Phillip Gorski

To get the most recent and  thorough understanding of this thing we call white Christian nationalism, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to America, published in April this year should be just such a book, especially if you are interested in a smattering of academic sociology research surveys used to inform a deeper dive into the mindset of citizens participating in the surveys. Over a dozen graphed surveys using their "christian nationalist scale" are documented  by the authors Phillip S. Gorski, a  comparative historical sociologist and Professor of Sociology at Yale U., and Samuel L. Perry, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma and a sociologist of American religion, race, politics, sexuality, and families. Packed into a mere 130 pages, the information density of the book is high, with the analysis of these plotted “binary regression models,” and tempered with a wealth of themes from political philosophy, many illustrated by current events. So high, in fact, that I found myself highlighting and bookmarking passages and pages at more than twice the frequency I am used to, any and all things “not to be missed, or forgotten,”  but unfortunately too numerous to get mentioned in this review, so I hope to convey the most important takeaways that I found that need sharing.

So what is  white Christian nationalism? The authors borrow a term from Arlie Russel Hochshild’s Strangers in Their Own Land—”deep story.”

“White Christian nationalism’s “deep story” goes something like this: America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were “traditional” Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on “Christian principles.” The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from “un-American” influences both inside and outside our borders. Like any story, this one has its heroes: white conservative Christians, usually native-born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders. The plot revolves around conflicts between the noble and worthy “us,” the rightful heirs of wealth and power, and the undeserving “them” who conspire to take what is ours. Sometimes, the conflicts culminate in violence—violence that restores white Christians to what they believe is their rightful place atop America’s racial and religious hierarchy. The heroes are those who defend the purity—and property—of the white Christian nation: with violence, when necessary.”

But this is pure myth, say the authors, given the diverse religions of deism and others present in the foundational era of the country, using  political ideas from The Enlightenment’s classical liberalism and civic republicanism borrowed from Athenian democracy, and, with the understated fact that “More than a little of the nation’s wealth and prosperity were derived from stolen land and slave labor.” And the authors point out that it is not just a matter of what it is, but also of what it should be: a Christian nation, “or at least a nation run by Christians.”

And why “White”? The myth was begun, built, and amended by first the original Anglo colonists (“we were here first”), and subsequent (mainly Protestant) theologians and other cultural factors; and like many myths has a Manichean theme of good versus evil, complete with heroes—themselves,  and villains—beginning with their combative cohabitants Native Americans and Black slaves. The list of villains evolves, as does that of who would be in the heroes column. “Secular” Christian nationalism may seem to be a contradiction in terms, but it is part of that evolution. Many that identify  with the concepts of the overarching movement are not particularly “religious” in practice. Gorski and Perry surmise the movement might better be labeled an “ethno-traditionalist” political movement rather than a predominantly Christian one. Andrew Seidel, in his debut study The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American refers to another of Perry’s studies that concludes “the single most accurate predictor of whether a person voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election was not religion, wealth, education, or even political party: it was believing the United States is and should be a Christian nation.” Gorski and Perry ask “Why would someone strongly affirm that the government should ‘advocate Christian values’ and yet support the use of torture or oppose gun regulations?.....and many of them don’t have an obvious connection to Christianity at all: There is no Commandment saying, “Thou shalt not wear a mask”. Identifying with white Christian nationalism is an especially effective political ploy to would-be aspirants to elected office in many regions of the country. You would think Donald Trump has run the batteries dead on this gadget politics by now, but the problem is, he hasn’t, and the remaining wattage available from it is being used by an increasing number politicians and would-be demagogues becoming actors in what now seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy inherited from the nascent days of our republic. But some key metrics remain consistent through the years (and now centuries): racism, the struggle of good v. evil, persecution, hierarchy, patriarchy, redemptive and restorative violence, aversion to liberal democracy, messianism (the most recent savior, of course, being Trump),  and a quirky libertarianism.

