In this chapter I argue for the conceptual unity of religion and politics. I suggest that Founding Fatherhood and charisma belong indifferently to religion and to the politics of nation and of party because these three seemingly distinct sectors of human activity share characteristics that belong to the nature and dynamics of the social as such, including resort to violence. I take off from an extended version of the conceptual apparatus of Weber’s sociology of religion not simply because the original habitat of concepts like charisma and Founding Fatherhood was religion, but because all the binary oppositions I intend to deal with inhere in the nature of sociality itself. At least that has been the case since the rise of cities, along with writing, texts and the religious changes of the Axial Age, including the embodiment of the spirit in a charismatic narrative. The spirit takes up its abode in the letter, and the letter, meaning by that the charismatic narrative and the mythic text, is to be found throughout the unified field of religion, nationalism and politics along with charisma, Founding Fatherhood and violence. In the Bible, as the main governing narrative of the so-called West, the name Abraham means Father of many nations, and he set out from the very early city of Ur of the Chaldeans to start the story off. It was, of course, through his biblical studies that Weber quarried the notion of charisma.
The assumption of a conceptual unity is bound up with another assumption. It is that the numerous binary oppositions informing the unified conceptual frame of religion, nationalism and political ideology can be set more or less in alignment with each other, and that we learn a great deal from alignments that are out of true. I am thinking of the oppositions between personal and institutional (or manufactured) charisma; the spontaneous and the routinised, the prophetic and the priestly, the marginal and the established, the core message and the extended dogma, the solidary and the conflictful, the remembered and the forgotten, the victim, the victor (and the victorious victim), the TriumphLied, the grief song (and the triumphant grief song). These binaries, these oppositions, these distinctions perform a dance with each other and with all the other binaries as part of the unified conceptual field. This unity is more basic than the simple fact that a figure like Abraham has historically been assigned a role as Father of a faith and Father of a people, or the kind of linkage we imply when we speak of ‘political religion’ and ‘political messianism’.
Starting with an extended version of Weber’s sociology of religion, my initial focus is on the binary oppositions between charisma and routinisation, change and continuity, crisis and stability (or peace), the unpredictable wind of the spirit and stable legitimation. Then there is the important distinction between the prophetic and the priestly, which ought to include a third element, the preacherly. There is also the distinction between overcoming the world and withdrawing from it, which includes intense striving within it, as well working within it pragmatically or just keeping the ship afloat. This distinction is bound up with the difference between the prophetic tradition of the righteous rebel and the wisdom tradition in which the sapient ruler keeps the show on the road. Then there is the difference between the little flock of the fully committed, meaning the sect, and the universal communion, or Church, which remains in ‘the world’ but with monastic enclaves for those virtuosi who aspire to perfection. That binary opposition ought to include a third element, ‘the denomination’: a voluntary religious organisation (like Congregationalism) emerging in the early modern period which can modify the claims of Church and sect and can be pragmatic in its organisation, including the adoption of representative religious democracy and separation from the state. These ‘third elements’ or intermediate positions, exemplified by the preacherly and the denominational, remind us that all the oppositions we deploy – like those between personal and institutional charisma or between prophet and priest – define the extremities of a spectrum as well as being interdependent.
Charisma originally referred to the special quality attending the one on whom God’s grace and favour rests. The grace may inhere in the office (say) the kingship of Solomon, or in the person (say) the prophetic mission of Amos, or in some combination of office and person. Such a combination is normal because the mission of a prophet or a messiah is an understood role awaiting an expected incumbent, and because the one who holds an office may have the kind of personal charisma attributed to Pope John Paul II.
I say ‘attributed’ because charisma requires a willing audience in a favourable situation, perhaps a crisis. Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Giuseppe Mazzini, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, King David and King Alfred the Great were all major figures marked by an aura of potent grace – or disgrace, since I do not see how we can avoid distinguishing between malignant and benign charisma. They were all dependent on a situation and empowered by a crisis. However, you can be a Founding Father and not all that charismatic. Bismarck was not charismatic; and Nelson Mandela, though a potent icon with many facets, was not charismatic in his own person or in his rhetoric.1 There is usually some creative management of charisma in the background when it comes to religion and politics. Creative management can include praise for qualities of solidity, steadfastness and ‘granite’, by way of contrast with merely superficial forms of charismatic appeal. Some kinds of anti-charisma can be quite effective when rightly presented with an emphasis on the sterling virtues of ‘steady as she goes’. It helps, of course, if manufactured charisma can fan a genuine charismatic spark. At the same time, the spark can be put out and the treasury of charismatic grace or credit forfeited by a ‘fall from grace’. Some genuinely charismatic figures – like Winnie Mandela, the Founding Mother of South Africa – can be quietly expunged from the record and their accumulated ‘treasury of grace’ and moral credit expropriated. Not only is Founding Fatherhood or Motherhood often attributed retrospectively, but it can be lost retrospectively too. Charisma is not stable.
Only some of the figures just cited – Mazzini, Gandhi, Mandela, Bismarck, King David and King Alfred – are candidates for the role of Founding Father of the nation, and it is a role that can be contested. There are different, even rival, political lineages descending from them and referring back to them, since Founding Fatherhood is often attributed retrospectively and from a particular political perspective. I see King Alfred as a Founding Father of England because he created schools and translated the founding text of the Bible. Like Luther, Alfred put down foundations for a cultural nation. The Victorians thought that way too, putting up a rather Wagnerian statue to him in the old Anglo-Saxon capital of Winchester.
You see rival lineages very clearly in the rival iconographies generated by the English Civil War. Those who attribute Founding Fatherhood to the republican Oliver Cromwell do not agree with those who see themselves in the lineage of Charles I. There are also different kinds of Founding Father. David established Jerusalem as his capital, but Moses was the lawgiver who led the people through the wilderness to the Promised Land, and Abraham was the one who first left Ur of the Chaldeans to seek a country and scatter a seed. These Founding Fathers are different in kind from Herzl and Ben-Gurion, the modern Founding Fathers of Israel.2 As Moses and Aaron and Moses and Joshua come in pairs, so too do Herzl and Ben-Gurion, Morelos and Miguel Hidalgo, Gandhi and Nehru, Mandela and Tutu, Masaryk and Beneš, and Washington and Jefferson. I suppose Ataturk and Bismarck come singly, and maybe Italy has three – Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi – so you cannot rely on the emergence of just two Founding Fathers. I am underlining the translatability of charisma, crisis, prophecy, priesthood and Founding Fatherhood across the permeable borders of religion and the politics of nation and of party. This translatability goes way beyond the kind of metaphorical usages we encounter when the British Labour Party is described as a ‘Broad Church’ or the factions of hard right and left as ‘sectarian’.
