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 97 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

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

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  30 At the same time, in his book Belief in God and Immortality , Bryn Mawr psychologist James H. Leuba produced statistics that “proved” that a college education endangered religious belief. Darwinism was causing young men and women to lose faith in God, the Bible, and other fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Bryan was not a typical fundamentalist; he was not a premillennialist nor did he read scripture with the new stringent literalism. But his “research” had convinced him that evolutionary theory was incompatible with morality, decency, and the survival of civilization. When he toured the United States with his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism,” he drew big audiences and received extensive media coverage. Bryan’s conclusions were superficial, naive, and incorrect, but people were ready to listen to him. The First World War had ended the honeymoon period with science; there was now an uneasiness about its fearsome potential and in some quarters a desire to see it kept within bounds. Darwin’s scientific theory was a prime example of the disturbing tendency of some scientific experts to fly in the face of “common sense.” People who wanted a plain-speaking religion were all too eager to find a plausible reason—that they could understand—to reject evolution. Bryan gave them this and, single-handedly, pushed the topic of evolution to the top of the fundamentalist agenda. It was a cause that appealed to the new fundamentalist ethos, since Darwinism contradicted the literal truth of scripture, and Bryan’s paranoid interpretation of its effect tapped the new fears that had surfaced after the First World War. As Charles Hodge had argued fifty years earlier, the Darwinian hypothesis was repugnant to the Baconian mind-set of the fundamentalists, who still clung to the scientific outlook of early modernity. Intellectuals and sophisticates might follow these new ideas with enthusiasm in Yale and Harvard and in the big eastern cities, but they were alien to many small-town Americans, who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist establishment. Yet the campaign against evolution might still never have replaced the Higher Criticism as the chief fundamentalist bugbear had it not been for a dramatic development in the South, which had hitherto taken little part in the fundamentalist battle. There had been no need for southerners to become fundamentalists.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Oz touched upon the core of the problem. Fundamentalists and secularists—of whatever faith—are at war because they have entirely different conceptions of the sacred. When speaking about Gush Emunim, Oz called it “a cruel and obdurate sect” which had emerged “from a dark corner of Judaism, and is threatening to destroy all that is dear and holy to us.” For secularists and liberals—be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—such Enlightenment values as the autonomy of the individual and intellectual liberty, are inviolable and holy. They cannot compromise or make concessions on such issues. These principles are so central to the liberal or secular identity that if they are threatened, people feel that their very existence is in jeopardy. Just as fundamentalists fear annihilation at the hands of the secularist, a liberal like Oz saw the Gush as threatening “to bring down upon us a savage and insane bloodlust.” The real aim of the Gush, he continued, was not the conquest of Nablus or Hebron, but the imposition of an ugly and distorted version of Judaism upon the State of Israel. The real aim of this cult is the expulsion of the Arabs so as to oppress the Jews afterwards, to force us all under the brutality of their false prophets.108 Each, the religious and the secularist, gazes at the other with horror. Neither can see the other clearly. Both recall the excesses, cruelties, and intolerance of the “other side” and, wounded to the core, they cannot make peace. THERE WAS ALSO polarization and hostility in America. In the United States, religious fundamentalists seemed more restrained and law-abiding. Fundamentalists did not assassinate their presidents, lead revolutions, or take hostages. But a deep ravine ran through American religion nonetheless. Polls showed the religious population of the United States to be neatly divided into two almost equal and mutually antagonistic camps. A Gallup Poll carried out in June 1984 revealed that 43 percent of Americans called themselves “liberals” and 41 percent “conservatives”; and that the major denominations were split down the middle. Most of the respondents argued that the rift was “serious” and had a negative image of the “other side,” which did not, as did other forms of prejudice, recede when there was greater contact.109 Other polls showed that even though only 9 percent of Americans identified themselves as “fundamentalists,” core tenets of Protestant fundamentalism were more widely held. 44 percent believed that salvation comes only through Jesus Christ. 30 percent describe themselves as “born-again.” 28 percent believe that every word of the Bible must be read literally. 27 percent denied that the Bible could contain scientific and historical errors.110 The success of American fundamentalism was not entirely due to the adroit marketing of Jerry Falwell and other televangelists. There were elements in American culture and religious life that were favorable to this literalistic form of faith, and which provided it with a fertile soil.111

