Читать книгу The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Karen Armstrong - Страница 9

AT THE SAME TIME as Jews were struggling with the traumatic consequences of their expulsion from Spain and Muslims were establishing their three great empires, the Christians in the West were embarking on a course that would take them far from the certainties and sanctities of the old world. This was an exciting period, but it was also disturbing. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Black Death had killed one-third of the population of Christendom, and countries of Europe had been ravaged by such interminable strife as the Hundred Years War between England and France and the internecine Italian wars. Europeans had endured the shock of the Ottoman conquest of Christian Byzantium in 1453, and the papal scandals of the Avignon Captivity and the Great Schism—when as many as three pontiffs had claimed to be the successor of St. Peter at the same time—had caused many to lose faith in the institutional church. People felt obscurely afraid, and found that they could not be religious in the old way. Yet it was also a time of liberation and empowerment. The Iberian explorers had discovered a new world; the astronomers were opening up the heavens, and a new technical efficiency was giving Europeans greater control over their environment than anybody had achieved before. Where the conservative spirit had taught men and women to remain within carefully defined limits, the new culture of Western Christendom showed that it was possible to venture beyond the confines of the known world and not only to survive but to prosper. This would ultimately make the old mythological religion impossible, and it would seem that Western modernity was inherently hostile to faith.

Yet during the early stages of this transformation of Western society this was not the case. Many of the explorers, scientists, and thinkers at the cutting edge of change believed that they were finding new ways of being religious rather than abolishing religion altogether. We shall examine some of their solutions in this chapter and consider their deeper implications. But it is important to be clear that the men who became the spokesmen of the modern spirit did not themselves create it. By the sixteenth century, a complex process was at work in Europe and, later, in its American colonies which was transforming the way that people thought and experienced the world. Change would occur gradually and often unobtrusively. Inventions and innovations, none of which seemed particularly decisive at the time, were occurring simultaneously in many different fields, but their cumulative effect would be conclusive. All these discoveries were characterized by a pragmatic, scientific spirit that slowly undermined the old conservative, mythical ethos and made an increasing number of people receptive to new ideas about God, religion, the state, the individual, and society. Europe and the American colonies would need to accommodate these changes in different political arrangements. Like any other period of far-reaching social change, this was a violent era. There were destructive wars and revolutions, violent uprooting, the despoliation of the countryside, and hideous religious strife. In the course of three hundred years, Europeans and Americans had to employ ruthless methods to modernize their society. There was bloodshed, persecution, inquisition, massacre, exploitation, enslavement, and cruelty. We are witnessing the same bloody upheavals in countries in the developing world which are going through the painful modernizing process today.

The rationalization of agriculture was just one small part of the process, but the increased productivity and healthier livestock affected everybody’s life. There were other, more specialized improvements. People started to make precise instruments: the compass, the telescope, the magnifying lens all revealed new worlds and made for better maps, charts, and navigational techniques. The seventeenth-century Dutch microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek for the first time observed bacteria, spermatozoa, and other microorganisms, and his observations would one day cast new light on the processes of generation and corruption. This would not only have the pragmatic effect of eliminating disease; it would also divest these basic areas of life and death of much of their mythical content. Medicine began to improve; even though therapy remained a hit-and-miss affair until well into the nineteenth century, there was, during the seventeenth century, a growing concern for sanitation, and some diseases were identified properly for the first time. The earth sciences began to develop, and discussion of such phenomena as earthquakes and volcanoes would push mythological considerations of such events into the background. Mechanical devices improved. Clocks and watches became more reliable and this development would lead to the secularization of time. The application of mathematical and statistical techniques gave people an entirely new sense of the future: in the 1650s and 1660s, the word “probable” began to change its meaning. It would no longer mean that something was “supported by the authorities,” as in the conservative period, but “likely in view of all the evidence.” This independent attitude and confidence in the future would lead to a new drive for scientific proof and bureaucratic rationalization. The British statisticians William Perry and John Graunt were especially interested in life expectancy, and by the early eighteenth century, people in Europe had begun to insure their lives.¹ All this was potentially subversive to the conservative ethos.

None of these developments seemed conclusive in itself, but, taken together, their effect was radical. By 1600, innovations were occurring on such a scale in Europe that progress seemed irreversible. A discovery in one field would often spark findings in another. The process acquired an unstoppable momentum. Instead of seeing the world as governed by fundamental and unalterable laws, Europeans were discovering that they could explore and manipulate nature to staggering effect. They could manage their environment and satisfy their material wants as never before. But as people became accustomed to this rationalization of their lives, logos became ascendant and myth was discredited. People felt more assured about the future. They could institutionalize change without fearful consequences. The wealthy were, for example, now prepared systematically to reinvest capital on the basis of continuing innovation and in the firm expectation that trade would continue to improve. This capitalist economy enabled the West to replace its resources indefinitely, so that it became impervious to the limitations of the old agrarian-based societies. By the time this rationalization and technicalization of society had resulted in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, Westerners were so confident of ceaseless progress that they no longer looked back to the past for inspiration, but saw life as a fearless march forward to ever-greater achievement in the future.

The process involved social change. It needed an increasing number of people to take part in the modernization process at quite a humble level. Ordinary folk became printers, machinists, and factory workers, and they too had to acquire, to a degree, modern standards of efficiency. A modicum of education would be required of more and more people. An increasing number of workers became literate, and once that happened they would inevitably demand a greater share in the decision-making processes of their society. A more democratic form of government would be essential. If a nation wanted to use all its human resources to modernize and enhance its productivity, it would be necessary to bring hitherto segregated and marginalized groups, such as the Jews, into mainstream culture. The newly educated working classes would no longer submit to the old hierarchies. The ideals of democracy, toleration, and universal human rights, which have become sacred values in Western secular culture, emerged as part of the intricate modernizing process. They were not simply beautiful ideals dreamed up by statesmen and political scientists, but were, at least in part, dictated by the needs of the modern state. In early modern Europe, social, political, economic, and intellectual change were part of an interlocking process; each element depended upon the others.² Democracy was found to be the most efficient and productive way of organizing a modernized society, as became evident when the eastern European states, which did not adopt democratic norms and employed more draconian methods of bringing out-groups into the mainstream, fell behind in the march of progress.³

This was an enthralling period, therefore, but also one of wrenching political change, which people tried to absorb religiously. The old medieval forms of faith no longer brought comfort, since they could not function clearly in these altered circumstances. Religion had to be made more efficient and streamlined too, as in the Catholic reformation of the sixteenth century. But the reformations of the early modern period showed that, despite the fact that the modernizing process was well under way in the sixteenth century, Europeans still subscribed to the conservative spirit. The Protestant reformers, like the great Muslim reformers we have considered, were trying to find a new solution during a period of change by going back to the past. Martin Luther (1483–1556), John Calvin (1509–64), and Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) all looked back ad fontes, to the wellsprings of the Christian tradition. Where Ibn Taymiyyah had rejected medieval theology and fiqh in order to return to the pure Islam of the Koran and the Sunnah, Luther likewise attacked the medieval scholastic theologians and sought to return to the pure Christianity of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. Like the conservative Muslim reformers, therefore, the Protestant reformers were both revolutionary and reactionary. They did not yet belong to the new world that was coming, but were still rooted in the old.

Yet they were also men of their time, and this was a time of transition. Throughout this book, we shall see that the modernizing process can induce great anxiety. As their world changes, people feel disoriented and lost. Living in medias res, they cannot see the direction that their society is taking, but experience its slow transformation in incoherent ways. As the old mythology that gave structure and significance to their lives crumbles under the impact of change, they can experience a numbing loss of identity and a paralyzing despair. The most common emotions, as we shall see, are helplessness and a fear of annihilation that can, in extreme circumstances, erupt in violence. We see something of this in Luther. During his early life, he was prey to agonizing depressions. None of the medieval rites and practices of the faith could touch what he called the tristitia (“sorrow”) that made him terrified of death, which he imagined as total extinction. When this black horror descended upon him, he could not bear to read Psalm 90, which describes the evanescence of human life and portrays men being condemned by the anger and fury of God. Throughout his career, Luther saw death as an expression of God’s wrath. His theology of justification by faith depicted human beings as utterly incapable of contributing to their own salvation and wholly reliant on the benevolence of God. It was only by realizing their powerlessness that they could be saved. To escape his depressions, Luther plunged into a frenzy of activity, determined to do what good he could in the world, but consumed also by hatred.⁴ Luther’s rage against the Pope, the Turks, Jews, women, and rebellious peasants—not to mention every single one of his theological opponents—would be typical of other reformers in our own day, who have struggled with the pain of the new world and who have also evolved a religion in which the love of God is often balanced by a hatred of other human beings.

Zwingli and Calvin also experienced utter impotence before they were able to break through to a new religious vision that made them feel born again. They too had been convinced that there was nothing they could contribute to their own salvation and that they were powerless before the trials of human existence. Both stressed the absolute sovereignty of God, as modern fundamentalists would often do.⁵ Like Luther, Zwingli and Calvin also had to re-create their religious world, sometimes resorting to extreme measures and even to violence in order to make their religion speak to the new conditions of a world that was unobtrusively but irrevocably committed to radical transformation.

