Christianity reconsidered.

Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2005). 530 pp.

Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007). 557 pp.

In September 1993, just months before his triumphant return to post-communist Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn traveled to a remote village in the Vendee region of western France. There, far from the salons of Pans and Brussels, he spoke at the dedication of a memorial to the more than two hundred thousand anonymous Catholic peasants who had died resisting the anti-clerical policies of the French Revolutionary government. For Solzhenitsyn, the lessons of the Vendee were plain. "I would not," he remarked, "wish a 'great revolution' upon any nation."

For Michael Burleigh, the distinguished historian of the Third Reich and author of Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, the link between the Vendee and the totalitarian violence of a later age is equally clear. Yet, as Burleigh shows in his remarkably illuminating two-volume history, the massacres in the Vendee are also part of a larger, less frequently studied narrative: the epic clash of religion and politics in Europe over the past three centuries.

Begun as a comparative study of Jacobin civic cults and the festivals of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, Burleigh's work grew in scope as he came to realize that religion--so often neglected by contemporary historians--offers a more effective window into the origins of modernity than other, trendier subjects. ''Perhaps we need less exposure to the Second World War and more on such themes as how Christianity came to be the dominant creed, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, relations between Church and state, and the deep causes of present secularly," he writes in the introduction to Earthly Powers. The result is a penetrating and deeply learned work filled with surprising insights and a consistently powerful moral compass.

Like fellow English Catholic Christopher Dawson, Burleigh sees the central tragedy of modern history in the "Moloch-like expansion of the modern state" and its colonization of all areas of human life, including morality: "[The] alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by nation states which vied for the ultimate human loyalties." Yet the churches would fight back, not only to secure their own existence, but also to protect individuals from the grasp of government. "Christianity," Burleigh reminds us, "has much to do with the notion of the autonomy of the individual, with the preservation of a sphere beyond the state that anticipated civil society, with the notion of elected leadership, and with holding rulers accountable to higher powers." It has also provided a tangible moral function that has sustained the West in some of its darkest hours.

Earthly Powers opens with a harmonious (and perhaps slightly exaggerated) portrait of Church/state relations in eighteenth-century France, where the religious orders were responsible for dispensing charity, education, and ecclesiastical justice. With the outbreak of Revolution, all this changed. The new prophets of an earthly paradise declared war on the Church, confiscated its lands, imprisoned its recalcitrant clergy, and ultimately assumed many of its functions. Although Napoleon tried to undo some of the destruction with his Concordat of 1801, the damage had been done. Secularization is the great theme of Burleigh's nineteenth century, when newly minted political ideologies learned to cloak themselves in quasi-religious dress to attract followers.

Nationalism effortlessly incorporated some of the major themes of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including the notion of divine election, or the belief that a people had been chosen to fulfill a providential purpose, a notion that is alive and well in the universal values pursued by the United States, and for that matter in the allegedly gentler, less strident role which some Europeans view as their continent's post-imperial mission: the repository of softer values, after earlier nationalism had eventuated into disastrous wars and the Holocaust.

Yet the Churches also proved capable of adapting to the new realities. As the century wore on, the papacy assumed an increasingly powerful and visible role: "a solitary dignity in a drastically simplified landscape," as Burleigh puts it. While Protestantism would largely accommodate itself to the state, the Catholic Church--assuming its ancient duty--sought to limit the state's power and reach. There was, however, one surprising development:

Contrary to many pessimistic predictions, the loss of religious faith did not result in the whole-sale de-moralization of morality On the contrary, in Victorian Britain morality--meaning an interlocking series of individual-social virtues and stigmas--became a sort of 'surrogate religion' to which the vast majority of respectable people (of whatever class) subscribed.

In Germany, the situation was similar. The Protestant middle classes were too self-absorbed in their own private pleasures and "family duties" to pay more than a passing interest to religion. "Outsiders, who are routinely deaf to the nuances of religion in Germany," writes Burleigh, "are often perplexed as to how Nazism could have taken root in a Christian nation without over-troubling themselves with the question of whether one part of the proposition is true."

Eventually, of course, this spiritual neglect would lead to social catastrophe. In his second and most trenchant volume, Sacred Powers, Burleigh explains how the trauma of the First World War combined with the decline of religious faith to create a values vacuum, allowing totalitarian regimes to gain footholds in Germany, Italy, and Russia. Here too, the new politics drew from religious and biblical forms. "The fundamental structure of the Nazi creed...," Burleigh writes, "was a redemptive story of suffering and deliverance, a sentimental journey from misery to glory, from division to mystic unity based on the blood bond that linked souls."