The borders between religion and politics are there, of course, especially given the process of social differentiation, whereby since the early modern period religion and politics are assigned to separate spheres. That differentiation came early and explicitly in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Yet every student of modern American history knows it is suffused with a civil religiosity and rapid recourse to religious rhetoric: what the elder Bush called ‘the vision thing’. The Pilgrim Fathers, the Revolutionary Fathers, as well as Lincoln and Obama share a common language and rhetoric rooted in the story of Moses and liberation from Egypt. I could make out a case in favour of Moses and Cromwell as the Founding Fathers of the United States.
The idea of the one on whom God’s favour rests, embedded in the vocabulary of faith, requires only a modest conversion across a permeable border to become Napoleon, the national ‘man of destiny’, or Spartacus, the revolutionary ‘man of the people’. Mazzini was at one and the same time a national man of destiny, a revolutionary man of the people, and consciously prophetic in a religious vein. Religious faith in a providential dénouement of history can be translated into Winston Churchill’s faith that the British would survive the crisis of 1940 into the ‘sunlit uplands’, or into the belief of students at ‘Red Oxford’ in the 1930s, like Iris Murdoch, that the proletariat was destined by the forces of history to triumph. Religion and all forms of politics participate in the common structure, the dynamics and the vocabulary of the social as such, and charisma and Founding Fatherhood are deposited many fathoms deep in that unified vocabulary.
At the heart of that vocabulary is myth as used by Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence.3 Charisma requires a charismatic and authoritative narrative. Myth is not a fairy tale but a story that mobilises a group for action, whether a faith, a nation or a party, and which promises triumph after tribulation. Sorel was ready to cross-reference religion and politics, as well as ancient and modern, in his comparison of martyrdom in the Early Church with the trials of the workers in the throes of a General Strike.
Modern spin doctors mobilise the electorate by devising a narrative, and the editors of the Hebrew Bible did likewise for the elect people of God in the crises of the middle centuries of the first millennium BC. They provided a template for long-term survival and continued mobilisation. A template offers a more durable focus for the people than a physical temple because the physical temple can be, and was, destroyed. T.S. Eliot said we must ‘for ever rebuild the temple’, but it is even more vital to maintain the narrative template and its special language.4 Even today a Zionist speaking the revived language of Hebrew wants to live in peace under his own fig tree, as Isaiah promised to his forefathers. He remembers the faithful remnant that endures and the tribulation that has been undergone, and that stimulates him to mobilise for contemporary trials. The remnant might be the saving remnant spoken of by Deutero-Isaiah against the foreground of yet another ancient Exodus, or the remnant left by the holocaust after exodus from Europe.
Of course, the same narrative or template is available for other nations as well as Israel, and these nations may devise new variants on the narrative that challenge Israel for its possession, such as the Qur’an and the Book of Mormon. They may create new sacred cities with new holy temples, while perhaps still laying claim to the original city of the people of the Jews. This is where rival narratives are integrated with political drives and tensions. Joseph Smith led marginal people out into a remote geographical margin, and the Islamic narrative powered a vast geopolitical drive in favour of a relatively marginal area against the contemporary centres of world power, such as Ctesiphon, Rome and Byzantium. Luckily for Israel the narrative of the American Zion is relatively well disposed to the Jewish narrative, while the Islamic narrative is in competition, especially when it comes to the possession of the physical Zion itself. Immediately after the mass slaughter of 11 September 2001 the American ambassador to Britain, as the representative of the most powerful contemporary Zion, went to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and read aloud from the prophetic narrative in Isaiah: ‘They shall build up the waste places’. Israel has no monopoly of Zionism. Rebuilding the waste places is a generic social imperative for a nation, a faith and a political movement.
In such examples I have linked ancient and modern, religious and political in order again to underline the permeability of the borders between religion and politics. I take my examples from ancient times, like Abraham and Moses, as well as from modern times, like Napoleon and Mandela; and I move from more or less mythic time to the clearly historical, even though the historical is also in part a mythic construction under constant reconstruction. After all, we regularly refer to the ‘almost mythic status’ of national Founding Fathers, like Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, or fathers of their people, like Abraham and Abraham Lincoln or Benjamin Franklin and Franklin Roosevelt. The continuity of the names across the centuries is not an accident. Nomen est omen.
Among major theorists of nationalism I differ from Ernest Gellner and agree with Anthony Smith. It is not so much a question of how modern or ancient nationalism is, since that in part depends on how you narrow or expand your definition of nation. Ernest Gellner believed in a genuine chasm between ancient and modern, which I think implies a strong border between religion and politics.5 I believe the reverse. My differences with Ernest Gellner are closely linked to differences between weak and strong theories of secularisation. That is because the way you articulate secularisation theory bears very closely on how you understand religion, nationalism and party politics. The controversies in the sociology of religion intersect with controversies in the study of nationalism. Gellner objected to my critique of strong theories of secularisation. Of course, a ‘middle range’ theory of secularisation fully recognises there was a genuine transition in the early modern period, heralding the emergence of the nation and the political party, even though that transition has religious roots far back in what Karl Jaspers, drawing on Max Weber, called the Axial Age, including roots in the binary distinction Christianity itself proposes between ‘the world’ and ‘the kingdom’. A historically conditional theory, such as I originally put forward, emphasises the continued coexistence of Church, nation and party, either in partnership as in the USA or in conflict as in France, as well as bringing out their structural similarities and unified vocabulary. That has crucial implications for the future of religion and of Christianity.
A historically conditional theory allows for the continued presence of religion in modern society. There are indeed general secularising tendencies, such as the working out of the differentiating logic of secular ‘world’ and divine kingdom; but there are also contingent historical factors tipping the balance of power in different directions, which in Europe can mean extensive secularisation. According to strong theories of secularisation the Western European situation presages the wider global future. That implies there is an absolutely crucial transition from pre-modern to modern, from religious to secular, from religious to political, from Church to nation and party, and from the traditional or charismatic to the rationalised and bureaucratic. That is why the way you articulate secularisation theory interlocks closely with your view of the permeability or otherwise of the borders between pre-modern and modern, and between religion and the politics of nation and party.
