The First World War (1914–18) destroyed a generation of young men, yet many Europeans initially embraced it with an enthusiasm that shows how difficult it is to resist those emotions long activated by religion and now by nationalism, the new faith of the secular age. In August 1914 the cities of Europe were swept up in a festival atmosphere that, like the rituals of the French Revolution, made the “imaginary community” of the nation an incarnate reality. Total strangers gazed enraptured into each other’s eyes; estranged friends embraced, feeling a luminous cohesion that defied rational explanation. The euphoria has been dismissed as an outbreak of communal madness, but those who experienced it said that it was the “most deeply lived” event of their lives. It has also been called an “escape from modernity” since it sprang from a profound discontent with industrialized society, in which people were defined and classified by their function and everything was subordinated to a purely material end.149 The declaration of war seemed a summons to the nobility of altruism and self-sacrifice that gave life meaning.
“All differences of class, rank and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity,” the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled. Everyone “had been incorporated into the mass, he was a part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.… Each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass and there to be purified of all selfishness.”150 There was a yearning to cast aside an identity that felt too lonely, narrow, and confining and to escape from the privacy imposed by modernity.151 An individual “was no longer the isolated person of former times,” said Zweig.152 “No more are we what we had been so long: alone,” declared Marianne Weber.153 A new era seemed to have begun. “People realized that they were equal,” remembered Rudolf Binding. “No one wished to count for more than anyone else.… It was like a rebirth.”154 It “transported the body as well as the soul into a trance-like, enormously enhanced love of life and existence,” recalled Carl Zuckmayer, “a joy of participation, of living-along-with, a feeling, even, of grace.”155 The triviality of the “petty, aimless lounging life of peacetime is done with,” Franz Schauwecker exulted.156 For the first time, said Konrad Haenisch, a lifelong critic of German capitalism, he could join “with a full heart, a clean conscience, and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”157
In the trenches, however, volunteers discovered that far from escaping industrialization, they were entirely dominated by it. Like a sinister religious revelation, the war laid bare the material, technological, and mechanical reality that twentieth-century civilization concealed.158 “Everything becomes machine-like,” one soldier wrote; “one might almost term the war an industry of professionalized human slaughter.”159 It is a telling indictment of the loneliness and segmentation of modern society that many of these soldiers never forgot the profound sense of community they experienced in the trenches. “There enwrapped us, never to be lost, the sudden comradeship of the ranks,” T. E. Lawrence recalled.160 One of Simone de Beauvoir’s professors “discovered the joys of comradeship which overcome all social barriers” and determined never again to submit to “the segregation which in civil life separates young middle-class men from working chaps … something he felt like a personal mutilation.”161 Many found that they could not even hate the invisible enemy and were shocked when they finally saw the people they had been shelling for months. “They were showing themselves to us as they really were, men and soldiers like us, in uniform like us,” an Italian soldier explained.162
This secular war for the nation had given some of the participants experiences associated with the religious traditions: an ekstasis, a sense of liberation, freedom, equanimity, community, and a profound relationship with other human beings, even the enemy. Yet the First World War heralded a century of unprecedented slaughter and genocide that was inspired not by religion as people had come to know it but by an equally commanding notion of the sacred: men fought for power, glory, scarce resources, and above all, their nation.
11
Religion Fights Back
During the twentieth century, there would be many attempts to resist the modern state’s banishment of religion to the private sphere. To committed secularists, these religious efforts seemed like so many efforts to turn the clock back, but in fact all were modern movements that could have flourished only in our own time. Indeed, some commentators have seen them as postmodern, since they represented a widespread dissatisfaction with many of the canons of modernity. Whatever the philosophers, pundits, or politicians claimed, people all over the world expressed a wish to see religion playing a more central role in public life. This type of religiosity is often called fundamentalism—an unsatisfactory term because it does not translate easily into other languages and suggests a monolithic phenomenon. In fact, though these movements share certain family resemblances, each has its own focus and trigger. In almost every region where a secular government has been established, a religious countercultural protest has developed as well, similar to the Muslim and Hindu reform movements that had emerged in British-controlled India. The attempt to confine religion to the individual conscience had originated in the West as part of Western modernization, but to others it made no sense. Indeed, many would find the expectation unnatural, reductive, and even damaging.
