Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  In October 1933, Stein’s spiritual mentors finally agreed that she could join the Carmelite Order. Her mother, who had reluctantly accepted Stein’s conversion to Catholicism, was even more upset by her decision to become a nun. Stein entered a Carmelite monastery in Cologne, and by the spring of 1934, she had become a novice, adopting the religious habit and the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her brothers and sisters were beginning to find places of refuge around the world; Frau Auguste Stein fortunately died in 1936 and did not have to face the trauma of emigration or death in the concentration camps.

  As a Carmelite, Stein was encouraged by her superiors to continue her philosophical writings. Her work, needless to say, could not be published in Germany. In 1938, she took her final vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and became a full member of the Carmelite Order. However, the net was closing in on all Germans of Jewish descent, including those within the walls of convents and monasteries, and the sisters spirited Edith away to a convent in Echt, across the border in Holland, on December 31, 1938. Her older sister Rosa, who had stayed with their ailing mother until her death, wanted to join Edith and follow her in becoming a Catholic, and she was able to do so in early 1940. But all was lost, for both Stein sisters, when the Nazis occupied Holland in May of that year. In Echt, Edith and Rosa received the news that their older brother Paul, his wife, Trude, and their sister Frieda had been sent to Theresienstadt. Frieda died there in 1942, Paul and Trude in 1943. They died for the same reason that Edith and Rosa Stein, Catholic converts, died—because they were born Jews.

  As Garry Wills observes in Papal Sin, the Vatican made the “ludicrous case” that Stein was killed for being a Catholic in a “tricky and roundabout way.”15 A joint statement in 1942 by Dutch Protestant ministers and Catholic bishops had condemned Nazi deportations of all Dutch Jews and had singled out Jews who had converted to Christianity, because “such measures would sever them from participation in the life of the Church.” The Nazis then said they would make an exception for baptized Jews if the bishops would stop protesting. But the bishop of Utrecht (most other clergy backed down) issued a pastoral letter continuing to denounce the deportations, and the Nazis went after baptized Jews—even in convents. Nevertheless, the German occupiers’ desire to silence Dutch Catholic and Protestant clergy does not mean that Edith and Rosa Stein were sent to Auschwitz because they were Catholics. On the contrary: if the Nazis had really wanted to get the bishops’ attention, they would have deported all Catholic nuns or, for that matter, priests, not simply one nun and one refugee of Jewish descent. There was no roundup of Dutch Catholics (unless they had been born Jewish) after the bishops’ letters.

  Moreover, Stein’s actions en route to Auschwitz demonstrate that she did not want to become a martyr or a victim. She tried to attract attention to her identity and her plight, leaving notes addressed to the Swiss Consulate at train stops along the way, and even offering to pay for help. Her faith was precious to her; had she imagined she was dying for it instead of for her Jewish birth, she would not have tried to escape. Because she had many international contacts, Stein—unlike many of her fellow Jewish deportees—knew what awaited them at the end of the journey.

  According to an article published in a Cologne newspaper on August 9, 1982, the last time anyone on the “outside” saw Stein was when the deportation train stopped at Breslau Station in 1942. Johannes Wieners, a postal employee who had recently been drafted by the Wehrmacht, told the newspaper that a woman in a nun’s habit stepped into the opening of the car and said, “This is my beloved hometown. I will never see it again. We are riding to our death.” Wieners asked, “Do your companion prisoners believe that also?” She answered, “It is better that they do not know it.” Wieners’s fellow workers were annoyed at him for speaking to a Jew and told him so. He was eventually taken prisoner of war by the Red Army. Years later, after returning to Germany, he saw a picture of Stein in the newspaper and was sure that she was the nun with whom he had spoken when the train stopped in Breslau. Stein was gassed within the week.

