by Susan Jacoby
When the Cathars were annihilated in the early fourteenth century, any monarch or bishop in Western Europe would have assumed that Roman Catholicism had been established, for all time, as the only proper route to Christian salvation. Yet, it took less than two centuries for Martin Luther to usher in the Reformation by nailing his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg (or, at least, to be credited with nailing his theses to the door). After then, it became a matter of decades, not centuries, before one new form of Christianity after another appeared—and before all of the dissident denominations began seeking converts in spite of extreme persecution. James argues that one of the most “curious peculiarities” of human beings is their susceptibility to sudden and complete conversion, but it is even more peculiar that people have shown themselves willing to die for their choice of one faith over another when both are rooted in the unseen and unprovable. That many people—not necessarily a majority, but enough—are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice is undeniable. Thus, belief in the effectiveness of forced conversion, whether politically or spiritually motivated (usually both), is always a demonstration of evidence-proof faith taken to an extreme. It is proof of a religion’s weakness, not strength—of a lack of confidence in a particular faith’s persuasive spiritual powers, even when it possesses the temporal power of a theocracy. As the well-educated liar Bin Laden certainly knew, the early Muslim rulers of al-Andalus did not force Christians or Jews to convert to Islam, but many did in fact convert—whether for social advantage, because they fell in love with a Muslim, or, who knows, maybe because the newer faith seemed to offer a more proper connection, in the Jamesian sense, to a higher power. And it couldn’t have hurt that the Muslim invaders—unlike the Visigoths and the Christians—were introducing new crops, restoring aqueducts, and disposing of sewage in ways unknown since Roman times.
The United States—the only nation in which it has been against the law, right from the start, for the government to interfere with freedom of religion—offers further proof, if more is needed, of the appeal of voluntary conversion. As an atheist, I take no pleasure in the fact that so many Americans are so eager to connect with a higher power that they would rather embrace not one but two or three faiths in a lifetime than entertain the possibility that there may be no power greater than our own. Furthermore, the American separation between church and state—which the leaders of the religious Right have tried so tenaciously to deny and demolish—is a historical tradition and a legal fact for which they should fall on their knees and thank their god. The United States is not a Christian nation, but Americans are, as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas observed, “a religious people.” We may be a more religious people than the inhabitants of secular Europe precisely because we are not a Christian nation with a Christian government. American civil society might well be as secular as France or Spain today if we, too, had encoded in our national DNA the memory of having been imprisoned, tortured, or murdered by the state for our choice of the wrong religion.
The catch is that government noninterference with the demonstrably strong human impulse toward voluntary conversion does not serve the goals of only one religion; if the heritage of persecution is strong, it may not even serve the purposes of religion in general. Yes, if you allow the distribution of Malay-language Bibles in Malaysia, some Muslims will probably decide that they prefer Jesus to Muhammad. And, yes, if Saudi Arabia stops whipping human rights activists until their backs are too bloody to be whipped any more, some Saudis will doubtless decide that they do not want any part of any god—and embrace Paine’s credo, “My own mind is my own church.” That is the nightmare of the modern inquisitors who threaten the peace and security of the world. That would be the glory of a world in which the liberty to choose any religion or no religion is recognized as a universal human right, and forced conversion becomes, finally, nothing more than a hideous oxymoron from the past.
* * *
*1 Eucharistic ministers in the church are lay Catholics, both men and women, chosen to aid in the distribution of Holy Communion if not enough priests or official deacons—who must be male—are available.
*2 I wish, instead of calling the victims dissenters or dissidents, that I could use the wonderful word once used by Russians to describe those who were skeptical about the Soviet regime. The term was inakomysliashchii; literally, “one who thinks differently.” This locution nicely captures the wide variety of people, with a wide variety of beliefs, who may be trapped in the nets of absolutist enforcers. It is a more elastic and inclusive term than the English “dissenter” or, in religious terms, “heretic.”
*3 For a devastating account of the Vatican’s refusal to criticize Italian and German militarism in the dangerous run-up to World War II in the 1930s, see David I. Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014). Kertzer notes that on Hitler’s April 20 birthday in 1939—little more than a month after Nazi troops gobbled up what was left of Czechoslovakia—Pope Pius XII’s papal nuncio in Berlin offered the Führer the pope’s congratulations, and church bells throughout Germany were rung in celebration of the blessed event.
*4 There is also a mirror-image conservative Christian response to any mention of the Crusades, as I discovered when I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times titled “The First Victims of the First Crusade” (February 15, 2015). This essay dealt with the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland by Crusaders en route to Jerusalem in 1096, and my author Web site crashed with e-mails from far-right Christians who objected to any negative talk about the Crusades and to any mention of Jewish victims. These correspondents ignored the fact that the piece compared Hebrew and Christian chronicles of the Crusaders’ behavior with newspaper accounts of the terror imposed by ISIS. My favorite example of the genre was one e-mail from a man who said I was obviously “obsessed” with Jews because I had inherited my Semitic ancestors’ “frog-like” facial features. His views may not represent the “real” Christianity but they certainly represent real anti-Semitism.
