This is not a history of Christianity, of which there are many, nor a history of modern times, of which Paul Johnson has already written an outstanding example. Rather, the book operates in the middle ground between them, where culture, ideas, politics and religious faith meet in a space for which I cannot find a satisfactory label. Perhaps one should not try. Establishing that space has been one of the major challenges in writing this book. It is easy to recognise what one wants to avoid, for below my rope bridge snap such crocodiles as ‘ecclesiastical history’, ‘the history of ideas’ and ‘theology’. The general ambition has been to write a coherent history of modern Europe primarily organised around issues of mind and spirit rather than the merely material, although in no sense do I discount the material as an important factor in history, being as I am inordinately credulous towards simple displays of production statistics.
A previous book, Earthly Powers, began with the ‘political religion’ created during the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution with its Cults of Reason or the Supreme Being. These were not simply cynical usurpations of religious forms, but were what the Italian thinker Luigi Sturzo in the mid-1920s referred to as ‘the abusive exploitation of the human religious sentiment’. Like much earlier attempts to realise heaven on earth—vividly described in Norman Cohn’s classic account of medieval heresies The Pursuit of the Millennium—these resulted in hell for many people, as anyone who walks around the sites of Jacobin massacres in the bleak and depopulated Vendée can readily establish. This dystopian strain recurred in various guises throughout the nineteenth century, whether in the crackbrained schemes of Auguste Comte or Charles Fourier, the moral insanity of Russian nihilists, or the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, which was morally insane in other ways. Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements—and in Britain remains so to this day—in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experiences at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere.
This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties. A succession of popes, more or less gifted in public diplomacy, doggedly tried to shore up their powers in the face of this assault, whether from the combination of liberals and the reactionary conservative Bismarck in Germany, or from the anticlerical zealots of the French Third Republic. Meanwhile many of the Protestant Churches feebly accommodated themselves to the latest secular ideologies such as nationalism and scientism. These conflicts took place in conjunction with a broader series of changes—for which the label secularisation is unsatisfactory—whereby ‘science’, ‘progress’, ‘morality’, ‘money’, ‘culture’, ‘humanity’ and even ‘sport’ became objects of devotion and refocused religiosity. By the end of the century, when God was invoked by all sides in a catastrophic world war, the ‘strange gods’ of Bolshevism, Fascism and Nazism were already discernible as alternative objects of religious devotion, those political religions being the initial focus of this book.
Sacred Causes begins amid the terrible trauma of the Great War, the shock that reverberated throughout the first half of the twentieth century. These were strange times. One of the assassins of the Weimar foreign minister Walter Rathenau, who was slain in 1922, claimed that he had been (spiritually) dead since Armistice Day (9 November 1918). Another extreme right-winger, depicted in a post-war play, says: ‘What does it matter whether I die of a bullet at twenty, or of cancer at forty, or of apoplexy at sixty. The people need priests who have the courage to sacrifice the best—priests who slaughter.’ There were many self-appointed priests (and prophets) in the 1920s, ranging from the strange individuals who briefly cropped up in Weimar Germany (the most successful of whom was Adolf Hitler) to the puritanical sectarians of Bolshevism. Rather than retell the over-familiar story of Fascism, Nazism and Communism, I have tried to evoke their pseudo-religious pathologies, ranging from the Nazis’ skilful manipulation of such notions as ‘rebirth’ and ‘awakening’ to the Bolsheviks’ bizarre resort to perpetual confession and remorseless search for heretics. Although there were important differences between these totalitarian regimes, they drew from a common well of enthusiasm, and shared such heretical goals (or rather temptations) as fashioning a ‘new man’ or establishing heaven on earth. They metabolised the religious instinct. The thinkers who first identified and conceptualised these worrying developments lead on to the next part of the story, for many of the most insightful critics of totalitarian political religions came from a religious background, whether the Catholics Luigi Sturzo and Eric Voegelin, the Orthodox Nikolai Berdyaev, or the Protestants Frederick Voigt and Adolf Keller.
The complex responses of the Churches to these challenges are a major concern of this book. While how a national Church reacted certainly requires comment, it is also the case that these were international institutions, so that whenever one writes that ‘the’ Catholic Church did this or that, this generalisation does not hold, for example, for Britain, the US, Africa or the whole of Central and Latin America. Indeed, international events are indispensable for understanding this subject. The general predisposition of the Churches towards authoritarian (rather than totalitarian) regimes in the inter-war period is inexplicable without reference to the anticlerical atrocities that took place in Russia, Spain and Mexico—what Pius XI called the ‘terrible triangle’ in direct anticipation of contemporary talk of ‘axes of evil’. If one wants a sense of the sort of polity the inter-war Church supported, then it is a matter of looking at Austria, Ireland, and Portugal, rather than Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, although again British or US Catholics were perfectly at home in their respective democracies regardless of their external sympathies in particular conflicts. Moving on to the period of the Second World War, I have tried to treat Pius XII in a historical way, which means giving him credit for one of the most penetrating intellectual demolitions of Nazism—in the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge—and by trying to evoke his personality and world, and hence the options that were realistically open to him as the Church grappled with a continent-wide conspiracy to murder Europe’s Jews. Very little of the cruder—Soviet inspired—‘black legend’ survives close analysis, although legitimate questions remain about his hesitations and tone.