  A final report, dated June 2, 1958, by the Bureau of Information of the Netherlands Red Cross, confirms that Edith Teresa Hedwig Stein, whose last residence was the Monastery of the Carmelite Nuns, Bovenstestraat 48, Echt, Holland, was arrested on August 2, 1942, “FOR REASONS OF RACE, AND SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF JEWISH DESCENT.” The capital letters are printed on the Red Cross document. The lie that Edith Stein, or any other Jewish convert to Christianity in Nazi-occupied Europe, died in a concentration camp not because she was a Jew but because she was a Christian, is imprinted on the history of modern Catholicism.

  * * *

  *1 The title turns up again in the 1941 Hollywood movie Watch on the Rhine, starring Bette Davis, written by Dashiell Hammett and released before America entered World War II. Here the context was quite different: the message was that the rest of the world should be paying more attention to the German threat to world peace.

  *2 See Leonard Gross, The Last Jews in Berlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

  *3 The whole question of whether “outsiders” should remain silent bystanders when they hear racial, ethnic, or religious slurs against another group is of course a perennial social and ethical issue in many societies. In multiethnic countries, this is often one of the first ethical questions children bring home from the schoolyard. What is striking about Stein’s observation is the utter matter-of-factness of her idea, as a young woman, that only a Jew speaks out against anti-Semitic remarks.

  *4 This standard definition, which might be offered to students in Philosophy 101, would not be accepted—or would be greatly modified—by many disciples of the phenomenological movement.

  *5 When the Nazis came to power, Jewish World War I veterans (especially those decorated for bravery) initially received a measure of protection from restrictions imposed on other Jews. Those preferences were revoked or ignored as the years passed, and in the end, Jewish veterans died in the concentration camps along with all other Jews.

  *6 The Institute of Carmelite Studies, based in Washington, D.C., and staffed with outstanding translators and scholars of Catholicism like the late Sister Josephine Koeppel, is largely responsible for the preservation of Edith Stein’s papers. Some of her letters and private writings were unquestionably lost during the war, when Carmelites feared that searches by the Gestapo might uncover communications that would endanger them as well as other people mentioned in the documents. But much of what she wrote, unpublished in her lifetime, was preserved by the nuns.

  *7 Both Stein’s letter and the text of Pacelli’s reply are contained in the once-secret Vatican archives covering the papacy of Pius XI, which were opened in 2006. The archives covering the even more controversial papacy of Pius XII, and his relations with Nazi Germany and Hitler, remain closed.

  · PART VI ·

  AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:

  TOWARD RELIGIOUS CHOICE AS A NATURAL RIGHT

  17

  PETER CARTWRIGHT (1785–1872): ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND THE BATTLE FOR REASON

  In 1801, when I was in my sixteenth year, my father, my eldest half brother, and myself, attend[ed] a wedding about five miles from home, where there was a great deal of drinking and dancing, which was very common at marriages those days….After a late hour in the night, we mounted our horses and started for home. I was riding my race-horse.

  A few minutes after we had put up the horses, and were sitting by the fire, I began to reflect on the manner in which I had spent the day and evening. I felt guilty and condemned….All of a sudden, my blood rushed to my head, my heart palpitated, in a few minutes I turned blind; an awful impression rested on my mind that death had come and I was unprepared to die. I fell on my knees and began to ask God to have mercy on me.

  —AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF PETER CARTWRIGHT, THE BACKWOODS PREACHER, 1856

  THUS DID PETER CARTWRIGHT, one of the most fiery evangelical Methodist preachers of America’s first century as a nation, describe th
e beginning of his conversion experience at the Cane Ridge Communion, a famous 1801 revival meeting in southwestern Kentucky that eventually drew, according to some sources, tens of thousands of previously unchurched, or at least religiously lukewarm, souls. By other accounts, there may have been only thousands; perhaps the higher estimates were based on a symbolic usage of the number ten, resembling the use of forty in the Bible. Even allowing for the exaggeration of pious observers, the Cane Ridge gathering was one of the most significant (and widely reported, by recently established newspapers) religious events in American history. “Lord, make it like Cane Ridge” was a frequent prayer at American revival meetings for decades afterward.

