shattered when, in October 1973 on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the most solemn day in the Jewish year, Egypt and Syria invaded Sinai and the Golan Heights, taking the Israelis completely by surprise. This time the Arab armies made a much better showing and were only pushed back by the IDF with great difficulty. Israelis were shocked, and a mood of depression and doubt settled on the country. Israel had been caught off-guard, and this near-defeat seemed the result of ideological decline. Kookists agreed. In 1967, God had made his will clear, but instead of capitalizing on this victory and taking over the territories, the Israeli government had temporized and worried about antagonizing the goyim , especially in the United States. The Yom Kippur War was God’s punishment and a reminder. Now religious Jews must come to the nation’s rescue. One Kookist rabbi compared secular Israel to a soldier falling in the desert after fighting an heroic war. Faithful Jews, who had never abandoned religion, would take over and carry on his mission. 94 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In Mainz late that year, however, the ritual went badly wrong. The hangman asked the assembled crowd whether the author had been legitimately condemned; they roared back that he had not been—and so he refused to light the fire, much to the audience’s delight. 67 Luther mocked Aleander for having spent hundreds of ducats buying his books to burn. But burning heretical texts prefigured burning the heretic himself: Luther knew what fate awaited him if he were to be seized by the Pope’s forces. W HEN L UTHER BECAME a novice, he had to kneel before the high altar, by the tomb of Andreas Zacharias, the Erfurt monastery’s most famous son. Doing so would have given the supplicant a sense both of physical abasement and of spiritual connection as his body felt the cold of the stone. A theologian of some renown, Zacharias had made a name for himself at the Council of Constance (1414–18), where he attacked the theology of the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus: He was credited—perhaps unfairly—with causing Hus to be burned as a heretic in 1415. Hus had called for Communion in both kinds, bread and wine, for laypeople. It is ironic that Luther himself came to hold many of the same views as Hus, who became a hero of the Reformation. 1 The monastery at Erfurt played an important part in turning the young Luther into the reformer he later became. Why did he choose the Augustinians? The town had many substantial monasteries: There was another Augustinian monastery and the Carthusians, Servites, Dominicans, and Franciscans all had houses there; with Luther’s connection to the Franciscans at Eisenach, that monastic order might have been particularly attractive. However, the “Black Monastery,” as the observant Augustinian house was known, would have been the intellectual’s choice. Many members of the house were also teachers at the university, and the monastery had a good library. It was expanding, with new buildings under construction while Luther was there, and it had a strong reputation among the citizenry. It housed a substantial community of some forty-five to sixty monks, was supported by a generous and growing endowment, and owned substantial properties in and around the town. 2 It was also caught up in a major conflict within the order: the struggle between the observants, who wanted strict obedience to the original rules, and the so-called conventuals, who were less rigid. Monastic orders tended to undergo cycles of renewal, as successive generations found that obedience to the rules had become lax. The latest Augustinian reform movement had begun in the 1480s and continued well into the early sixteenth century, and the Erfurt monastery was one of the major houses in Thuringia leading the observant side. The nature of their concerns can be glimpsed in the questions the reformer Andreas Proles had asked in 1489.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  By the summer of 1518, however, it was clear that matters were serious. There were further reports of plots against his life, and Count Albrecht of Mansfeld was warning him not to leave Wittenberg.26 On August 28, Luther wrote to Spalatin in Augsburg, weighing up what to do: “In all this I fear nothing, as you know, my Spalatin. Even if their flattery and power should succeed in making me hated by all people, enough remains of my heart and conscience to know and confess that all for which I stand and which they attack, I have from God, to whom I gladly and of my own accord entrust and offer all of this. If he takes it away, it is taken away; if he preserves it, it is preserved. Hallowed and praised be his name forever. Amen.”27 But while he seemed to be putting his life in God’s hands, he was at the same time working out how far he should go before putting himself in mortal danger. Luther had no reason to trust Cajetan, who was an Italian and a member of the papal court; rumors were circulating that the cardinal had been instructed by the Pope to get emperor and princes to unite against him. Not for the last time, therefore, Luther came up with a cunning ruse: He would avoid going to Augsburg by requesting safe conduct from the Elector, which he knew Spalatin would get Friedrich to refuse, thereby giving him an excuse not to travel. But it turned out to be a miscalculation. Spalatin rejected the suggestion out of hand, for both he and the Elector trusted Cajetan and were anxious for the meeting to take place.28