As men of their time, the reformers reflected the changes that were taking place. In leaving the Roman Catholic Church, they made one of the earliest of the declarations of independence that would punctuate Western history from this point. As we shall see, the new ethos demanded autonomy and total freedom, and that is what the Protestant reformers demanded for the Christians of this altered world, who must be free to read and interpret their Bibles as they chose, without the punitive control of the Church. (All three could be intransigent, however, about anybody who opposed their teaching: Luther believed that “heretical” books should be burned, and both Calvin and Zwingli were prepared to kill dissidents.) All three showed that in this rational age, the old symbolic understanding of religion was beginning to break down. In conservative spirituality, a symbol partook of the reality of the divine; men and women experienced the sacred in earthly objects; the symbol and the sacred were thus inseparable. In the medieval period, Christians had experienced the divine in the relics of the saints, and had seen the Eucharistic bread and wine as mystically identical with Christ. Now the reformers declared that relics were idols, the Eucharist “only” a symbol, and the Mass no longer a cultic representation of the sacrifice of Calvary that made it mystically present, but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as though they were logoi, and the alacrity with which people followed the reformers showed that many of the Christians of Europe were also beginning to lose the mythical sensibility.

Life was slowly becoming secularized in Europe, and the Protestant Reformation, despite the intensity of its religious drive, was secularizing too. The reformers claimed to be returning, conservative-wise, to the primary source, the Bible, but they were reading Scripture in a modern way. The reformed Christian was to stand alone before God, relying simply on his Bible, but this would not have been possible before the invention of printing had made it feasible for all Christians to have a Bible of their own and before the developing literacy of the period enabled them to read it. Increasingly, Scripture was read literally for the information it imparted, in much the same way as modernizing Protestants were learning to read other texts. Silent, solitary reading would help to free Christians from traditional ways of interpretation and from the supervision of the religious experts. The stress on individual faith would also help to make truth seem increasingly subjective—a characteristic of the modern Western mentality. But while he emphasized the importance of faith, Luther rejected reason vehemently. He seemed to sense that reason could, in the coming dispensation, be inimical to faith. In his writings—though not in Calvin’s—we can see that the old vision of the complementarity of reason and mythology was eroding. In his usual pugnacious way, Luther spoke of Aristotle with hatred, and loathed Erasmus, whom he regarded as the epitome of reason, which, he was convinced, could only lead to atheism. In pushing reason out of the religious sphere, Luther was one of the first Europeans to secularize it.⁶

Because, for Luther, God was utterly mysterious and hidden, the world was empty of the divine. Luther’s Deus Absconditus could not be discovered either in human institutions or in physical reality. Medieval Christians had experienced the sacred in the Church, which Luther now declared to be Antichrist. Nor was it permissible to reach a knowledge of God by reflecting on the marvelous order of the universe, as the scholastic theologians (also objects of Luther’s simmering rage) had done.⁷ In Luther’s writings, God had begun to retreat from the physical world, which now had no religious significance at all. Luther also secularized politics. Because mundane reality was utterly opposed to the spiritual, church and state must operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere of activity.⁸ Luther’s passionate religious vision had made him one of the first Europeans to advocate the separation of church and state. Yet again, the secularization of politics began as a new way of being religious.

Luther’s separation of religion and politics sprang from his disgust with the coercive methods of the Roman Catholic Church, which had used the state to impose its own rules and orthodoxy. Calvin did not share Luther’s vision of a Godless world. Like Zwingli, he believed that Christians should express their faith by taking part in political and social life rather than by retreating to a monastery. Calvin helped to baptize the emergent capitalist work ethic by declaring labor to be a sacred calling, not, as the medievals thought, a divine punishment for sin. Nor did Calvin subscribe to Luther’s disenchantment of the natural world. He believed that it was possible to see God in his creation, and commended the study of astronomy, geography, and biology. Calvinists of the early modern period would often be good scientists. Calvin saw no contradiction between science and scripture. The Bible, he believed, was not imparting literal information about geography or cosmology, but was trying to express ineffable truth in terms that limited human beings could understand. Biblical language was balbative (“baby talk”), a deliberate simplification of a truth that was too complex to be articulated in any other way.⁹

The great scientists of the early modern period shared Calvin’s confidence, and also saw their researches and discussions within a mythical, religious framework. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) believed that his science was “more divine than human.”¹⁰ Yet his theory of a heliocentric universe was a devastating blow to the old mythical perception. His astounding hypothesis was so radical that in his own day very few people could take it in. He suggested that instead of being located in the center of the universe, the earth and the other planets were actually in rapid motion around the sun. When we looked up at the heavens and thought that we saw the celestial bodies moving, this was simply a projection of the earth’s rotation in the opposite direction. Copernicus’s theory remained incomplete, but the German physicist Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was able to provide mathematical evidence in its support, while the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican hypothesis empirically by observing the planets through the telescope, which he had himself perfected. When Galileo published his findings in 1612, he created a sensation. All over Europe, people made their own telescopes and scanned the heavens for themselves.

Galileo was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his own somewhat belligerent temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. Religious people did not instinctively reject science in the early modern period. When Copernicus first presented his hypothesis in the Vatican, the Pope approved it, and Calvin had no problem with the theory. The scientists themselves saw their investigations as essentially religious. Kepler felt himself possessed by “divine frenzy” as he revealed secrets that no human being had ever been privileged to learn before, and Galileo was convinced that his research had been inspired by divine grace.¹¹ They could still see their scientific rationalism as compatible with religious vision, logos as complementary to mythos.

Nevertheless, Copernicus had initiated a revolution, and human beings would never be able to see themselves or trust their perceptions in the same way again. Hitherto, people had felt able to rely on the evidence of their senses. They had looked through the outward aspects of the world to find the Unseen, but had been confident that these external appearances corresponded to a reality. The myths they had evolved to express their vision of the fundamental laws of life had been of a piece with what they had experienced as fact. The Greek worshippers at Eleusis had been able to fuse the story of Persephone with the rhythms of the harvest that they could observe for themselves; the Arabs who jogged around the Kabah symbolically aligned themselves with the planetary motions around the earth and hence felt in tune with the basic principles of existence. But after Copernicus a seed of doubt had been sown. It had been proved that the earth, which seemed static, was actually moving very fast indeed; that the planets only appeared to be in motion because people were projecting their own vision onto them: what had been assumed to be objective was in fact entirely subjective. Reason and myth were no longer in harmony; indeed, the intensive logos produced by the scientists seemed to devalue the perceptions of ordinary human beings and make them increasingly dependent upon learned experts. Where myth had shown that human action was bound up with the essential meaning of life, the new science had suddenly pushed men and women into a marginal position in the cosmos. They were no longer at the center of things, but cast adrift on an undistinguished planet in a universe that no longer revolved around their needs. It was a bleak vision, which, perhaps, needed a myth to make the new cosmology as spiritually meaningful as the old.

But modern science was beginning to discredit mythology. The British scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) synthesized the findings of his predecessors by a rigorous use of the evolving scientific methods of experimentation and deduction. Newton posited the idea of gravity as a universal force that held the entire cosmos together and prevented the celestial bodies from colliding with one another. This system, he was convinced, proved the existence of God, the great “Mechanick,” since the intricate design of the cosmos could not have come about by accident.¹² Like the other early modern scientists, Newton had brought human beings what he believed to be utterly new and certain information about the world. He was sure that his “system” coincided exactly with objective reality and had taken human knowledge further than before. But his total immersion in the world of logos made it impossible for Newton to appreciate that other, more intuitive forms of perception might also offer human beings a form of truth. In his view, mythology and mystery were primitive and barbaric ways of thought. “’Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,” he wrote irritably, “ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.”¹³

Newton became almost obsessed with the desire to purge Christianity of its mythical doctrines. He became convinced that the a-rational dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation were the result of conspiracy, forgery, and chicanery. While working on his great book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia (1687), Newton began work on a bizarre treatise entitled The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, which argued that Noah had founded a superstition-free religion in which there were no revealed scriptures, no mysteries, but only a Deity which could be known through the rational contemplation of the natural world. Later generations had corrupted this pure faith; the spurious doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity had been added to the creed by unscrupulous theologians in the fourth century. Indeed, the Book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism—“this strange religion of ye West,” “the cult of three equal Gods”—as the abomination of desolation.¹⁴ Newton was still a religious man and still, to an extent, in thrall to the conservative spirit in his quest for a rational primordial religion. But he could not express his faith in the same way as previous generations. He was unable to appreciate that the doctrine of the Trinity had been devised by the Greek Orthodox theologians of the fourth century precisely as mythos, similar to that later created by the Jewish Kabbalists. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained, the three hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit were not objective facts but simply “terms that we use” to express the way in which the “unnameable and unspeakable” divine nature (ousia) adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds.¹⁵ It made no sense outside the cultic context of prayer, contemplation, and liturgy. But Newton could only see the Trinity in rational terms, had no understanding of the role of myth, and was therefore obliged to jettison the doctrine. The difficulty that many Western Christians today experience with trinitarian theology shows that they share Newton’s bias in favor of reason. Newton’s position was entirely understandable. He was one of the very first people in the West to master fully the methods and disciplines of scientific rationalism. His was a towering achievement and the result was as intoxicating as any religious experience. He used to cry out in the course of his studies: “O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee!”¹⁶ He had literally no time for the intuitive mystical consciousness, which might actually have impeded his progress. Reason and myth were, for the first time in human history, becoming incompatible because of the intensity and dazzling success of this Western experiment.

By the seventeenth century, progress was so assured that many Europeans were already entirely oriented toward the future. They were discovering that they had to be ready to scrap the past and start again if they wanted to find the truth. This forward momentum was diametrically opposed to the mythical return to the past which was the foundation of the conservative spirit. The new science had to look forward; this was the way it worked. Once Copernicus’s theory had been proved satisfactorily, it was no longer possible to bring back the Ptolemaic cosmological system. Later, Newton’s own system, though not his methods, would be discounted. Europeans were evolving a new notion of truth. Truth was never absolute, since new discoveries could always replace the old; it had to be demonstrated objectively, and measured by its effectiveness in the practical world. The success of early modern science gave it an authority which was starting to be stronger than that of mythical truth, which met none of these criteria.