The intervention of the Churches in post-war politics—for their ‘good war’ facilitated this amid the collapse of other authorities—is an important part of the book, notably regarding the extraordinary success of European Christian Democrats in ensuring that Stalin’s surrogates did not achieve power in the western half of the continent. It is fashionable, on the left, to decry those aged French, German or Italian leaders, including Pius XII, as well as Adenauer, Bidault and de Gasperi; this is a view I do not share in view of the dizzy alternative prospect of rule by a Marxist nomenklatura, a secret police, and trades union hacks. Turning eastwards, the book charts the state imposition of atheism on the intensely religious societies of eastern Europe, and the extraordinary heroism of persecuted churchmen in Hungary and Poland, who ensured the survival of a heavily restricted form of civil society amid the ambient corruption and darkness of Communism. That theme is taken up in connection with the role of Pope John Paul II (himself a protégé of cardinal Stefan Wyszy ´ nski) and the Catholic Church in Poland in the implosion of European Communism in the late 1980s, a role whose importance has been independently recognised by such leading historians of the Cold War as John Lewis Gaddis, and an Italian parliamentary commission unravelling the 1981 KGB/Bulgarian plot to kill the pope.
Three chapters of Sacred Causes deal with Europe’s present and possible futures. I cast a rather dyspeptic eye over the 1960s, which in many ways were the chief motor of what then seemed like a highly secularised future, with Churches scrambling to articulate every evanescent secular gospel in a manner trenchantly analysed by Edward Norman. The politicisation of religion is as important in this story as the ‘sacralisation’ of politics. So are the forces that seemed to be turning Europe into a post-Christian desert, in which ‘wisdom’ would be represented by the lyrics of John Lennon.
There was one regional exception, that along with Franco’s Spain seemed immune not just to the 1960s—although it certainly had its barricades—but to the European Enlightenment. No discussion of religion and politics would be complete without reference to the long war in Northern Ireland. Initially, I regarded this as an almost inexplicable, atavistic, tribal struggle fitfully audible as distant bombs rattled the windows of various places I’ve lived in London. However, in the long term, this squalid little conflict also anticipated the sinister surrender of power to so-called ‘moderate’ community leaders (and the creation of exceptional pockets where the law does not appear to apply) that is becoming evident in the responses of European governments to the much wider threat of Islamic radicalism. The spectrum of such responses ranges from the appeasement practised by the Spanish socialists—with their vain dialogue about a common ‘Mediterranean’ culture with people who think ‘Andalus’ belongs in a revived Caliphate—to the harder line of the Netherlands with its threats of compulsory Dutch and the banning of the burqa—an understandable reaction to the murder of Theo van Gogh, the prominent film-maker, and to the fact that some of its MPs, notably the redoubtable ‘Infidel’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now have to sleep on army bases surrounded by bodyguards. Those Americans who disparage what they see as an emerging ‘Eurabia’ might bear a thought for the many Europeans who not only dread that prospect but are doing their best to avert it, sometimes risking their lives.
There are a few grounds for hope in this present ‘age of anxiety’. Most obviously, Islamist terrorism is not the same order of threat as that of the thermonuclear destruction that overshadowed the planet during the Cold War. Furthermore, whether in Britain or once-liberal Holland, there are definite signs that the worm has turned, suggesting that ordinary people—as opposed to politicians with inner-city Muslim constituents—are not ready to tolerate indefinitely those who wish to eradicate homosexuals, reduce women to second-class citizens, or openly call for the murder of Danish cartoonists, Dutch politicians or Jews and Israelis, activities that may be acceptable in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but which are not all right here. Anyone with those views is irreconcilable with our civilisation and should take the opportunity to leave before Europe’s history repeats itself. There are encouraging signs that the Churches—and in particular the Catholic Church of Benedict XVI—are ready to make certain non-negotiable positions clear rather than to mouth the platitudes of a discredited multiculturalism that only exists in the Left university and within local government, neither of them at the cutting edge of European thinking.
