This review appears in the June 2007 issue of The
American Spectator. To subscribe to the monthly print edition,
click here.
Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and
Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror
by Michael Burleigh
(HarperCollins, 557 pages, $27.95)
IF YOU WANTED TO SUMMARIZE the history of the West, you could do
worse than say it’s the story of the conflict between Church and
State. That was true in Rome, true in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, true in the Protestant (and kingly and princely)
revolt against the pope, true in the period of the French
Revolution, true in the secularizing regimes of the 19th century
(and in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf), and certainly true in the
20th century, which is the taking off point for historian Michael
Burleigh’s Sacred Causes, a breathtaking examination of
how the age of the dictators was an age of political religion
trying to exterminate the real thing — and how the real thing, one
would almost say miraculously, not only survived but was crucial to
bringing down its longest-lived oppressor, the Soviet Union.
Burleigh covered the period from the French Revolution to the
Great War in his previous book, the highly acclaimed Earthly
Powers. Sacred Causes is just as powerful — written
as it is by a professor spilling over with erudition, entertaining
arcana, magisterial summary judgments, and sarcastic asides, in a
style that is both rococo and shot full of adrenalin. It has the
additional fillip of closing with the battle we’re in now: the
clash of militant Islam versus the West.
But first things first, and first things here are what Burleigh
deems “the political manifestations of what could be called mass
spiritual need in deranged times” — those times being the years
following the First World War. And the focus, in this period, is
not on Britain, but on the Continent. Europe (particularly Germany
and Italy) found itself awash with prophets, preaching new gospels,
some truly bizarre, others that seem less so only because we know
they succeeded.
A Franciscan friar writing from Germany in 1924 remarked that
the “war of Christianity against Teutonic paganism” had never
ended, “the battle continued as a guerrilla war in the souls and
the beliefs and religious customs… and there were always men who
preferred Wotan to Christ. Today it seems as though this
century-old skirmish will again become an open battle.”
So it did. The battle raged across Europe, with different gods
competing for different countries. In Italy, Benito Mussolini,
author of that famous pre-Richard Dawkins tract, God Does Not
Exist, explicitly stated that “Fascism is not only a party, it
is a regime, it is not only a regime, but a faith, it is not only a
faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the
Italian people.”
The masses were important, for not only was this the age of the
dictators, it was the age of the masses. It is a backhanded tribute
to the Italians that the fervently anti-clerical Mussolini felt he
could not effectively rule them without some measure of concession
to the Church. No matter how swept up the masses might be by the
fascist religion, many of them still wanted their Masses as well.
So he cut a deal with the Catholic Church, just as Napoleon
Bonaparte did in his time for similar reasons. In both cases, it
was an uncomfortable relationship — one wielding a gun, the other
wielding moral rebukes — that ended with the flight of the
dictator.
In Germany, things were different. Germany was predominantly
Protestant, with a long anti-Catholic tradition, not only with
Luther, but with Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and, as Burleigh
points out, while German Catholics “had been as patriotic as the
next man in the recent war, some, ignoring the dissolution of the
Habsburg Empire and the role of Protestant Britain and the US,
regarded the victory of, inter alia, France, Belgium and Italy as a
delayed triumph of Catholicism over the Lutheran Reformation.”
Catholics felt much more at home in the Weimar Republic than did
German Protestants. Not only, perhaps, because of the Catholic
tendency to laissez les bon temps rouler, but because they
had Catholic parties to vote for. Protestants found themselves not
only stripped of state preference in the Republic, but felt
politically homeless, until, Burleigh notes, “the Nazis
successfully presented themselves as the sword of an awakening
semi-religious German spirit.”
Hitler, liberal Christians will be interested to know, was not
only an animal-loving, non-smoking, vegetarian, artist, and former
member of the homeless community, but was “indulgent towards
Protestantism, especially in its theologically liberal and socially
conscious varieties.” Because Protestants were much more interested
than Catholics in keeping up with “science” and “progress,” they
proved much more amenable to ideas about eugenics and “orders of
creation” (in one version of liberal Protestant theology). While
Catholics were tutored in natural law (from which there were no
national exemptions), were members of a universal, cosmopolitan
Church that transcended borders, and were beholden to an
authoritarian (and authoritative) pope in Rome (who had explicitly
condemned eugenics and “the pagan worship of the state”), German
Protestants had for Hitler the advantage of not shying away from
national destiny. They had been catechized in the idea of a German
church for the German people. When Protestant pastors dissented
from the Nazification of their churches, they did so on the grounds
that such a merger of people and religion amounted to a hateful —
wait for it — Zionism.
