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)

  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. Egypt did not achieve either independence or democracy as quickly as Turkey. After the First World War, Egyptian nationalists had demanded independence; there were riots, Englishmen were attacked, railway lines torn up, and telegraph lines cut. In 1922, Britain allowed Egypt a measure of independence. Khedive Fuad became the new king; Egypt was given a liberal constitution, and a representative, parliamentary body. But this was no true democracy. Britain retained control of defense and foreign policy, so there was no real independence. Between 1923 and 1930, the popular Wafd Party, which demanded the withdrawal of the British, won three large electoral victories under the liberal constitution, but each time it was forced to resign under pressure from either the British or the king.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Jewish people had been central to the vision of John Darby, the founder of premillennialism. Fundamentalists had been thrilled by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the actual creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was seen by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell as “the greatest … single sign indicating the imminent return of Jesus Christ”; he saw May 14, 1948, when Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel, as the most important day in history since the ascension of Jesus into heaven.54 Support for Israel became mandatory; Israel’s history was beyond human influence and control, determined by God from all eternity. Christ could not return, the Last Days could not begin, unless the Jews were living in the Holy Land.55 Protestant fundamentalists were enthusiastic Zionists, but their vision had a darker side. John Darby had taught that Antichrist would slaughter two-thirds of the Jews living in Palestine in the End-time: Zachariah had predicted this, and, like all such prophecies, his words must be interpreted literally.56 Some fundamentalists had seen the Holocaust as God’s last effort to convert the Jews, and a foretaste of worse to come. In Israel and Prophecy, the prolific fundamentalist writer John Walvoord gave a detailed timetable of this final persecution of the Jews, based on a patchwork of prophecies. Antichrist would help the Jews to rebuild their Temple and convince many of them that he was the Messiah; but then he would set up his own image in the new Temple as an object of worship. After this apostasy, 144,000 Jews would reject Antichrist, be converted to Christianity, and die as martyrs. Then Antichrist would unleash a hideous persecution and Jews would die in ghastly numbers. Only a few would escape and be present to greet Jesus at his Second Coming.57 At the same time as Protestant fundamentalists celebrated the birth of the new Israel, they were cultivating fantasies of a final genocide at the end of time. The Jewish state had come into existence purely to further a Christian fulfillment. The Jews’ fate in the Last Days is uniquely grim, since they are doomed to suffer whether or not they accept Christ. American Protestants had not suffered like the Jews, but their vision of modernity was also dark and doomed. They had evolved their literal and “scientific” reading of scripture in response to the rationalistic spirit of the modern world, yet if the true test of a religious vision is that it helps believers to cultivate the cardinal virtue of compassion (a teaching that informs the Gospels and the letters of St. Paul, if not the Book of Revelation), Protestant fundamentalism seemed to be failing as a religious movement, just as at the Scopes trial its science had proved to be defective. Indeed, their literal reading of highly selected passages of the Bible had encouraged them to absorb the Godless genocidal tendencies of modernity.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  frequently dangerous world, an organism should react cautiously to a novel stimulus, with withdrawal and fear. Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty. However, it is also adaptive for the initial caution to fade if the stimulus is actually safe. The mere exposure effect occurs, Zajonc claimed, because the repeated exposure of a stimulus is followed by nothing bad. Such a stimulus will eventually become a safety signal, and safety is good. Obviously, this argument is not restricted to humans. To make that point, one of Zajonc’s associates exposed two sets of fertile chicken eggs to different tones. After they hatched, the chicks consistently emitted fewer distress calls when exposed to the tone they had heard while inhabiting the shell. Zajonc offered an eloquent summary of his program of research: The consequences of repeated exposures benefit the organism in its relations to the immediate animate and inanimate environment. They allow the organism to distinguish objects and habitats that are safe from those that are not, and they are the most primitive basis of social attachments. Therefore, they form the basis for social organization and cohesion—the basic sources of psychological and social stability. The link between positive emotion and cognitive ease in System 1 has a long evolutionary history. Ease, Mood, and Intuition Around 1960, a young psychologist named Sarnoff Mednick thought he had identified the essence of creativity. His idea was as simple as it was powerful: creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well. He made up a test, called the Remote Association Test (RAT), which is still often used in studies of creativity. For an easy example, consider the following three words: cottage Swiss cake Can you think of a word that is associated with all three? You probably worked out that the answer is cheese. Now try this: dive light rocket This problem is much harder, but it has a unique correct answer, which every

