Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Industrialization also gave birth to the nation-state.112 Agrarian empires had lacked the technology to impose a uniform culture; the borders and territorial reach of premodern kingdoms could be only loosely defined and the monarch’s authority enforced in a series of overlapping loyalties.113 But during the nineteenth century, Europe was reconfigured into clearly defined states ruled by a central government.114 Industrialized society required standardized literacy, a shared language, and a unified control of human resources. Even if they spoke a different language from the ruler, subjects now belonged to an integrated “nation,” an “imaginary community” of people who were encouraged to feel a deep connection with persons they knew nothing about.115

  Religiously organized agrarian societies had often persecuted “heretics”; in the secularized nation-state, it was “minorities” who had either to assimilate or disappear. In 1807 Jefferson had instructed his secretary of war that the Native Americans were “backward peoples” who must either be “exterminated” or driven “beyond our reach” to the other side of the Mississippi “with the beasts of the forest.”116 In 1806 Napoleon made Jews full citizens of France, but two years later he issued the “Infamous Decrees” ordering them to take French names, privatize their faith, and ensure that at least one in every three marriages per family was with a gentile.117 This forcible integration was regarded as progress. Surely, argued the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), it was better for a Breton to accept French citizenship “than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage remnant of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.”118 But the English historian Lord Acton (1834–1902) deplored the notion of nationality, fearing that the “fictitious” general will of the people that it promoted would crush “all natural rights and all established liberties for the purpose of vindicating itself.”119 He could see that the desire to preserve the nation could become an absolute used to justify the most inhumane policies. Even worse,

  By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, [nationality] reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary.… According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated or reduced to servitude, or put in a condition of dependence.120

  His reservations about nationalism would prove to be all too well grounded.

  The new nation-state would labor under a fundamental contradiction: the state (the governmental apparatus) was supposed to be secular, but the nation (“the people”) aroused quasi-religious emotions.121 In 1807–08, while Napoleon was conquering Prussia, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had delivered a series of lectures in Berlin, looking forward to the time when the forty-one separate German principalities would become a unified nation-state. The Fatherland, he claimed, was a manifestation of the divine, the repository of the spiritual essence of the Volk and therefore eternal. Germans must be ready to die for the nation, which alone gave human beings the immortality they craved because it had existed since the dawn of time and would continue after their deaths.122 Early modern philosophers, such as Hobbes, had called for a strong state to restrain the violence of Europe, which, they believed, had been solely inspired by “religion.” Yet in France, the nation had been evoked to mobilize all citizens for war, and Fichte now encouraged Germans to fight French imperialism for the sake of the Fatherland. The state had been devised to contain violence, but the nation was now being used to release it.

  If we can define the sacred as something for which one is prepared to die, the nation had certainly become an embodiment of the divine, a supreme value. Hence national mythology would encourage cohesion, solidarity, and loyalty within the confines of the nation. But it had yet to develop the “concern for everybody” that had been such an important ideal in many of the spiritual traditions associated with religion. The national mythos would not encourage citizens to extend their sympathy to the ends of the earth, to love the stranger in their midst, be loyal even to their enemies, to wish happiness for all beings, and to become aware of the world’s pain. True, this universal empathy had rarely affected the violence of the warrior aristocracy, but it had at least offered an alternative and a continuing challenge. Now that religion was being privatized, there was no “international” ethos to counter the growing structural and military violence to which weaker nations were increasingly subjected. Secular nationalism seemed to regard the foreigner as fair game for exploitation and mass slaughter, especially if he belonged to a different ethnic group.

  In America, the colonies and later the states had lacked the manpower to maintain productivity, so by 1800 between ten and fifteen million African slaves had been forcibly transported to North America.123 They were subdued brutally: slaves were repeatedly reminded of their racial inferiority, their families were broken up, and they were subjected to hard labor, flogging, and mutilation. None of this seemed to bother the Founders, who had so proudly asserted that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those who would object did so by invoking not Enlightenment principles but Christian morals. In the northern states, Christian abolitionists condemned slavery as a blot on the nation, and in 1860 president-elect Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) announced that he would prohibit it in any newly conquered territory. Almost at once South Carolina seceded from the Union, and it was clear that other Southern states would follow.