The book addresses four basic questions outlined by the authors: What is white Christian nationalism, When did it emerge?  How does it work politically? and Where might it be headed tomorrow? They call it a “primer,” and based on its brevity, I guess you could call it that. But 130 pages of text followed by over 30 pages of notes, acknowledgements, and a comprehensive  index makes it a sourcebook that should serve any reader a wealth of ideas and references for some time. Or at least until it is banned, if a white Christian nation becomes a reality, which seems to become more of a possibility with each passing day’s news. The authors do give some answers as to minimizing these threats, and list some built-in Constitutional structures and laws of the Republic that would make it difficult to achieve, but…..

Marty Bankson reporting for The Humanist Advocate

August 13, 2022

1.  “Binary logistic regression models the relationship between a set of independent variables and a binary dependent variable. It’s useful when the dependent variable is dichotomous in nature, like death or survival, absence or presence, pass or fail and so on. Independent variables can be categorical or continuous, for example, gender, age, income or geographical region.” 

Probably no better quote can be found about fundamentalist religion’s theological stance towards intellectualism, the need for reason, the progressive nature of human knowledge, the inevitable rise of specialization and expertise in a complex world, and the institutions that promote and sustain them, and the folly of superstition and dogma, than this from Bill Donahue writing for the radically theocratic Catholic League: “Susan Jacoby.... is not ready for the asylum, but she is ready to find a home in the asylum’s first cousin—the academy. Indeed, there are few colleges or universities that wouldn’t be proud to hire her. And that is because she entertains a radical secular world-view, one in total harmony with the elites on campus.”                                                                                                                                      

Susan Jacoby

Ms. Jacoby is a historian, journalist, astute cultural and sociological analyst, and leading figure in the secular movement in the United States today. Donahue was reviewing her first major book publication Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Metropolitan, 2004) and wrote the aforementioned quote in reference to Jacoby’s observation of the Bush presidency’s continued assault on the the First Amendment’s separation clause: “It is no secret that the Bush administration is engaged in the most radical assault on the separation of church and state in American history.” Mr. Bush, we remember, wasn’t able to keep very much secret, especially a remarkable lack of interest in history and his persistent abasement of the English language.

Four years later, Jacoby would publish what would be a more focused recent history detailing the  trend in the cultural and psychological make-up of the American population, and her conclusions were not optimistic. The events of the past four years should inspire anyone interested in the origins of the strain of mass insanity racing through the American citizenry as fast as COVID-19 to check out The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008). She introduces the book with a tribute to Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life as a work that “provides the foundation for insights that may lie decades or centuries in the future. She explores the thesis that the most recent version of American anti-intellectualism “can  best be understood as a complex of symptoms with multiple causes, and ...over time possesses the potential to turn a treatable, livable condition into a morbid disease affecting the entire body politic..” She  narrows the vectors of anti-intellectualism to the two she considers as foundational: mass media, and secondly—in an indirect rebuke to Donahue’s nonsense–the recent resurgence of fundamentalist religion.

In the chapter “The New Old-Time Religion”, Ms. Jacoby recounts a time within the past 75 years that, for a vast majority of the American public, religion seemed to assume its logical place as a guide for living and a way of looking at life’s big questions that accommodate such direction: its place as a private belief and understanding, and not as a force in legislating its tenants as  matters of public policy in a secular government. After the sensational Scopes “Monkey Trial”, fundamentalist political meddling seemed to go into hibernation. But we learned that hibernation is a time to rest, refresh, and re-group. As early as the mid-1950s we witnessed the beginning of its return to the public sphere with large revivals, now televised on America’s new favorite pastime, the television execs apparently inspired by the popularity of The Greater Los Angeles Billy Graham Crusade, a literal old-time tent revival in 1949 in the heart of LA that drew over 350,000 in eight weeks. “As we now know, the conclusion that American fundamentalists were a dying breed was a misjudgment of historic (dare one call it biblical?) proportions. The growth of fundamentalist denominations at the expense of mainstream and liberal Protestantism, which began in the fifties, accelerated throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties and gave birth to the Christian right.”