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Between late May and mid-July 1980, four separate coups against the regime were discovered, and until the end of the year, there were constant street battles between secularist guerrillas and Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards. The confusion and terror of these days was increased by the proliferation all over Iran of so-called revolutionary councils, which the government was unable to control. These komitehs executed hundreds of people for such “un-Islamic behavior” as prostitution or having held office under the Pahlavis. The emergence of such local bodies after the collapse of a central power seems a universal characteristic of revolutions designed to reconstruct society. Khomeini condemned the excesses of these komitehs, which, he declared, contravened Islamic law and undermined the integrity of the Revolution. But he did not disband them and was, eventually, able to bring them under his aegis, control them, and make them a grassroots support for his regime. 5 Khomeini also had to face war with Iraq. On September 20, 1980, the forces of Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, invaded southwest Iran, with the encouragement of the United States. This meant that the social reforms planned by Khomeini had to be put on hold. Throughout this period, the American hostages served a purpose. Only when they had outgrown their usefulness were the hostages released, on January 20, 1981 (the inauguration day of the new U.S. president, Ronald Reagan). Inevitably, however, the plight of the hostages tarnished the image of the new Islamic republic. Despite the high-flown talk during the crisis of the iniquity of the Great Satan, there was nothing religious or Islamic about this hostage-taking. Quite the contrary. Even though the capture of the hostages was not popular with all Iranians, many could appreciate its symbolism. An embassy is regarded as the given country’s territory on foreign soil, and the occupation of the students thus amounted to an invasion of American sovereignty. Yet to some it seemed appropriate that American citizens should be held captive in their own embassy in Iran, because for decades Iranians felt that they had been prisoners in their own country with the connivance of the United States, which had supported the Pahlavi dictatorship. But this was revenge politics, not religion. In the occupation’s early days, some of the hostages had been bound hand and foot, forbidden to speak, and told that the United States had abandoned them. Later, the hostages were moved to more comfortable quarters, 6 but this type of cruelty and ill-treatment contravenes the cardinal insight of all the major confessional faiths, Islam included: no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to practical compassion.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For some, this religious movement seems to have been a bridge that would enable them, later, to make the difficult transition to rational modernity. The alacrity with which so many had been ready to jettison the Torah, and the persistence of Shabbateans in dreaming of a new Law, demonstrated that they were ready to envisage change and reform. 61 Gershom Scholem, who has written the definitive study of Shabbetai and Shabbateanism, has argued that many of these closet Shabbateans would become pioneers of the Jewish Enlightenment or of the Reform movement. He points to Joseph Wehte in Prague, who spread the ideas of the Enlightenment in Eastern Europe during the early nineteenth century and had once been a Shabbatean; Aron Chovin, who introduced the Reform movement in Hungary, was also a Shabbatean in his youth. 62 Scholem’s theory has been disputed, and cannot be proved definitively one way or the other, but it is generally acknowledged that Shabbateanism did much to undermine traditional rabbinic authority and that it enabled Jews to envisage a change that would once have seemed taboo and impossible. After Shabbetai’s death, two radical Shabbatean movements led to the mass conversion of Jews into the dominant faith. In 1683, about 200 families in Ottoman Turkey converted to Islam. This sect of donmeh (“converts”) had their own secret synagogues, but also prayed in the mosques. At its peak, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sect numbered some 115,000 souls. 