Finally, what of the long-term relationships between religion and politics? Atheists and anticlericals (many regarding themselves as ‘liberals’) like to rehearse the rote of Crusades and Inquisition, wars of religion and US evangelical Christians to extrude the Churches from any involvement in politics. Insofar as there is a debate, this is conducted on the level of alarm aroused when a British prime minister casually mentions that he is accountable to God, a rather unremarkable admission in a broad sweep of European history from Louis the Pious to Gladstone. Historically, of course, as has been pointed out by such thinkers as Marcel Gauchet and George Weigel, Christianity had much to do with the notion of the autonomous, sacrosanct individual, with the preservation of a sphere beyond the state that anticipated civil society, with the notion of elected leadership, and with holding rulers accountable to higher powers. It is almost superfluous to add that Christianity played an integral part in Europe’s high culture, and in such campaigns (or crusades) as abolishing the slave trade or ameliorating the social evils of industrialisation. How many atheistic liberals run soup kitchens for homeless drug addicts? Is the culture of guns and gangster rap, which thrills progressive cultural commentators, a better alternative to the thriving black Pentecostal churches? More controversially, the Churches upheld necessary inhibitions and taboos, without which we seem degraded, judging by much of what TV commissioning editors regularly inflict upon us in an obsession with sex that they share with some clergy. Christianity’s historical achievements deserve more notice than they customarily receive. Interestingly, it is increasingly secular intellectuals, like Régis Debray or Umberto Eco, who are mounting the defence of Christianity against silly politically correct attempts to deny or marginalise it.
There also seems no rational reason to exclude Christians—to range no further—from political debate, any more than there is to deny the vote to people with blue eyes or red hair. That is particularly so where they speak with authority, namely regarding the aged, imprisoned, sick and disadvantaged whom bureaucratised welfare has done little or nothing to help. Whether they have anything relevant to contribute to, for example, foreign policy seems more dubious, especially when they simply replicate the predictable views of the progressive intelligentsia regarding, say, Israel and Palestine. Matters become more complex regarding such issues as the creation or expansion of faith schools, with all their potentialities for consolidating antagonistic ghettos through what amounts, in the worst scenarios, to monocultural indoctrination, whatever lip-service is tactically paid to a self-serving multiculturalism. That a cardinal archbishop of France, of Jewish extraction, has become one of the main defenders of the separation of Church and state or that Bavaria has banned Muslim head-scarves while making crucifixes mandatory on school walls, illustrates the complexity of current developments that radical Islam has been largely responsible for.
A number of people have helped in the writing of this book and it is a pleasure to thank them. My friend Andrew Wylie has been a great ‘pit-stop boss’, of a team that includes Katherine Marino and Maggie Evans. HarperCollins in New York and London have been amazingly sympathetic publishers, notably Tim Duggan, Arabella Pike, Kate Hyde and Helen Ellis, who have all brought a great deal of thought to bear on the entire project. Peter James deserves my special thanks for his careful work on what is now his third manuscript by an author who can almost anticipate his learned queries.
Several people have helped with specific subjects, some of which I was unfamiliar with when I started. Hermann Tertsch and Miguelangelo Bastinar of El Pais have helped deepen my knowledge of their remarkable country whenever I surface in Madrid. Detective Chief Superintendent Janice McClean was kind enough to facilitate meetings with retired RUC and current PSNI officers, and to show me Belfast. My wife’s relative Andrew Robathan MP kindly set aside time in the Opposition Whips’ lair to explain the army view of the conflict in Northern Ireland, while Sean O’Callaghan provided insights into armed republicanism from the former practitioner’s point of view. Dean Godson and Paul Bew extended my perceptions of a conflict they both know so well. Hazhir Temourian has been a tremendous help with anything to do with the Middle East. I was also privileged to meet Norman Cohn whose work stimulated my own.
William Doino was generous with his knowledge of Pius XII, sharing the latest archival findings and his own publications. Rabbi David Dalin, Karol Gadge and Ronald Rychlak also kept me abreast of their work. In Rome, fathers Peter Gumpel SJ and Giovanni Sale SJ gave encouragement and advice, while in London father James Campbell SJ explained an especially opaque biblical prophecy that made more sense to Max Weber than it initially did to me. John Cornwell, who reanimated the debate about Pius, kindly commented on the entire manuscript, which helped clarify the few remaining areas where we may disagree. Professor Gerhard Besier kept me supplied with his stream of books on the Churches in the former German ‘Democratic’ Republic and on cognate subjects, while Professor Hans Maier has been a constant source of wisdom and encouragement as a leading historian and philosopher of religion. I am also grateful to Denys Blakeway and James Burge for helping turn some of these ideas into the programme Dark Enlightenment, and for such memorable experiences as sheltering from a mini-tornado while filming in Mussolini’s Foro Italico. The editors of the Sunday Times, The Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, as well as Nancy Sladek at the Literary Review, encouraged me to write about Islamist terrorism after 9/11, thereby liberating me from the ghastly prospect of writing about Nazis for the next twenty years.
The book’s dedication is divided three ways. My wife Linden has been a constant source of love and encouragement despite health problems not made any easier by Islamist bombers striking near her workplace on two occasions in 2005. Martin Ivens is both a fund of knowledge—on anything ranging from St Augustine to City churches—and someone who thinks deeply about contemporary issues. Finally, Adolf Wood has been a true and wise friend for twenty years now, reading every page of my work when I suspect he’d rather be in the company of Conrad, Dickens, James or Eliot. He has always been ready with a point of style or literary allusion, all delivered with his characteristic reticent firmness. None of them are responsible for my conclusions—the chief of which is that clearly identifying a problem takes one halfway to its resolution, the viewpoint that accounts for the qualified optimism with which I end the book.