This had already been apparent in the Advancement of Learning (1605), written by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England. Bacon insisted that all truth, even the most sacred doctrines of religion, must be subjected to the stringent critical methods of empirical science. If they contradicted proven facts and the evidence of our senses, they must be cast aside. None of the great insights of the past could be permitted to impede our creation of a glorious new future for humanity. The inventions of science would end human misery, Bacon believed, and inaugurate here on earth the millennial kingdom foretold by the prophets. In Bacon’s writings we sense the excitement of the new age. So confident was he, that he could see no conflict between the Bible and science, and, years before the condemnation of Galileo, he demanded complete intellectual liberty for the men of science, whose work was far too important for the human race to be obstructed by simpleminded clergymen. The Advancement of Learning amounted to a declaration of independence on the part of scientific rationalism, which sought emancipation from myth and declared that it alone could give human beings access to truth.

It was an important moment, marking the beginning of science as we know it in the modern West. Hitherto, scientific and rational exploration had always been conducted within a comprehensive mythology which had explained the meaning of these discoveries. The prevailing myth had always controlled these researches and put a brake on their application, as the limitations of conservative society demanded. But by the seventeenth century, European scientists were beginning to liberate themselves from these old constraints. There was no need for them any longer, since the factors that had held agrarian societies back were gradually being overcome. Bacon insisted that science alone was true. His view of science was, admittedly, very different from our own. For Bacon, scientific method consisted chiefly in gathering facts; he did not appreciate the importance of guesswork and hypothesis in scientific research. But Bacon’s definition of truth would be extremely influential, especially in the English-speaking countries. He believed that the only information upon which we could safely rely came from our five senses; anything else was pure fantasy. Philosophy, metaphysics, theology, art, imagination, mysticism, and mythology were all dismissed as irrelevant and superstitious because they could not be verified empirically.

People who subscribed to this wholly rational way of life but who wanted to be religious would have to find new ways of thinking about God and spirituality. We see the death of the mythical approach in the philosophy of the French scientist René Descartes (1596–1650), who was able to speak only in logoi, in rational language. His was a lonely vision. For Descartes, the universe was a lifeless machine, the physical world inert and dead. It could give us no information about the divine. The single living thing in the cosmos was the human mind, which could find certainty merely by turning in upon itself. We could not even be sure that anything besides our own doubts and thoughts existed. Descartes was a devout Catholic; he wanted to satisfy himself about God’s existence, but refused to go back to the primordial, imaginary past of myth and cult. Nor could he rely on the insights of prophets and holy texts. A man of the new age, he would not accept received ideas; the scientist must make his mind a tabula rasa. The sole truth was that supplied by mathematics or by such lapidary propositions as “What’s done cannot be undone,” which was irrefutably correct. Since the way back was closed, Descartes could only inch his way painfully forward.

One evening, sitting beside a wood stove, Descartes evolved the maxim Cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” This, he believed, was self-evident. The one thing of which we could be certain was our mind’s experience of doubt. But this revealed the limitation of the human mind, and the very notion of “limitation” would make no sense if we did not have a prior conception of “perfection.” A perfection that did not exist, however, would be a contradiction in terms. Ergo, the Ultimate Perfection—God—must be a reality.¹⁷ This so-called proof is unlikely to satisfy a modern unbeliever, and it shows the impotence of pure reason when faced with such issues. Rational thought is indispensable for our effective functioning in the world. It is at its best when directed toward a pragmatic goal or when, like Descartes, we withdraw from the mundane to consider something as objectively as possible. But when we ask why the world exists (if it does!) or whether life has meaning, reason can make little headway, and the object of our thought itself can become strange to us. Descartes beside his stove, in his cold, empty world, locked into his own uncertainty, and uttering a “proof” which is little more than a mental conundrum, embodies the spiritual dilemma of modern humanity.

Thus, at a time when science and unfettered rationality were forging brilliantly ahead, life was becoming meaningless for an increasing number of people, who, for the first time in human history, were having to live without mythology. The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that there was a God, but for all practical purposes, God might just as well not exist. Like Luther, Hobbes saw the physical world as empty of the divine. God, Hobbes believed, had revealed himself at the dawn of human history and would do so again at its End. But until that time we had to get on without him, waiting, as it were, in the dark.¹⁸ For the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), an intensely religious man, the emptiness and the “eternal silence” of the infinite universe opened up by modern science inspired pure dread:

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.¹⁹

Reason and logos were improving the lot of men and women in the modern world in a myriad practical ways, but they were not competent to deal with those ultimate questions that human beings seem forced, by their very nature, to ask and which, hitherto, had been the preserve of mythos. As a result, despair and alienation, as described by Pascal, have been a part of the modern experience.

But not for everybody. John Locke (1632–1704), who was one of the first to initiate the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, had none of Pascal’s existential angst. His faith in life and human reason was serene and confident. He had no doubts about God’s existence, even though, strictly speaking, he was aware that proving the reality of a deity that lay beyond our sense experience did not pass Bacon’s empirical test. Locke’s religion, relying entirely on reason, was similar to the deism espoused by some of the Jewish Marranos. He was fully convinced that the natural world gave ample evidence for a Creator and that if reason were allowed to shine forth freely, everybody would discover the truth for himself. False and superstitious ideas had only crept into the world because priests had used cruel and tyrannical methods, such as the Inquisition, to force the people to accept their orthodoxy. For the sake of true religion, therefore, the state must tolerate all manner of beliefs, and must concern itself solely with the practical administration and government of the community. Church and state must be separate, and neither must interfere in the business of the other. This was the Age of Reason, and for the first time in human history, Locke believed, men and women would be free, and, therefore, able to perceive the truth.²⁰

This benign vision set the tone for the Enlightenment and the inspiring ideal of the modern, secular, tolerant state. The French and German Enlightenment philosophers also subscribed to the rational religion of deism, and saw the old mythical, revealed religions as outmoded. Since reason was the sole criterion of truth, the older faiths, based on a fictitious notion of “revelation,” had simply been naive versions of this natural religion and should be rejected. Faith had to be rational, argued the radical British theologian Matthew Tindal (1655–1733) and the Irish Roman-Catholic-turned-deist John Toland (1670–1722). Our natural reason was the only reliable way to arrive at sacred truth, and Christianity must be purged of the mysterious, the supernatural, and the miraculous. Revelation was unnecessary because it was quite possible for any human being to arrive at the truth by means of his or her unaided reasoning powers.²¹ As Newton had pointed out, reflection on the design of the physical universe provided irrefutable evidence for a Creator and First Cause. On the continent, the German historian Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) argued that Jesus had never claimed to be divine, and that his ambitions had been entirely political. Jesus should simply be revered as a great teacher, the founder of a “remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion.”²²

The old truths of mythos were now being interpreted as though they were logoi, an entirely new development that was, eventually, doomed to disappoint.

For at the same time as these theologians, philosophers, and historians proclaimed the supremacy of reason, the German rationalist Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) undercut the entire Enlightenment project. On the one hand, Kant issued yet another of the early modern declarations of independence. People must have the courage to throw off their dependence upon teachers, churches, and authorities and seek the truth for themselves. “Enlightenment is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage,” he wrote. “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his own understanding, without direction from another.”²³ But on the other hand, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant argued that it was impossible to be certain that the order we think we discern in nature bore any relation at all to external reality. This “order” was simply the creation of our own minds; even the so-called scientific laws of Newton probably tell us more about human psychology than about the cosmos. When the mind receives information about the physical world outside itself through the senses, it has to reorganize this data according to its own internal structures in order to make any sense of it. Kant was wholly confident of the mind’s capacity to devise a viable rational vision for itself, but by showing that it was really impossible for human beings to escape from their own psychology, he also made it clear that there was no such thing as absolute truth. All our ideas were essentially subjective and interpretive. Where Descartes had seen the human mind as the sole, lonely denizen of a dead universe, Kant severed the link between humanity and the world altogether and shut us up within our own heads.²⁴ At the same time as he had liberated humanity from tutelage, he had enclosed it in a new prison. As so often, modernity took with one hand what it gave with the other. Reason was enlightening and emancipating, but it could also estrange men and women from the world they were learning to control so effectively.

If there was no absolute truth, what became of God? Unlike the other deists, Kant believed that it was impossible to prove God’s existence, since the deity was beyond the reach of the senses and, therefore, inaccessible to the human mind.²⁵ Faced with the ultimate, reason alone had nothing to say. The only comfort that Kant could offer was that it was, by the same token, impossible to disprove God’s existence either. Kant was himself a devout man, and did not regard his ideas as hostile to religion. They would, he thought, liberate faith from a wholly inappropriate reliance upon reason. He was utterly convinced, he wrote at the end of his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), of the moral law inscribed within each human being, which, like the grandeur of the heavens, filled him with awe and wonder. But the only rational grounds he could find for the deist God was the quite dubious argument that without such a Deity and the possibility of an afterlife, it was hard to see why we should act morally. This again, as a proof, is highly unsatisfactory.²⁶ Kant’s God was simply an afterthought, tacked onto the human condition. Apart from innate conviction, there was no real reason why a rationalist should bother to believe. As a deist and a man of reason, Kant had no time for any of the traditional symbols or practices by means of which alone men and women of the past had evoked a sense of the sacred, independently of reason. Kant was deeply opposed to the idea of divine law, which, in his eyes, was a barbarous denial of human autonomy, and he could see no point in mysticism, prayer, or ritual.²⁷ Without a cult, any notion of religion and the divine would become tenuous, unnecessary, and untenable.