Borrowing the name from previous religious revivals in the country, one could think of the current spiritual fervor as a “Third” Great Awakening, after the first in the mid-18th century and the second in the early 19th, as a “cyclical manifestation” and “course-correction in an unsettled society. But today’s revival is more troubling for a couple of  reasons, a double-edge sword swung by archangel St. Michael that promises to make the current trend an indefatigable and cunning foe in the culture wars. The first is what she calls the “disjunction of the fundamentalist faith and the sum of human knowledge.” Today we simply know much more about how the world works than we did in recent centuries past, and we have it all accessible at our fingertips for those able or interested in discovering it. Failing public education–and private, in a different way–are certainly to blame. But this choice between learning or fantasizing about the world may be involved a feedback loop with the second edge of that sword. That problem was never  more obvious than in the last presidential cycle: “the political engagement of modern fundamentalists on the side of one party and their belief that it is both a right and religious duty to institutionalize their moral values” (italics mine). 

___________________________________________________

 I’ve left out of this one-chapter snapshot of Jacoby’s magnum opus  examples making her points, and some of those examples could easily be updated with fresher ones. And thumbnail peeks into other chapters titled “Social Pseudoscience in the Morning of America's Culture Wars,” “Junk Thought,” “The Culture of Distraction,” and “Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward” have been left as possible motivations for the reader; but all suggest the cause for Jacoby’s admission of the book’s pessimistic outlook. She concludes that in America’s new age of unreason, the inescapable theme of our time is the erosion of memory and knowledge. She does not conclude without at least suggesting  several conditions that could offer some hope out of a modern day Dark Age, all primarily concerning recapturing the those two eroding qualities that separates humans from real progress. It should go without saying that Bill Donahue and his Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim counterparts are not a part of the solution and therefore a part of the problem.

Reporting for The Humanist Advocate

Marty Bankson

March 3, 2021

The second in a series reviewing Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2018.)

If, said I, it is sweet to refuse to do good, it must be heavenly to do evil.

"The Dark Divinity of Nature"

The writings of Dontien Alphones Francois, Marquis de Sade, from whose name we are indebted to as the origin of English words such as sadism, sadistic, and sado-masochism are filled with “descriptions of orgies….which feature highly ritualized fantasies of torture, incest, coprophagy and sexual murder,” reports John Gray to open the chapter on another of his seven types of atheism. Sade, (1740-1814) hailed from a from an aristocratic lineage dating back to the twelfth century and was “if not the first, then certainly the greatest modern prophet of misotheism—the current of thought that hates God as the enemy of humanity.” So, by Gray’s own metric, it is only natural that he would serve as a good example of his “god-hater” type of atheism. One could surely suspect that Sade hated something—if not from his writings alone, but by some of the scandals that followed his reputation (flogging an indigent widow, cutting her flesh, and then pouring hot wax into the wounds, for example; and another in which he and his manservant were condemned to death and executed in effigy for arranging and participating in a orgy in which four females where offered aphrodisiacs and—along with Sade—whipped and sodomized by the manservant), eventually  leading to his imprisonment for extended periods of his life. And, one might be perfectly within reason to suspect him of having bouts with “insanity,” and that his group debaucheries were not about sex, but cruelty.

The philosophical wrong turn that twisted the marquis’ outlook on life and led to his depraved behavior Gray surmises is this: with no gods, the natural world and all it contains becomes, from its sublimest of pleasures to the horror of its  most perverse cruelties, is all we are given in this life, and stands as the as ultimate arbiter of incontrovertible truth. “There is not a single virtue that is not necessary to Nature and conversely not a single crime which she does not need…)” Sade relates in A Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man. Sade, in the voice of the dying man, tells the priest that which he wants to repent is not the sins he has committed, but “the fact that he did not commit more of them,” and regrets he “made so little use of the capacity for pleasure that Nature had given him...and wishes he had followed her commands more faithfully.”