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Shapira and Teitelbaum contemplated the Zionist kibbutzim in Palestine, they felt the same outrage and dread as, later, people felt when they heard about the Nazi death camps. This is not an exaggeration. Teitelbaum, who narrowly escaped extermination by migrating with his people to America, put the entire blame for the Holocaust on the great sin of the Zionists, who had “lured the majority of the Jewish people into awful heresy, the like of which has not been seen since the world was created.… And so it is no wonder that the Lord lashed out in anger.”6 These rejectionists could see nothing positive in the agricultural achievements of the Zionists, who were making the desert bloom, or the political acumen of their leaders, who were striving to save Jewish lives. This was an “outrage,” a “defilement,” and the final eruption of the forces of evil.7 The Zionists were atheists and unbelievers; even if they had been the most strictly observant of Jews, their enterprise would still be evil because it was a rebellion against God, who had decreed that Jews must endure the punishment of the Exile and must take no initiative to save themselves. For Shapira, the Land was too holy to be settled by any ordinary Jew, let alone by self-confessed Zionist rebels. Only the religious zealot who devoted his entire life to study and prayer could live there safely. Wherever there is a holy object, like Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), evil forces gather to attack it. The Zionists, Shapira explained, were simply the external manifestation of these demonic influences. The Holy Land itself, therefore, was teeming with wicked forces “which excite God’s anger and fury.” Instead of God, it was Satan that now dwelt in Jerusalem. The Zionists who “pretend to ‘ascend’ to the Land, are in fact, descending to the depths of hell.”8 The Holy Land was empty of God and had become an inferno. Eretz Israel was not a homeland, as the Zionists maintained, but a battlefield. The only people who could safely dwell there in these terrible times were not householders and farmers, but holy warriors, “zealous fearers of God,” “valiant men of war” who set out “to fight the just war for the residue of God’s heritage in the holy mountain of Jerusalem.” The whole Zionist enterprise imbued Shapira with existential terror. Teitelbaum saw the Zionists as the latest manifestation of the evil hubris that had consistently brought disasters upon the Jewish people: the Tower of Babel, the idolatry of the Golden Calf, the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE which had cost thousands of Jewish lives, and the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco. But Zionism was the heresy par excellence; this was brazen arrogance which shook the very foundations of the world. It was no wonder that God had sent the Holocaust!9

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Its apparent absence in the United States had disturbed him. When Qutb gazed at modern secular culture, like other fundamentalists he saw a hell, a place utterly drained of sacred and moral significance, which filled him with horror. Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts and the mass media! And add to all this, the system of usury which fuels man’s voracity for money and engenders vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law. 17 He wanted Muslims to revolt against this secular city, and to restore a sense of the spiritual to modern society . Qutb saw history mythically. He did not approach the Prophet’s life like a modern, scientific historian, seeing these events as unique and located in a distant period. He had been a novelist and a literary critic, and knew that there were other ways of arriving at the truth of what had really happened. For Qutb, Muhammad’s career was still an archetype, a moment when the sacred and the human had come together and acted in concert. It was in the deepest sense a “symbol,” which linked the mundane with the divine. Muhammad’s life thus represented an ideal beyond history, time, and place and, like a Christian sacrament, it provided humanity with a “constant encounter” with the ultimate Reality. 18 It was, therefore, an epiphany, and the different stages of the Prophet’s career represented “milestones” that guided men and women to their God. In the same way, the term jahiliyyah could not simply refer to the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, as in conventional Muslim historiography. “Jahiliyyah is not a period in time,” he explained in Milestones , his most controversial book. “It is a condition that is repeated every time society veers from the Islamic way, whether in the past, the present, or the future.” 19 Any attempt to deny the reality and sovereignty of God is jahili . Nationalism (which makes the state a supreme value), communism (which is atheistic), and democracy (in which the people usurp God’s rule) are all manifestations of jahiliyyah , which worships humanity instead of the divine. It is a state of Godlessness and apostasy. For Qutb, the modern jahiliyyah in both Egypt and the West was even worse than the jahiliyyah of the Prophet’s time, because it was not based on “ignorance” but was a principled rebellion against God. But in premodern spirituality, the Muhammadan archetype had been created in the ground of each Muslim’s being by means of the rituals and ethical practices of Islam.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet for all Falwell’s apparently hardheaded approach, the fundamentalists who responded to him were filled with fear. It was no use arguing with Falwell, LaHaye, or Robertson in the hope of convincing them that there was no secular humanist conspiracy. This paranoid fear of annihilation and destruction, which they shared with Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, would add urgency and conviction to their campaign. Modern society had achieved a great deal, materially and morally. It had reason to believe in its righteousness. In Europe and the United States, at least, democracy, freedom, and toleration were liberating. But fundamentalists could not see this, not because they were perverse, but because they had experienced modernity as an assault that threatened their most sacred values and seemed to put their very existence in jeopardy. By the end of the 1970s, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditionalists were poised to fight back. 9. The Offensive (1974–79) THE FUNDAMENTALIST ASSAULT took many secularists by surprise. They had assumed that religion would never again be a major player in politics, but during the late 1970s there was a militant explosion of faith. In 1978–79, the world watched in astonishment as an obscure Iranian ayatollah brought down the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, which had seemed to be one of the most progressive and stable states in the Middle East. At the same time as governments applauded the peace initiative of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, his recognition of the State of Israel, and his overtures to the West, observers noted that the