Yet, paradoxically, the emergence of reason as the sole criterion of truth in the West coincided with an eruption of religious irrationality. The great Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which raged through many of the Protestant and Catholic countries of Europe and even made a brief appearance in the American colonies, showed that a cult of scientific rationalism cannot always hold darker forces at bay. Mysticism and mythology had taught men and women to deal with the world of the unconscious. It may not be accidental that at a time when religious faith was beginning to abandon this type of spirituality, the subconscious ran amok. The Witch Craze has been described as a collective fantasy, shared by men, women, and their inquisitors throughout Christendom. People believed that they had sexual intercourse with demons, and flew through the air at night to take part in satanic rituals and perverse orgies. Witches were thought to worship the Devil instead of God in a parody of the Mass—a reversal that could represent a widespread unconscious rebellion against traditional faith. God was beginning to seem so remote, alien, and demanding that for some he was becoming demonic: subconscious fears and desires were projected upon the imaginary figure of Satan, depicted as a monstrous version of humanity.²⁸ Thousands of men and women convicted of witchcraft were either hanged or burned at the stake before the Craze burned itself out. The new scientific rationalism, which took no cognizance of these deeper levels of the mind, was powerless to control this hysterical outburst. A massive, fearful, and destructive un-reason has also been part of the modern experience.

These were frightening times for the people of the West on both sides of the Atlantic. The Reformation had been a fearful rupture, dividing Europe into viciously hostile camps. Protestants and Catholics had persecuted one another in England; there had been a civil war in France between Protestants and Catholics (1562–63), and a nationwide massacre of Protestants in 1572. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) had devastated Europe, drawing in one nation after another, a power struggle with a strong religious dimension which killed any hope of a reunited Europe. There was political unrest also. In 1642, England was convulsed by a civil war that resulted in the execution of King Charles I (1649) and the establishment of a republic under the Puritan Parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, its powers were curtailed by Parliament. More democratic institutions were painfully and bloodily emerging in the West. Even more catastrophic was the French Revolution of 1789, which was succeeded by a reign of terror and a military dictatorship, before order was restored under Napoleon. The French Revolution’s legacy to the modern world was Janus-faced: it promoted the benevolent Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but it also left a memory of malignant state terrorism, which has been equally influential. In the American colonies also, the Seven Years War (1756–63), in which Britain and France fought one another over their imperial possessions, raged down the eastern coast of America with fearful casualties. This led directly to the War of Independence (1775–83) and the creation of the first secular republic of the modern world. A more just and tolerant social order was coming to birth in the West, but this was only achieved after almost two centuries of violence.

In the turmoil, people turned to religion, and some found that in these new circumstances, old forms of faith no longer worked. Antinomian movements, similar to the later Shabbatean revolt in Judaism, attempted a break with the past and reached incoherently for something new. In seventeenth-century England, after the Civil War, Jacob Bauthumely and Lawrence Clarkson (1615–67) preached an incipient atheism. A separate, distant deity was an idolatry, Bauthumely argued in The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650); God had been incarnate in men other than Jesus and the divine existed in all things, even in sin. For Clarkson in The Single Eye, sin was simply a human fantasy, and evil a revelation of God. Abiezer Coppe (1619–72), a radical Baptist, would flagrantly break sexual taboos and curse in public. Soon, he believed, Christ, the “Mighty Leveller,” would return and sweep this present rotten and hypocritical order away.²⁹ There was antinomianism also in the American colonies of New England. John Cotton (1585–1652), a popular Puritan preacher who arrived in Massachusetts in 1635, insisted that good works were pointless and a good life useless: God could save us without these man-made rules. His disciple Anne Hutchinson (1590–1643) claimed that she received personal revelations from God and felt no need to read her Bible or perform good works.³⁰ These rebels were, perhaps, trying to express their inchoate sense that old restraints no longer applied in the new world, where life was changing so fundamentally. In a period of constant innovation, it was inevitable that some would strike out for religious and ethical independence and innovation too.

Others tried to express the ideals of the new age in a religious way. George Fox (1624–91), founder of the Society of Friends, preached an enlightenment that was not dissimilar to that later described by Kant. His Quakers should seek a light within their own hearts; Fox taught them to “make use of their own understanding, without direction from another.”³¹ Religion must, he believed, in this age of science, be “experimental,” verified not by an authoritative institution but by personal experience.³² The Society of Friends espoused the new democratic ideal: all human beings were equal. Quakers should not doff their hats to anybody. Unlearned men and women need not defer to clerics with university degrees, but must make their own views known. Similarly, John Wesley (1703–91) attempted to apply scientific method and system to spirituality. His “Methodists” followed a strict regimen of prayer, Bible-reading, fasting, and philanthropy. Like Kant, Wesley welcomed the emancipation of faith from reason, and declared that religion was not a doctrine in the head but a light in the heart. It could even be a blessing that the rational and historical evidence for Christianity had become “clogged and encumbered” in recent years. This would free men and women, forcing them “to look into themselves and attend to the light shining in their hearts.”³³

Christians were becoming divided: some followed the philosophes and tried to demystify and rationalize their faith; others jettisoned reason altogether. This was a worrying development that was especially marked in the American colonies. One of the repercussions of this split would be the development of fundamentalism in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early years, most of the colonists, except the Puritan New Englanders, had been indifferent toward religion; it seemed as though the colonies were becoming almost entirely secularized by the end of the seventeenth century.³⁴ But during the early eighteenth century, the Protestant denominations revived, and Christian life became more formal in the new world than in the old. Even such dissenting sects as the Quakers, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians, which had all originally rejected ecclesiastical authority and insisted on the right to follow their own leadings, set up Assemblies in Philadelphia that kept a sharp eye on the local communities, supervised the clergy, vetted the preachers, and snuffed out heresy. All three denominations flourished as a result of this coercive but modernizing centralization, and numbers increased dramatically. At the same time, the Church of England was established in Maryland, and elegant churches transformed the skylines of New York City, Boston, and Charleston.³⁵

But while on the one hand there was a move for greater control and discipline, there was also a vehement, grassroots reaction against this rationalized restraint. Conservative religion had always seen mythology and reason as complementary; each would be the poorer without the other. This had also been the case in religious matters, where reason was often allowed to play an important, if subsidiary, role. But the new tendency to sideline or even to jettison reason in some of the new Protestant movements (a development that can be traced back to Luther) led to a disturbing irrationality. The Quakers were so called because, in the early days, they would often express their religious transports so vehemently: they were known to tremble, howl, and yell, making—an observer noted—the dogs bark, the cattle run madly about, and the pigs scream.³⁶ The Puritans, radical Calvinists who had started by opposing what they deemed the “popery” of the Church of England, also had an extreme, tumultuous spirituality. Their “born-again” conversions were often traumatic; many experienced an agony of guilt, fear, and paralyzing doubt before the breakthrough, when they sank blissfully into the arms of God. Their conversion gave them great energy and enabled them to play leading roles in early modernity. They were good capitalists and often good scientists. But sometimes the effects of grace wore off and Puritans suffered a relapse, falling into chronic depressive states and in a few cases even committing suicide.³⁷

Conservative religion had not usually been hysterical in this way. Its rituals and cult had been designed to attune people to reality. Bacchanalian cults and frenzied ecstasy had certainly occurred but had involved the few rather than the majority. Mysticism was not for the masses. At its best, it was a one-to-one process, in which the adept was carefully supervised to make sure that he or she did not fall into unhealthy psychic states. The descent into the unconscious was an enterprise demanding great skill, intelligence, and discipline. When expert guidance was not available, the results could be deplorable. The crazed and neurotic behavior of some of the medieval Christian saints, which was often due to inadequate spiritual direction, showed the dangers of an undisciplined cultivation of alternate states of mind. The reforms of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had been designed precisely to correct such abuses. When mystical journeys were undertaken en masse, they could degenerate into crowd hysteria, the nihilism of the Sabbatarians, or the mental imbalance of some of the Puritans.

Emotional excess became a feature of American religious life during the eighteenth century. It was especially evident in the First Great Awakening, which erupted in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734 and was chronicled by the learned Calvinist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Before the Awakening, Edwards explained, the people of Northampton had not been particularly religious, but in 1734 two young people died suddenly, and the shock (backed up by Edwards’s own emotive preaching) plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. People stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. Within six months, three hundred people in the town had experienced a wrenching “born-again” conversion. They alternated between soaring highs and devastating lows; sometimes they were quite broken and “sank into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.” At other times they would “break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping.”³⁸ The revival was just burning itself out when George Whitefield (1714–70), an English Methodist preacher, toured the colonies and sparked a second wave. During his sermons, people fainted, wept, and shrieked; the churches shook with the cries of those who imagined themselves saved and the groans of the unfortunate who were convinced that they were damned. It was not only the simple and unlearned who were so affected. Whitefield had an ecstatic reception at Harvard and Yale, and finished his tour in 1740 with a mass rally where he preached to 30,000 people on Boston Common.

Edwards showed the dangers of this type of emotionalism in his account of the Awakening. When the revival died down in Northampton, one man was so cast down that he committed suicide, convinced that this loss of ecstatic joy could only mean that he was predestined to Hell. In other towns too, “multitudes … seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’” Two people went mad with “strange enthusiastic delusions.”³⁹ Edwards insisted that most people were calmer and more peaceful than before the Awakening, but his apologia shows how perilous it could be to imagine that religion is purely an affair of the heart. Once faith was conceived as irrational, and the inbuilt constraints of the best conservative spirituality were jettisoned, people could fall prey to all manner of delusions. The rituals of a cult were carefully designed to lead people through a trauma so that they came out healthily on the other side of it. This was clear in the rites of Lurianic Kabbalah, where the mystic was allowed to express his grief and abandonment but made to finish the vigil joyfully. Similarly, the popular Shii processions in honor of Husain gave people an outlet for their frustration and anger, but in a ritualized form: they did not usually run amok after the ceremony was over and vent their rage on the rich and powerful. But in Northampton, there was no stylized cult to help people through their rite of passage. Everything was spontaneous and undisciplined. People were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions and even to indulge them. For a few, this proved fatal.