But he confesses in his work Juliettte (1797, but not published openly in France until the early 1960s)  “...yes, I abhor Nature; and I detest her because I know her well...I have experience a kind of pleasure in copying her foul deeds…” And though he held that  “The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind,” and while his libertine characters rebelled against God to serve “the divinity of Nature,” Gray points out that Sade has replaced one insufferable deity with another. For atheists who really leave theism behind and return to Nature, Gray opines—as the Epicureans  did—there is no problem of evil, at least evil delivered by an agent, whether the agency be “God” or Nature. Shit happens, and, for the Epicureans (and humanists), human suffering should be deserving of our compassion and not a condition that we should be trying to increase or exacerbate.

Some of us have gotten this question: Why do you hate God? If it happens to you, take a minute to reflect “WWMDSD? What would the Marquis de Sade do?”—just don’t do it; and be wary of deifying Nature.

This chapters also contains similar studies of Dostoevsky and William Empson which I have chosen to exclude, at least for the time being.

Reviewed for The Humanist Advocate
by Marty Bankson

Far-right English conservative, Douglas Murray, released a highly controversial book in 2017 called The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, identity, Islam (Bloomsbury Continuum, London). The book was written amid the European refugee crisis that caused a political turmoil in the aging continent—a crisis that highlighted the rise of contemporary right-wing populism. Murray describes himself as a Christian atheist (a non-doctrinal atheist with “Christian” values), a neoconservative, and an openly gay activist. Murray has accused the European Union establishment for promoting the inheritance of guilt for Europe’s 20th Century ugly past that will become become indoctrinated in future generations and is already fracturing the continent.  The author stresses that modern day Europe should never be carrying the guilt of what their ancestors did during World War I and II. Add to this the concept of "tiredness," or ennui, or, as the Germans call it "gesichtsmüde"—which means 'weary of history'*(1)—and you have a recipe for a total abdication of sovereignty of a once great continent.

The book also focuses on how much a collectivist identity can distort the distinguished identities in many European countries by globalism and the failed culture of integration. Moreover, the idea of culture neutrality is a myth. Murray says that we can’t accept that fact that all cultures are equal when women are forced to cover their head in Iran and Saudi Arabia; yet many Islamists are compromising the liberty that Europe offers and promote its fundamentalist ideology.

The book fiercely attacks the European establishment in Brussels about the systematic censorship against any criticism of Islam. According to the writer himself, ‘islamophobia is a myth,’’ invented to tolerate the uncontrollable. Murray stated that censorship against Islamic criticism started with the attempts to assassinate Salman Rushdie after his infamous book ‘’Satanic Verses’’ was  released in 1988. As Europe is trying to polish it’s sinful pasts, any attempts to show solidarity with the writer or sceptics are demonized. The Charlie Hebdo mass shooting was proof that Islam is imposing an exclusivity from public scrutiny in Europe. The writer emphasises that Europe cannot be the centre of the world and Europeanism isn’t a mindset that can be easily embraced by anyone who decides to step onto the continent. Hundreds of millions of people are living in extreme hardship and poverty—would it reasonable to allow millions every year to come into the content and identify as European?

In terms of immigration policies, Europe is the most liberal  place in the world for asylum-seekers. While only 8% of asylum applications are in fact refugees, it might take several years for denied applicants to be forcibly removed from the country. This is because of the bureaucracy that is chaining the immigration system. The denied applicant seeker can appeal up to three times in the country of asylum before getting deported!

The spread of ghettos and the increasing societal segregation is becoming the norm in many countries like Belgium and England. Europe is now experiencing increasing ethnic tensions among the immigrant communities at an rampant scale. There is also an epidemic of honor-related crimes that are spreading across the continent, especially in England where the writer argues that there are 20,000 illegal polygamous marriages within the Muslim community.