  The political issue—the preservation or dissolution of the Union—was not in doubt, but to their dismay, both Northerners and Southerners found that the clergy on whom they relied for ideological guidance could find no common ground. Supporters of slavery had a host of biblical texts at their command,124 but in the absence of any explicit biblical condemnation of slave ownership, abolitionists could only appeal to the spirit of scripture. The Southern preacher James Henry Thornhill argued that slavery was a “good and merciful” way of organizing labor,125 while in New York Henry Ward Beecher maintained that it was “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin.”126 But the theological split did not coincide neatly with the North-South divide. In Brooklyn, Henry Van Dyke argued that abolition was evil because it amounted to an “utter rejection of the Scriptures,”127 but Taylor Lewis, a professor of Greek and Oriental studies at New York University, retorted that Van Dyke was not taking “the vastly changed condition of the world” sufficiently into account: it was a “malignant falsehood” to suggest that ancient institutions could be transplanted wholesale to the modern world.128

  Lewis’s nuanced approach to scripture was based on a scholarly understanding of ancient slavery that was anathema to evangelicals in the North, who had led the Abolitionist movement since its founding in the 1830s.129 They still approached scripture with the Enlightenment conviction that human beings could discover the truth for themselves without authoritative or expert guidance, but now, to their dismay, they found that the Bible that had united the nation after the War of Independence was tearing it apart.130 The evangelicals had failed to guide the nation at this moment of grave crisis. When, however, the political unity of the states foundered with the election of Abraham Lincoln and the secession of the Confederacy, the problem of slavery was settled by the battles of the Civil War (1861–65), not by the Bible.

  This is not to say that wartime saw an eclipse of religious sentiment. On the contrary: though the American state would regard its effort as a principled defense of the Constitution, for the American nation it was a conflict charged with religious conviction. The Civil War armies have been described as the most religiously motivated in American history.131 Northerners and Southerners both believed that God was on their side and that they knew exactly what he was doing.132 And when it was all over, Southerners would see their defeat as divine retribution, while Northern preachers would celebrate their victor
y as God’s endorsement of their political arrangements. “Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never were before,” Beecher exulted; “God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event to all the nations of the earth: ‘Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.’ ”133 “The Union will no more be thought of as a mere human compact,” exclaimed Howard Bushnell at the Yale Commencement of 1865. “The sense of nationality becomes even a kind of religion.”134

  In fact, however, the outcome had been decided not by God but by modern weaponry. Both sides were armed with Minié rifles, which made it impossible for either to charge—the traditional mode of engagement—without being vulnerable to the gun’s substantial range and suffering horrific casualties.135 Despite the appalling loss of life—two thousand men could be lost in a single charge—generals continued to order their men to take the offensive.136 As a result, in eight of the first twelve battles of the war, the Southern Confederacy lost 97,000 men, and in 1864 the Northern general Ulysses Grant lost 64,000 men in the first six months of his campaign against Robert E. Lee in the Wilderness.137 The infantrymen caught on to this problem before the political or military leaders. Because one had to fire the Minié standing up, foot soldiers on both sides started to dig the trenches that would become the hallmark of early industrialized warfare with its protracted stalemates.138 With both sides “dug in,” unable to advance decisively, modern wars would drag on battle after battle.

  After the war, the more reflective leaders—such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Andrew Dixon White, and John Dewey—retreated from the certainties of Enlightenment Protestantism.139 In Europe too, Enlightenment confidence had been undermined. In Germany during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholars had applied to scripture the modern historical-critical methodology used to study classical texts. This “Higher Criticism” revealed that there was no univocal message in scripture; that Moses had not written the Pentateuch, which was composed of at least four different sources; that the miracle stories were little more than a literary trope; and that King David was not the author of the psalms. A little later Charles Lyell (1797–1875) argued that the earth’s crust had not been shaped by God but by the incremental effects of wind and water; Charles Darwin (1809–82) put forward the hypothesis that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same protoape as the chimpanzee; and studies revealed that the revered philosopher Immanuel Kant had actually undercut the entire Enlightenment project by maintaining that our ways of thinking bear no relation to objective reality.

  In Europe the rising tide of unbelief was born not merely from skepticism but from a hunger for radical social and political change. The Germans had been enthralled by the French Revolution, but the social and political situation in their country ruled out anything similar; it seemed better to try to change the way people thought than to resort to violence. By the 1830s, a radical cadre of intellectuals had emerged who were theologically literate, were particularly incensed by the social privileges of the clergy, and saw the Lutheran Church as a bastion of conservatism. As part of this corrupt Old Regime, they argued, the churches had to go, together with the God who had supported the system. Ludwig Feuerbach’s atheistic statement The Essence of Christianity (1841) was avidly read as a revolutionary as well as a theological tract.140

