The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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.

4. Jews and Muslims Modernize

(1700–1870)

IF MODERNIZATION was difficult for the Christians of Europe and America, it was even more problematic for Jews and Muslims. Muslims experienced modernity as an alien, invasive force, inextricably associated with colonization and foreign domination. They would have to adapt to a civilization whose watchword was independence, while themselves suffering political subjugation. The modern ethos was markedly hostile toward Judaism. For all their talk of toleration, Enlightenment thinkers still regarded Jews with contempt. François-Marie Voltaire (1694–1778) had called them “a totally ignorant nation,” in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1756); they combined “contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all the nations which have tolerated them.” Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), one of the first avowed atheists of Europe, had called Jews “the enemies of the human race.”1 Kant and Hegel both saw Judaism as a servile, degraded faith, utterly opposed to the rational,2 while Karl Marx, himself of Jewish descent, argued that the Jews were responsible for capitalism, which, in his view, was the source of all the world’s ills.3 Jews would, therefore, have to adapt to modernity in an atmosphere of hatred.

In America, the developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had split Protestant Christians into two opposing camps. There had been a similar conflict within Eastern European Jewry at the same time. The Jews of Poland, Galicia, Belorussia, and Lithuania were divided into opposing parties, which would both play a crucial role in the formation of Jewish fundamentalism. The Hasidim, who were not unlike the New Lights, made their appearance at exactly the same time as the American Calvinists were experiencing the First Great Awakening. In 1735, a poor Jewish tavern-keeper called Israel ben Eliezer (1700–60) announced that he had received a revelation that made him a “Master of the Name” (baal shem), one of the faith healers and exorcists who roamed through the villages and rural districts of Poland working miracles of healing in the name of God. But Israel soon acquired a special reputation, because he tended to the spiritual as well as to the physical needs of the poor, so he became known as the “Besht,” an acronym of the title Baal Shem Tov, literally “the Master of the Good Name,” a Master of exceptional status. This was a dark time for Polish Jewry. People had still not fully recovered from the Shabbatean scandal, and Jewish communities, which had suffered grave economic problems ever since the massacres of 1648, were now in spiritual crisis. In their struggle for survival, wealthier Jews did not distribute the tax burdens fairly, the social gap between rich and poor widened, strongmen, habitués of the nobles’ courts, seized control of the kehilla

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