  The spiritual awakening of the young, largely unschooled (but not illiterate) Cartwright was, in many respects, typical of the evangelical conversions that would characterize American life throughout many cycles of religious fervor, exemplified in revival meetings in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Born in Amherst County, Virginia, Cartwright grew up in a pioneer farm family that pulled up stakes two years after the end of the Revolutionary War (of which Peter’s father was a veteran) and headed for Kentucky. Kentucky was the frontier, and the settlers were in danger from the lawless elements within their own communities as well as from Indians. What is now Logan County, where the family settled down, was known as “Rogues’ Harbor.” As Cartwright colorfully recounts:

  Here many refugees, from almost all parts of the Union, fled to escape justice or punishment; for although there was law, yet it could not be executed, and it was a desperate state of society. Murderers, horse thieves, highway robbers, and counterfeiters fled here until they combined and actually formed a majority. The honest and civil part of the citizens would prosecute these wretched banditti, but they would swear each other clear; and they really put all law at defiance, and carried on such desperate violence and outrage that the honest part of the citizens seemed to be driven to the necessity of uniting and combining together, and taking the law into their own hands, under the name of Regulators. This was a very desperate state of things.1

  Gun battles and lynchings (the latter usually carried out by Regulators against criminals) were the stuff of daily life, and it was not easy to determine who was on the side of the law. Puritan hegemony, which had restrained ordinary criminal behavior as well as religious dissent in the early days of colonization in New England, did not exist on the frontier. Thus, the arrival of circuit-riding preachers, whose theological credentials came not from any Eastern divinity school but from their own conversion experiences, was greeted as a force for order in a society desperately in need of enforceable social norms. To churchgoing Americans in long-established small towns in New England or even in the large, less orderly cities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, revival meetings on the frontier looked like wild, disorderly melees bordering on the savage. To settlers on the frontier, the revivals could leave behind a new kind of security based on some sort of religious affiliation, which might also encourage the establishment of functional law enforcement institutions. As Richard Hofstadter observes in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, “The style of a church or sect is to a great extent a function of social class, and the forms of worship and religious doctrine congenial to one social group may be uncongenial to another.” The “possessing classes,” Hofstadter argues, have generally shown more interest in reconciling religion with reason and with the observance of elaborate, traditional liturgical forms. The “disinherited classes,” by contrast, have been moved more by emotional forms of religion and been hostile to ecclesiastical hierarchy associated with the upper classes.2

  The one unusual aspect of Cartwright’s upbringing on the frontier was that his father sent him, for a brief time, to a boarding school run by a traveling preacher for the Methodist Episcopal Church. There Cartwright learned to read and write—a capability that would greatly enhance his future prospects, in spite of his expressed disdain for higher education (at least insofar as it was considered a qualification for the ministries of upper-class denominations). Had he been illiterate, Cartwright would not have become one of the best-known Methodist ministers of his day. By the 1820s, frontier communities were beginning to regard the presence of a school as a necessary sign of civilization. Circuit-riding preachers on the frontier, at a time when many settlements in Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and Illinois lacked churches and ministers of their own, could enhance their influence through their own literacy. A Kentucky farmer might not have any use for a minister with a degree from the Yale Divinity School, but he did value a preacher who could actually read the Good Book.

  Scholarly estimates indicate that 90 percent of the residents of the brand-new United States of America were “unchurched” when Cartwright was born in 1785, in the early years of the Second Great Awakening. “Unchurched” meant not that Americans were indifferent to religion but that they were in the process of moving to areas of the country beyond the reach of existing, formal religious institutions. Thus, a large proportion of the population was ripe for proselytizing, spread across the land at revival meetings over hundreds and eventually thousands of miles. Religious conversion, at least among Protestant denominations, became a feature of daily life in the formative decades of the republic. Furthermore—then as now—“born-again” experiences that took place without the exchange of one denomination for another were also considered forms of conversion. And—then as now—families whose faith was expressed mainly by saying grace before meals and going to church on Sunday could be irked and unsettled by a member who suddenly placed religion and Jesus at the center of every aspect of life. Cartwright does not tell us in his autobiography how his father and brother reacted to his sudden discovery that dancing and riding racehorses—which they enjoyed—not only wasted time but were sinful.