Yet fascism was, at its core, evil: a fact the Catholic Church was quick to realize. Far from accommodating Mussolini and Hitler, as some recent, highly publicized works have suggested, the Church fought valiantly against a foe that it knew wished to destroy and replace it. When the first racial laws appeared in Italy, Pius XI was swift and clear in his denunciation: "If there is anything worse than the various theories of racialism and nationalism, it is the spirit that dictates them." When Fascist attacks on him intensified during the final year of his pontificate, 1938, he refused to back down. "Through Christ and in Christ," he told a group of Belgian Catholics, "we are Abraham's descendants. No, it is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism. Spiritually we are Jews."

Burleigh provides his most fervent defense, however, for Eugenio Pacelli, who fought fascism as the Vatican's Secretary of State in the 1930s, and from 1939 onwards as Pius XII. He explains Pacelli's role in the 1933 Reichskonkordat with Germany, examines his devastating philosophical critique of Nazism (the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge), reveals the full extent of his wartime actions against the Nazis, as well as his efforts to protect Europe's imperiled Jewish population. It is a much-needed corrective to the recent spate of politically motivated slanders against both Pius and the wartime Church.

There are many criticisms one might make of the Catholic Church, but responsibility for the Holocaust is not among them. That was the devil's work of the Nazi government of Germany, and those who took the opportunity its evanescent continental empire afforded. Nor is there the slightest evidence to support the idea that Pius XII was 'Hitler's Pope', a title more befitting 'Hitler's mufti', the anti-Semitic Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini of jerusalem.... Pius was actually involved in a conspiracy against Hitler which the Allies failed to support. Making use of the Holocaust as the biggest moral club to use against the Church, simply because one does not like it policies on abortion, contraception, homosexual pnests or the Middle East, is as obscene as any attempt to exploit the deaths of six million European Jews for political purposes. When the Church could intervene, as in the smaller satellite states of Eastern Europe, it did so, to the gratitude of the Jews concerned. Everywhere, those clergy who risked their lives by helping jews attributed this to instructions they had received from Pius XII. That is why some people now argue that Israel ought to recognize him as 'Righteous among the Nations'.

Yet this is no whitewash. Burleigh frankly admits that [Pius's] attempts to maintain peace [in the 1930s] were ineffectual. For reasons of either personal character or of professional training, his statements were exceedingly cautious and wrapped up in an involuted language that is difficult for many to understand, especially in this age of the resonant soundbite and ubiquitous rent-a-mor-alists. A more robust character, like Pius XI or John Paul II, not to speak of medieval popes who took on emperors, might have said more in fewer words.

In short, Pius must be judged within the context of the historical record--and Burleigh proves more than up for the challenge.

In the immediate postwar era, religion once again demonstrated its relevance. In Eastern Europe, the Catholic Church was one of the few institutions willing to stand up to communist tyranny, eventually playing a crucial role in its demise. In the West, buoyed by rock-solid Catholic statesmen like Konrad Adenauer, the Church worked to strengthen democratic institutions and comfort a population left spiritually and emotionally shell-shocked.

Despite these successes, many in the West would abandon traditional Christianity for the promise of New Age religion, defined by Burleigh as "fused snippets of Eastern mysticism, astrology and occultism, environmen-talism, and psychotherapy." Where communism and fascism had sought to destroy traditional values, the New Age merely sanctified the silly and the absurd, an incense-infused escape from the work-a-day world of the white middle-class.

New Age religions often reach backwards to pre-modern (or utterly fantastical) cultures and times--the Native Americans and King Arthur are favorites--or reach outwards to less developed societies. Viewed superficially, [they] seem little more than an updated form of the romantic belief in ex orienle lux, a post-imperial cultural cringe that has replaced the alleged arrogance of Western imperialism with limitless credulity in response to the spiritual of the underdeveloped world.

Today, much of Western culture worships at the newly-erected altar of multiculturalism, while the modern European state has all but lost touch with its Christian roots. In drafting the constitution of the European Union,

[l]iberal and secular politicians, many with a lawyers' limited historical consciousness, decided to omit a religion that made a major contribution to the dignity and sacred identity of autonomous individuals regardless of their ethnic origins, as the greatness of one God paradoxically lessened human dependence.

Yet Burleigh remains an optimist. Although weakened by self-doubt and at war with radical Islam, the West may find it has no choice but to acknowledge and, ultimately, reclaim those values and institutions which have sustained it for thousands of years. " [An] increasingly sharp definition of what is at stake," writes Burleigh, "is itself surely part of the solution."

MARK MOLESKY is Assistant Professor of History at Seton Hall University.