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Book Review, 26 October 2006 The past comes back to haunt us
Sacred Causes: religion and politics from the European dictators to Al Qaeda In recent years, Michael Burleigh has emerged as the pre-eminent historian of that no-man's-land where religion and politics meet. His brilliant history of the Third Reich picked up the idea of "political religion" where earlier thinkers had left off, and used it to cast the Nazis in a fresh light. Burleigh followed The Third Reich: a new history with an ambitious reconsideration of European history over the last two centuries from the same perspective. Last year, the first part of this huge undertaking appeared as Earthly Powers: religion and politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War. This book, too, deserved the rapturous praise it received for its analysis of the rise of the political religions. Now, only a year later, Sacred Causes lives up to the promise of its precursor, and even surpasses it. One must admire the energy of a man who can read so widely and write so well about a field that most historians have skirted round. Burleigh happens also to be a Catholic, and this background may explain his universal range - though the unforgiving treatment of ecclesiastical subjects here proves that his historiography is by no means subordinated to his faith. But Burleigh also deserves a tribute to his moral courage. It is not easy to tackle the phenomenon of political Islam, or Islamism, with any degree of honesty in today's climate of intimidation and self-censorship. Islam only comes into the picture in the final chapter of Sacred Causes, which covers the whole period from the Great War, through the rise and fall of Communism, Fascism and Nazism, to the resurgence of Catholicism in the latter stages of the Cold War. But this book is emphatically a product of the post-9/11 world, and a historian with political antennae as acute as Burleigh's cannot help but draw implicit lessons for our present predicament from his interpretation of our recent history. Reading this book while controversy raged over Muslim reaction to a German pope's quotation of a Byzantine emperor's observations about Islam in an academic lecture in the former capital of the Holy Roman Empire, I was inevitably struck by the sudden irruption of a past that we thought had passed away beyond recall. One of the finest sections of Sacred Causes deals with the role of the popes, and especially Pius XII, in the age of dictators. The author is careful to avoid the anachronistic approach of some scholars, who arraign Pius XII "Hitler's Pope" for his "silence" about the Holocaust: Burleigh gives due weight to the Vatican's wartime role in trying to restrain authoritarian Catholic regimes, especially Slovakia and Croatia, where it had more influence than in countries under direct Nazi rule. Hitler held the whole of European Catholicism hostage, including the Vatican itself. The fate of Russian Orthodoxy under Lenin and Stalin, superbly documented here, was a terrible warning to Pius XII of what might befall those who did not render unto the totalitarian Caesars whatever tribute they deemed to be theirs. What comes through clearly from Burleigh's account is that Pius XII was genuinely perplexed by the fear of reprisals against Catholics - especially Catholics of Jewish or other "non-Aryan" origin - if he adopted a secular, political discourse in voicing his moral indignation. The atrocities visited upon many subject populations by the Nazis gave him grounds for such fear. Hindsight may judge him pusillanimous, but his sins of omission pale by comparison with those of the United Nations during many post-war genocides. Fear of reprisal was still a factor in Vatican foreign policy during the Cold War. Burleigh devotes two chapters to the Churches in Eastern Europe, which remained the only sanctuaries from totalitarian control and which during the 1980s played a vital role in its overthrow. If Benedict XVI, following the courageous example of John Paul II in confronting Communism, has lately been outspoken in condemning violence in the name of Islam, he is acutely conscious of the fact that some 100 million Catholics live in Islamic states where they are all potential hostages. The same counter-intuitive approach governs the rest of Burleigh's enjoyably irreverent debunking of liberal pieties. His analysis of the spiritual crisis of the 1960s makes the shrewd point that the transmission of faith from one generation to the next was broken by the decline of female piety. Meanwhile, "the religious implications of mass immigration went unattended ... what seemed a promising celebration of difference has turned out to be highly divisive". In an especially perspicacious chapter on Northern Ireland, Burleigh concludes that we are "horribly wrong" in seeing the conflict there merely as an "atavistic throwback" to seventeenth-century wars of religion: "Its model of the state surrendering ‘communities' to the tender mercies of their so-called leaders may presage the future, except it will involve minorities who worship another God." Burleigh develops this critique in his final chapter on Europe after 9/11, "Cubes, Domes and Death Cults". He shows how the external threat of Islamist terrorism and the internal cultural crisis provoked by a rapidly growing and increasingly assertive Islamic minority have caused both secular and Christian versions of multiculturalism to buckle under the strain. The sketch is enlivened by Burleigh's transatlantic experience. He is impressed by what he sees as the more muscular Christianity of the United States. The European media, he feels, has ignored the "extraordinary range of religious public intellectuals" who enrich the American scene. On this side of the Atlantic "the public culture is dominated by sneering secularists" such as Richard Dawkins, who is likened to "the hotter sort of seventeenth-century English Protestant in his zeal to mock the faith of people who believe in miracles". Burleigh concludes as an optimist, though not a Panglossian one. Judaeo-Christian Europe need succumb neither to demography nor decadence. If it is to survive in its heartland, however, the Church will need to learn hard lessons from both America and Eastern Europe. The millions that Billy Graham attracted to his rallies in Britain half a century ago, like the even greater numbers of "John Paul II Catholics" across the world, are reminders that the decline of Christianity in the West is anything but preordained. It is, on the contrary, the rule that religious revivals come upon us like a thief in the night.  |
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