This last transition from the charismatic to the rationalised is one of the areas where I most disagree with strong theories of secularisation, but not necessarily with Max Weber. Although Weber anticipated a mode of secularisation through the incarceration of charisma in the iron cage of rationalised bureaucracy, he also thought charisma might once more break out in prophetic form. He further complicated matters by regarding the Hebrew prophets as rationalising the spirit-infested and magico-religious world of their time. Of course, Weber died before Germany – one of the most advanced, rationalised and bureaucratic societies in the world – was bedevilled by the malignant charisma of Adolf Hitler. Weber also died before Soviet Russia, celebrated in 1935 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb as a ‘New Civilisation’, was terrorised by Stalin, a tyrant whose charismatic presence can still be successfully invoked and whose statue still stands in Tbilisi as a Georgian national hero. President Mugabe has been the Founding Father of Zimbabwe, and he has strengthened the hold of his tyranny by a combination of personal charisma and the charisma of his office. Once again, seeming oppositions are closely conjoined. Charisma has not lost its power for good or ill, in religion, or in the nation or in politics. At the same time the charismatic leader needs to be able to claim a role embedded in the myth. He has to be a plausible Joshua, Moses or Cromwell. The Founding Fathers of modern Italy, Mazzini and Garibaldi, cast themselves in a contemporary version of religious martyrdom. The Ceausescus made an all-too-plausible claim to the mantle of Vlad the Impaler, and President Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan now lays claim to the civilising inheritance of Timur the Lame. The example of the Ceausescus resonates with the kind of revolutionary politics designed to release the potential of the Superman or the communist New Man, but in practice only confirming the presence of the Old Adam.
There is one other implication of a unified structure and conceptual vocabulary which I can only mention in passing. It is that the attribution of a special capacity for violence to religion is dubious. Vast swathes of rhetoric since the Enlightenment, and since the rise of the nation state and the revolutionary political party, may be misdirected. The very phrase ‘the wars of religion’ could be part of a hostile narrative motivated by the same will to power and violence Voltaire stigmatised as the special prerogative of priests and kings. Very similar dynamics drove the resort to violence after 1648 as operated in the so-called ‘wars of religion’.
Obviously the presence of a charismatic and authoritative myth is central to my argument. That myth specifies where ‘we’ came from, whoever we think ‘we’ are as distinct from ‘them’, and points to our present role and promised future. It is in the nexus between us and them, between our story and theirs, between our sacred city and theirs that violence most obviously resides. That means I am talking about the sacred city of Jerusalem, then and now, as well as the other capital cities of permanent recollection and aspiration, Athens, Rome and perhaps Paris too, since Paris has challenged Rome for European and Christian pre-eminence for most of a millennium. I take it that Mecca represents too big a variant on the Abrahamic story to be dealt with here, even if I knew how, and that Benares is a different story.
In our so-called western history Athens and Jerusalem are often supposed to be at odds, as Tertullian claimed they were in a famous aphorism, but in practice they have a great deal to do with each other. All the same, my centre of attention is Jerusalem. I focus on the Founding Fatherhood of David in creating Jerusalem as a capital, and on the Founding Fatherhood of Moses, the lawgiver, because the Bible is the people’s book. The supplementary national anthem of England sings of building ‘Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’ – not Rome or Athens, let alone Paris. The elites who founded or re-founded new nations had usually read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the Georgics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Herodotus, Tacitus and Julius Caesar. More than that, the founding kings of modern nationhood like Frederick the Great, Joseph II, Peter and Catherine, Louis XIV and even the Hanoverian Georges of Britain – as well as the revolutionaries of France and the United States like Robespierre and Thomas Jefferson – reverted to the classical in their monumental creations and their new cities, like Washington and St. Petersburg. They imagined themselves as grave senators in the agora.
Yet even these elites cross-referenced the Bible and Virgil, particularly in Protestant England and the United States. Henry VIII is a serious candidate for the Founding Fatherhood of an independent Protestant England, and his extraordinarily rich iconography depicts him as a Jupiter who is also a Solomon and an Abraham. Linda Colley in her Britons relates the nascent myth of Britain somewhat later to what became the large-scale singing of the oratorios of Handel, and in those great works Handel used typological identifications, lineages if you like, which cross-reference the classical and the biblical: for example, the link between the suffering of Hercules, Samson and Christ. Handel’s oratorios also implicitly identified the rival lineages of the Stuart and Hanoverian kings with the prototypical kings David and Saul, and associated George II equally with judicious Solomon and amorous Jupiter. Any early modern tapestry tells the same intertwined typological story of Founding Fatherhood, sometimes reaching back to Adam. In the poetry of James Thomson in the first half of the eighteenth century England plays the role of a modern Israel, as well as Greece and Rome.6
Today we find it difficult to read these typological lineages, particularly when they cross-reference the classical and the biblical, but they bear a strong resemblance to the procedures of structural anthropology. They also fit very well with Schütz’s concept of a lineage of precursors and successors so central to the discernment of a charismatic advent or incursion. But if cross-referencing the classical and the biblical characterised the elites, it was the mass printing of the Bible in the vernacular in the sixteenth century, and the extension of reading, that fed the imaginations of the people. The Bible informed their vocabulary and provided a potent analogue of their history, as Adrian Hastings has argued, and not just in Europe and North America but in Africa too.7 In 1985 John Osborne wrote in a play, God Rot Tunbridge Wells, that Handel’s Messiah, based on the vernacular English translation of the Bible, ‘gave the English their religion’, and it was Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, set to music at the direst moment of national crisis in 1917, that gave them their supplementary national anthem.
I am pointing to a significant divide between Catholic and Protestant historical trajectories leading to a major difference in the degree to which different Enlightenments, with interacting Jewish, Catholic and Protestant contributions from Spinoza onward, either conflicted with religion in the formation of nations, as happened in Catholic France, or more or less cooperated with religion, as in the United States, England, Ulster, Scotland, Holland, Switzerland and Germany. I am also saying that the charisma or the ‘presence’ of Founding Fatherhood depends on the supporting presence of a mythic narrative reflecting the contemporary situation, and that the Bible, very much the narrative of a marginal people throughout, performed this role, particularly in Bible-reading Protestant countries. Sometimes that had philo-Semitic consequences, though philo-Semitism is another instance of divergence as well as convergence because the Jewish narrative is sometimes transferred to a rival lineage. France also claimed the role of New Israel, but France was different because it was Catholic and experienced a militant and secularist Enlightenment rooted in the classical world, which was then globally exported. That introduces one other crucial consideration. In the two-thirds world the weight of influence has shifted from the French to the American model, and that means there has been a further shift in favour of the biblical narrative, and with that an expansion of the long tradition of Christian Zionism.8
I have set out Weber’s basic distinction between personal charisma based on the disruptive power of the spirit and charisma of office based on law and routinised legitimation. As I have already hinted, in the context of roots which go back to the Axial Age, this binary distinction, like the differentiation of secular and religious, is built into the foundation documents of Christianity. That goes back, as Talal Asad has rightly commented, to its long apprenticeship as a voluntary and sometimes persecuted minority. It is the biblical text itself that opposes faith and the world, and it is again the biblical text that opposes the letter that kills to the spirit that gives life. The Spirit authorises the narrative in each of its three basic parts: it broods over the origin or creation; it emerges at the annunciation of a crux or crisis; and it falls upon the prophets of the end-time or of the re-creation and the arrival of a New Jerusalem, as John attests in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation. And it is the letter that confirms the authority of the Spirit and prevents it disappearing like the invisible wind.