As I have written elsewhere in detail, fundamentalism, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, is not in itself a violent phenomenon.1 Only a tiny proportion of fundamentalists commit acts of terror; most are simply trying to live a devout life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith, and nearly all begin with what is perceived as an assault on them by the secular, liberal establishment. These movements tend to follow a basic pattern: first they retreat from mainstream society to create an enclave of authentic faith, rather as the Deobandis did in the subcontinent; at a later stage, some—but by no means all—engage in a counteroffensive to “convert” the broader society. Every one of the movements I have studied is rooted in fear—in the conviction that modern society is out to destroy not only their faith but also themselves and their entire way of life. This is not simply, or even mainly, paranoid. Fundamentalism first became a force in Jewish life, for example, after the Holocaust, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate European Jewry. Moreover, we have seen that in the past when people fear annihilation, their horizons tend to shrink, and they can lash out violently—though most “fundamentalists” have confined their antagonism to rhetoric or nonviolent political activity. It will be our concern to consider the reasons why those exceptional cases turn out as they do.
We can learn a great deal about fundamentalism generally from a crisis in one of the first of these movements, which developed in the United States during and immediately after the First World War. The term itself was coined in the 1920s by American Protestants who resolved to return to the “fundamentals” of Christianity. Their retreat from public life after the Civil War had narrowed and, perhaps, distorted their vision. Instead of engaging as before with such issues as racial or economic inequality, they focused on biblical literalism, convinced that every single assertion of scripture was literally true. And so their enemy was no longer social injustice but the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, which had been embraced by the more liberal American Christians who were still attempting to bring the gospel to bear on social problems. For all the claims that fundamentalisms make of a return to basics, however, these movements are highly innovative. Before the sixteenth century, for instance, Christians had always been encouraged to read scripture allegorically; even Calvin did not believe that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life, and he took severely to task those “frantic persons” who believed that it was.2 The new fundamentalist outlook now required a wholesale denial of glaring discrepancies in scripture itself. Closed to any alternative and coherent only in its own terms, biblical inerrancy created a shuttered mind-set born of
great fear. “Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” warned Charles Hodge, who formulated this dogma in 1874.3 This embattled preoccupation with the status of the biblical text reflected a wider Christian concern about the nature of religious authority. Just four years earlier the First Vatican Council (1870) had promulgated the new—and highly controversial—doctrine of papal infallibility. At a time when modernity was demolishing old truths and leaving crucial questions unanswered, there was a yearning for absolute certainty.
Fundamentalisms are also often preoccupied by the horror of modern warfare and violence. The shocking slaughter in Europe during the First World War could only be the beginning of the end, the evangelicals concluded; these times of unprecedented carnage must be the battles foretold in the book of Revelation. There was a deep anxiety about the centralization of modern society and anything approaching world rule. In the new League of Nations, they saw the revival of the Roman Empire predicted in Revelation, the abode of Antichrist.4 Fundamentalists now saw themselves grappling with satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. Their spirituality was defensive and filled with a paranoid terror of the sinister influence of the Catholic minority; they even described American democracy as the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.”5 The American fundamentalists’ chilling scenario of the end time, with its wars, bloodshed, and slaughter, is symptomatic of a deep-rooted distress that cannot be assuaged by cool rational analysis. In less stable countries, it would be all too easy for a similar malaise, despair, and fear to erupt in physical violence.
Their horrified recoil from the violence of the First World War also led American fundamentalists to veto modern science. They became obsessed with evolutionary theory. There was a widespread belief that German wartime atrocities were the result of the nation’s devotion to Darwinian social theory, according to which existence was a brutal, godless struggle in which only the strongest should survive. This was, of course, a vulgar distortion of Darwin’s hypothesis, but at a time when people were trying to make sense of the bloodiest war in human history, evolution seemed to symbolize everything that was most ruthless in modern life. These ideas were particularly disturbing to small-town Americans who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist elite—almost as though they were being colonized by a foreign power. This distress came to a head in the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, when the fundamentalists, represented by the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, tried to defend the state legislature’s prohibition of the teaching of evolution in the public schools. They were opposed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow, supported by the newly founded American Civil Liberties Union.6 Even though the state law was upheld, Bryan’s bumbling performance under Darrow’s sharp interrogation thoroughly discredited the fundamentalists’ cause.
Their response to this humiliation is instructive. The press mounted a virulent campaign exposing Bryan and his fundamentalist supporters as hopeless anachronisms. Fundamentalists had no place in modern society, argued the journalist H. L. Mencken: “They are everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden for human minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in the little red schoolhouses.” He mocked Dayton as a “one-horse Tennessee village” and its citizens the “gaping primates of the upland valleys.”7 Yet whenever a fundamentalist movement is attacked, either with violence or in a media campaign, it almost invariably becomes more extreme. It shows malcontents that their fear is well grounded: the secular world really is out to destroy them. Before the Scopes Trial, not even Hodge had believed that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail, but afterward “creation science” became the rallying cry of the fundamentalist movement. Before Dayton, some leading fundamentalists still engaged in social work with people on the left; afterward, they swung to the far right, retreating altogether from the mainstream and creating their own churches, colleges, broadcasting stations, and publishing houses. They grew and grew below the mainstream cultural radar. Once they became aware of their considerable public support, in the late 1970s they would reemerge from the margins with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.