63 It started to disintegrate in the early nineteenth century, when members began to receive a modern, secular education and no longer felt the need for any religion. Some donmeh youth became active in the secularist Young Turk rebellion of 1908. The second of these movements was more sinister and showed the nihilism that can result from a literal translation of myth into practical action. Jacob Frank (1726–91) was initiated into Shabbateanism while visiting the Balkans. When he returned to his native Poland, he formed an underground sect whose members observed Jewish law in public but in secret indulged in forbidden sexual practices. When he was excommunicated in 1756, Frank converted first to Islam (during a visit to Turkey) and then to Catholicism, taking his flock with him. Frank did not simply cast off the restrictions of the Torah, but positively embraced immorality. In his view, the Torah was not merely outmoded but dangerous and useless. The commandments were the laws of death and must be discarded. Sin and shamelessness were the only ways to achieve redemption and to find God. Frank had come not to build but “only to destroy and annihilate.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Ironically, premillennialism had more in common with the secular philosophies it despised than with true religious mythology. Hegel, Marx, and Darwin had all believed that development was the result of conflict. Marx had also divided history into different eras, culminating in a utopia. Geologists had found the successive epochs of the earth’s development in the strata of fossilized fauna and flora in rocks and cliffs, and some thought that each had ended in catastrophe. Bizarre as the premillennial program sounds, it was in tune with nineteenth-century scientific thought. It was modern also in its literalism and democracy. There were no hidden or symbolic meanings, accessible only to a mystical elite. All Christians, however rudimentary their education, could discover the truth, which was plainly revealed for all to see in the Bible. Scripture meant exactly what it said: a millennium meant ten centuries; 485 years meant precisely that; if the prophets spoke of “Israel,” they were not referring to the Church but to the Jews; when the author of Revelation predicted a battle between Jesus and Satan on the plain of Armageddon outside Jerusalem, that was exactly what would happen. 11 A premillennial reading of the Bible would become even easier for the average Christian after the publication of The Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which became an instant best-seller.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But until that time we had to get on without him, waiting, as it were, in the dark. 18 For the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), an intensely religious man, the emptiness and the “eternal silence” of the infinite universe opened up by modern science inspired pure dread: When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. 19 Reason and logos were improving the lot of men and women in the modern world in a myriad practical ways, but they were not competent to deal with those ultimate questions that human beings seem forced, by their very nature, to ask and which, hitherto, had been the preserve of mythos. As a result, despair and alienation, as described by Pascal, have been a part of the modern experience. But not for everybody. John Locke (1632–1704), who was one of the first to initiate the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, had none of Pascal’s existential angst. His faith in life and human reason was serene and confident. He had no doubts about God’s existence, even though, strictly speaking, he was aware that proving the reality of a deity that lay beyond our sense experience did not pass Bacon’s empirical test. Locke’s religion, relying entirely on reason, was similar to the deism espoused by some of the Jewish Marranos. He was fully convinced that the natural world gave ample evidence for a Creator and that if reason were allowed to shine forth freely, everybody would discover the truth for himself. False and superstitious ideas had only crept into the world because priests had used cruel and tyrannical methods, such as the Inquisition, to force the people to accept their orthodoxy. For the sake of true religion, therefore, the state must tolerate all manner of beliefs, and must concern itself solely with the practical administration and government of the community. Church and state must be separate, and neither must interfere in the business of the other. This was the Age of Reason, and for the first time in human history, Locke believed, men and women would be free, and, therefore, able to perceive the truth. 20 This benign vision set the tone for the Enlightenment and the inspiring ideal of the modern, secular, tolerant state.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Believes in the equal distribution of America’s wealth to reduce poverty and bring about equality. Believes in control of the environment, control of energy, and its limitation. Believes in the removal of American patriotism, and the free-enterprise system, disarmament, and the creation of a one-world socialistic government. 105 This list, which seems to have been compiled from the first and second Manifestos of the American Humanist Society (1933 and 1973), an organization of little influence, could, nevertheless, be described as a reasonably accurate description of the liberal mind-set that evolved during the sixties. But in the way of most ideologies, it was, of course, also a caricature and an oversimplification of liberalism.