Recent European History, Politics and Religion

An important historian discusses Christianity and secularism in Europe:

Talk about a grandiose title. No, I am not setting out to write a library-worth of articles on these topics, but just draw your attention to two valuable volumes penned twenty years ago by the noted British historian, Michael Burleigh. They cover European history from the time of the French Revolution to the war on terror. They are:

Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War. (HarperCollins, 2005, 529pp)

Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror. (HarperCollins, 2006, 2007. 557pp)

While one might think these books address the problems of religion (which certainly exist), Burleigh’s main concern is to discuss, and warn against, radical secularism and its war on religion. One aim is to look at how Europe has experienced far more bloodshed and tyranny during this period than it has because of religion. Indeed, he notes how the secular powers that be have had far too much negative impact on the churches.

Please note that I have discussed these volumes three years ago:

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2022/10/22/on-political-religion/

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2022/10/23/on-statist-religion/

Here I am not seeking to present any sort of proper reviews of these works, but to simply quote a bit more from them in the hopes that readers might be tempted to grab copies for themselves. Here are some select portions of each volume:

Earthly Powers

In the Introduction Burleigh says his intention “was to discuss some notorious ‘political religions’, notably the civic cults of the Jacobins during the French Revolution, and the no less bizarre festivals and spectacles of the Bolsheviks, Fascists and National Socialists.” (p. 1)

He looks at how totalitarianism and political religions are connected: “The term ‘political religion’ has a more venerable history than many may imagine. It came into widespread use after 1917 to describe the regimes established by Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. The religious analogy was usually with orthodox or heterodox Christianity.” (p. 3)

In addition, “the book also gives detailed attention to the utopian philosophical religions of the nineteenth century, from Saint-Simon, via Robert Owen, to Auguste Comte and Karl Marx. These projects mainly involved filling the void left by the decline in religion with the no less absolutist and totalising worship of humanity itself, although there was little ‘humanity’ evident when some of these ideas became a ghastly reality for hundreds of millions of people.” (p. 12)

As to the French Revolution and its war against the faith, he goes into a good amount of detail. He writes:

The assault on the Church served to undermine one of the essential supports of monarchical authority, namely the supernatural element… Incessant criticism, some of it well below the belt, led to gradual disenchantment with both throne and altar….

 

Almost effortlessly, much of the Gallican Church switched tracks, like a train gliding over points, aligning itself with the moderate constitutional revolution. But the irreconcilable residue was permanently identified with counter-revolution, an identification which led to spoliation and persecution as moderation ceased to be the Revolution’s watchword. Even those clergy who sought to collaborate with the Revolution were eventually persecuted too. As the Revolution embarked upon building a secular republic as the prelude to the messianic regeneration of mankind, a Church whose own history provided the only known exemplars for the compulsory imposition of a creed posited upon ‘rebirth’ was almost destroyed. This remarkable turn of events will occupy the following two chapters. The first looks at the Church during the opening phases of the Revolution; the second at the attempt to convert the Revolution itself into a form of religion. The results were disastrous, leaving the Church deeply hostile to any future invocations of equality, liberty, nation or people. (pp. 46-47)

A short quote from that second chapter highlights the nature of this political religion:

The attempted fusion of Church and Revolution through the Constitutional Church had been a divisive failure. So why not elevate the Revolution itself into the religion? After all, it had its creeds, liturgies and sacred texts, its own vocabulary of virtues and vices, and, last but not least, the ambition of regenerating mankind itself, even if it denied divine intervention or the afterlife. The result was a series of deified abstractions worshipped through the denatured language and liturgy of Christianity.

