The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  The assumed validity of Enlightenment principles logically implied their universalization. If truth was universally valid, knowledge should be made universally known. Science should replace Biblical accounts of human existence. Darwin in the nineteenth century was to produce one such account, which he meant to be of purely scientific reference, that of natural selection in the development of animal and botanical life, but the unvoiced implication was that the same was true for man, and the unsettling conclusion was that natural selection would go on.

  The Enlightenment repudiation of religion opened the quest for a secular utopia, a new resolution of the Western drive to progress that could reconcile human divisions and reveal the supposed ultimate harmonies of the human experience. European elites had since the Renaissance speculated about utopias in such works as Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627). It was thought then (and again in the Enlightenment generation) that an ideal society had existed in the distant past (a Golden Age; the classical Greeks had themselves written about the existence of Atlantis). The society of the earlier age had supposedly been corrupted by civilization. Thus Rousseau and others (including many of our twenty-first-century contemporaries) believed in the innate goodness of people that would reemerge in an ideal society, once corruption and tyranny could be swept away.*

  The Enlightenment assumption that religious superstition had been chiefly responsible for past violence and war, something widely taken for granted today in the new religious controversies of the twenty-first century, has to be considered with an understanding of the missionary assumptions of Christianity from its beginning, and subsequently those of Islam, producing the Crusades, and eventually of the Reformed Churches, culminating in the terrible wars of religion eventually ended at Westphalia in 1648.

  Christianity was a missionary religion because it considered itself commissioned to convey God’s message to the “Gentiles,” meaning all the non-Jewish world. This mission to convert the world rapidly became a political affair which the Roman authorities attempted to suppress: a new and classless religion that enjoined Christians to obey the state, accept military service, and pay taxes, but simultaneously claimed the allegiance of all Christians in matters that were not “Caesar’s” but “God’s”—a God replacing the Roman gods and therefore a subversive force.

  The Jews have never fought a war in order to spread their religion (although since the founding of the modern state of Israel they have certainly defended their country and sought to extend the territories they control). The Christians and Muslims have always done so: in the Crusades, in the Christian conquest of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and Russia in order to deliver the Christian Scripture, in the conquest and exploration of the Americas and Asia to convert their “pagan” populations, and so on into Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Far North. The Arabs’ explosions out of Arabia in the eighth and ninth centuries to conquer all the Eastern Mediterranean, the North African coast to the Atlantic, Spain, France as far as Poitiers, and through the Balkans to Vienna were military conquests inspired by their new religion, although the evolution into political empire began early.

  The Christian era had (and has) seen much violence in the course of struggles over doctrinal differences in order to suppress heresy, so as to prevent “error” from being propagated (logically, the purpose being to save even the enemies’ souls, in jeopardy because of heresy). The Crusades were meant to free the Holy Land from the Muslim infidels, who were viewed as unfit to possess them and as oppressors of Christians, and the Muslims fought the Crusaders for the equivalent reasons. By the time of the Enlightenment, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had already undermined European Christian belief in a single uncontestable religious truth. The Reformation’s challenge to the Roman church rapidly acquired political form, reinforcing or rationalizing existing dynastic and political contests, or inspiring new ones as societies divided on lines of religious persuasion.

  With Calvinism, the issue of theocracy reappeared, that of uncontested government by a single undisputable religious authority (as aspired to by Islamic integrists today, as in Iran). Calvinism attacked the separation of religious from secular or imperial authority that had generally prevailed as the fundamental assumption of the Holy Roman Empire. The Bishop of Rome had in the year 800 crowned Charlemagne as Emperor, signifying that pope and emperor each possessed legitimate authority in their separate realms, on the scriptural authority of Jesus of Nazareth that the things belonging to Caesar were to be rendered to Caesar, and things that belonged to God were owed to God.

  Calvin’s doctrine of predestination made its way from Geneva to John Knox’s Scotland, to English and Dutch Puritanism, and eventually to the American New England colonies, where the sectarian millenarianism and unaccommodating religious beliefs of America’s Puritan Pilgrim ancestors provided the United States with its founding myth, that of the City on the Hill, given a triumphalist appropriation for another age by Ronald Reagan.* The amalgamation of American Calvinism into what became mainstream American Protestantism (or its abandonment under the pressure of Enlightenment ideas) was an important contribution to American religious exceptionalism.

  Wars among Christians concerning the control of populations, territories, and dynastic interests were inspired by the political motives that provide the common substance of history. They took place, however, within an intellectual and moral framework concerned with the exactitude of what Christians considered a revelation of divine truth and motivation yet to be delivered to the mass of mankind, that of Jesus of Nazareth.

  His crucifixion and resurrection, in the New Testament account, revealed him as the Christ or Messiah foreseen in Jewish scriptures. His message was no longer directed only to God’s chosen people, the Jews, who included all the original followers of Jesus. It was now a radically new mission, to convert the whole world to the belief of the Christians that there had been a divine intervention in history which the Apostles had witnessed, that of God’s Son become man, and to foster belief in the mission among men of that third “person” of God described as the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost, in his/her archaic but more pleasing appellation).