*5 In 2010, Muslims made up 7.5 percent of the population in France, 5 percent in Germany, and 4.6 percent in the United Kingdom, but only 0.8 percent in the United States. Projections for 2030 are that Muslims will make up 11.3 percent of the French population, 7.1 percent of Germans, 8.2 percent of U.K. residents, and 1.7 percent of Americans. Such demographic projections by the Pew Research Center are based on current birthrates and rates of immigration—both of which could, of course, change in two decades. Birthrates, in particular, frequently defy demographic projections based on present trends. The huge influx of refugees fleeing war in Syria could also have a major impact.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this book was first suggested to me fifteen years ago by my dear friend and onetime editor Aaron Asher, who died in 2008. I discussed many of the premises of Strange Gods with Aaron during the years before I actually started writing.
This is my third book published by Pantheon, and I cannot say enough in praise of Editor in Chief Dan Frank’s meticulous attention to every detail involved in looking after a book that takes years to research and write. The broad knowledge Dan brings to the whole process was always more rare than sentimentalists about the “good old days” of book publishing like to think, but his qualities are even rarer today.
Betsy Sallee, editorial assistant extraordinaire, made everything work more smoothly and displayed seemingly inexhaustible patience with an author who is digitally challenged when confronted by electronic copy editing. Kelly Blair (along with Caravaggio) designed the spectacular cover. Jane Hardick and Maralee Youngs are the best proofreaders I have encountered in my career.
I especially want to thank Hank Burchard, who was one of my first copy editors at The Washington Post when we were kids in the newspaper business, for reading the entire manuscript and, once more, applying his pencil to my copy. Mark Lee, Angeline Goreau, and Johanna Kaplan made valuable suggestions along th
e way. Philip Roth read the last chapter and provided a word of encouragement at the moment that comes to nearly every writer—the spasm of fear, when you are nearing the end of years of work on a book, that makes you think you will never finish.
Bob and Blaikie Worth, whose interest in anything to do with secularism never seems to run dry, provided their usual supportive attention.
Most of this book was written in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room of The New York Public Library, where I spent years reading real, physical books—the kind that make you think of other scholars and authors who held the same copies in their hands more than a century ago. I am especially indebted to Jay Barksdale and Carolyn Broomhead, who were in charge of the research rooms for writers while I was working on Strange Gods.
As always, I owe much to my agents and friends, Georges and Anne Borchardt.
NOTES
Author’s Note: When a printed work is easily accessible online from a reliable source, I have indicated this with a parenthetical (W) after the endnote. In most cases, the work can be accessed by typing the precise title into a search engine. Because Web addresses change so frequently, I have provided them only when the page has been maintained continuously for several years by an established institution.
1 AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (354–430)
1. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York, 1961), p. 59.
2. Ibid., p. 32.
3. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, 1967), p. 160.
4. Christopher Hitchens, “When the King Saved God,” Vanity Fair, May 2011. (W)
5. Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995), p. 14.
6. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. John Healey (Edinburgh, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 200–201.
7. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York, 2001), p. 218.
8. Ibid., p. 219.
9. Cited in Marc Saperstein, Moments of Crisis in Jewish-Christian Relations (Philadelphia, 1989), p. 11.
10. Saint Augustine, Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Rev. Dr. E. B. Pusey (1838; London, 1909), p. 37.
11. C. R. C. Alberry, A Manichean Psalmbook, cited in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 49.
12. Pine-Coffin, Introduction, in Augustine, Confessions, p. 24.
13. Cited in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 48.
14. Augustine, Confessions, Pusey trans., pp. 100–101.
15. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
16. Ibid., pp. 33–34.
17. Ibid., p. 34.
18. Garry Wills, Augustine’s Confessions (Princeton, 2011), p. 23.
19. Augustine, Confessions, Pusey trans., p. 34.
20. St. Augustine, Soliloquies, book I, p. 17, trans. C. C. Starbuck, rev. and ed. by Keven Knight as originally published in English in From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, N.Y., 1888), http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1703.htm. (W)
21. Saint Augustine, On the Sermon on the Mount, book I, p. 41, trans. William Findlay, rev. and ed. by Keven Knight as originally published in English in From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, N.Y., 1888), www.newadvent.org/fathers/16011.htm. (W)
22. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Christopher Gill (Oxford, Eng., 2013), book 6, p. 41.
23. Confessions, Pine-Coffin trans., p. 178.
24. Saint Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. J. G. Pilkington (New York, 1963), p. 173.
25. Ibid., pp. 177–78.
26. Augustine, Confessions, Pusey trans., p. 297.
27. Ibid., pp. 296–97.
28. Ibid., pp. 299–300.
2 THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE LIFE, THE EMPIRE
1. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York, 1954), vol. 2, p. 816.
