Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (163 page)

Far worse in its long-term effects was the experiment with total national prohibition of alcohol, which came into effect as the Eighteenth Amendment to the American Constitution in 1920, after a bitter fight, in which it had survived a presidential veto by that staunch establishment Presbyterian, Woodrow Wilson. In the nineteenth century, temperance or total abstention had not been a party issue, but a campaign involving people right across the spectrum of denominations from Catholics to Fundamentalists, especially the womenfolk. Yet as the cleavage grew between liberal Protestants and conservative Evangelicals, the Anti-Saloon League established in 1895, eventual victors in the campaign for the Amendment, seemed more and more the voice of angry small-town Evangelical America: suspicious alike of the big coastal cities and wicked old drink-sodden Europe, and determined to assert what now, after a century of temperance campaigning, seemed to be an old-time cause. Even the Southern Baptists, still nursing the grievances of the white South from the civil war, dropped their distaste for entanglements with hypocritical Yankee moral campaigners, in order to bring succour to the fight for godliness.
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The result has often been portrayed on the cinema screen as gangster entertainment, but it was the cause of much human tragedy, providing a perfect opportunity for organized crime and its corruption of otherwise law-abiding society. No issue more effectively divided conservative Evangelicals from those among their fellow Christian Americans who could see no harm in a glass of whiskey. It was a rerun of Cromwellian England's bitter divisions over social regulation back in the 1650s (see p. 652). After President Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment in 1933, for half a century conservative Evangelicals were too cowed by the fiasco of Prohibition to try to impose their social values on the rest of the nation by political means. They largely left Federal politics to liberal Protestants, plus a growing number of elite Catholics. As Washington DC's hilltop Episcopal cathedral, which called itself 'National', steadily rose from its scaffolding to dominate northward views of the city, its cool and scholarly English Gothic represented the low-temperature, well-mannered religion of the white neighbourhoods in the Federal capital, in a way that Europeans would understand. Meanwhile, Evangelicals waited. They listened to their wireless sets in their small towns, their unfashionable suburbs, their remote farms, even in the barn milking, and they took comfort from the packaging of old-time religion, syndicated and delivered by a host of local radio stations, which had profited from the example set by Aimee Semple McPherson. The Evangelicals' hour would come, in a more literal historical sense than their Scofield Reference Bibles told them.
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As the tectonic plates of American religion shifted, so around the world innumerable offshoots of enthusiastic Protestantisms found their own life and style. By no means all observed the Pentecostal shibboleth of speaking in tongues, though they were certainly charismatic in their own fashion. Africa bred a host of prophets who owed something, if only at a remove, to William Wade Harris (see pp. 887-8). A major spur to their message was the great influenza epidemic which swept the world in 1918, proving as destructive of human life as the First World War, and in Africa almost as destructive to the reputation of the West: the much-vaunted Western medicine seemed helpless in face of it. So two characteristics of the new prophets were first that they left European-led Churches which had fostered their faith, and second that they offered their own style of healing. In West Africa their Churches were commonly known by the Yoruba word for 'owners of prayer':
Aladura.
Prophet-led they might be, but one of their most effective founders, the Nigerian Josiah Olulowo Ositelu, brought from his rather High Church Anglican background a proper respect for hierarchy, which quickly ran to twelve categories of male officer, from Primate down to Male Cross Holders (women could bear iron rods or crosses with the Primate's permission). Aladura were proud of their new beginning, proclaiming in their constitution 'that Ethiopia or Africa shall raise up her own hands unto the Great Jehovah-God under the Spiritual Guide and lead her own indigenous sons'.
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That pride in an 'Ethiopian' faith, something truly African, runs through the crowded assembly of prophets across the continent. They could bring African solutions to African problems. That proud boast was a great contrast with the generation of political leaders who were to take over when European colonies in Africa became independent countries in the 1960s. Those leaders were mostly from European-led churches, and very commonly were Christian schoolteachers (like Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe), with a history of patient study in Western-style universities, often in Europe itself. Prophets constructed alternatives. In the Zulu Isaiah Shembe's AmaNazaretha Church, founded amid the growing racism of the white-governed Union of South Africa, Shembe maintained that his Church rather than the Zulu monarchy should be the source of Zulu national identity in future. He instilled the sense that true virtue lay in avoiding service to whites, especially amid the corrupt cities. In the worship-dancing which his followers still perform regularly through the liturgical week, following Shembe's instructions, broom handles are brandished in place of the death-dealing assegais of warriors: so domestic values triumph over traditional Zulu military posturing. The dance empowers ancestors to dance in Heaven: it is a system of reciprocity, connecting with the dead in as satisfying a manner as the medieval Western Purgatory industry.
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Even if simply passive in suffering, a prophet might have a mighty effect on people all too familiar with suffering, rather like St Boris and St Gleb through the centuries of Russian Orthodoxy (see pp. 508-9). Simon Kimbangu, inspired to begin healing after the 1918 influenza epidemic, had a public or rather clandestinely public ministry for no more than five months, before he was imprisoned for life by the authorities in the Belgian Congo on charges of subversion. His thirty years of silence did not stop other imprisoned disciples from cherishing his memory as good news for multitudes silenced by 'the prophets of Satan, missionaries, the Belgian government'. Now his Church, treasuring his body enshrined at its headquarters, is one of the largest in central Africa.
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Africa thus presented a constant interaction between African-initiated Churches, the still-growing Churches brought earlier by Westerners and a steadily more obvious Pentecostalism. Their growth over the twentieth century was phenomenal, far outstripping that of the population. In 1914 there may have been four million Christians in Africa, by 1950 seventy-five million, and much more was to come. One wise observer who knew Africa over more than thirty years, the Swedish Lutheran bishop in Tanzania Bengt Sundkler, observed that whereas in the nineteenth century African Christianity had largely been a youth movement, in the twentieth it was a women's movement. Healing, that particular concern for women as they cared for their families, has become the great symbol of Christian success alongside education.
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This was not confined to charismatic Protestantism. The Maasai of Kenya were long resistant to Christianity of any sort; men proud of their warrior tradition despised its message of forgiveness and sexual continence. Women contrariwise rather appreciated these propositions, and they allied with Catholic Spiritan missionaries when the priests arrived from Europe in the 1950s. Derided and obstructed by their menfolk, many women began developing a spiritual sickness called
orpeko,
which was caused by an evil spirit. It turned out that the only sure-fire permanent cure for
orpeko
was Christian baptism. There was not much that men could do in riposte to this: Catholic Christianity had arrived, but it was overwhelmingly female. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most Maasai Christians are inclined to think of the Christian God as a woman, which is not calculated to please the Spiritan Fathers.
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During the same period, Christianity radically diversified in other regions too. Latin America, a culture already overwhelmingly Christian, began to transform its Christianity. Catholic in outlook and Spanish or Portuguese in language in 1900, from the first few decades of the century, Latin America was gaining a Pentecostal presence which marched in step with an increasingly diverse immigrant community, but which also rapidly began penetrating existing communities. Pentecostalism was a new manifestation of its long-tangled relationship with the United States. By the 1950s, there were twenty to thirty different Pentecostal denominations in Brazil alone.
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Then Asia was to produce Christianity's most spectacular recent success story, although that was not yet apparent in the 1950s. Korea, reduced to ruins in war between 1950 and 1953 and partitioned with a new 'Hermit Kingdom' in its Communist north, was to develop in the southern Republic its own mixture of old-established Churches, Pentecostals and indigenous syncretism, which arose alongside the painful rebuilding of Korean society from wartime destitution. Koreans did not forget the witness of premillennial Korean Protestants, who in the last grim years of Japanese colonial rule before its collapse in 1945 had refused to be present at state Shinto ceremonies, considering it idolatry to worship a king who was not Jesus. This was a conjuncture in which patriotism met apocalyptic faith. Koreans were grateful too to the Western powers which in the Korean War had saved them from being overwhelmed by Communism; as a result, they felt very positively towards American-style religion, at a time when many countries in Asia and Africa saw all varieties of Western power as oppressive colonialism.