  In the United States, however, the urban elite had been appalled by the violence of the French Revolution and used Christianity to promote the social reform that would hold such turbulence at bay. Lyell’s revelations had caused a brief panic, but most Americans remained convinced by Newton’s vision of a design in the universe that proved the existence of an intelligent, benign Creator. These more liberal Christians were open to the Higher Criticism and willing to “christen” Darwinism, largely because they had not yet fully absorbed its implications. Evolution was not yet the bogey in America that it would become during the 1920s. At this point the liberal elite believed that God had been at work in the process of natural selection and that humanity was gradually evolving to a greater spiritual perfection.141

  After the Civil War, demoralized by their failure to resolve the slavery question, many of the Evangelicals withdrew from public life, realizing that they had marginalized themselves politically.142 Their religion thus became separate from their politics, a private affair—just as the Founders had hoped. Instead of bringing a Christian voice to the great questions of the day, they turned inward, and perhaps because the Bible had seemed to fail them in the nation’s darkest hour, they became preoccupied with the minutiae of biblical orthodoxy. That retreat was in some ways a positive development. Evangelicals were still staunchly anti-Catholic, and their withdrawal made it easier for Catholic immigrants to be accepted into the American nation, but it also deprived that nation of salutary criticism. Before the war, preachers had concentrated on the legitimacy of slavery as an institution but had neglected the issue of race. Tragically, they would remain unable to bring the gospel to bear on this major American problem. For a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, African Americans in the South would continue to suffer segregation, discrimination, and routine terrorism at the hands of white supremacist mobs, which the local authorities did little to suppress.143

  Shaken by the catastrophe of the Civil War, Americans dismantled their military. Europeans meanwhile came to believe that they had discovered a more civilized and sustainable mode of warfare.144 Their model for this supposedly efficient warfare was the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), who had invested heavily in railways and telegraph systems and issued his army with new needle guns and steel cannons. In three relatively short, bloodless, but spectacularly successful wars against states that did not have this advanced technology—the Danish War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870)—Bismarck created a united Germany. Fired by their national myths, the nation-states of Europe now embarked on an arms race, each convinced that it too could fight its way to a unique and glorious destiny. The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914, not a single year passed in which a novel or short story about a future catastrophic conflict did not appear in a European country.145 The “Next Great War” was invariably imagined as a terrible but inevitable ordeal, after which the nation would rise to enhanced life. This would not be as easy as they imagined, however. What each power failed to reckon was that when all nations had the same new weapons, none would have an advantage and that Bismarck’s victories were, therefore, not replicable.

  As Lord Acton had predicted, this aggressive nationalism made life even more problematic for minorities. In the nation-state, Jews increasingly appeared chronically rootless and cosmopolitan. There were pogroms in Russia, condoned and even orchestrated by the government;146 in Germany anti-Semitic parties began to emerge in the 1880s; and in 1893 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was convicted on false evidence of transmitting secrets to Germany. Many were convinced that Dreyfus was part of an international Jewish conspiracy that was plotting to weaken France. The new anti-Semitism drew on centuries of Christian prejudice but gave it a scientific rationale.147 Anti-Semites claimed that Jews did not fit the biological and genetic profile of the Volk, and some argued that they should be eliminated, in the same way as modern medicine cut out a cancer.

  It was perhaps inevitable that, correctly anticipating an anti-Semitic disaster, some Jews would develop their own national mythology. Loosely based on the Bible, Zionism campaigned for a safe haven for Jews in their ancestral land, but Zionists also drew on varied currents of modern thought—Marxism, secularism, capitalism, and colonialism. Some wanted to build a socialist utopia in the Land of Israel. The earliest and most vociferous Zionists were atheists who were convinced that religious Judaism had made Jews passive in the face of persecution: they horrified Orthodox Jews, who insisted that only the Messiah could lead Jews back to the Promised Land. Like most forms of national
ism, though, Zionism had a religiosity of its own. Zionists who settled in agricultural colonies in Palestine were called chalutzim, a term with biblical connotations of salvation, liberation, and rescue; they described their agricultural work as avodah, which in the Bible had referred to temple worship; and their migration to Palestine was aliyah, a spiritual “ascent.” Their slogan, however, was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”148 Like other European colonists, they believed that an endangered people had a natural right to settle in “empty” land. But the land was not empty. Palestinians had their own dreams of national independence, and when the Zionists finally persuaded the international community to create the State of Israel in 1948, the Palestinians became a rootless, endangered people without a land of their own in a world that now defined itself by nationality.