In a counter argument about this book, many points can be defined from the reader’s perspective. Europe is nicknamed the ‘’Aging Continent’’ because over 1 in 5 Europeans are now above 65 years of age. The average fertility rate per woman is 1.4 across the 28 members of the European Union. No civilization can persist at this rate, and it could take Europe at least a century to recover this decline.

Moreover, most people who fled into Europe since the early 21^st century are from countries that experienced an inhumane and unjustified wars led or supported by the West itself, primarily in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and later, Syria.
Murray failed to mention In his book that the idea of integration and multiculturalism is a very recent concept in Europe. European nations who welcomed temporary guests from places like Turkey and Pakistan assumed that those migrant workers would be returning home (or at least moving on)  sooner or later. But as millions of first generation immigrants remained in the continent, the overwhelming majority of them were isolated, creating a cultural vacuum or void. The wealthy Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded Islamic missionaries that discourage any association with the European modernity which is deemed un-Islamic. The layered discrimination against immigrants in Europe combined with the militarisation of global politics by funding wars against vulnerable Muslim countries has indeed radicalized generations of Muslims that will hold Europe and the West accountable for their misery for years to come.

Reviewed by Fidel Azazi  

January 10, 2019

*(1) As the author explains the condition, "It isn't an entirely new phenomenon. For centuries Europe has had terms, including pseudo-medical ones, to describe personal listlessness and fatigue, including varieties of nervous exhaustion....even nineteenth-century exhaustion was not only about frayed nerves, but also existential tiredness."

—Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

 

 

The Grand Design  Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

 

—Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.  

Carl Sagan

 

—Physical facts fix all the facts.  

Alex Rosenberg

 

One making the claim that a certain ideology, discipline, theology, practice or philosophy is the only way to understanding reality—and that all other fields of thought are subordinated to its methods of inquiry and findings—invites the criticism that such a conclusion is one that can’t or won’t address contradictory reasoning or evidence, or something that is ultimately unprovable. After all, the critic points out, there could be more than one such way to the truth of reality, another way of knowing the nature of reality, assuming in the first place there is even such a thing or, if so,  it is discoverable and knowable at all. These are the primary criticisms of scientism and its proponents because it makes just that claim, and in criticisms that have come from diverse sources the words “scientism” and “scientistic” are, more often than not, used in a pejorative sense. Its detractors range from theologians to postmodern relativists,  academics in the humanities, from politicians on the left and right, and even to philosophers of science.

Rik Peels, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam makes the distinction between “restricted” and “unrestricted” scientism, wherein the restricted version limits its inquiry to “a specific realm, or particular topic,” but the unrestricted variety makes the broadest assertions about metaphysical truths and the nature of reality and its accessibility only through the discipline of science.

Philosopher Alex Rosenberg has perhaps presented the definitive explanation of the “unrestricted” version of scientism in his recent book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions (W.W. Norton and Co., New York. 2012), and offers as thorough of an A-Z outline of the modern naturalist’s view of the human condition as could be expected in a book of less than 400 pages. The book, he says, is not meant to de-convert the religious, but as a supplement to those already of the naturalist, scientifically-leaning mindset. Atheists, agnostics, sceptics, and freethinkers will find some novel ideas supplementing their worldview, paralleling theories familiar to them from works of evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould; cosmologists Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, and neuro/cognitive scientists Sam Harris and and Steven Pinker—and classical Newtonian physics. This is the stuff that debunks theism and eviscerates supernaturalism. The simpler explanation is usually the best, and if we are gaining new understanding without the need for interpreting an other-worldly cause on top of it all, the better off we all are, partly because, as Rosenberg quips, “”Reality is rough. But it could have been worse. We could have been faced with reality in all its roughness plus a god who made it that way.”

