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The Sunday Times - Books
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The Sunday Times
October 08, 2006History
False ideals, dangerous beliefsREVIEWED BY MAX HASTINGS
SACRED CAUSES: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al-Qaedaby Michael Burleigh
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HarperCollins £25 pp576
Michael Burleigh forged a formidable reputation as a historian of Germany, and consolidated it with Earthly Powers, his study of the influence of religion upon European politics between 1789 and 1918, published last year. Sacred Causes takes the story up to the present day.
Its first half addresses in masterly fashion the relationship between the churches and the totalitarians. The later chapters are part narrative, part an outpouring of rage about the manner in which Europe over the past 40 years has abandoned itself to the worship of false idols, of which secularism, multiculturalism and indulgence of Irish republican gangsterism are among the most damaging.
Burleigh is at his best analysing the relationship between Christianity and the Nazis, about whom he knows as much as any man. Of Hitler, he writes: “There is something faintly ridiculous about the weight of learning brought to bear in the last six decades on this less than fascinating figure, a cavernous blank behind the impassioned postures.”
Hitler is almost defined by his banality. Fascination focuses on what made a highly educated, sophisticated society fall for him. Burleigh examines the manner in which Nazism, like Italian fascism, sought to adopt the rituals and liturgy of a religion with the Führer himself as Godhead, although Hitler always professed belief in a deity. The author suggests drily that heaven would not have suited him, since he believed that it was inhabited by “life’s failures” and “women of indifferent appearance and faded intellect”.
Burleigh delivers a huge assault on what he considers the myth of the Vatican’s indulgence of the Nazis. He presents impressive evidence to show that many prominent members of the European Catholic hierarchies consistently and publicly opposed Hitler, gave aid to his victims and did their inadequate best to succour Jews. He acknowledges that Pius XII himself might have spoken out more forcefully, but accepts the view widely held among Church potentates at the time, that public confrontation with the Nazis could have made things even worse. He contrasts, for instance, the not ineffectual private pressure exercised on Romania’s rulers not to surrender their Jews, with the shameless collaboration of the Romanian Orthodox Church. He cites numerous examples of Catholic wartime aid to Jews and other persecuted minorities. He concludes: “There are many criticisms we might make of the Catholic Church, but responsibility for the Holocaust is not one of them.” He accuses those who have branded Pius XII “Hitler’s Pope” of cynically exploiting the Holocaust as a club to belabour the Vatican, which they dislike for other reasons, related to its positions on birth control, abortion and women priests. He argues that the Vatican resisted Mussolini’s fascists with considerable vigour and never endorsed Franco’s excesses, even though the Caudillo sought to harness the Church to his repulsive regime. During the post-1945 cold-war period, for its own political reasons, America was much more ready to indulge Franco’s rule than was the Pope.
European communism prompted a remarkable revival of religion. While clerics of all denominations were subject to persecution, even Stalin found himself unable to eradicate private faith. Throughout the years of Soviet tyranny, the churches formed bastions of resistance. In Italy, when the communists threatened to gain control of the country at the 1948 election, the strong support of the Catholic Church was probably decisive in giving victory to the Christian Democrats.
The author dons sackcloth and ashes, and takes up a staff of fire, to denounce the delusions that swept western Europe in the 1960s: “A number of trends came together in ways that were . . . catastrophic to the Christian churches, and ultimately to Christian belief . . . There was no apparent and conceivable challenge to the verities of western liberalism, except from a lunatic far right and its analogues on the extreme left.” He finds brimstone to spare for Harold Pinter, John Osborne, leftist clerics and the home secretaryship of Roy Jenkins. He reserves some of his most bitter invective for the Irish Catholic Church and its support for Sinn Fein. While these strictures seem justified as far as they go, his wider analysis of Northern Ireland’s Troubles seems more questionable. Some of us are prepared to defy charges of wetness, and assert that the 1921 partition of Ireland was unjust and mistaken. The Protestant administration of Ulster before 1969 was rotten to the core. The Irish Republic may indeed have been a nasty little country “wallowing in victimhood”, but through the centuries the British had contributed mightily to making it so.
Burleigh seems dead right, however, in deploring the willingness of recent British governments to subcontract dissident fragments of our polity to local leaders, be these Irish republicans and Loyalist paramilitaries in Belfast, or Muslims in parts of Britain. He writes with withering scorn of the “liberal elites” that argue for multiculturalism in the name of “diversity, human rights and tolerance”, observing that these were Christian virtues long before the secular left sought to hijack them.
Secularism has done no favours to modern European societies. The Christian churches can boast a better historic record of resisting tyranny than they are sometimes given credit for, and this book does much to redress the balance. Yet it seems doubtful whether our governance or even our morals would today be improved by granting God a higher profile. If George Bush and Tony Blair had been less inspired by a serene assurance that the Almighty approved their purposes and more willing to listen to some sensible earthly advisers, western foreign policy might not today be the disaster that it is. Burleigh makes a formidable case, that moral discipline and a renunciation of witchcraft (whether peddled by Osama Bin Laden or home-grown new-age gurus) are essential to sustaining our civilisation, and that our susceptibility to cant has done us awful damage.
His book deserves the widest possible readership in the context of the struggle in which we are engaged against Muslim radicalism. It seems highly debatable, however, whether a Christian revival in Europe is either plausible or necessary. The influence of the religious right on American politics, not to mention that of some Muslim imams on the faithful in Europe, suggests that believers can be more of a menace to a civilised society than atheists.
MONEY TALKS
Burleigh is keen to highlight the hypocrisies of fundamentalists such as the Taliban, right. Noting that their “ostentatious puritanism” is no bar to their support of opium growers, he points out that doubts their leaders may have about Bin Laden’s presence have been “allayed by annual payments of up to $20m for their hospitality”.
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