  Cartwright’s description of his own conversion moment at Cane Ridge, following several weeks of reflection upon the depravity of playing cards and betting on horses, is typical of many accounts by converts who were able to write about their experience.

  To this meeting I repaired, a guilty, wretched sinner. On the Saturday evening of said meeting, I went, with weeping multitudes, and bowed before the stand, and earnestly prayed for mercy. In the midst of a solemn struggle of soul, an impression was made on my mind, as though a voice said to me, “Thy sins are all forgiven thee.” Divine light flashed all round me, and it really seemed as if I was in heaven; the trees, the leaves on them, and everything seemed, and I really thought were, praising God. My mother raised the shout, my Christian friends crowded around me and joined me in praising God; and though I have been since then, in many instances, unfaithful, yet I have never, for one moment, doubted that the Lord did, then and there, forgive my sins and give me religion.3

  Many of these conversion accounts have an adolescent tone (whether or not they actually took place in adolescence). Nearly all such stories display an exaggerated consciousness of both sin and the possibility of redemption, a sense of being directly addressed by an otherworldly power, and supernatural manifestations within the natural world. Cartwright, like Saul on the road to Damascus, experiences a period of blindness. Flashing lights are as much a staple of conversion accounts from nineteenth-century revival meetings as a white light at the end of a tunnel is in every modern movie about near-death experiences. Unlike Augustine’s Confessions, nineteenth-century American adolescent conversion stories generally skirt the subject of sexual sin: an excessive fondness for dancing is as close as Cartwright gets to the matter. But there is no doubt that these conversions were real, in the sense of being life-changing, to most of the people who experienced them, and that their very frequency, up to and after the closing of the frontier in the 1890s, shaped an American religious environment that would become more accustomed to and accepting of changes of faith than any country in Europe. It took time for existing religious institutions to catch up with the westward movement of settlers, and “backwoods” preachers, many self-appointed, would fill the gap
.

  •

  Cartwright eventually settled in Illinois, where he mixed religion and politics with zest. Like most evangelicals, he was quick to denounce any hint of government interference with religion but was uninterested in the other side of the founding constitutional bargain, which restrains religious interference with government. In his first run for public office, in 1832, Reverend Cartwright, a Democrat, defeated a Whig, a young store clerk, for a seat in the Illinois state legislature. In 1846, however, Cartwright ran for Congress and was defeated by his former opponent, a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln shared Cartwright’s lack of formal schooling but not his biblically literal (today they would be called fundamentalist) religious convictions and dismissal of Enlightenment thought. During the 1846 campaign, Cartwright charged Lincoln with deism and “infidelity”—an accusation based partly on the well-known fact that Lincoln did not belong to any church (an omission less acceptable socially in the 1840s than it had been when Cartwright was a young man). Moreover, Lincoln, who was born in 1809, was drawn to the books of Enlightenment thinkers ranging from the most liberal Protestants to outright atheists. Two of the books Lincoln was reading at the time of his first campaign against Cartwright were Enlightenment classics—Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Constantin Volney’s The Ruins.*1

  Cartwright’s encounters with Lincoln (not altogether unfriendly, because they would come to agree about slavery) embodied a confrontation between two competing forces that have shaped American religious culture to this day. The first, exemplified by Cartwright’s conversion, was a propensity for highly emotional, nonhierarchical, personal forms of religion associated with biblical literalism and revivalism. The second was a struggle—sometimes successful, sometimes not—within mainline American Protestantism to reconcile Christian faith with Enlightenment rationalism. Lincoln the freethinker—a man who, whatever his private beliefs were, would have nothing to do with organized religion—was shaped in part by the individualism of the frontier and in part by the mainstream religious split that encouraged not only the establishment of more liberal Protestant denominations but the rise of secular American freethought.