young Egyptians appeared to be turning to religion. They were donning Islamic dress, casting aside the freedoms of modernity, and many were engaged in an aggressive takeover of the university campuses. In the United States, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, urging Protestant fundamentalists to get involved in politics and to challenge state and federal legislation that pushed a “secular humanist” agenda. This sudden eruption of religion seemed shocking and perverse to the secularist establishment. Instead of embracing one of the modern ideologies, which had proved so effective, these radical traditionalists quoted scripture and cited archaic laws and principles that were quite alien to twentieth-century political discourse. Their initial success seemed inexplicable; it was (surely?) impossible to run a modern state along these lines. The fundamentalists seemed engaged in an atavistic return to the past. Further, the enthusiasm and the support that these policies inspired were an affront. Those Americans and Europeans who had imagined that religion had had its day were now forced to see that not only could the old faiths still inspire a passionate allegiance, but that millions of committed Jews, Christians, and Muslims loathed the secular, liberal culture of which they were so proud.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Iran was becoming a polarized country: a few benefited from the American boom, but the vast majority were being left behind. And Iran was not unique. By the middle of the twentieth century, the societies of all the countries we are considering were being divided into two camps. Some saw the modern age as liberating and empowering; others experienced it as an evil assault. There was fear, hatred, and a barely suppressed rage. It would not be long before fundamentalists, who felt this anger acutely, would decide that it was no longer sufficient to hold aloof from society and build a counterculture. They must mobilize and fight back. 8. Mobilization (1960–74) BY THE 1960s, revolution was in the air throughout the West and the Middle East. In Europe and America the young people took to the streets and rebelled against the modern ethos of their parents. They called for a more just and equal system, protested against the materialism, imperialism, and chauvinism of their governments, refused to fight in their nation’s wars or to study in its universities. Sixties youth began doing what the fundamentalists had been doing for decades: they started to create a “counterculture,” an “alternative society” in revolt against the values of the mainstream. In many ways, they were demanding a more religious way of life. Most had little time for institutional faith or for the authoritarian structures of the monotheisms. Instead, they went to Katmandu or sought solace in the meditative or mystical techniques of the Orient. Others found transcendence in drug-induced trips, transcendental meditation, or personal transformation in such techniques as the Erhard Seminars Training (est). There was a hunger for mythos and a rejection of the scientific rationalism that had become the new Western orthodoxy. This was not a rejection of rationality per se, but of its more extreme forms. Twentieth-century science itself was cautious, sober, and highly conscious in a disciplined, principled way of its limitations and areas of competence. But the prevailing mood of modernity had made science ideological and had refused to countenance any other method of arriving at truth. During the sixties, the youth revolution was in part a protest against the illegitimate domination of rational language and the suppression of mythos by logos.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like all millennial visions, this liberal theology was doomed to disappoint. Instead of achieving greater harmony, American Protestants were discovering that they were profoundly at odds. Their differences threatened to tear the denominations apart. The chief bone of contention at the end of the nineteenth century was not evolution but the Higher Criticism. Liberals believed that even though the new theories about the Bible might undermine some of the old beliefs, in the long term they would lead to a deeper understanding of scripture. But for the traditionalists, “Higher Criticism” was a scare term. It seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with the modern industrialized society that was sweeping the old certainties away. By this time, popularizers had brought the new ideas to the general public, and Christians discovered to their considerable confusion that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, nor the Psalms by King David; the Virgin Birth of Christ was a mere figure of speech, and the Ten Plagues of Egypt were probably natural disasters which had been interpreted later as miracles.22 In 1888, the British novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, which told the story of a young clergyman whose faith was so undermined by the Higher Criticism that he resigned his orders and devoted his life to social work in the East End of London. The novel became a best-seller, which indicated that many could identify with the hero’s doubts. As Robert’s wife said, “If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.”23 The rational bias of the modern world now made it impossible for many Western Christians to understand the role and value of myth. Faith had to be rational, mythos had to be logos. It was now very difficult to see truth as anything other than factual or scientific. There was a deep fear that these new biblical theories would undermine the basic structure of Christianity and leave nothing at all. Yet again, the void loomed. “If we have no infallible standard,” argued the American Methodist clergyman Alexander McAlister, “we may as well have no standard at all.”24 Discount one miracle, and consistency demanded that you reject the lot. If Jonah did not really spend three days in the belly of a whale, did Christ really rise from the tomb? asked the Lutheran pastor James Remensnyder.25 Once biblical truth had been unraveled in this way, all decent values would disappear. For the Methodist preacher Leander W. Mitchell, the Higher Criticism was to blame for widespread drunkenness, infidelity, and agnosticism.26 The Presbyterian M. B. Lambdin saw it as the cause of the rising divorce rate, graft, corruption, crime, and murder.27