American fundamentalism would ever after vie to be heard as a decisive voice in American politics—with notable success. It would not resort to violence, largely because American Protestants did not suffer as greatly as did, for example, the Muslims of the Middle East. Unlike the secular rulers of Egypt or Iran, the U.S. government did not confiscate their property, torture and assassinate their clergy, or cruelly dismantle their institutions. In America secular modernity was a homegrown product, which was not imposed militarily from outside but had evolved organically over time, and when they arrived on the public scene in the late 1970s, American fundamentalists could use well-established democratic channels to make their point. Although American Protestant fundamentalism was not usually an agent of violence, it was, to a degree, a response to violence: the trauma of modern warfare and the psychological assault of the aggressive disdain of the secularist establishment. Both can distort a religious tradition in ways that reverberate far beyond the community of the faithful. Nevertheless, fundamentalism in America shares with other disaffected groups the sensibility of the colonized, in its defiant self-assertion and in a determination to recover one’s own identity and culture against a powerful Other.
Muslim fundamentalism, by contrast, has often—though again, not always—segued into physical aggression. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant Christianity but rather because Muslims had a much harsher introduction to modernity. Before the birth of the modern state in the crucible of colonialism, Islam had continued in many Muslim lands to operate as the organizing principle of society. In 1920, after the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France divided Ottoman territories into Western-style nation-states and established mandates and protectorates there before granting these new countries independence. But the inherent contradictions of the nation-state would be especially wrenching in the Muslim world, where there was no tradition of nationalism. The frontiers drawn up by the Europeans were so arbitrary that it was extremely difficult to create a national “imaginary community.” In Iraq, for example, where Sunnis were a minority, the British appointed a Sunni ruler to govern both the Shii majority and the Kurds in the north. In Lebanon, 50 percent of the population was Muslim and naturally wanted close economic and political relations with their Arab neighbors, but the Christian government selected by the French preferred stronger ties with Europe. The partition of Palestine and the creation of the Jewish State of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 proved no less mischievous. It resulted in the forcible displacement of 750,000 Arab Palestinians, and those who remained found themselves living in a state that was hostile to their nation. There was the added complication that Israel was a secular state founded for adherents of one of the world’s ancient religions. Yet for the first twenty years of its existence, the Israeli leadership was aggressively secular, and the violence inflicted on the Palestinians, Israel’s wars with its neighbors, and the Palestinian riposte were fought not for religion but for secular nationalism.
The British partition of the subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947 was similarly problematic, since both were established as secular states in the name of religion. The brutal process of partition caused the displacement of over seven million people and the deaths of a million others who were attempting to flee from one state to join their coreligionists in the other. In both India and Pakistan, vast numbers found themselves unable to speak the so-called national language. A particularly volatile situation was created in Kashmir, which despite a Muslim majority was given to India, because it was ruled by a Hindu maharaja. That British decision is still contested, and a similar arbitrariness was felt in the separation of eastern and western Pakistan by a thousand miles of Indian territory.
As they struggled for independence before parti
tion, Hindus had engaged in an intense discussion about the legitimacy of fighting the British, shaped in large part by the Bhagavad-Gita, a text that has deeply shaped the collective memory of India. Ahimsa was an important spiritual value in India, yet the Gita seemed to sanction violence. Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), however, disagreed with this interpretation. He had been born into a vaishya family and had many Jain friends who influenced his later attitudes. In 1914, after working for years as a lawyer in South Africa to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, he had returned to India and become interested in the issue of home rule, founding the Natal Indian Congress Party and developing his unique method of resisting colonial oppression by nonresistance. Besides the Hindu religious tradition, he had been influenced by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.
Central to Gandhi’s worldview was the insight, first developed in the Upanishads, that all beings were manifestations of the Brahman. Since everybody shared the same sacred core, violence went against the metaphysical bias of the entire universe. This deeply spiritual vision of the oneness of existence directly countered the aggressive separatism and chauvinism of the nation-state. Gandhi’s peaceable refusal to obey the self-serving obduracy of the British regime was based on three principles: ahimsa, satyagraha (the “soul force” that comes with the realization of the profound unity of humanity), and swaraj (“self-rule”). In the Gita, Gandhi maintained, Arjuna’s initial refusal to fight had not been true ahimsa, because he still regarded himself as different from his enemies and had not realized that they were all, friend and foe alike, embodiments of the Brahman. Had Arjuna truly understood that he and Duryodana, the adversary he was about to fight, were ultimately one, he would have acquired the “soul force” that had the power to transform an enemy’s hatred into love.
Fields of Blood Page 38