Is religion politics or is politics religion?

Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War

Michael Burleigh (Harper Collins, 2006, 544PP) 0060580933, $29.95

Suddenly, religion is everywhere. Since 2001, politicians, pundits and even the occasional serious person have explored the treacherous shores where waves of true believers crash over the supposedly secular societies of the modern West. In America, abortion struggles steadily erode the conventional wisdom of church-state separation. Across the Atlantic, Tony Blair seeks divine guidance for his war-making policies, while the continent debates the place of God and Turkey in the European Union and its constitution. Looming in the imagination is the potential tsunami of religious anger and violence surging through the disaffected communities of disfranchised Muslim immigrants in Europe. The easy dogmas of the quiet past seem quite inadequate to the stormy present.

Yet it would be a grave mistake to think that these are uncharted waters. Though Americans have also been here before, it is the Europeans who have struggled since Constantine to find the proper balance between religious values and state purposes. Nor is this just a holdover from the distant past, as Michael Burleigh shows in his problematic but timely Earthly Powers. Indeed, one difficulty with Burleigh's own work on the 19th century is lack of reference to ancient and violent European quarrels over religion.

Burleigh's book moves from the ancien regime and the French Revolution up to the Great War, tracing not only the conflict between politics and religion, but also their frequent interaction. In this way, the subtitle of the book is a misnomer, for the rich variety of Burleigh's own material shows that religious institutions and sensibilities were integral participants in European life even in the anticlerical 19th century. Of course, anticlericalism is itself a long-standing European tradition.

Burleigh describes this book as a "discussion of the politics of religion and the religion of politics" (pp12-13). The first three chapters (out of 10) trace the religious struggles of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. Central to Burleigh's arguments are fanciful and frequently frightening attempts to supplant Christianity with a new religious sentiment grounded in the French republic itself. Like so many of the strange phenomena Burleigh describes (and will be describing in his next volume), the pseudoreligious festivities of revolutionary France would seem just plain goofy if they were not backed by murderous purpose. For Burleigh, these oft-described practices were a central act of the revolutionary melodrama, rather than a sideshow.

Indeed, the author tries in successive chapters to recast 19th century European history with religion at the center, rather than on the periphery. That is a worthy project, and Burleigh moves in two ways. First and most obviously, he treats the "clash" of Christian churches with newly aggressive state powers seeking to curtail or overturn the prerogatives of establishment. This was most obvious in France and then in the tragicomic conquest of the papal states by liberal Italy. Burleigh gives the churches their due and rightly refuses to be dazzled by Italy's claim to natural sovereignty over the papacy. On the other hand, Burleigh fails to deal with the flip side: The papaW was no placid sacred entity claiming a spiritual sovereignty; the pope was the absolute monarch of his territories and sought to remain so. If we understand the struggle to consist, at least in part, of territorial conflicts, then loss of papal rule seems only one among many such changes in the 19th century as nation-states coalesced (or were hammered together). Further, it completed a cycle in Italy that dated back past Machiavelli and on to the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century. Unifying Italy was not a new hope.

Burleigh is also a little too indulgent of Pio Nono and his disastrous maneuvers. True, contemporary European developments were the "immediate" background to the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870, as Burleigh claims. One should not ignore, though, that this blatant, short-term political maneuver overturned a good bit of established Catholic law and tradition, set up conflicts within the church for the next century and placed the Roman church on a path of collusion with Mussolini's fascists--all so the bishop of Rome could keep playing at being a king.

The second approach burleigh employs extensively is much trickier. Taking his cue from the language of 16th century Dominican Tommaso Campanella, Burleigh describes the "political religions" of the 19th century. What this means is either taking seriously an ideology's claim to be "religions" in nature (nationalism is the best example of an explicit claim) or treating passionately held, seemingly transcendent beliefs as implicitly religious (socialism the God that flailed).

This part of the project (Burleigh is looking to add another volume on the 20th century) is problematic. One could suggest that Burleigh's method expands the definition of "religion" so much that the category becomes useless. The author recognizes the problem but does not escape it. The approach he uses could apply as well to the Ku Klux Klan, fans of Manchester United or true believers in the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. Beyond a certain point, we don't learn much from such a wide definition. As a historian of Catholicism, I must also say that this catholicizing description of human behavior as religious cheapens religious behavior itself. In the end, it places Pius IX's desperately self-preserving efforts on the same plane as Tom DeLay's recent primary campaign. Religion is a serious category, as bitter recent experience tells us, not one to trivialize. Nor is it a catch-all category. For his next volume, Michael Burleigh needs to do some sharper thinking than he displays here.

For all Burleigh's ambition, then, the book has a slapdash quality about it. What, for example, is the narrative arc that links the French Revolution to World War I? One could imagine a number of possibilities, including the idea that the Christian churches, though disestablished by secularist liberal states, still played a formidable role in shaping national morale; secularization, then, was a fitful process at best. Alternatively, he might suggest that the churches, once independent and powerful, had been so vitiated by nationalism that they were now merely the handmaids to aggressive bellicosity. Either position would serve Burleigh's larger goal of diminishing the accomplishments of 19th century liberal politics. One has instead the feeling that the author ends with the Great War for the simple reason that he has another, more serious volume to write on "political religion" and totalitarianism in the 20th century. Earthly Powers is an overture--a 530-page prequel.

In sum, Earthly Powers is a meandering series of footnotes for another book not yet written. The narrative very much needs a stronger editorial hand and the argument needs a devil's advocate, even a reality check. The author is deeply skeptical of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is also determined to defend neoconservatives from attack by the academic left. Burleigh might want to recognize, though, that the reigning "political religion" in America and Europe is led by precisely that self-congratulatory group of intellectuals whose faith-based confidence in "democracy" and "free enterprise" has led the US and the UK into a disastrous, endless war to which the only solution is to construct a secularized, liberal nation in which religious passions are held in check by a decided policy of separating mosque and state--by force, if necessary. In other words, rather than defend neoconservatives, Burleigh might want to recommend to them a good confessor.

W. DAVID MYERS is associate professor of history at Fordham University in New York. He is completing a book, Death and a Maiden, that will examine the "obscure, fascinating, and often terrifying lives of poor women in an early modern city."