Rosenberg weaves standard fare elementary particle  physics from its building blocks of matter and fields—fermions and bosons—from which all of the physical world can be reduced, and builds the case that all there is in the universe, from the barren rocks in deep space to the warm, breathing, replicating biological life forms found on our little rock Earth,are these two elementary particles working in harmony to the tune of the hard score of a set deterministic laws. No purpose, no design: all beginning from a quite random, improbable beginning; but all too possible and documentable to have required the introduction of an interminably inexplicable supernatural creator. Before the emergence of life on earth 3 billion years ago , amino acids, essential to protein formation, and the other chemical building blocks of life were likely created from existing chemical elements and compounds known to exist in earth’s atmosphere, and, in combination with an electrical charge as demonstrated in the Miller-Urey experiment, falsified the earlier belief that such compounds could be created only from previous lifeforms. Once the emergence of the simplest prokaryotes appeared, the race of replicating life in all its diversity was on. Charles Darwin showed how accumulated random mutations, combined with a natural selection (Rosenberg uses this term interchangeably with “environmental filtration”) made possible the kaleidoscopic array of species over the eons.

So far, so good, right? All-natural causes of origins and subsequent development of the universe. Purpose and design are both unnecessary and improbable in the equation—the explanatory power of chance and randomness is again the winner over superimposing an infinitely complex intelligence at the root of it all. In a deterministic universe, where physical facts fix all the facts, the human brain is the most complex of physical structure of all, but still subject to the processes that preceded it, with no free will, no soul, no “self” independent of the living brain with its 100 billion neurons wired together by 100 trillion synaptic connections.The biggest hindrance to “accepting science’s answers to life’s persistent questions is the human love affair with stories and storytelling.” Because of the way we like our information packaged, perhaps hardwired into our genes, we are “suckers for a good story,” Rosenberg says, “events  in the form of a plot with characters driven by motives,” and “if information doesn’t come in story form, we have trouble understanding it, remembering it, and believing it.” And the problem with that? All physical laws of the universe, save one, are time-reversible, i.e., they work either way, and could create a reverse chronological sequence of results. A typical story starts at a beginning, with a middle and a tidy end resulting in a satisfying exposition from the everyday  to the complicated descriptions of “what happened,” from your trip to the grocery this morning to God’s creation of the Earth in 6 days. And the temptation to embellish stories on the fly is one that most fail to resist. “Narrative” is a word extremely overused these days, and heard usually in a sceptical sense if not totally pejoratively. Though it’s just a coincidence, it expresses scientism’s critique of stories as a source of truth: they are unreliable at best, or just dead wrong, devoid of any corresponding physical facts, past or present. And history? Merely a form of entertainment.

And about that one law of physics that is not reversible, the one that doesn’t “run” with equal ease forward or backward? The Second Law of Thermodynamics holds true for almost all cases, though an extremely minute possibility exists that it may not. The law states that, in a closed system, entropy (or disorder, or the loss of ability to do work) increases. “The most probable distribution of matter and energy in the universe is the completely even distribution of everything,” says Rosenberg, and that is the apparent fate of the universe. Stars burn out, heat, energy, and mass dissipate into a homogenized mixture of neutered fermions and bosons, bound for the  the inevitable “heat death” of the universe.

Is this the cheerless reality that science leads us to—our universe as a random and spontaneous, an undesigned and purposeless set of particles of matter and energy, destined to eventually turn out the lights on itself and any possibility of permanence, with the prognosis of the inevitable extinction of present and future lifeforms? Is humanity left directionless on a  vast ocean of moral choices, with no North Star for bearing, and no sacred scripts for guidance? That is the foundation of nihilism, of course, but Rosenberg sees a glimmer of hope and reason to live, at least for the time being. His “nice nihilism” proposes that even without a sacrosanct verification of what is a good or evil ethic, or checklist for acceptable behavior, we have inherited through natural selection in Darwin’s law—a “core morality”—that can be seen to have developed early in the stages of the evolution of humanity. It centers on two premises and their multitude of documentable derivations:

—”All cultures...endorse most of the same core moral principles as binding on everyone.