Nevertheless, Edwards was convinced that the Awakening was the work of God. It revealed that a new age had dawned in America and would spread to the rest of the world. By means of such revivals, Edwards was convinced, Christians would establish God’s kingdom on earth; society would reflect the truth and justice of God himself. There was nothing politically radical about the Awakening. Edwards and Whitefield did not urge their audiences to rebel against British rule, campaign for democratic government, or demand an even distribution of wealth, but the experience did help to prepare the way for the American Revolution.⁴⁰ The ecstatic experience left many Americans who would be quite unable to relate to the deist Enlightenment ideals of the revolutionary leaders, with the memory of a blissful state of freedom. The word “liberty” was used a great deal to describe the joy of conversion, and a liberation from the pain and sorrow of normal life. Whitefield and Edwards both encouraged their congregations to see their own ecstatic faith as superior to that of the elite, who had not been born again and regarded the frenzy with rationalist disdain. Many who remembered the hauteur of those clerics who condemned the revivals, were left with a strong distrust of institutional authority, which became part of the Christian experience of many American Calvinists. The Awakening had been the first mass movement in American history; it gave the people a heady experience of taking part in earth-shattering events that would, they believed, change the course of history.⁴¹

But the Awakening also split the Calvinist denominations of the colonies down the middle. People who became known as Old Lights, such as the Boston ministers Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66) and Charles Chauncy (1705–87), believed that Christianity should be a rational, enlightened faith, were appalled by the hysteria of the revivals, and distrusted their anti-intellectual bias.⁴² Old Lights tended to come from the more prosperous sectors of society, while the lower classes gravitated toward the emotional piety of the breakaway New Light churches. During the 1740s, over two hundred congregations left existing denominations and founded their own churches.⁴³ In 1741, the Presbyterian New Lights broke away from the Presbyterian synod, establishing their own colleges for the training of ministers, notably Nassau Hall in Princeton, New Jersey. Later the split was healed, but in the interim the New Lights had acquired a separatist, institutional identity that would be crucial during the emergence of the fundamentalist movement in the late nineteenth century.

The Awakening had shaken everybody up, and henceforth even the Old Lights were ready to ascribe apocalyptic significance to current events. Jonathan Mayhew was convinced that “great revolutions were at hand,” when a series of earthquakes occurred simultaneously in various parts of the world in November 1755; he looked forward to “some very remarkable changes in the political and religious state of the world.”⁴⁴ Mayhew instinctively saw the imperial struggle during the Seven Years War between Protestant Britain and Catholic France over their colonial possessions in America and Canada in eschatalogical terms. It would, he believed, hasten the Second Coming of Christ by weakening the power of the Pope, who was Antichrist, the Great Pretender of the Last Days.⁴⁵ New Lights also saw America as fighting on the front line of a cosmic battle with the forces of evil during the Seven Years War. It was at this time that Pope’s Day (November 5) became an annual holiday, during which rowdy crowds burned effigies of the Pontiff.⁴⁶ These were frightening and violent times. Americans still looked to the old mythology to give their lives meaning and to explain the tragedies that befell them. But they also seemed to sense impending change and, as they did so, developed a religion of hatred, seeing France and the Roman Catholic Church as satanic and utterly opposed to the righteous American ethos.⁴⁷ As they cultivated these apocalyptic fantasies, they seemed to feel that there could be no redemption, no final deliverance, no liberty, and no millennial peace unless popery was destroyed. A bloody purge would be necessary to bring this new world into being. We shall find that a theology of rage would frequently be evolved in response to dawning modernity. Americans could sense that transformation was at hand, but they still belonged to the old world. The economic effects of the Seven Years War led the British government to impose new taxes upon the American colonists, and this provoked the revolutionary crisis that resulted in the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775. During this protracted struggle, Americans started the painful process of making that radical break with the past that was central to the modern ethos, and their religion of hatred would play a major role in this development.

The leaders of the Revolution—George Washington, John and Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, for example—experienced the revolution as a secular event. They were rationalists, men of the Enlightenment, inspired by the modern ideals of John Locke, Scottish Common Sense philosophy, or Radical Whig ideology. They were deists, and differed from more orthodox Christians in their view of revelation and the divinity of Christ. They conducted a sober, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power, moving only slowly and reluctantly toward revolution. They certainly did not see themselves as fighting a cosmic war against the legions of Antichrist. When the break with Britain became inevitable, their goal was practical and limited to terrestrial objectives: the “united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, with John Adams and Franklin, and ratified by the Colonial Congress on July 4, 1776, was an Enlightenment document, based on the ideal of self-evident human rights propounded by Locke. These rights were defined as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration appealed to the modern ideals of independence, autonomy, and equality in the name of the deist God of Nature. The Declaration was not politically radical, however. There was no utopian talk of redistributing the wealth of society or founding a millennial order. This was practical, rational logos, outlining a far-reaching but sustainable program of action.

But the Founding Fathers of the American republic were an aristocratic elite and their ideas were not typical. The vast majority of Americans were Calvinists, and they could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Indeed, many of them regarded deism as a satanic ideology.⁴⁸ Initially, most of the colonists were just as reluctant to break with England as their leaders were. Not all joined the revolutionary struggle. Some 30,000 fought on the British side, and after the war between 80,000 and 100,000 left the new states and migrated to Canada, the West Indies, or Britain.⁴⁹ Those who elected to fight for independence would be as much motivated by the old myths and millennial dreams of Christianity as by the secularist ideals of the Founders. In fact, it became difficult to separate the religious from the political discourse. Secularist and religious ideology blended creatively to enable the colonists, who had widely divergent hopes for America, to join forces against the imperial might of England. We shall find a similar alliance of religious and secularist idealism in the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978–79), which was also a declaration of independence against an imperialist power.

During the first decade of the revolutionary struggle, people were loath to make a radical break with the past. Severing relations with Britain seemed unthinkable, and many still hoped that the British government would change its policies. Nobody was straining forward excitedly to the future or dreaming of a new world order. Most Americans still instinctively responded to the crisis in the old, premodern way: they looked back to an idealized past to sustain them in their position. The revolutionary leaders and those who embraced the more secular Radical Whig ideology drew inspiration from the struggle of the Saxons against the invading Normans in 1066, or the more recent struggle of the Puritan Parliamentarians during the English Civil War. The Calvinists harked back to their own Golden Age in New England, recalling the struggle of the Puritans against the tyrannical Anglican establishment in Old England; they had sought liberty and freedom from oppression in the New World, creating a godly society in the American wilderness. The emphasis in the sermons and revolutionary rhetoric of this period (1763–73) was on the desire to conserve the precious achievements of the past. The notion of radical change inspired fears of decline and ruin. The colonists were seeking to preserve their heritage, according to the old conservative spirit. The past was presented as idyllic, the future as potentially horrific. The revolutionary leaders declared that their actions were designed to keep at bay the catastrophe that would inevitably ensue if there was a radical severance from tradition. They spoke of the possible consequences of British policy with fear, using the apocalyptic language of the Bible.⁵⁰

But this changed. As the British clung obstinately to their controversial imperial policies, the colonists burned their boats. After the Boston Tea Party (1773) and the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) there could be no going back. The Declaration of Independence expressed a new and courageous determination to break away from the old order and go forward to an unprecedented future. In this respect, the Declaration was a modernizing document, which articulated in political terms the intellectual independence and iconoclasm that had characterized the scientific revolution in Europe. But the majority of the colonists were more inspired by the myths of Christian prophecy than by John Locke. They would need to approach modern political autonomy in a mythological package which was familiar to them, resonated with their deepest beliefs, and enabled them to find the psychological strength to make this difficult transition. As we shall so often find, religion often provides the means that get people through the painful rite of passage to modernity.

Thus, ministers in many of the mainline churches (even the Anglicans) Christianized the revolutionary rhetoric of such populist leaders as Sam Adams. When they spoke of the importance of virtue and responsibility in government, this made sense of Adams’s fiery denunciations of the corruption of the British officials.⁵¹ The Great Awakening had already made New Light Calvinists wary of the establishment and confident of their ability to effect major change. When revolutionary leaders spoke of “liberty,” they used a term that was already saturated with religious meaning: it carried associations of grace, of the freedom of the Gospel and the Sons of God. It was linked with such themes as the Kingdom of God, in which all oppression would end, and the myth of a Chosen People who would become God’s instrument in the transformation of the world.⁵² Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), president of Yale University, spoke enthusiastically of the revolution ushering in “Immanuel’s Land,” and of America becoming “the principal seat of that new, that peculiar Kingdom which shall be given to the saints of the Most High.”⁵³ In 1775, the Connecticut preacher Ebenezer Baldwin insisted that the calamities of the war could only hasten God’s plans for the New World. Jesus would establish his glorious Kingdom in America: liberty, religion, and learning had been driven out of Europe and had moved westward, across the Atlantic. The present crisis was preparing the way for the Last Days of the present corrupt order. For Provost William Smith of Philadelphia, the colonies were God’s “chosen seat of Freedom, Arts and Heavenly Knowledge.”⁵⁴

But if churchmen were sacralizing politics, secularist leaders also used the language of Christian utopianism. John Adams looked back on the settlement of America as God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity.⁵⁵ Thomas Paine was convinced that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”⁵⁶ The rational pragmatism of the leaders would not itself have been sufficient to help people make the fearsome journey to an unknown future and break with the motherland. The enthusiasm, imagery, and mythology of Christian eschatology gave meaning to the revolutionary struggle and helped secularists and Calvinists alike to make the decisive, dislocating severance from tradition.