  These claims themselves produced conflict among the Christians over the interpretation of doctrine, and also disagreements between territorial and political communities of Christians in the Roman empire, leading eventually, after Constantine the Great, to the doctrinal conflict between the bishops of the Eastern Roman Empire and those of the West, and to disputes over papal primacy among the bishops, an eminently political issue. These eventually caused the East-West schism in 1054, confirmed in 1472, that still exists.2

  The wars pitting Christian believers against other Christians ordinarily were linked to the ambitions of bishops, princes, and dynasties, or to exercises of secular power by religious authorities. Conventional and chivalric moral limits were overridden in the Crusades, driven by the religious imperative to free the Holy Land from domination by Muslim unbelievers but often degenerating into politics and plunder (Innocent III said of the Fourth Crusade, in which the Venetian armies in 1204 sacked Christian Constantinople, the second city of the Christian Roman empire: “the Latins giving an example only of perversity and works of darkness”). By the time of the Great Schism, the Greeks, who had suffered quite enough collateral damage from the activities of the Western Crusader armies, said “better the sultan’s turban than the pope’s tiara.”

  The pitiless Albigensian Crusade that took place within Europe in the thirteenth century succeeded in destroying the heretical Catharist movement in France. This was an ideological war, as were the other Crusades, but all had the peculiar and paradoxical character that they were meant to save even their enemies from the damnation that heresy or paganism implied. This is more or less what the Crusaders of the tenth to fourteenth centuries were offering Muslims: Become Christians; give up your false beliefs and accept ours, and we’ll end the war.*

  The Cathars were powerful in southern France, although the beli
ef existed elsewhere in Western Europe; it had arrived from the Balkans, as the Cathar “Bogomils” living in what today is Muslim Bosnia migrated westward under Orthodox Christian pressure. The heresy itself had ancient sources, in Manichean and Gnostic thought. Cathars believed in a dualistic universe in which the New Testament God, ruler of spiritual things, warred against Satan, who ruled matter. (The Cathars who remained in their Balkan homes are thought to have converted to Islam as a means of resistance to their Christian enemies, and to compose the population now known as Bosniaks).

  The Inquisition and Christian crusaders attacked the Cathars in France, brutally suppressing the movement, notably in a great massacre at Béziers in 1209, where no one was spared. Arnaud-Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux, made himself immortally infamous by saying, when asked how the heretics could be distinguished from the faithful in Béziers, “Burn them all. God will know his own!” This actually was, in principle, a sound statement of what he presumably believed. The crucial significance of intention in religious warfare is commonly ignored; in principle, its purpose is to destroy or limit the influence of heresy or religious error, so as to preserve the truth essential to humanity’s salvation, and if possible to convert the unbeliever or heretic.

  The claim that crusader war is mindless fanaticism, as made by John Gray in his otherwise brilliant book Black Mass, misses the point, as do the comparisons often made between crusader war and modern secular ideological war, such as the Second World War. Totalitarian war is intended to produce a permanent transformation in the nature of human society, the defining purpose of post-Enlightenment secular utopianism. The purpose of war against heretics was in the past conceived as saving them and others from the supposed deceits of Satan.

  The purpose of twentieth-century war against kulaks, or the capitalist bourgeoisie, or what Comintern propagandists chose to describe as running dogs of imperialism, was to exterminate social classes that resist human progress, or in the Nazi case to destroy human groups such as the Jews as inferior beings unfit to live. It is the designated group’s nature itself that makes the group an obstacle to the achievement of a new order. The heretic, on the other hand, can be converted to the truth. This is a capital point in understanding the difference between religious millenarianism and secular utopianism. Gray, for example, writes that the stated belief of George W. Bush that his government’s “responsibility to history is clear: to … rid the world of evil,” ultimately derives from a “Christian post-millenarianism, which harks back to the belief of the first Christians that the blemishes of human life can be wiped away in a benign catastrophe.”3 President Bush actually was giving voice to the ancient Manichean heresy that has become unwittingly assimilated into the apocalyptic fictions (themselves heretical, in terms of orthodox Protestant belief) of a sect of the American so-called “religious right,” by whom the former American president seems to have been greatly (and disastrously) influenced.

  The American invasion of Iraq and the Israeli displacement and repression of Palestinians also are seen by many theologically naive American fundamentalist Protestants as fulfilling apocalyptic prophesies in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. They are interpreted as preliminary to the prophesied “End Days” of earthly existence, which will bring the separation of the Saved—themselves and a limited number of other Christians belonging to specified denominations or sects, who have experienced a Pentecostal experience and “found Jesus”—who will be “raptured away” to heaven, while the rest of us, denominationally excluded Christians, all Muslims, and all those Jews unlucky enough not to have converted to Christian belief in the last instants before Armageddon’s arrival, will go to hell. It’s all in the Bible, they claim.