I am now going to set out the other binary distinctions inhering in what I see as the common structure of religion and politics. I want to ask just how far these distinctions can be stacked up in mutual alignment and how far they are aligned with the binary distinction between charisma of office and personal charisma. One might treat charisma of office and personal charisma as heading up and implicated in all the other binaries. How far is charisma of office aligned with continuity, peaceful stability, routinisation, legitimation, world acceptance and inclusivity; and how far is personal charisma linked with crisis, disruption, rejection of the present world order and – maybe – violent conflict? We can learn a great deal by enquiring to what extent these alignments are either persuasive or problematic.
Supposing we now select the opposition between the heart of the message which in the New Testament word-book is kerygma and the intellectualised and stabilised teaching, or dogma. This seems to be closely aligned with personal and official charisma, with grace (in every sense) and the law. But how far is it aligned with the opposition between centre and periphery, margin and established order? How far does charismatic grace emerge from the margin, and how far does law emanate from the centre? This is where matters become genuinely revealing, so I will throw in some more examples taken in turn from religion, nation and political party.
Amos came out of the mountainous margins to descend like a tide of judgement on the cities of the plain which, like Babylon the Great, stood simultaneously for corruption and civilisation. John the Baptist came out of the wilderness to Jordan just like Joshua. Jesus came ‘full of grace’ from the unconsidered margin of Nazareth to enter into the wilderness like Moses, before he offered a new law from the mountaintop, and confronted Jerusalem, David’s dangerous capital. Perhaps these eruptions from the margin strike us as very understandable because those on the margin – the half-breeds, the ‘poor’ in New Testament terms and the stutterers according to the Hebrew Scriptures – hear God’s call more easily than those who are at their ease in palaces. My examples taken from nationalism and political ideology may seem more strained and accidental.
Napoleon came out of the Corsican periphery to save France, and De Gaulle and Joan of Arc lurked in Lorraine till they received the call. The Thracian-born Spartacus was sold into slavery to emerge and challenge Rome, and Trotsky emerged from the second-class citizenship of the Jewish Pale to oust the Tsar of the All the Russias. Perhaps uncertainties will increase as I offer some other examples, like the founding of modern English Conservatism by the Anglo-Irishman Edmund Burke, and of ‘One Nation’ Conservatism by the assimilated Jew Benjamin Disraeli. Nevertheless I remain inclined to believe that a special role is often taken up by the marginal and by the minorities: for example the role of Arab Christians in the initial creation of Arab nationalism; or the role of an Anglo-Irish poet like Yeats in Irish nationalism; or the role of Pierre Nora, a Sephardic Jew, in recollecting the patrimony of France; or the role of the Hungarian Protestant leader Lazlo Tokes in the Romanian revolution of 1989.
I come now to some more oppositions taking us close to the divisive and reconciling heart of the dynamic of the social as such, that is to the mutual implication of conflict and solidarity. Consider the dance between solemn remembrance and forgetting, and between anamnesis (the constant recollection of the narrative of deliverance) and amnesia. We can ask how far that dance is aligned with the dance between victim and victor as realised in the mobilising power of the experience of defeat: at Mohács, Kosovo, Armenia in 1915, Tbilisi, Katyn, ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Ireland, the bloody suppression of protest in Russia in 1905 and at Novocherkassk in 1962, Tiananmen Square, Sharpeville and Tehran in 2009, as well as the triumphant Victim at Calvary.
The dance between anamnesis and amnesia can be aligned with the dance between the legacy of disgrace from generation to generation that follows on primal corruption and the treasury of grace created for all generations by sacrificial or exemplary death. That death might be of the marginal innocent individual at Calvary or the collective death of the marginal collective innocents at Auschwitz. That puts Calvary and Auschwitz in apposition. Moreover, in speaking of Hitler and Auschwitz we are once again dealing with the opposition of charisma for good and charisma for ill. We are talking about grace and disgrace, innocence and a damnosa hereditas. The interwoven opposition of good and evil cannot be omitted from our account, especially when you recollect that in the text of the Exsultet for Easter Eve the Christian narrative of death and resurrection includes the famous ‘O felix culpa’, ‘O blessed sin that merited so great a redemption’. In the Holy Week liturgy of Tenebrae, death is aligned with a descent into chaos as all the lights are slowly extinguished, leaving only the paschal candle hidden behind the altar, followed by resurrection aligned with the new creation of the new man as the candle is retrieved. New Creation and the new man are, of course, profoundly political as well as religious concepts, especially when you remember that resurrection, Risorgimento and renaissance are linked with the restoration of the nation. In the same way the creation of a new calendar, l’an un, is linked with political revolution.
But the cosmic reference is also one that reaches back beyond lineages rooted in Adam, the paradigmatic man, to the Fatherhood of God in all its varied manifestations. Here we are following through the complicated implications of the binary between Father and Son, together with a third element which may be the Spirit or the Mother. Notoriously, all kinds of political inferences have been drawn from the ‘superiority’ of the Father to the Son and of the effective replacement of the Father by the Son. Whereas Adam ‘named’ the animals, as pictured in William Blake’s mystical representation, God ‘named’ all human fatherhood. A theological Doppelgänger shadows the sociological, and vice versa. Theologically all fatherhood is ‘named under’ the Fatherhood of God, and sociologically this works itself out in the iconography of power and care for ‘the people’ ascribed to kings, popes and political leaders alike, from Holbein’s representations of Henry VIII where Henry replaces the Holy Father as the supreme father-figure of England, to Ingres’ representation of Napoleon. Cromwell was exceptional in requiring at least two portraits of him to show an ordinary human, ‘warts and all’, but the more usual kind of representation has leaned towards divinisation and idealisation, for example the Founding Fatherhood and Motherhood attributed to, and claimed by, the Ceausescus in Communist Romania. The early Labour Party in Britain in the tradition of its Founding Father, Keir Hardie, spoke of the Fatherhood of God in relation to the Brotherhood of Man, and one of the supreme examples of that linkage is found in Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, now the international anthem of the European Union. That brotherhood ‘under God’, reflecting the American motto ‘e pluribus unum’, is in constant tension with a nationalism that interprets Gott mit uns as a divine legitimation for the exclusive demands of the Fatherland or the Motherland. God with us can be understood as an expression of the presence of God, Emmanuel, in human form as the ‘express image of God’, or in all humanity as the ‘image of God’ implanted from our very genesis. The ancient ‘image of God’ idea provides a foundation for the contemporary concept of human rights.