2. Cited in Sarah Zielinski, “Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar,” Smithsonian.com, March 14, 2010. (W)
3. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind (New York, 2005), p. xix.
4. Augustine, Letter 125.2, cited in Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, 2012), p. 324.
5. Freeman, Closing, p. 84.
6. Ibid., p. 85.
7. Lactantius, “On the Deaths of Persecutors,” p. 33. (W)
8. Cited in Rod Nordland, “Persecution Defines Yemen’s Remaining Jews,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 2015.
9. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1986), p. 17.
10. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, p. xxiv.
11. Ibid., p. xxvii.
12. Cited in Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods (New York, 2004), p. 247.
13. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974), p. 193.
14. Cited in John Holland Smith, The Death of Classical Paganism (New York, 1976), pp. 169–70.
15. Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995), p. 14.
16. N. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Count in a Christian Capital (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 181–95, cited in Freeman, Closing, p. 225.
17. Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (Oxford and New York, 1990), vol. 1, p. 181.
18. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York, 1989), p. 104.
19. Ibid., p. 33.
20. Socrates Scholasticus, “Of Hypatia the Female Philosopher,” cited in Michael A. B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr (Buffalo, 2007), pp. 147–48. (W)
21. John of Nikiu, The Chronicle of John of Nikiu, chapter LXXXIV, cited in ibid, pp. 148–49. (W)
22. Cited in Pierre Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, trans. B. A. Archer (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 86.
23. Larry Rohter, “Science vs. Zealots, 1500 Years Ago,” New York Times, May 23, 2010. (W)
24. Chap. XVI, “The Temple of Serapis (AD 391),” Sketches of Church History. (W)
25. Ibid.
3 COERCION, CONVERSION, AND HERESY
1. Saint Augustine, “On Catechizing the Uninstructed,” chap. 6, rev. and ed. by Kevin Knight as originally published in English in From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, N.Y., 1887), http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1303.htm. (W)
2. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York, 1961), pp. 75–76.
3. Michael S. Horton, “Pelagianism: The Religion of the Natural Man.” (W)
4. Pelagius, “To Demetrias,” in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, 1967), p. 343.
5. In John Ferguson, Pelagius: A Historical and Theological Study (Cambridge, Eng., 1956), p. 60.
6. In ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 160.
4 BISHOP PAUL OF BURGOS (C. 1352–1435)
1. Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia, 1961), vol. 1, p. 141.
2. Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: A History, trans. Janet Lloyd (New Haven, 2005), p. 12.
3. Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995), p. 168.
4. Cited in ibid., p. 140.
5. Judith Gale Krieger, “Pablo de Santa Maria, the Purim Letter and Siete Edades del Mundo,” Mester, vol. 17, no. 2 (Fall 1988). (W)
6. Baer, History of the Jews, p. 141.
7. Netanyahu, Origins of the Inquisition, pp. 170–71.
8. Ibid., p. 171.
9. Baer, History of the Jews, p. 141.
10. Cited in ibid., pp. 143–44.
11. Cited in ibid., pp. 147–48.
12. Ibid., p. 148.
13. Cited in ibid., p. 149.
14. Krieger, “Pablo de Santa Maria.” (W)
5 IMPUREZA DE SANGRE: THE CRUMBLING OF THE CONVIVENCIA
1. S. M. Adams et al., “The Genetic Legacy of
Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula,” American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 83, no. 6 (Dec. 12, 2008), pp. 725–36. (W)
2. Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 720–97.
3. María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, 2002), p. 25.
4. Matthew Carr, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (New York, 2009), p. 17.
5. Menocal, Ornament of the World, p. 28.
6. Carr, Blood and Faith, p. 3.
7. Menocal, Ornament of the World, p. 135.
8. Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition, trans. Janet Lloyd (New Haven, Conn., 2005), p. 2.
9. Cited in Robert Pasnau, “The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy,” National Endowment for the Humanities, Nov.–Dec. 2011, http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/novemberdecember/feature/the-islamic-scholar-who-gave-us-modern-philosophy. (W)
10. Cited in Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel, “Maimonides’ Practical Advice: On Feigning Apostasy…,” Nov. 2009, http://rabbimichaelsamuel.com.
11. Shaul Magid, “The Great Islamic Rabbi,” Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2008. (W)
12. David Shasha, “Moses Maimonides: Arab Jew, Religious Humanist,” Huffington Post, March 9, 2010. (W)
6 THE INQUISITION AND THE END
1. Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition, trans. Janet Lloyd (New Haven, Conn., 2005), p. 27.
2. Ibid., p. 34.
3. Howard M. Sachar, Farewell España: The World of the Sephardim Remembered (New York, 1994), p. 73, cited in Cullen Murphy, God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 2012), p. 102.