So did the theology of hatred that had erupted during the Seven Years War. In rather the same way as Iranians would later call America “the Great Satan” during their Islamic Revolution, British officials were portrayed as being in league with the devil during the revolutionary crisis. After the passing of the notorious Stamp Act (1765), patriotic poems and songs presented its perpetrators, Lords Bute, Grenville, and North, as the minions of Satan, who were conspiring to lure the Americans into the devil’s eternal Kingdom. The Stamp was described as the “mark of the Beast” that, according to the Book of Revelation, would be inscribed on the damned in the Last Days. Effigies depicting the British ministers were carried alongside portraits of Satan in political processions and hung from “liberty trees” throughout the colonies.⁵⁷ In 1774, King George III became associated with the Antichrist when he granted religious freedom to the French Catholics in the Canadian territory conquered by England during the Seven Years War. His picture now adorned the liberty trees alongside pictures of the Papal Antichrist and the Devil.⁵⁸ Even the more educated colonists fell prey to this fear of hidden cosmic conspiracy. The presidents of Harvard and Yale both believed that the colonists were fighting a war against satanic forces, and looked forward to the imminent defeat of popery, “a religion most favourable to arbitrary power.” The War of Independence had become part of God’s providential design for the destruction of the Papal Antichrist, which would surely herald the arrival of God’s millennial Kingdom in America.⁵⁹ This paranoid vision of widespread conspiracy and the tendency to see an ordinary political conflict as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil seems, unfortunately, to occur frequently when a people is engaged in a revolutionary struggle as it enters the new world. This satanic mythology helped the colonists to separate themselves definitively from the old world, for which they still felt a strong residual affection. The demonizing of England transformed it into the antithetical “other,” the polar opposite of America, and thus enabled the colonists to shape a distinct identity for themselves and to articulate the new order they were fighting to bring into being.

Thus, religion played a key role in the creation of the first modern secular republic. After the Revolution, however, when the newly independent states drew up their constitutions, God was mentioned in them only in the most perfunctory manner. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson disestablished the Anglican church in Virginia; his bill declared that coercion in matters of faith was “sinfull and tyrannical,” that truth would prevail if people were allowed their own opinions, and that there should be a “wall of separation” between religion and politics.⁶⁰ The bill was supported by the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of Virginia, who resented the privileged position of the Church of England in the state. Later the other states followed Virginia’s lead, and disestablished their own churches, Massachusetts being the last to do so, in 1833. In 1787, when the federal Constitution was drafted at the Philadelphia Convention, God was not mentioned at all, and in the Bill of Rights (1789), the First Amendment of the Constitution formally separated religion from the state: “Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Henceforth faith would be a private and voluntary affair in the United States. This was a revolutionary step and has been hailed as one of the great achievements of the Age of Reason. The thinking behind it was indeed inspired by the tolerant philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the Founding Fathers were also moved by more pragmatic considerations. They knew that the federal Constitution was essential to preserve the unity of the states, but they also realized that if the federal government established any single one of the Protestant denominations and made it the official faith of the United States, the Constitution would not be approved. Congregationalist Massachusetts, for example, would never ratify a Constitution that established the Anglican Church. This was also the reason why Article VI, Section 3, of the Constitution abolished religious tests for office in the federal government. There was idealism in the Founders’ decision to disestablish religion and to secularize politics, but the new nation could not base its identity on any one sectarian option and retain the loyalty of all its subjects. The needs of the modern state demanded that it be tolerant and, therefore, secular.⁶¹

Paradoxically, however, by the middle of the nineteenth century the new secularist United States had become a passionately Christian nation. During the 1780s, and still more during the 1790s, the churches all experienced new growth⁶² and began to counter the Enlightenment ideology of the Founding Fathers. They now sacralized American independence: the new republic, they argued, was God’s achievement. The revolutionary battle had been the cause of heaven against hell.⁶³ Only ancient Israel had experienced such direct divine intervention in its history. God might not be mentioned in the Constitution, Timothy Dwight noted wryly, but he urged his students to “look into the history of your country [and] you will find scarcely less gracious and wonderful proofs of divine protection and deliverance … than that which was shown to the people of Israel in Egypt.”⁶⁴ The clergy confidently predicted that the American people would become more pious; they saw the expansion of the frontier as a sign of the coming Kingdom.⁶⁵ Democracy had made the people sovereign, so they must become more godly if the new states were to escape the dangers inherent in popular rule. The American people must be saved from the irreligious deism of their political leaders. Churchmen saw “deism” as the new satanic foe, making it the scapegoat for all the inevitable failures of the infant nation. Deism, they insisted, would promote atheism and materialism; it worshipped Nature and Reason instead of Jesus Christ. A paranoid conspiracy fear developed of a mysterious cabal called the “Bavarian Illuminati” who were atheists and Freemasons and were plotting to overthrow Christianity in the United States. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president in 1800, there was a second anti-deist campaign which tried to establish a link between Jefferson and the atheistic “Jacobins” of the godless French Revolution.⁶⁶

The Union of the new states was fragile. Americans nurtured very different hopes for the new nation, secularist and Protestant. Both have proved to be equally enduring. Americans still revere their Constitution and venerate the Founding Fathers, but they also see America as “God’s own nation”; as we shall see, some Protestants continue to see “secular humanism” as an evil of near-satanic proportions. After the revolution, the nation was bitterly divided and Americans had an internal struggle to determine what their culture should be. They conducted, in effect, a “second revolution” in the early years of the nineteenth century. With great difficulty and courage, Americans had swept away the past; they had written a groundbreaking Constitution, and brought a new nation to birth. But this involved strain, tension, and paradox. The people as a whole had still to decide the terms on which they were to enter the modern world, and many of the less privileged colonists were prepared to contest the cultural hegemony of the aristocratic Enlightenment elite. After they had vanquished the British, ordinary Americans had yet to determine what the revolution had meant for them. Were they to adopt the cool, civilized, polite rationalism of the Founders, or would they opt for a much rougher and more populist Protestant identity?

The Founding Fathers and the clergy in the mainline churches had cooperated in the creation of a modern, secular republic, but they both still belonged in many important respects to the old conservative world. They were aristocrats and elitists. They believed that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead the nation from above. They did not conceive of the possibility of change coming from below. They still saw historical transformation being effected by great personalities, who acted rather like the prophets of the past as the guides of humanity and who made history happen. They had not yet realized that a society is often pushed forward by impersonal processes; environmental, economic, and social forces can foil the plans and projects of the most coercive leaders.⁶⁷ During the 1780s and 1790s, there was much discussion about the nature of democracy. How much power should the people have? John Adams, the second president of the United States, was suspicious of any polity that might lead to mob rule and the impoverishment of the rich.⁶⁸ But the more radical Jeffersonians asked how the elite few could speak for the many. They protested against the “tyranny” of Adams’s government, and argued that the people’s voice must be heard. The success of the revolution had given many Americans a sense of empowerment; it had shown them that established authority was fallible and by no means invincible. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. The Jeffersonians believed that ordinary folk should also enjoy the freedom and autonomy preached by the philosophes. In the new newspapers, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and other specialists were ridiculed. Nobody should have to give total credence to these so-called “experts.” The law, medicine, and religion should all be a matter of common sense and within the reach of everyone.⁶⁹

This sentiment was especially rife on the frontiers, where people felt slighted by the republican government. By 1790, some 40 percent of Americans lived in territory that had only been settled by white colonists some thirty years earlier. The frontiersmen felt resentful of the ruling elite, who did not share their hardships, but who taxed them as harshly as the British, and bought land for investment in the territories without any intention of leaving the comforts and refined civilization of the eastern seaboard. They were willing to give ear to a new brand of preacher who helped to stir up the wave of revivals known as the Second Great Awakening. This was more politically radical than the first. These prophets were not simply concerned with saving souls, but worked to shape society and religion in a way that was very different from anything envisaged by the Founders.

The new revivalists were not learned men, like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, who had studied at Yale and Oxford. They hated academia and insisted that all Christians had the right to interpret the Bible for themselves, without submitting to the theological experts. These prophets were not cultivated men; in their preaching they spoke in a way that ordinary people could understand, often using wild gestures along with earthy humor and slang. Their services were not polite and decorous, but noisy, rowdy, and highly emotional. They were recasting Christianity in a popular style that was light-years from the refined ethos of the Age of Reason. They held torchlight processions and mass rallies, and pitched huge tents outside the towns, so that the revivals took on the appearance of a vast campsite. The new genre of the Gospel Song transported the audience to ecstasy, so that they wept, rocked violently backward and forward, and shouted for joy.⁷⁰ Instead of making their religion rational, the prophets relied on dreams and visions, signs and wonders—all the things that were deplored by the scientists and philosophers of the Enlightenment. And yet, like the Jeffersonians, they refused to see the past as the repository of wisdom, conservative-wise. They were moderns. People should not be bound by learned traditions. They had the freedom of the sons of God, and, with common sense, relying on the plain facts of scripture, they could figure out the truth for themselves.⁷¹ These new preachers railed against the aristocracy, the establishment, and the learned clergy. They emphasized the egalitarian tendencies of the New Testament, which stated that in the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God sent his insights to the poor and unlettered: Jesus and the Apostles had not had college degrees.