What cannot properly be followed up here are the cultural and political implications of Founding Sonship and the way the New Testament initiates a new spiritual genealogy through new birth in the Spirit, and through the identification of the believer with the incarnate Son. The body of the Son is realised and made present wherever the spiritual ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ of Christ come together ‘in Him’ and share a common meal. What we have here is nothing less than the invention of a new template whereby ‘the Church’, understood as those who are ‘members one of another’, becomes a moveable feast always available to the ‘People of God’ as they set out on pilgrimage to the spiritual Jerusalem. This invention complements the earlier invention of the portable God carried around by and with the people in the Ark of the Covenant. Christianity humanises God by ‘taking up’ humanity into Godhead, and that enables the life and presence of God to be realised in brotherhoods and sisterhoods. It is also realised by the raising up of the Mother alongside the Risen Son, in part as an expression of the radicalism of the Magnificat, but also because the Virgin Mother can be assimilated to the powers of sacred monarchy and portrayed as a courtly lady. There is even radical potential in the idea of virginity itself because the natural and particular relationships generated by sexuality are disciplined in the service of concern for all humanity, especially the poor. Christian sermons in the late Roman Empire combined praise of the virgin state and of celibacy with praise for love of the poor and the excluded. As Peter Brown puts it, the preachers of the fourth and early fifth centuries, drawing on the Hebrew Scriptures, adopted ‘a view that saw the poor not only as beggars but also as persons in search of justice’, with social consequences far beyond the practice of charity towards the destitute.9
The partial displacement of the solitary and authoritative Father by the Son and his Mother has radical implications, so that churches are never dedicated just to the Father; but these implications are controlled by the reinstitution of a priesthood made up of spiritual Fathers-in-God. The anarchic implications of brothers and sisters without fathers are kept under control in the monastic tradition but they often leak out in radical and antinomian forms of Christianity, like the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The variable range of implication arising from Founding Sonship is realised in the extraordinary range of iconographic representation as it runs all the way from the abject horror of Grünewald’s crucifixion and depictions of the vulnerable child, to the portrayal of the Son as the Resurrected Lamb with emblazoned flag and as the all-powerful Pantocrator. The power of the Resurrection was recruited by romantic nationalists in Orthodox Europe to the restoration of the nation, for example in Greece.
The same variable range of implication lies latent in the exaltation of a humble Jewish mother as Queen of Heaven. This allows the Mother in particular to become the patroness of the city and the nation, and also to be the Founding Mother of a nation, as in Poland and in Mexico, or to emerge to protect the nation in time of danger. In Mexico the banners of the initial insurrections against Spain by the two Mexican Founding Fathers, Miguel Hidalgo and Morelos, were inscribed with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, representing the union of the diverse ethnic groups in the formation of a new nation. The Virgin Mother is guardian of Mexico and Queen of Poland and Brazil, and her dowry is England. This role of the Mother can be generalised, for example, in the memorials of the two world wars in France and in the memorial in Berlin to all the dead in the Second World War. The Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey and in other countries symbolises the way ceremonies of remembrance can be transferred to the collective body of a whole people, as they were in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures. At the same time these ceremonies of remembrance also place collective sacrifice for the nation (and/or for Humanity) in the context of the voluntary sacrifice of Christ, for example by the use of the quotation ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’
The core narrative of a faith, or of a national movement or of a revolutionary political programme turns on a poetic axis of loss and retrieval, the grief song which is also a TriumphLied. The paradigmatic TriumphLied is the Song of Moses, recapitulated in the Easter liturgy. In modern times the recollection of the two world wars unites lament with retrieval, for example the sounding of the ‘last post’ and ‘reveille’ on Remembrance Day in Britain. Remembrance Day is a religious, national and political moment of solemn anamnesis, as it is in Russia whenever and wherever the ‘Great Patriotic War’ is solemnly remembered. In Britain the core ceremony turns around the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph (an empty tomb), the singing of a loose paraphrase of Psalm 90 by Isaac Watts and the saying of the Lord’s Prayer. At Obama’s first inauguration ceremony, a moment of the retrieval of promise if ever there was one, the Lord’s Prayer, a purely Jewish prayer of course, was extended to include all the children of Abraham by being introduced as the prayer of Isa, Jeshua and Jesus. The Founding Fatherhood of Abraham, like the Founding Fatherhood of God, can be used inclusively or exclusively as the politics and sentiments of a situation dictate.
I now use my sociological imagination to pursue some of the complexities stimulated by the dance of oppositions by selecting three oppositions which may have important alignments with personal charisma and charisma office, as well as with each other. These are the oppositions between flesh (sarx) and spirit; between outward observance and inner sincerity as discussed by Adam Seligman; and between the tangible expression and the intangible mental or spiritual conception as discussed by the anthropologist Webb Keane.10 All of these are core concepts in the Bible and fundamental to our contemporary world. The working out of the dance of this opposition is very intricate, but I suggest it has an important relation to the dance of personal and official charisma. Suppose we take the opposition between the tangible and the intangible. The physical Ark of the Covenant with its scroll is a tangible expression, and we can regard the covenant idea as its spiritual or mental analogue. However, the idea of the moveable Ark of the Covenant is, as Régis Debray has pointed out, an extraordinarily powerful idea on its own account because it enabled the people of Israel to take their portable and invisible God with them, whereas tangible temples have a fixed location in material territory, often at the established centre of that territory, as in the case of the temple in Jerusalem.11 That suggests one can at least say that the tangible temple has some relation to the priest rather than to the prophet, and therefore to charisma of office rather than personal charisma.
But the idea of the Ark of the Covenant can float free of the tangible Ark in the form of the covenant idea binding a people and their God together, and by extension it can include the idea of binding commitments embodied (say) in the closely related English Bill of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The lawyers who act as keepers and interpreters of the Constitution are a secular priesthood ensconced in their classical temple the Supreme Court. Lay hands on the Ark of that Covenant, even to steady it, as recounted in the Bible, and you are already as good as politically dead. At this point the distinction between the inward spirit of the laws and outward conformity to the letter re-emerges in disputes over how the Constitution is to be interpreted. You need a very great fund of personal charisma and grace to lay impious hands on the letter in favour of a free interpretation of its inner spirit carried in out in sincerity and truth. You may become a sacrificial victim at the hands of the guardians in Church and state, which in turn brings us back to the arrival of a charismatic prophet from the margins who declared in words quoted by Weber: ‘You have heard that it was said of old time, but I say unto you’. The charismatic prophet also picks up the potent strand in the Hebraic tradition that declares it is better to circumcise your inward heart rather than ritually to rend your external garments. That particular pronouncement made so long ago has become the effective creed of the modern United States, and it informs all contemporary education in learning to express yourself rather than obey the rules. Yet public comment is also saturated in righteous judgement, so the ancient distinction between grace and the law remains at the heart of modern culture.