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Over the next few months, women from every level of St. Petersburg closer to hers. She felt his society visited Rasputin in his apartment. He would talk to them of spiri- hot breath on her cheeks, tual matters, but then without warning he would turn sexual, murmuring and saw how his eyes, burning from the depths of the crassest come-ons. He would justify himself through spiritual dogma: their sockets, furtively roved how can you repent if you have not sinned? Salvation only comes to those over her helpless body, until who go astray. One of the few who rejected his advances was asked by a he dropped his lids with a sensuous expression. His friend, "How can one refuse anything to a saint?" "Does a saint need sinful voice had fallen to a love?" she replied. Her friend said, "He makes everything that comes near passionate whisper, and he him holy. I have already belonged to him, and I am proud and happy to murmured strange, voluptuous words in her have done so." "But you are married! What does your husband say?" "He ear. • Just as she was on considers it a very great honor. If Rasputin desires a woman we all think it the point of abandoning a blessing and a distinction, our husbands as well as ourselves." herself to her seducer, a memory stirred in her Rasputin's spell soon extended over Czar Nicholas and more particu- dimly and as if from some larly over his wife, the Czarina Alexandra, after he apparently healed their far distance; she recalled son from a life-threatening injury. Within a few years, he had become the that she had come to ask most powerful man in Russia, with total sway over the royal couple. him about God. —RENÉ FÜLÖP-MILLER, RASPUTIN: THE HOLY DEVIL People are more complicated than the masks they wear in society. The man who seems so noble and gentle is probably disguising a dark side, which will often come out in strange ways; if his nobility and refinement are in fact a put-on, sooner or later the truth will out, and his hypocrisy will disappoint and alienate. On the other hand, we are drawn to people who seem more comfortably human, who do not bother to disguise their contradictions. This was the source of Rasputin's charisma. A man so authenti-cally himself, so devoid of self-consciousness or hypocrisy, was immensely appealing. His wickedness and saintliness were so extreme that it made him seem larger than life. The result was a charismatic aura that was immediate and preverbal; it radiated from his eyes, and from the touch of his hands.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It is poignant to look back at this early admiration in the light of the hostility that developed later. Tahtawi and the Syrian journalists were living in a brief period of harmony between East and West. The old crusading hatred of Islam seemed to have died in Europe, and Tahtawi clearly did not see Britain and France as a political threat, even though his sojourn in Paris coincided with the brutal colonization of Algeria by the French. For Tahtawi, the British and French were simply bearers of progress. But in 1871, an Iranian arrived in Cairo who had come to fear the West, which, he realized, was on the way to achieving world hegemony. Even though he was Iranian and a Shii, Jamal al-Din (1839–97) styled himself “al-Afghani” (the Afghan), probably because he hoped to attract a wider audience in the Islamic world by presenting himself as a Sunni.54 He had had a traditional madrasah education, which had included both fiqh (jurisprudence) and the esoteric disciplines of Falsafah and mysticism (irfan), yet he had become convinced, during a visit to British India, that modern science and mathematics were the key to the future. Afghani, however, did not fall in love with the British as Tahtawi had fallen under the spell of the Parisians. His visit coincided with the Indian Mutiny against British rule (1857), which left a lasting bitterness in the subcontinent. Afghani traveled in Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and Europe, and became acutely anxious about the ubiquity and power of the West, which, he was convinced, was about to crush the Islamic world. When he arrived in Cairo in 1871, he was a man with a mission. He was determined to teach the Muslim world to unite under the banner of Islam and to use religion to counter the threat of Western imperialism. Afghani was passionate, eloquent, wild, and quick-tempered. He sometimes made a bad impression, but had undoubted charisma. In Cairo, he quickly gathered together a circle of disciples and encouraged them to spread his pan-Islamic ideas. There was much discussion about the form that modern Egypt should take at this time. Syrian journalists had promoted the idea of a secular state, and Tahtawi had believed that Egyptians should cultivate a Western-style nationalism. Afghani would have none of this. If religion was weak, in his view, Muslim society was bound to disintegrate. It was only by reforming Islam and remaining true to their own unique cultural and religious traditions that the Muslim countries would become strong again and build their own version of scientific modernity. He was convinced that unless the Muslims took strong action, the Islamic community (ummah) would soon cease to exist. Time was short. The European imperialists were becoming stronger every day, and in a very short space of time the Islamic world would be overrun by Western culture.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But by making jihad central to the Muslim vision, Qutb had in fact distorted the Prophet’s life. The traditional biographies make it clear that even though the first ummah had to fight in order to survive, Muhammad did not achieve victory by the sword but by a creative and ingenious policy of nonviolence. The Koran condemns all warfare as abhorrent, and permits only a war of self-defense. The Koran is adamantly opposed to the use of force in religious matters. Its vision is inclusive; it recognizes the validity of all rightly guided religion, and praises all the great prophets of the past.26 The last time Muhammad preached to the community before his death, he urged Muslims to use their religion to reach out to others in understanding, since all human beings were brothers: “O men! behold we have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.”27 Qutb’s vision of exclusion and separation goes against this accepting tolerance. The Koran categorically and with great emphasis insisted that “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith.”28 Qutb qualified this: there could only be toleration after the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a true Muslim state.29 The new intransigence springs from the profound fear that is basic to fundamentalist religion. Qutb had personally experienced the murderous and destructive power of the modern jahiliyyah. Nasser did seem bent on wiping out Islam, and he was not alone. When Qutb looked back into history, he saw what looked like one jahili enemy after another intent on the destruction of Islam: pagans, Jews, Christians, Crusaders, Mongols, Communists, capitalists, colonialists, and Zionists.30 Today, these were linked in a vast conspiracy yet again. With the paranoid vision of the true fundamentalist who has been pushed too far, Qutb saw connections everywhere. Jewish and Christian imperialists had conspired together to dispossess the Arabs of Palestine; Jews had created both capitalism and communism; Jews and Western imperialists had put Atatürk in power to get rid of Islam, and when other Muslim states had not followed Turkey’s example, they had supported Nasser.31 Like most neuroses, this conspiracy fear flew in the face of the facts, but once human beings feel that they are fighting against great odds simply to survive, their views are not likely to be reasonable.

• 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