Religion and politics were part of a single vision. With his flowing hair and wild, glittering eyes Lorenzo Dow looked like a modern-day John the Baptist. He would see a storm as a direct act of God, and relied on dreams and visions for his insights. A change in the weather could be a “sign” of the approaching End of Days; he claimed the ability to foretell the future. He seemed, in sum, to be the antithesis of the new world of modernity. Yet he was likely to begin a sermon with a quotation from Jefferson or Thomas Paine, and like a true modernist, he urged the people to throw off the shackles of superstition and ignorance, cast off the authority of the learned establishment, and think for themselves. It seemed that in the new United States, religion and politics were two sides of a single coin and spilled easily into each other, whatever the Constitution maintained. Thus Elias Smith first experienced a political conversion during Jefferson’s presidential campaign, when he became a radical egalitarian. But he then went on to found a new and more democratic church. Similarly, James O’Kelly had fought in the revolution and been held prisoner by the British. He had been thoroughly politicized, wanted a more equal church, and seceded from mainstream Christianity to found his own “Republican Methodists.” When Barton Stone broke with the Presbyterians, he called his secession a “declaration of independence.” Alexander Campbell (1788–1866), who had received a university education, cast off his Scottish Presbyterianism when he migrated to America, to found a sect that approximated more closely to the egalitarian Primitive Church.⁷² Still more radical was Joseph Smith (1805–44), who was not content to read the Bible, but claimed to have discovered an entirely new scripture. The Book of Mormon was one of the most eloquent of all nineteenth-century social protests, and mounted a fierce denunciation of the rich, the powerful, and the learned.⁷³ Smith and his family had lived for years on the brink of destitution, and felt that there was no place for them in this brave new republic. The first Mormon converts were equally poor, marginalized, and desperate, perfectly ready to follow Smith in an exodus from and symbolic repudiation of the United States. Mormons subsequently founded their own independent kingdoms, first in Illinois and, finally, in Utah.

The establishment looked with disdain upon Dow, Stone, and Joseph Smith, regarding them as mindless demagogues who had nothing to offer the modern world. These preachers seemed to be barbarous anachronisms, relics of a primitive bygone world. The response of the mainline clergy and American aristocrats to these latter-day prophets was not dissimilar to the way in which liberals and secularists regard fundamentalist leaders today. But they were wrong to dismiss them. Men such as Dow or Joseph Smith have been described as folk geniuses.⁷⁴ They were able to bring the revolutionary modern ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech, and independence to the folk in an idiom that uneducated people could understand and make their own. These new ideals that were going to be essential in the new world that was coming to birth in America were brought to the less privileged majority in a mythological context that gave them meaning, and provided a necessary continuity during this time of turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. These new prophets demanded recognition, and, though they were reviled by the established elite, their reception by the people showed that they answered a real need. They were not content with individual conversions, like the preachers of the First Great Awakening, but wanted to change society. They were able to mobilize the population in nationwide mass movements, using popular music and the new communications media to skilled effect. Instead of trying to impose the modern ethos from above, like the Founding Fathers, they built from the ground up and led what amounted to a grassroots rebellion against the rational establishment. They were highly successful. The sects founded by Elias Smith, O’Kelly, Campbell, and Stone, for example, amalgamated to form the Disciples of Christ. By 1860, the Disciples had some 200,000 members and had become the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the United States.⁷⁵ Like the Mormons, the Disciples had institutionalized a popular discontent that the establishment could not ignore.

But this radical Christian rebellion against the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment had a still more profound effect. The Second Great Awakening managed to lead many Americans away from the classical republicanism of the Founders to the more vulgar democracy and rugged individualism that characterize much American culture today. They had contested the ruling elite and won a substantial victory. There is a strain in the American spirit that is closer to the populism and anti-intellectualism of the nineteenth-century prophets than to the cool ethos of the Age of Reason. The noisy, spectacular revivals of the Second Great Awakening made a permanent impression on the distinctive political style of the United States, whose mass rallies, unabashed sentiment, and showy charisma are so bewildering to many Europeans. Like many fundamentalist movements today, these prophets of the Second Great Awakening gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited in the new states a means of making their views and voices heard by the more privileged elite. Their movements gave the people what Martin Luther King called “a sense of somebodiness,”⁷⁶ in much the same way as the fundamentalist groups do today. Like the fundamentalist movements, these new sects all looked back to a primitive order, and determined to rebuild the original faith; all relied in an entirely new way upon Scripture, which they interpreted literally and often reductively. All also tended to be dictatorial. It was a paradox in early-nineteenth-century America, as in late-twentieth-century fundamentalist movements, that a desire for independence, autonomy, and equality should lead large numbers of people to obey religious demagogues implicitly. For all his talk about enfranchisement, Joseph Smith created what was virtually a religious dictatorship, and, despite his praise of the egalitarian and communal ideals of the Primitive Church, Alexander Campbell became the richest man in West Virginia, and ruled his flock with a rod of iron.

The Second Great Awakening shows the sort of solutions that many people find attractive when their society is going through the wrenching upheaval of modernization. Like modern fundamentalists, the prophets of the Second Great Awakening mounted a rebellion against the learned rationalism of the ruling classes and insisted on a more religious identity. At the same time, they made the modern ethos accessible to people who had not had the opportunity to study the writings of Descartes, Newton, or John Locke. The prophetic rebellion of these American prophets was both successful and enduring in the United States, and this means that we should not expect modern fundamentalist movements in societies that are currently modernizing to be ephemeral and a passing “madness.” The new American sects may have seemed bizarre to the establishment, but they were essentially modern and an integral part of the new world. This was certainly true of the millennial movement founded by the New York farmer William Miller (1782–1849), who pored over the biblical prophecies, and, in a series of careful calculations, “proved” in a pamphlet published in 1831 that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in the year 1843. Miller was reading his Bible in an essentially modern way. Instead of seeing it as a mythical, symbolic account of eternal realities, Miller assumed that such narratives as the Book of Revelation were accurate predictions of imminent events, which could be worked out with scientific and mathematical precision. People now read texts for information. Truth must be capable of logical, scientific demonstration. Miller was treating the mythos of Scripture as though it were logos, and he and his assistant Joshua Hines constantly stressed the systematic and scientific nature of Miller’s investigations.⁷⁷ The movement was also democratic: anybody could interpret the Bible for him or herself, and Miller encouraged his followers to challenge his calculations and come up with theories of their own.⁷⁸

Improbable and bizarre as the movement seemed, Millerism had instant appeal. Some 50,000 Americans became confirmed “Millerites,” while thousands more sympathized without actually joining up.⁷⁹ Inevitably, however, Millerism turned into an object lesson in the danger of interpreting the mythos of the Bible literally. Christ failed to return, as promised, in 1843, and Millerites were devastated. Nonetheless, this failure did not mean the end of millennialism, which became and has continued to be a major passion in the United States. Out of the “Great Disappointment” of 1843, other sects, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, appeared, adjusted the eschatological timetable, and, by eschewing precise predictions, enabled new generations of Americans to look forward to an imminent End of history.

At first this new, rough, and democratic Christianity was confined to the poorer and more uneducated classes. but during the 1840s, Charles Finney (1792–1875), a pivotal figure in American religion, brought it to the middle classes. He thus helped to make this “evangelical” Christianity, based on a literal reading of the Gospels and intent on converting the secular nation to Christ, the dominant faith of the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century.⁸⁰ Finney used the uncouth, wild methods of the older prophets, but addressed lawyers, doctors, and merchants, urging them to experience Christ directly, without the mediation of the establishment, to think for themselves and rebel against the hegemony of the learned theologians in the denominations. He also urged his middle-class audiences to join other evangelicals in the social reform of society.⁸¹

After the Revolution, the state had declared its independence of religion and, at the same time, Christians in all the denominations began to withdraw from the state. There was disillusion and disenchantment with the Revolution, which had not managed to usher in the millennium after all. Protestants began to insist on preserving their own religious “space,” apart from the deist republican government. They were God’s community and did not belong to the federal establishment. Protestants still believed that America should be a godly nation, and public virtue was increasingly seen as nonpolitical⁸²; it was better to work for the redemption of society independently of the state, in churches, schools, and the numerous reform associations which sprang up in the northern states during the 1820s, after the Second Great Awakening. Christians started to work for a better world. They campaigned against slavery and liquor, and to end the oppression of marginalized groups. Many of the Millerites had been involved in temperance, abolitionist, and feminist organizations.⁸³ There was certainly an element of social control in all this. There was also an unpleasantly nativist motivation in the emphasis on the Protestant virtues of thrift, sobriety, and clean living. Protestants were greatly disturbed by the massive flood of Catholic immigrants into the United States. At the time of the Revolution, America had been a Protestant country, with Catholics comprising only about one percent of the total population. But by the 1840s, there were over 2.5 million Catholics in America, and Roman Catholicism was the largest Christian denomination in the United States.⁸⁴ This was an alarming development in a nation that had long regarded the Pope as Antichrist. Some of the evangelical reform effort was an obvious attempt to counter this Catholic influence. Temperance, for example, was promoted to oppose the drinking habits of the new Polish, Irish, and Italian Americans.⁸⁵