We can now relate the dance of this opposition to the amnesia of forgetting and the anamnesis of perpetual remembrance that constantly recurs in the recitation of the Torah, in the Passover or in the Christian Eucharist with its invocation of a continuing Presence. Charisma is potent presence. This is the intellectual territory of René Girard and, as the religious narrative has it, the placing of the accumulated inheritance of disgrace on the head of the sacrificial and innocent Lamb cancels it all by an act of gratuitous forgiveness. It creates a treasury of grace to be drawn on that cannot be exhausted. That example apparently belongs to the sphere of religion, but analogues occur everywhere in national and party political narratives. Notoriously the Reformation, with all its consequences for nationhood in Northern Europe, was sparked off by raids on the treasury of grace for financial profit and to feed papal ambitions to build magnificent temples in Rome in Southern Europe. Prior to that, the treasury of grace was dispensed at pilgrimage centres. In Germany the treasury was dispensed by actual flows of Christ’s blood, and in the city of Naples by the liquefaction of the blood of its patron saint.12 The liquefaction of the Holy Blood in Bruges is closely linked to local nationalism and it used to be ceremonially attended by the king.
I return now to the charismatic power of the victim in defeat in the mobilisation of a nascent national consciousness, for example at Sharpeville or at Memphis, both of which are celebrated in works and acts of perpetual anamnesis. For my main example I take the relatively unknown massacre at Novocherkassk in 1962 because its recollection in samizdat form to counter the very successful cover-up undermined the faith of the elite and helped hollow out the Soviet system. In the same way, the massacre at Amritsar and the massacres following the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 hollowed out the legitimacy of British rule and created a national treasury of grace to be drawn on for generations. At the same time, as Francis Spufford has pointed out, the vast sacrifices of the Red Army at Stalingrad and Kursk, and the sufferings of the Russian people, were drawn upon by the elites of the communist system in ritual acts and parades of perpetual recollection as though they constituted a treasury of grace available indefinitely.13 The crunch came when a new charismatic leader, Khrushchev, repudiated the terrible excesses of the system in order to steady the Ark of the Covenant. After that Russians assumed such acts of repression were confined to the past. As the protesters gathered at Novocherkassk they comforted themselves with the thought that whereas the Tsar as father of his people had massacred protesters in 1905, and Uncle Joe Stalin likewise, this was a new era. As a result their blood flowed, and slowly the treasury of grace overflowed until the regime fell and the victims were victorious.
Or so it seemed, because the cycle of sacrifice is never finally abrogated and closure rendered complete. The beneficiaries of sacrifices continue to expropriate them for their own purposes. As I already have suggested, Mugabe is a perfect exemplar of the confiscation of sacrifice for the purposes of renewed tyranny. Beneficiaries, whether immediate or remote, regularly draw on the treasury of grace filled up by paradigmatic suffering to inflict suffering on minorities or protesters, and to expel those they want out of their way. That is what was disgracefully symbolised in the reference to the recalcitrance of the Jews in the Holy Week liturgy. Often oppressors deny that the suffering of the victim ever happened, or cite what they regard as their own equivalent or greater suffering. That leads to a competition over who has the moral high ground on account of being the most conspicuous victim. This competition is played out in the minority politics of the West all the time, aided by the effective censorship exercised over critical ripostes from the majority, but I am not certain it works in quite the same way in (say) Turkey. In Turkey it is reference to the suffering of minorities that is censored, and it is the protesters, like Orhan Pamuk, who are arrested or molested. The moral high ground is always a field of battle; and the baring of present wounds or of remote wounds, like the loss of Granada or Constantinople, is part of the rhetorical and ceremonial skirmishing.
Here I want to offer some more extended examples to probe the paradoxes of charisma and Founding Fatherhood as that gives rise to narratives of liberation and victory, which may lead in turn to an ambiguous narrative of dispossession. I use these narratives to introduce the charismatic preacher, as a third kind of figure alongside priest and prophet. The preacher ascends a real or a metaphorical pulpit to expound, exhort and criticise. The tradition is deeply entrenched in the Anglosphere, and I was first introduced to it by Tony Benn, the Labour politician, who told me he used his government department as a pulpit for lay sermons. I am pointing here to a tradition of lay preaching with a particular kind of righteous rhetoric rooted in the Bible, either implicitly in its style or explicitly in its content. Tony Benn came from a devout family with a lay preaching tradition, and his rhetoric rendered the pragmatism of temporisers and trimmers, and of ‘normal’ pragmatic government, mere treachery. Pragmatic temporisers could easily find themselves lacerated by him as in the bastard lineage of such traitors to Labour and its principles as Ramsay MacDonald.
Michael Foot, who was briefly and disastrously the Labour leader, came from the same tradition of lay preaching as Tony Benn. He possessed an eloquent rhetorical style, and the lineage to which he explicitly looked back was that of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, West Country Methodist agricultural labourers who anticipated the birth of trade unions, the Scottish Labour leader Keir Hardie and the massacre of Welsh miners at Tonypandy. Gordon Brown, as a son of the preaching tradition of the Scottish manse, used this rhetoric in his early years very effectively, before it was inhibited by facts and events, after which it had in part to be manufactured on his behalf. That political and religious lineage has been populist rather than Marxist, and today it is a virtually extinct style either as sermon or political speech. The immediate precursors of this populist rhetorical style are the early nineteenth-century radical journalist and Unitarian William Hazlitt and the sometime Quaker Thomas Paine.14 With the onset of political and national amnesia, a tradition of political principle rooted in sophisticated historical recollection, has disappeared to be replaced by straightforward calculations of interest and power.
However, the radical tradition of passionate lay preaching goes back much further than Hazlitt to Latimer’s famous ‘Sermon of the Plough’ at the beginning of English Reformation, and beyond that to the friars preaching in the open air or in large hall churches to mass congregations, and to Savonarola. Whether Foot and Benn saw themselves as destroyers of the vanities I doubt, but both placed themselves in a lineage going back to Cromwell. That link allows me to move to the United States and the early preachers of a new city set on a hill, like the Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop. It is through the Puritan revolution and its direct revolutionary successor in America in 1776, as well as through the mass preaching of people like the Calvinistic Methodist George Whitefield, a fervent patriot in the revolutionary war whose tomb became a pilgrimage centre, that I would defend the idea that Moses and Cromwell were the Founding Fathers of the United States. Jesus may be, indeed is, the ‘personal Saviour’ of Americans; but the lawgiver is Moses, and there is plenty of evidence for his formative and continuing role. The American lineage I propose runs from the charismatic figure of Moses to the charismatic figures of the Rev. Martin Luther King, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and President Obama. Space forbids a sidelong glance at an alternative black lineage including the new ‘Nation of Islam’. The appropriately named Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who embarrassed Obama with his message of ‘God damn America’, represents the Christian variant of this rival lineage.