 

The discourse of the Revolution was saturated with religious terminology. Words like catechism, credo, fanatical, gospel, martyr, missionary, propaganda, sacrament, sermon, zealot, were transferred from a religious to a political context. (p. 81)

The book continues through to the end of the First World War. Burleigh closes the volume this way:

The Great War, the domestic and international civil wars, and economic dislocation that followed it, gave rise to mass despair, to which the solution appeared to be various forms of authoritarianism. In some countries, authoritarian regimes were successfully supplanted by sinister movements that tapped into more atavistic levels of the human psyche, although in Italy the transition was from democracy to Fascism. These political religions threatened either to eradicate Christianity entirely, as the Bolsheviks sought to do in Russia, or perhaps worse, offered to accommodate it, within the new dispensations of Fascism and Nazism, which had themselves adopted many of the outward forms of Europe’s old religion. (p. 460)

Sacred Causes

In the Preface Burleigh lays out the main thrust of the book:

A previous book, Earthly Powers, began with the ‘political religion’ created during the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution with its Cults of Reason or the Supreme Being. These were not simply cynical usurpations of religious forms, but were what the Italian thinker Luigi Sturzo in the mid-1920s referred to as ‘the abusive exploitation of the human religious sentiment’. Like much earlier attempts to realise heaven on earth — vividly described in Norman Cohn’s classic account of medieval heresies The Pursuit of the Millennium — these resulted in hell for many people, as anyone who walks around the sites of Jacobin massacres in the bleak and depopulated Vendee can readily establish. This dystopian strain recurred in various guises throughout the nineteenth century, whether in the crackbrained schemes of Auguste Comte or Charles Fourier, the moral insanity of Russian nihilists, or the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, which was morally insane in other ways. Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements — and in Britain remains so to this day — in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experiences at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere.

 

This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties. . . . The complex responses of the Churches to these challenges are a major concern of this book… (xi-xii)

As for the Nazi attempt to usurp and commandeer the churches, Burleigh has chapters of Christian resistors – Protestant and Catholic alike. Just one brief quote:

Like altruism in wartime, resistance was as much a matter of outlook, upbringing, and temperament as of ideological conviction, a dangerous form of doing the decent thing. Determining when resistance commenced is as imprecise as gauging which acts constituted it, but in virtually every European country, Christians were closely involved, the general trend, for them as well as for everyone else, being from passive to active resistance as the depredations and exactions of occupiers grew more desperate and German defeat seemed more probable. (p. 284)

Unlike many other historians and commentators, Burleigh is not afraid to ask hard questions about the current period: about things like mass migration into Europe, especially of Muslims. While he acknowledges that many are not problematic, he documents the plain fact that far too many do not even bother to integrate but to promote Islamist values there.

That at a time when the churches seemed to be increasingly concerned with primarily pushing leftist values, be it nuclear disarmament or homosexuality and so on. Far too many churchmen simply bowed to the secular elites and their agendas. Says Burleigh:

Instead of religion, the liberal elites prefer their monopolistic mantra of ‘diversity’, ‘human rights’ and ‘tolerance’ as if they invented them, unaware of the extent to which these are products of a deeper Christian culture based on ideas and structures that are so deeply entrenched that most of us are hardly aware of them. As a contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet has written: ‘Modern society is not a society without religion, but one whose major articulations were formed by metabolising the religious function.’

 

That truth was suppressed in the draft 2004 European Union Constitution, which Dutch and French voters have since pushed into limbo. This document grandly traced Europe’s ethos and telos from Thucydides to the Enlightenment. Vociferous objections from Italy, Poland, Spain and Pope John Paul II forced the drafters to concede the scantest reference to the continent’s fifteen centuries of Christianity. (pp. 474-475)

As to Europe’s future, he closes by looking at the case of the optimists in this regard, but also explains the pessimist point of view, including how the demands of the migrants never seem to end, including the call for separate legal systems. He continues:

Demographic factors alone will result in the grim prospect of ‘Eurabia’ if only to ensure a workforce to support the large over-hang of pensioners of my own generation and beyond. No measures will appease Europe’s Islamist radicals whose primary loyalties are to the free-floating mercenary army symbolised by Al-Qaeda, whose solidarities and values have been forged on battlefields stretching from the Balkans, via the Caucuses to Iraq and Afghanistan. On the whole, I conclude this book as an optimist, although certainly not of the Panglossian variety, since the increasingly sharp definition of what is at stake is itself surely part of the solution. (p. 483)

That is from 20 years ago – I wonder what he thinks now. Nonetheless, this is an excellent two-volume set, not just on the fate of Christianity in Europe, but in the West as a whole. It still is well worth reading.

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