Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 576 pages
• Published by: HarperCollins February 27, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 006058095X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0060580957
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Weighs: 1.8 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
In a dazzling display of erudition, British historian Burleigh completes his two-volume chronicle of the interaction between religion and politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the present. The first book, Earthly Powers (2006), took the story to World War I, concentrating on the battle for and against secularization in the 19th century, while this installment carries the story to the present. Though best known for his books on Germany, including the prize-winning The Third Reich (2001), Burleigh's remarkable breadth of knowledge is manifest in his trenchant analysis of the role of religion in a number of European countries and the Soviet Union. He thoroughly reviews totalitarian attacks on religion and its misuse by Nazis, Fascists and Communists. Burleigh's opinions are forceful, especially when he condemns a prevalent "fantasy view" of Ireland that is blind to the "gangsters of the Provisional IRA" who are responsible for "bullying, intimidating and killing others." He colorfully criticizes "politicians in Western democracies [who] treat high office as pigs regard their troughs." Burleigh also upbraids critics of Pius XII, claiming that the controversial pope actually did a good deal to save and shelter Jews during the Holocaust. Use of odd words such as "erastianism" and "soteriological" detract from what is otherwise a rewarding example of intellectual history. (Mar.)
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From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Mark Mazower

Perhaps in the United States, with its high rate of churchgoing, the importance of religion is obvious. But in Europe, the impact of faith on public life was, until recently, widely assumed to be in decline. Of course, episodes such as the Roman Catholic Church's alliance with Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s highlighted the oddity of thinking that religion was a medieval phenomenon, not a modern one. Yet for decades, theorists of progress predicted that the more societies modernized, the weaker the grip of religion would become: What lay at the end of the road was the inevitable triumph of secularism.

Quite rightly, Michael Burleigh wants none of this. His Sacred Causes -- a sprawling, uneven and irascible book -- argues that religion never went away. Not only did churches play a role in the resistance (and accommodation) to 20th-century totalitarianism of the Right and Left, but, in Burleigh's view, those ideologies were in fact political religions that borrowed their trappings, rhetoric, dogmatism and fervor from the church. There was, however, a key difference between religious leaders engaging in politics and political leaders demanding religion-like devotion. Christianity, Burleigh says, contributed to Europe's political culture by carving out a space beyond the power of the state. Stalin and Hitler, on the other hand, extended state power into previously private realms. Lethal, fake religions triumphed -- for a time -- over real, humane ones.

Burleigh defends the Catholic Church in particular. He claims its upper echelons, although inclined to authoritarianism, were more opposed to Hitler than people tend to think. There's no doubt where Burleigh's sympathies lie: Only when he comes to the liberation theology of Latin America, which views Jesus as a liberator of the oppressed, does his anti-Marxism temporarily trump his appreciation for the clergy. But this book is really about Europe. It is silent on political Hinduism in India, Sinhala Buddhist fundamentalism in Asia, evangelical missionaries in Africa and contemporary forms of Jewish nationalism in the Middle East. On Islam, it reproduces the apocalyptic slurs of post-9/11 punditry. While Burleigh does have plenty to say about the battle between religion and secularism on the Old Continent after 1945, little of it is positive. The Protestant churches -- full of their German hand-wringers and English do-gooders -- do not generally elicit from him the same understanding as the papacy, and in his account the sufferings of Orthodox Christianity under communism are counterbalanced by the fascist sympathies of the Romanian clergy. Northern Ireland is portrayed in the spirit of a plague on both houses.

One notices these things because Burleigh is nothing if not opinionated. He despises "sneering secularists" but is a considerable sneerer himself. Targets include "humanist radical eggheads," "tenured radicals" who take a "vampiric interest in female students," the "horde of bodgers and shysters" in the English construction trades and "dingy Irish theme pubs" with their "relentless, mindless gabbling." As the book moves on, jibes and bile clog the writing, and one has the sinking feeling of being cornered by the pub bore, ranting on about '60s swingers, the threat to European civilization, terrorists and trade unions -- pretty much everything and everyone except the pope, Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher. I would like to think that the old Burleigh, the fine historian who wrote some superb works on Nazism, is not gone. Maybe this lament for the disappearing "Christian Constitution of Britain" is really a tasteless spoof designed to show the reader where a certain kind of religious despair can leave you. Or perhaps it is simply what he thinks.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reader Reviews
This book is not as good as "Earthly Powers", volume I of a history of the interplay between religion and politics since the French Revolution. "Earthly Powers" takes us from that esteemed episode to World War I. "Sacred Causes" picks up in 1918 and into the not so distant future. As envisioned by Burleigh, in the future secular authorities in European cities will be able to keep order only by devolving authority to Muslin religious leaders who will police their own kind. That will be a fine paradox: irreligious democracy only subsisting through the cooperation of extremist theocratic religion. In volume II Burleigh goes out of his way to be provocative. His purpose is to defend religion (mainly Catholicism and some versions of Protestantism) as a golden thread running through most of the last century, and to decry irreligion (or rather political religion) as the devil incarnate. His view of Nazism and Communism as two sides of the same coin (millenarist politics gone awry) is only offensive among former comrades. His principled defense of Pius XII is so learned and so elegant, and so contrary to current consensus, that it is sure to get him pilloried. His derision of hippy/New Age spirituality is thoroughly well deserved, but it won't help him with aging baby boomers. His withering view of the Irish is so extreme that it verges on slander. His criticism of multiculturalism as ethically bankrupt and politically useless is spot-on. While I very much enjoyed the robust argumentation (and in fact agree with much of the diagnosis and prognosis), I don't think volume II is as good as volume I, because I think Burleigh stepped over the fine line that separates History from editorial opinion. The book could have done with less invectives and more grounded analysis. Coming after "The Third Reich" and "Earthly Powers", "Sacred Causes" is rather like "Godfather III", good but not great.