I go back now via Boston to the early modern Reformation and the period of nation building. That means I go back to the Founding Fathers, Luther and Calvin. Both of them sought a return ad fontes: one to Paul, the apostle of the gift of grace; and the other to Moses, the giver of the law and therefore the Founding Father of Geneva as a New Jerusalem set on a hill before that vision moved on to Boston. I have to leave out the Radical Reformation, even though that third lineage lay behind the founding of Rhode Island, with its tradition of the separation of Church and state, and the creation of Pennsylvania. The radical Baptist Roger Williams, from the English dissenting University of Cambridge, was thrust out of Boston to become Founding Father of Providence, Rhode Island, and has now been added to the Founding Fathers of the United States. So have several others, like the black woman Sojourner Truth, selected to represent lineages not so far accorded adequate honour. In Britain Mary Seacole was briefly promoted alongside Florence Nightingale as a Founding Mother for her exemplary courage in the Crimean War. Sarah and Rachel are now matriarchs in a revised Jewish liturgy. There is a close and visible relation between the promotion of new figures to the role of a Founding Father or a Founding Mother and rebranding. The construction of Founding Fatherhood and Founding Motherhood are continuing and retrospective mythic enterprises as well as prospective ones.
I take Luther first. He is the Founding Father of the German cultural nation and of its language through his translation of the Bible and the setting up of schools, long before Bismarck created the political nation, and he is at the same time the Founding Father of the Reformation. In the mythology of the Counter-Reformation he was the wolf that descended on the Catholic fold. Through a genealogy which passed through German Pietism and Anglo-American Evangelicalism Martin Luther spiritually begat Martin Luther King. King founded or re-founded the new nation of African-Americans as Martin Luther founded or re-founded the German nation centuries earlier, and Luther King begat Obama, King’s conscious heir as he is also Abraham Lincoln’s conscious heir.
But Obama is heir to Calvin, to Geneva as well as Wittenberg, because that trail leads back to the freedom trail in Boston, and from there to Jerusalem. This trail also leads back to Moses the lawgiver, and the liberator who first rang the Liberty Bell, so it is no wonder Obama instituted the first seder in the White House in 2009. The story of the Exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land through the wilderness was consciously recapitulated by the Pilgrim Fathers, and then again in the Revolutionary War and once again in the peaceable slave revolt of the African-Americans. Moses had Pisgah gleams from Mount Nebo of the Promised Land; Luther King also had sight of the Promised Land of full citizenship according to the promise of the American covenant before his exemplary death; and Obama entered into that inheritance, like a veritable Joshua.
However, the figure of Joshua reminds us that those who have been liberated according to a covenant promise may also expropriate ‘the people of the land’, as the early Americans expropriated the Native Americans and some of the heirs of the Revolutionary War, like Jefferson, kept slaves. The task of African-Americans was to wrest the promise from the exclusive grasp of white Americans, which is why one of their most eloquent historians referred to the Bible as the poison book as well as the book of the Exodus. Who exactly are the peoples who play the roles of the children of Ham and of Ishmael? There are always disputed and rewritten lineages and ferocious disputes, political and religious, about who occupies the super-ordinate or subordinate roles. There is nearly always a cold war as well as a hot war about who is loyalist or rebel, patriot or traitor, and therefore about who should be expelled from the land or well advised to make a rapid Exodus from it. That is what many of the luckless American loyalists had to do, some of them ending up in Sierra Leone, as well as the Akkadians expelled by the British and often ending up in Louisiana. This is a poignant illustration of the fundamental dynamic of the social, in that exodus and liberation are linked to episodes of people cleansing, which may be religious, or ethnic or part of the perceived necessities of revolutionary politics. The contemporary examples are legion. Bulgakov’s The White Guard (1926) tells how terrible it was in Kiev during the post-1918 civil wars in conflicts involving the Germans and the various factions of nationalist or revolutionary Russians and Ukrainians.
Of course, before the mobilisation of the African-American new nation, marginal white Americans had made their exodus under Joseph Smith, eventually to found another white new nation with a temple at Salt Lake City in Utah, where they drew the wrath of the USA on their heads, in part by reinstituting the marital arrangements of patriarchs like Abraham. As usual an angel dictated the new version of the narrative in the Book of Mormon especially for the benefit of North America, hitherto left out of the story. With enough personal charisma borrowed from an angelic presence you can rewrite the narrative of liberation to power a new national drive, as in the case of Joseph Smith, or a new geopolitical drive, as in the case of Mohammed.
Of course, these are not the only lineages in the United States. The Irish were massacred by Cromwell at Drogheda, and dominated by the British; and they made their own exodus to Boston and elsewhere. Their Founding Father, celebrated in parades of ‘the Green’ in Boston and elsewhere, is the semi-mythic figure of St. Patrick, who, as a matter of more or less fact, originated in Wales. Once again we run into the rivalry of lineages because the Protestants of Ulster, who became defined by the Orange against the Green, also made their exodus to America under the auspices of Calvin and Moses, in accord with the original founding story of America, and they mostly fought on the revolutionary side against the British. They also contributed an astonishing proportion of incumbents to the American presidency.
A similar problem to that faced by Martin Luther King was faced by Nelson Mandela in South Africa because the Dutch white settlers had already appropriated the Exodus story in their Long Trek from domination by the British to the Orange Free State. The Voortrekker memorial remains to this day. There was an analogy available for polemical deployment between apartheid South Africa and ‘the settler society’ of contemporary Israel face to face with the Palestinians. At the same time millions of black Christians in South Africa embraced the longing for Zion, creating their own Jerusalem, and some black Christians linked their release from apartheid to the Israeli recovery of the original Zion. Stories are subject to multiple and contradictory appropriations.
The brief examples I now offer are of the interchange and partial expropriation of iconographies and narratives by religion, or by nationalism or by revolutionary politics. In the cases of Mazzini and Garibaldi discussed by the historian Lucy Riall, Mazzini adopted an ascetic lifestyle and a passionate if generalised religious rhetoric. Mazzini drew on the charismatic ‘prophetic’ tradition and identified himself with the Italian people. At the same time he both promoted Garibaldi in the romantic garb of guerrilla hero and genius and deployed a highly authoritarian style of leadership. Both Mazzini and Garibaldi used heroic failure to present themselves as icons of martyrdom and even of crucifixion in the Catholic tradition.15 That struggle for possession of traditional religious symbolism was all part of an intense struggle between the Church and the nationalists.
This struggle for possession can take many forms, including a reversion to religion, such as we observe in Islam, Judaism, Russia and parts of Eastern Europe. After the events of 1989, the monuments of the nationalist revolutionaries of 1848 in Romania were marked by crosses and became traditional religious shrines. In Timisoara the liberation and the massacre of 1989 is solemnly remembered on the Feast of the Assumption, even though the prime mover at the time was a nationalist pastor (later bishop) serving the Hungarian Calvinist minority. Religion and nation were once more fused together.