BURLEIGH IS AN EXPERT on Nazi Germany, and, for this reader at
least, the rise and beliefs of the National Socialists make for
much more compelling and horrifying reading than do the dread and
bloody ideologues of Soviet Russia, whose crimes are also recounted
here. It is the difference between a Satanic power on the march and
a group of thuggish theoreticians (recognizable on many college
campuses today) who at last can take academic politics to the level
of mass extermination they’d always wanted. They can order mock
trials, extracting truly pathetic confessions. (“Yes, comrades, I
know it is ridiculous, and it means nothing to me, but I was
married in a church, I confess, but I agreed to the church comedy
only because of my wife,” is an abbreviated paraphrase of one such
confession.) And they can mock religion — through the Bolshevik
League of Militant Godless and other “people’s” organizations — to
their progressive hearts’ content, which, being the sort of people
they are, means unearthing the holy dead to prove that even saints’
bodies decay, detonating cathedrals into ruins, and imprisoning or
killing clergy as appropriate to rid the world of superstition.
Nazis and Communists had a liking for other progressive ideas
that continue to have currency. For instance, the Nazis tried to
replace Christmas with a Yule Festival (Winterval anyone?), while
the Soviets preferred a fully fledged anti-Christmas with mockeries
of Christianity and religion in general that would not be out of
place in San Francisco, many modern art galleries, or perhaps a Dan
Brown novel.
Like many leftists today, too, they had a comparative soft spot
for Islam. The Nazis’ anti-Semitism never incorporated the Arabs,
and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a keen ally in the cause of
Jewish extermination, wishing only that it could be accelerated.
Similarly, while the Bolsheviks happily trashed churches and
synagogues, they thought it wise to leave mosques well enough
alone. (Though they did include effigies of Mohammed in their
bonfires of religion; perhaps they could be confident that no
Muslims would actually be present during these celebrations.)
Much of the book, inevitably, covers the Second World War and
the fate of the churches behind the Iron Curtain. In the course of
doing so, Burleigh convincingly refutes and dismisses with contempt
the calumnies heaped on Pope Pius XII; highlights how Polish
Catholicism (and Pope John Paul II) effectively undermined the
Soviet empire; and covers the waterfront of every European country
from Portugal to Franco’s Spain to Czechoslovakia to the nether
reaches of Eastern Europe, with some definite surprises along the
way (including how even in East Germany, the most successfully
secularized of the Eastern bloc states, churches were the focal
point for defeating Communism).
But much though they dominate the story, Nazis, fascists, and
Communists are not the whole of Burleigh’s tale. There is an
invigorating section on Cold War church politics in the West, a
welcome reminder of when three German-speaking, and veteran
anti-fascist Catholics — Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, and
Robert Schuman — reconstructed Continental Europe on lines that
rejected “alien” Prussianism (which was now locked up in Communist
East Germany, incorporating, as Adenauer pointed out, the
historically least Christianized areas) and the “oriental”
Kremlin.
Adenauer, de Gasperi, and Schuman were not only ardent Catholics
but profoundly pro-American, to the disgust of the European Left
(and the disgust of some Protestants, including leftist pastors
like Karl Barth and Martin Niemoeller, who disliked both their
religion and their pro-Americanism).
But the Catholic Church wholeheartedly supported this
pro-American tilt, as well as endorsing German rearmament, military
conscription (with one Cardinal stating that “conscientious
objection to military service is not compatible with Christian
teaching”), and deployment of nuclear weapons to counter to the
Soviet threat. The Europe the Church supported in the 1950s is the
Europe George W. Bush no doubt wishes he had today.
BURLEIGH CLOSES HIS BOOK with the radical Muslim death cult that
now threatens the West, and ties that threat to Britain’s
experience with the IRA (the Troubles are given their chapter as
well). As he writes,
We are horribly wrong in imagining that Northern
Ireland is some atavistic throwback to the religious wars of the
sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. 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. The gloomy spires of Fermanagh and Tyrone
will continue to haunt us…but they may well be outnumbered by the
gleaming domes of Europe’s proliferating mosques, in areas from
which the state has quietly retreated.
From all the wreckage, Burleigh emerges a cautious optimist. The
West remains at war with itself, with secularists apparently still
keener on attacking Christianity than facing up to the threat of
militant Islam. Nevertheless, many politicians — and certainly
many Europeans — are alive to the threat, and so in particular,
notes Burleigh, is the Catholic Church, the faith (honored or not)
of the majority of Europeans.
Burleigh, a Briton, does not end on this note, but I will
because it is addressed to us: “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.” We can hope that
Burleigh’s book, published to high praise in England, is a sign of
Europe’s looming recovery.