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  89 One of the chief ideologues of the Jewish underground was Yeshua ben Shoshan, a gentle, soft-spoken Kabbalist who believed that the Dome of the Rock was the abode of the evil forces of the “Other Side” that were impeding redemption. It was he who had approached Livni and Etzion with the idea of purging the “abomination” during the Camp David negotiations, which, in his view, had been inspired by these demonic influences. Their power would be neutralized by the destruction of the Dome, and the accursed peace process would come to an abrupt end. At the very least, the dramatic action would shock the Jewish people worldwide into a proper awareness of their religious responsibilities, and cause them to abandon this talk of reconciliation with the enemy. It had been a perilous moment. Not only would the bombing of the Dome of the Rock have ended the peace process, it would almost certainly have resulted in a war in which, for the first time, the whole Muslim world would have joined forces against Israel. Strategists in Washington agreed that, in the context of the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States, Israel, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock could well have sparked World War III. 90 The specter of nuclear catastrophe did not trouble these extreme Kookists, however. They were convinced that by instigating an apocalypse here on Earth, they would activate powers in the divine world and “oblige” God to intervene on their behalf and send the Messiah to save Israel. 91 This was kabbalistic thinking gone mad. It is a terrifying example of the fundamentalist tendency to use mythology as a blueprint for action. On the practical level, there was nothing irrational about the conspirators’ plans. Livni had been trained as an explosives expert in the IDF. He had studied the Haram al-Sharif meticulously for two years, and purloined a large quantity of explosives from military camps in the Golan Heights. He had manufactured twenty-eight precision bombs that would have destroyed the Dome but not its surroundings. 92 They were entirely ready for the attack. All that stopped them was that they could find no rabbi who was willing to sanction their plan. The Dome of the Rock plot represented an abdication of reason, a reliance upon the miraculous, and a nihilism that could have entirely destroyed the Jewish state. This catastrophic messianism exhibited the death wish that has long been part of the modern experience. It was also self-destructive in that it badly damaged the credibility of Gush Emunim, which never recovered the admiration it had won in certain sectors of the Israeli public during its golden age.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Gray, retorted that it was the pacifism of the liberals which had caused the United States to fall behind Germany in the arms race, so it was they who had jeopardized the war effort. 17 In The King’s Business, a premillennial magazine, Thomas C. Horton argued that it was the liberals who were in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism which they taught in their Divinity School had caused the war and was responsible for the collapse of decent values in Germany. 18 Other conservative articles blamed rationalism and evolutionary theory for the alleged German atrocities. 19 Howard W. Kellogg of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles insisted that the philosophy of evolution was responsible for “a monster plotting world domination, the wreck of civilization, and the destruction of Christianity itself.” 20 This acrimonious and, on both sides, unchristian dispute had clearly touched a raw nerve, and evoked a deep fear of annihilation. There was no longer any possibility of reconciliation on the subject of the Higher Criticism, which, for the conservatives, now had an aura of absolute evil. The literal truth of scripture was a matter of the life and death of Christianity itself. The critics’ attacks on the Bible would result in anarchy and the total collapse of civilization, the Baptist minister John Straton declared in a famous sermon entitled “Will New York City Be Destroyed If It Does Not Repent?” 21 The conflict had got out of hand and it would become almost impossible to heal the rift. In August 1917, William Bell Riley had sat down with A. C. Dixon (1854–1925), one of the editors of The Fundamentals, and the revivalist Reuben Torrey (1856–1928) and decided to form an association to promote the literal interpretation of scripture and the “scientific” doctrines of premillennialism. In 1919 Riley held a massive conference in Philadelphia, attended by six thousand conservative Christians from all the Protestant denominations, and formally established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA). Immediately afterward, Riley escorted fourteen speakers with a troupe of Gospel singers on a superbly organized tour of the United States, which visited eighteen cities. The liberals were entirely unprepared for this onslaught, and the response to the fundamentalist speakers was so enthusiastic that Riley believed that he had launched a new Reformation. 22 The fundamentalist campaign was perceived as a battle. Constantly, the leaders used military imagery. “I believe the time has come,” wrote E. A.

• 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.