Don Cupitt called his book The Sea of Faith, but it is the sub-title – Christianity in Change – which gives the clearer picture of the contents. ‘For those caught up in it,’ Don wrote in 1984, ‘a time of religious upheaval is peculiarly hard to understand... we live in such a time.’ Burleigh’s book examines some of this upheaval, and may help us understand our predicament.
Earthly Powers tells the story of the interaction of politics and religion in Europe in the long 19th Century (1789-1914) in a strikingly revisionist way.
Most older studies assumed that politics and religion are clearly separate affairs (as the Constitution of the USA formally made them), and that the 19th Century was a time of struggle of left against right, enlightened secular progress against defensive religious tradition. Without directly confronting this, Burleigh undermines much of it with a sustained alternative account, presenting the evidence to show the synergy of politics and religion, and the faithbased nature of the various ostensibly non-religious, civic, secular, ideological, and utopian movements and cults of the time – mostly nationalist and socialist – and their offspring. He also points to the political character of much of Europe’s religion prior to 1789.
Writing in 1856, de Tocqueville observed that the French Revolution ‘seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the human race even more than for the reform of France... it lit a passion... it took on that appearance of a religious revolution that so astonished its contemporaries.. Or rather, it itself became a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God... but one which, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.’ For Burleigh, even the most overtly aggressive anti-religious movement – Bolshevism – had quasi-religious roots in anti-Czarist terrorism, a moral protest against oppression. And when trying to explain how the proletariat could be the saviour class, Marx resorted to the language of Gnosticism!
Burleigh is aware that he is dealing in variables – matters which look different from a changed viewpoint. Nationalism and Socialism both altered the way we imagine God: ‘in changing times, God did not remain the celestial equivalent of a terrestrial absolute monarch’. Burleigh shares common ground with SoF here, and he comments, on ‘Dover Beach’, that tides come in as well as go out, perhaps signalling his lack of surprise at the recrudescence of religion now. In general, he writes as a historian, reviewing the evidence. He acknowledges a debt to Maurice Cowling and Edward Norman (usually labelled conservatives), but hints at his own sympathies when he writes that of the faiths he deals with, ‘some, like liberalism are mercifully still with us.’ Is Burleigh’s selection of the evidence fair, and his presentation convincing? Any historian who differs will have a formidable force of academic studies, accessed through footnotes, to contend with. I found the book persuasive. At the least, it raises deeply interesting questions – like, is the separation of politics and religion, state and church, a permanency?
It is a fairly recent development, owing a lot to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended a century of cruel and destructive religious wars and normalised the autonomous nation state. As long as we distinguish secular and sacred, we help the convention survive – but readers of Cupitt will have wondered, is nothing sacred – or, is everything sacred? Resurgent Islam rejects the separation.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkish state (outside the limits of this work) is strongly contested.
And large areas of human life – culture, marriage, education, etc – have always belonged to both politics and religion.
This book ‘leaves encoded’ its messages for the present, but messages there are. If you are puzzled by continuing genocides in a humanitarian world, the political clout of the Religious Right in the USA, the ban on the hijab in French schools, and such problems, there is illumination here.
John Challenor is a member of SoF and former Editor of Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).
Burleigh’s further work covering the 20th Century, Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda was published by Harper Press in 2006.
John Challenor reviews Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh HarperCollins (London). 2005. £20. hbk 530 pages. ISBN: 0007195729 reviews ‘One of the finest and funniest writers to emerge in England since Kingsley Amis’ (Herald Tribune). ‘One of the most interesting unsung novelists of her generation. She is gifted with devastating powers of observation’ (Sunday Telegraph). ‘She gets to the heart of the matter, and there, lurking below the seriously mundane, we discover the spiritual underpinnings of the universe’ (Fay Weldon).
Review of Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh, HarperCollins (London). 2005. £20. hbk 530 pages. ISBN: 0007195729.