Nevertheless, these evangelical reform movements were also positive and modernizing. There was an emphasis on the worth of each human being. They actively promoted an egalitarianism that would help to make slavery, for example, intolerable in the northern states, though not in the South, which remained virtually untouched by the Second Great Awakening, and which retained a premodern, elitist social structure until long after the Civil War.⁸⁶ The reform movements helped people to accommodate the modern ideal of inalienable human rights in a Christian package, at least in the North. The movements for feminism and for penal and educational reform, which were spearheaded by evangelical Christians, were also progressive. The reform groups themselves also helped people to acquire the modern spirit. Members made a conscious, voluntary decision to join an association, and learned how to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined objective in a modern, rational way. Eventually evangelical Christians would form the backbone of the Whig party (to which the later Republican party was in large measure the successor), while their opponents (the Old Lights and the Catholics) tended to gravitate to the Democratic party. The Whigs/Republicans wanted to create a “righteous empire” in America, based on Godly rather than Enlightenment virtues.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the evangelicals were no longer marginalized and disenfranchised. They had challenged the secularist establishment and made their voices heard. They were now engaged in a Christian reconquista of American society, which they were determined to return to a strictly Protestant ethos. They felt proud of their achievement. They had made an indelible impression upon American culture, which, despite the secular Constitution of the United States, was now more Christian than it had ever been before. Between 1780 and 1860, there was a spectacular rise in the number of Christian congregations in the United States, which far outstripped the national rate of population growth. In 1780, there were only about 2,500 congregations; by 1820 there were 11,000, and by 1860 a phenomenal 52,000—an almost 21-fold increase. In comparison, the population of the United States rose from about four million in 1780 to ten million in 1820, and 31 million in 1860—a less-than-eightfold increase.⁸⁷ In Europe, religion was becoming increasingly identified with the establishment, and ordinary people were turning to alternative ideologies, but in America, Protestantism empowered the people against the establishment, and this tendency has continued, so that it is difficult to find a popular movement in America today that is not associated with religion in some way. By the 1850s, Christianity in America was vibrant, and seemed poised for future triumphs.

It was a very different story in Europe. There the chief ideologies taking people into the modern world were not religious but secularist, and, increasingly, people’s attention focused on this world rather than the next. This was clear in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who brought the transcendent God down to earth and made it human. Fulfillment was to be found in the mundane, not in the supernatural. In Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), the universal Spirit could only achieve its full potential if it immersed itself in the limiting conditions of space and time; it was most fully realized in the human mind. So too, human beings had to give up the old idea of a transcendent God in order to understand that they were themselves divine. The myth, a new version of the Christian doctrine of incarnation, can also be seen as a cure for the alienation from the world experienced by many modern people. It was an attempt to resacralize a world that had been emptied of the divine, and to enhance the vision of the human mind whose powers had seemed so curtailed in the philosophy of Descartes and Kant. But above all, Hegel’s myth expressed the forward-thrusting dynamic of modernity. There was no harking back to a Golden Age; Hegel’s world was continually re-creating itself. Instead of the old conservative conviction that everything had already been said, Hegel envisaged a dialectical process in which human beings were constantly engaged in the destruction of past ideas that had once been sacred and incontrovertible. In this dialectic, every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite; these opposites clash and are integrated and fulfilled in a more advanced synthesis; then the whole process begins again. In this vision, there was to be no return to fundamentals, but a continuous evolution toward entirely new and unprecedented truth.

Hegel’s philosophy expressed the driving optimism of the modern age, which had now irrevocably left the conservative spirit behind. But some could not see why Hegel should even have bothered with God. Religion and mythology were beginning to be viewed by some Europeans as not only outmoded but positively harmful. Instead of curing our sense of alienation, they were thought to compound it. By setting up God as the antithesis of humanity, Hegel’s pupil Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued, religion was bringing about “the disuniting of man from himself.… God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak.”⁸⁸ For Karl Marx (1818–83), religion was a symptom of a sick society, an opiate that made the diseased social system bearable and removed the will to find a cure by directing attention away from this world to the next.⁸⁹

Atheists were beginning to take the high moral ground. This became clear in the aftermath of the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, by Charles Darwin (1809–82). This represented a new phase of modern science. Instead of collecting facts, as Bacon had prescribed, Darwin put forward a hypothesis: animals, plants, and human beings had not been created fully formed (as the Bible implied), but had developed slowly in a long period of evolutionary adaptation to their environment. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin proposed that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same proto-ape that was the progenitor of the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee. Darwin’s name has become a byword for atheism in fundamentalist circles, yet the Origin was not intended as an attack upon religion, but was a sober, careful exposition of a scientific theory. Darwin himself was an agnostic but always respectful of religious faith. Nevertheless, the Origin was a watershed. It sold 1400 copies on the day of publication. Certainly, it and Darwin’s later work dealt another blow to human self-esteem. Copernicus had displaced humanity from the center of the cosmos, Descartes and Kant had alienated humans from the physical world, and now Darwin had suggested that they were simply animals. They had not been specially created by God, but had evolved like everything else. Indeed, there seemed no place for God in the creative process and the world, “red in tooth and claw,” had no divine purpose.

Yet in the years immediately following the publication of the Origin, the religious reaction was muted. There was much more fuss the following year, when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews, which made the latest biblical criticism available to the general reader.⁹⁰ Since the late eighteenth century, German scholars had applied the new techniques of literary analysis, archaeology, and comparative linguistics to the Bible, subjecting it to a scientifically empirical methodology. They argued that the first five books of the Bible, traditionally attributed to Moses, were in fact written much later and by a number of different authors; the book of Isaiah had at least two different sources, and King David had probably not written the Psalms. Most of the miracles described in the Bible were simply literary tropes and could not be understood literally; many of the biblical events were almost certainly not historical. In Essays and Reviews, the British clerics argued that the Bible must not have special treatment, but should be subjected to the same critical rigor as any other text.⁹¹ The new “Higher Criticism” represented the triumph of the rational discourse of logos over myth. Rational science had subjected the mythoi of the Bible to radical scrutiny and found that some of its claims were “false.” The biblical tales were simply “myths,” which, in popular parlance, now meant that they were not true. The Higher Criticism would become a bogey of Christian fundamentalists, because it seemed a major assault upon religion, but this was only because Western people had lost the original sense of the mythical, and thought that doctrines and scriptural narratives were logoi, narratives that purported to be factually accurate and phenomena that could be investigated scientifically. But in revealing how impossible it was to read the Bible in an entirely literal manner, the Higher Criticism could also have provided a healthy counterbalance to the growing tendency to make modern Christian faith “scientific.”

Noting the discrepancy between Darwin’s hypothesis and the first chapter of Genesis, some Christians, such as Darwin’s American friend and fellow scientist Asa Gray (1810–88), tried to harmonize natural selection with a literal reading of Genesis. Later the project known as Creation Science would go to even greater lengths to make Genesis scientifically respectable. But this was to miss the point, because, as a myth, the biblical creation story was not an historical account of the origins of life but a more spiritual reflection upon the ultimate significance of life itself, about which scientific logos has nothing to say.

Even though Darwin had not intended it, the publication of the Origin did cause a preliminary skirmish between religion and science, but the first shots were fired not by the religious but by the more aggressive secularists. In England, Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95), and on the Continent, Karl Vogt (1817–95), Ludwig Buchner (1824–99), Jakob Moleschott (1822–93), and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), popularized Darwin’s theory, touring and lecturing to large audiences to prove that science and religion were incompatible. They were, in fact, preaching a crusade against religion.⁹²

Huxley clearly felt that he had a fight on his hands. Reason, he insisted, must be the sole criterion of truth. People would have to choose between mythology and rational science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.”⁹³ Scientific rationalism was, for Huxley, a new secular religion; it demanded conversion and total commitment. “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration,” he urged his audience. “And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.”⁹⁴ Huxley was supported by the whole thrust of modern, progressive culture, which had achieved such spectacular results that it could now claim aggressively to be the sole arbiter of truth. But truth had been narrowed to what is “demonstrated and demonstrable,” which, religion aside, would exclude the truth told by art or music. For Huxley, there was no other possible path. Reason alone was truthful, and the myths of religion truthless. It was a final declaration of independence from the mythical constraints of the conservative period. Reason no longer had to submit to a higher court. It was not to be restricted by morality but must be pushed to the end “without regard to any other consideration.” The continental crusaders went further in their war against religion. Buchner’s best-seller, Force and Matter, a crude book which Huxley himself despised, argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything in the world had derived from a simple cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. But the large numbers of people who read this book and the huge crowds who flocked to Haeckel’s lectures showed that in Europe a significant number of people wanted to hear that science had disproved religion once and for all.

This was because by treating religious truths as though they were rational logoi, modern scientists, critics, and philosophers had made them incredible. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) would proclaim that God was dead. In The Gay Science, he told the story of a madman running one morning into the marketplace crying “I seek God!” When the amused and supercilious bystanders asked him if he imagined that God had emigrated or run away, the madman glared. “Where has God gone?” he demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!”⁹⁵ In an important sense, Nietzsche was right. Without myth, cult, ritual, and prayer, the sense of the sacred inevitably dies. By making “God” a wholly notional truth, struggling to reach the divine by intellect alone, as some modern believers had attempted to do, modern men and women had killed it for themselves. The whole dynamic of their future-oriented culture had made the traditional ways of apprehending the sacred psychologically impossible. Like the Jewish Marranos before them, who had themselves been thrust, for very different reasons, into a religious limbo, many modern men and women were experiencing the truths of religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and incomprehensible.

Nietzsche’s madman believed that the death of God had torn humanity from its roots, thrown the earth off course, and cast it adrift in a pathless universe. Everything that had once given human beings a sense of direction had vanished. “Is there still an above and below?” he had asked. “Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?”⁹⁶ A profound terror, a sense of meaninglessness and annihilation, would be part of the modern experience. Nietzsche was writing at a time when the exuberant exhilaration of modernity was beginning to give way to a nameless dread. This would affect not only the Christians of Europe, but Jews and Muslims, who had also been drawn into the modernizing process and found it equally perplexing.