  In this particular Protestant conception of mortal destiny, Muslims, Jews, and errant Christians are treated as lacking in personal responsibility for what happens to them; they are the assigned agents in a drama in which a limited number of Christians are predestined to salvation not by their virtue, since most of these believers are part of an ultimately Calvinist doctrinal tradition holding all of fallen man to be totally corrupt, but by the arbitrary choice of God. Predestinarianism has, of course, been a tormenting and controversial issue in Protestant theology since even before Calvin’s time.

  Apocalyptic sectarianism of this kind, together with other utopian religious movements, have been fairly common in Christian (and other) religious history, although more often than not quietist, unworldly, and pacifist, as with the Mennonites and Amish (of Swiss Anabaptist descent), Quakers, and Shakers. More dramatic theocratic utopias were established by the Calvinists in Geneva; by the Mormons’ founder, Joseph Smith, in “burnt-over” upstate New York; and by their counterparts elsewhere, including, of course, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they are celebrated as America’s Pilgrim fathers.

  If we exclude the theologically eccentric contemporary sects of American Christian apocalyptics, eager to be snatched to heaven before the battle of Armageddon destroys everyone else, leaving existence unblemished, Christian eschatology generally has not expected John Gray’s benign catastrophe but a divine intervention to vindicate the elect against their oppressors, raise the dead, judge mankind, and establish a new creation. Such apocalyptic forecasts were frequent in the two or three centuries before and after the birth of Jesus. “The” Apocalypse is the subject of the last book of the New Testament, the book of Saint John. In it, John falls into a trance and the bearer of prophecy identifies himself by saying, “I am before all, I am at the end of all, and I live. I who underwent death am alive, as you seest, to endless ages, and I hold the keys of death and hell.” While this is unmistakably a description of the Christians’ Christ, the meaning of the prophecy that follows is obscure and has always been treated with great circumspection by theologians.

  During and after the Reformation both Catholic and Protestant authorities, while struggling against one another, also tried to contain or destroy such heretical or apocalyptic sects as the revolutionary Anabaptists, regarded as not only false but erratic, uncontrollable, and irrational. Rationalism and rational argument were dominant in mainstream Western Christianity, even if the fundamental Christian claim that God exists and has implicated Himself in human history seems to modern secular society inherently unreasonable. The established religious as well as political authorities naturally had heavy investments in order and orthodoxy.

  Anglo-American intellectual and political circles during the late 1950s and after were greatly influenced by a wonderful book on the millenarian currents and sects of medieval and Reformation Europe, seeking earthly utopias. The author was the British scholar Norman Cohn, and the book was called The Pursuit of the Millennium.

  His topic was suggested to him by his experiences as a military intelligence officer during the Second World War and his book was published at the height of the Cold War. It describes revolutionary, chiliastic (millenarian) movements such as the Flagellants and revolutionary Anabaptists among “the surplus population living on the margin” in medieval and Reformation Europe, whose leaders made “boundless, millennial” promises that inspired upheavals of great violence, meant to bring about the “utopia” of Christ’s imminent return to rule the earth. Writing at the time he did, Cohn saw a connection between these prophets and their followers, and the leaders and followers of the Communist and Fascist totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. This seemed particularly true in the Fascist case because of certain parallels to the history of the revolutionary Anabaptists, who eventually ended in a cult of an amoral superman.

  Cohn describes the pitiless suppression by church and civil authorities of the Anabaptists in Münster in 1535, where the Anabaptists had established an absolutist religious dictatorship and proclaimed a new revelation, their leader ordering and enforcing polygamy, terrorizing dissidents, and naming himself Monarch and Messiah of the Last Days. The struggle in which this ended pitted the illuminati-led utopian revolutionaries against the forces of political order and religious
orthodoxy, outraged by the turbulence provoked by this fanatical, heretical, and subversive movement .4

  The constraints of customary morality were tested to the limit in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion. Yet even the terrible Thirty Years’ War, the great post-Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggle between Protestants and Catholics, was mainly a competition for secular power between Protestant and Catholic monarchs and princes. Both sides formally wanted the religious abdication of the other side. In fact, what practical people on both sides probably most wanted was restoration of the comfortable and singularly noncommittal and nondoctrinal (indeed, formally heretical) agreement of “cuius regio eius religio” that had prevailed before, meaning that people were expected to accept the religion of their rulers (which was more or less the terms on which the Thirty Years’ War actually ended).

  Its best English historian, C. V. Wedgwood, wrote of it that the war “need not have happened and settled nothing worth settling … The dismal course of the conflict, dragging on from one decade to the next and from one deadlock to the next, seems to me an object lesson on the dangers and disasters which can arise when men of narrow hearts and little minds are in high places.”

  By the eighteenth century there was a reaction against the horrors of such war. Fighting continued after the Westphalian Settlement, but within limits, meant to achieve reasonable political and dynastic purposes. The Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero writes that “a formula for resolving conflicts between states [had by then been arrived at] that consisted in a mixture of war, negotiation, battles and indemnities … ” He concludes, “Force can only serve [mankind] when it knows where to stop, for in intensifying itself it causes its own destruction. This is one of the simplest and most difficult of truths, and one which the human mind is both capable and yet incapable of comprehending.”