—”The core moral principles have significant consequences for humans’ biological fitness—for our survival and reproduction.”

The evolutionary origins of “principles,” and “survival” as rudimentary forms of morality taking form in altruism and cooperation has no shortage of support in the past several years, and expressed quite effectively by Richard Dawkins as an extrapolation from his “selfish gene” theory. But in the end, neither science or scientism can give a good argument for the “supreme or intrinsic value of science...scientific explanation of what we value cannot justify those values or serve as a basis to enforce them on others….[and] since science is the only possible source of justification, if it doesn’t work to justify values, nothing does.”

……..to be continued.  More from Rosenberg’s book, “Secular Humanist: Who Needs It?”  and trying to put it all in perspective.

Readers interested in the early history of Christianity will enjoy historian Bart Ehrman’s latest book and bestseller, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World. The book focuses mainly on what happened, and why things happened the way the did, during the 4th century. In 301 CE, Christians were a small but visible minority within the Roman Empire, subject to persecution by decree of emperor Diocletian. By 399 Christianity was the official religion of the empire, and probably half the population practiced it. How did so dramatic a change unfold? What factors made the rise of Christianity improbable? What factors contributed to its success?

Unlike some historians, Ehrman fully accepts the conversion of Constantine the Great, Rome’s first Christian Emperor, as entirely authentic. Constantine’s edict (312 CE) tolerating all religions, and the prestige of having an emperor who was Christian, spurred on the growth of the religion. But Ehrman gives less importance to these facts than some historians do. He describes a number of factors restraining the growth of Christianity. It’s insistence on worshipping only one god, excluding all others, was quite alien to the world view of pagan Rome, which encompassed a nearly infinite pageant of gods, spirits, and heroes. The idea of blending ethical philosophy with religion would also have seemed strange, maybe even a little bit crazy, to most Greeks and Romans, whose gods and priests had little say to about how humans should behave toward other humans. Moreover, Christianity’s emphasis on an afterlife might have seemed rather superstitious to people who mostly had only very vague and fuzzy notions about such things. Ehrman points out that many Roman graves of the era had an inscription that was as familiar to them as R.I.P. would be on our tombstones. It often read simply N.F.F.N.S.N.C., standing for Non Fui, Fui, Non Sum, Non Curo, meaning I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. Many modern secularists may share a similar notion today, expecting no more cares after death than before birth.

But some of Christianity’s oddities might also have made the religion attractive. An afterlife that included rewards in heaven could have appealed to a large portion of the population, whose lives were often hard. The possibility of punishments in hell, coupled with the claim that a final judgment was near at hand, added a sense of urgency. More than most of the religions of the empire, Christianity claimed to offer a plan, a method for getting that heavenly life ever after. Ehrman emphasizes, too, the importance of miracles in persuading many of the validity of the new religion. Miracles then, Ehrman suspects, were much the same as miracles today, meaning that most of the people who believed in miracles never experienced one personally nor witnessed one directly. People hear about miracles that happen to other people, and some come to believe those miracles are facts, and are persuaded by them. Miracles, or at least stories about miracles, were a major selling point of early Christianity.

One common understanding that Ehrman tries to dispense with is the notion that the Christianization of the Roman Empire required repeated conversions on a massive scale. Of course no solid numbers are available. But reasonable estimates of the population of the empire and the numbers of Christians at different points in time tell a story that is distinctly non-dramatic. The shift from tiny minority to clear majority took several centuries, and could have been achieved at an average growth rate in the range of 3% to 4% per year. That is, each group of 100 Christians had to increase their number by 3 or 4 persons every year, something that could easily result from converting a single family. That doesn’t sound like much, but like compounded interest the growth curve is exponential over time. Ehrman makes a strong case that a modest growth rate, sustained mostly by one-on-one, face-to-face communication, continued over several centuries, converted a vast empire.