I come now to a narrative that links the pre-Reformation New Jerusalem of Hussite Prague to the communist attempt in Eastern Europe to assimilate the narrative of Czech nationalism to the communist version of ‘salvation history’. I also look at the communist attempt to assimilate elements in the cultural history of the German nation to what became the German Democratic Republic. On the whole it is the preferred strategy of conquerors and oppressors, especially when presenting themselves as liberators, to absorb and reuse the iconography of an earlier nationalism and a previous revolutionary movement to stabilise their own legitimacy. In Czech Lands they took over the iconography of the Hussite Revolution in the fifteenth century, including its aspiration to build a New Jerusalem in Prague, and appropriated the charisma of such figures as the leader of the Taborite left wing, General Ziska. Czech nationalism under Beneš and Masaryk had been very successful in recruiting Hus and his martyrdom, and in representing the Czechs as innocent and democratic victims, which was a something of an exaggeration.16 This role of innocent victim so governed the self-image of Beneš that it informed the decision not to resist the German invasion. At the same time it was also useful in justifying the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans after the war in revenge for the German takeover in 1938. As so often, liberation is linked to the expulsion of the people of the land as well as to the recovery of the land promised to the forefathers.
In Germany itself after the Second World War and the division of the country the national icon of Luther was initially assimilated by the communists to the earlier and superseded bourgeois revolution; but then it was decided to take over his image, shorn of the intermediate lineage of Bismarck (let alone Hitler), along with Bach and Handel and others, as forerunners of the people’s state. To give one example, the Handel Festival was launched in Halle in 1952, attended by vast crowds and representatives of the Soviet Union, and the words of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ were rewritten to celebrate the triumph of the people, just as the Nazis rewrote Judas Maccabaeus as Wilhelm von Nassau. In the case of Handel this shows how a major figure can feature in several competing lineages. Historically Handel was the Founding Father of the musical canon at the same time as the putative rise of nationalism, and in due course he was introduced into the lineage of ‘genius’ and Founding Fatherhood in the British, the German, the Nazi and the German communist narratives. Since 1990 he has figured as the great cosmopolitan composer symbolising the restored unity of Europe. Contemporary Europe needs its Founding Fathers, beginning with Charlemagne, crowned close to the Franco-German border at Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle.
A final narrative with some poignant paradoxes is found in the charismatic figure of a Founding Mother of Britain, Boudicca, who unsuccessfully fought the Romans and was crushed in 61 AD only a few years before the Jews were crushed at Masada at the other end of the empire. By contrast, Arminius in Germany earlier in the same century successfully overwhelmed the Romans, and has taken up his mythic place in the Founding Fatherhood of Germany. In Boudicca and the Zealots at Masada we again encounter the link between Victim, Victor and Victorious Victim. Queen Boudicca was probably client sovereign of the Iceni in what is now the east of England, but she may also have been a Roman citizen. That made her lashing by the Romans and the rape of her daughters heinous even in Roman eyes, and helps explain the violence of her revolt when she burnt down the cities of Camulodunum, Verulamium (now St. Albans, in honour of England’s founding saint and martyr) and Londinium. After a millennium and a half had passed, her defeat led to her apotheosis as a Founding Mother of Britain alongside the purely mythic Britannia. She was invoked in the iconography of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth as England first sought a place in the sun against the power of Roman Catholicism and the might of imperial Spain. She was once more invoked as a wronged queen prior to the divorce of Queen Caroline, and then again deployed in the iconography of Queen Victoria, Regina Imperatrix, as she ruled over yet another empire on which the sun never sets. Boudicca’s nineteenth-century memorial – rampant and defiant in her war chariot, with her name Latinised as Boadicea – is on the Thames Embankment opposite Big Ben.
The paradox is that Boudicca, the original colonial victim, who raged like a lioness against imperial Rome, as Tippu Sultan raged like a tiger against the imperial British in India, re-emerged a mere 18 centuries later as a Founding Mother of a world empire consciously emulating imperial Rome. Britain has been as prolific in stimulating the emergence of Founding Fathers for new nations all over the world as Napoleon was in Europe; and some of these Founding Fathers used the democratic literature and rhetoric of British politics, of the British self-image and of the educational institutions they attended – such as Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and the Inns of Court of the legal profession – to gain their independence. Maybe this form of moral suasion based on the proclaimed values of the British Empire was not available to those struggling against Ottoman imperialism.
In contemporary usage charisma has broken free from its specific theological and social scientific meanings to become a floating signifier, and that immediately implies the central relevance of charisma to all kinds of power – whether malign or benign, whether religious, national or political. Charisma indicates the presence of power and the power of presence, and the two are often one.
If I were to pursue the issue of Founding Fathers and their relationship to charisma and narrative, I would look at rival claims to succession and alternative genealogies: for example in Hungary, where one genealogy goes back to St. Stephen and St. Stephen’s crown; one to Louis Kossuth, nationalist hero drawn from the marginal religion of Lutheranism; and one to Béla Kun, the Jewish communist. I would also look at the revival of semi-mythic Founding Fathers, as part of a nationalist move to displace more recent genealogies, defined as alien and oppressive, whether religious or political. This move is congruent with neo-primitivism in modern art and iconography. I am thinking of the quasi-worship of figures like Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame in the Central Asian republics; the reference back to folk narratives in Europe, such as the Kalevala; and the revival of pre-Columbian figures in Central and South America. The revival of the Kalevala in Finland reminds us that a Founding Father of a nascent nationalism can be a musician, as was Sibelius, the writer of the national hymn, Finlandia. Curiously enough, one recognised Founding Father of Finland was actually the Tsar Alexander II, who, on taking Finland into his empire and building its capital on the model of St. Petersburg, declared Finland should be a nation like other nations, which is why his statue still stands in Senate Square in Helsinki.
Finally, I would look at the varying constellations of national Founding Fathers: some with military heroes, like General Mannerheim; some with political leaders; and some with saints, monks and poets. As a sociologist of religion I might find the monks, saints and poets particularly interesting. The semi-mythic saints are assigned to the origins as Founding Fathers; the monks salvage the history and the language; and the poets write or rewrite the national script. But ‘ill fares the land’ where saints, monks and poets take on these roles. It is all too likely that they have been long under foreign domination, and have achieved independence very late in the day.
1 Elleke Boehmer, Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2 Allon Gal, David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
3 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Introduction by Edward Shils (Glencoe: Free Press, 1950).
4 T.S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from The Rock’, in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (London: Faber and Faber, 1936, p. 164).
5 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964).
6 John Chalker, The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
7 Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood.
8 Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
9 Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, p. 80.
10 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
11 Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary (London and New York: Verso, 2000).
12 Caroline Bynum, Wonderful Blood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
13 Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).
14 Keane, Tom Paine.
15 Riall, Garibaldi.
16 Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).