The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, by Bart D. Ehrman (Simon and Schuster, 2018), is currently available in hardcover, ebook, and audible editions.

The literature, both scholarly and fanciful, on the European witchcraze is voluminous and of uneven quality. It was a pleasure, then, to find a work of scholarly quality that stands out for its unusual perspective. Historian Anne Llewellyn Barstow has studied the phenomenon from a much need feminist perspective in Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts.

There is far less here, than in many other studies of the same phenomenon, about religion and beliefs about witchcraft, and a lot more about the roles of women and men, and changes in the social and economic structures of Europe during the worst years of the witchcraze (1550-1750). Barstow sets the number of persons executed for witchcraft during that time at roughly 100,000, a lower figure than some other historians, and admittedly an estimate from incomplete sources. This does not mean she casts the witchcraze in a more positive light than others. In fact, she shows that a very large percentage of the accused and executed were women, and is careful to demonstrate the cloud of fear under which European women lived for those centuries, the nearly absolute lack of fairness or objectivity toward the accused, and the sexual sadism of the processes of interrogation and execution.

Why that time and that place? Barstow takes a multifactorial view. The roles and opportunities for European women had been narrowing for centuries (and would continue to narrow until well into the 19th century). The early rumblings of Capitalism were actually increasing the gap between rich and poor, and women who owned property but had no male protectors became especially vulnerable. Two religious movements, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, generated a drive toward orthodoxy that included formal control of sexual expression as well as of religious doctrine. Increasingly centralized religious and governmental power meant more intervention by authorities into local and private interactions. Witchcraft came to be seen as not merely heresy, but as a crime against the state.

In a brief but fascinating analysis, Barstow points out that the era of the witchcraze corresponds roughly with the age during which Europeans enslaved Africans. This is no coincidence. Barstow writes (pp. 159-160):

“We need to see the similarities between all women in a patriarchal system and all persons in an unfree status . . . . free women and slaves of both sexes fell into many of the same categories in the eyes of early modern European men. Neither had control over what they produced, other than in exceptional circumstances, and their labor could be coerced. Both were seen by the law as children, as fictive minors who could be represented in court only by their masters/husbands. Both could legally be beaten, debased, and humiliated. When mistreated, both were impotent to gain help from others within their group, nor usually could their families help them.”

For readers interested in what early modern Europeans thought witches actually did and why, Kramer’s (ca. 1486) inquisitorial handbook Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer against Witches) is indispensable. A similar insider’s view of the Salem witch hunts can be found in Cotton Mather’s (ca. 1692) On Witchcraft. But the Malleus and On Witchcraft are products of their respective times and places, making no attempt to place paranoia about witchcraft in a social and historical context. Anne Barstow’s Witchcraze helps make sense of the nonsense.

Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, by Anne Llewellyn Barstow (1994). Pandora/HarperCollins; ISBN 0-06-2500049-X.

In Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, archaeologist William Dever grapples with the disconnect between biblical texts and the material remains of the ancient cultures of Canaan. Dever’s perspective is scholarly, based on a knowledge both of the contents of Hebrew scripture -- what Christians call the Old Testament -- and of what digging in the dirt can still turn up from biblical times.
Dever’s book focuses mainly on the origins of the Israelites, the Children of Israel who, according to the Bible, were enslaved in Egypt, escaped by divine intervention, and conquered the lands of the Canaanites in and around what we would call Israel today. Biblical lore emphasizes the distinctness of the Israelites, separating them ethnically and religiously from the peoples of both Egypt and Canaan. Scholars have long realized that the lines of descent must be much blurrier than the Bible seems to say. The Hebrew language is close kin of the languages of Canaan, and contact between Canaanites and Egyptians was frequent and prolonged.