As the 1950s reached their end, it would not have been unreasonable for Christian leaders to feel optimism about the future of their faith after the batterings of two world wars, yet few would have been likely to take a wide enough view to see which parts of the world actually justified that optimism. No one could miss the stirring of Africa, but most attention might be drawn by the healthily full churches of Europe, of its white dominions worldwide and of North America, or the success of European-led Churches elsewhere which were still regarded as 'missionary'. Alongside them were obvious setbacks: the now-shackled Churches, Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic, in Soviet Russia's sphere of influence, and a new age of peril from 1949 for the Christianities of China, facing a newly united, self-confident and intolerant Communist republic. As Christian leaders renewed or extended their acquaintance, decorously socializing around World Council of Churches committees, and as archbishops boarded planes in Buenos Aires or Sydney to consult the Holy Father in the Vatican, Pentecostalism was rarely the subject of their concern. Nor was the possibility that the Enlightenment would spring any fresh surprises on a liberal Protestantism which had adroitly profited from it, or on a Catholicism which presented a sturdy front against it, protected by a rampart of volumes of Thomas Aquinas. Perspectives were, however, about to change with remarkable speed.

25

Culture Wars (1960-Present)

THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL: HALF A REVOLUTION

In 1978, on my first visit to Rome, on the eve of the enthronement of the tragically short-lived Pope John Paul I, I stared with some astonishment at the flower-decked grave of Pope John XXIII in the crypt of St Peter's Basilica. His tomb was flanked by a pair of large bronze-effect wreaths, gifts from the late General Francisco Franco of Spain. They looked like two particularly sinister minders for this most cheerily informal of twentieth-century popes, and presumably had been in place since soon after the Pope's death in 1963. I would be interested to know to what Valley of the Fallen they have now been relegated. The possibility of embarrassing memories around the tomb has otherwise ended, since the Pope himself has been reverently relocated to the customary sacred glass-fronted showcase, in the run-up to his being declared a saint.
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Although John XXIII enjoyed one of the shorter pontificates in the papacy's history, it had a transformative effect on Christianity far beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church. It negated everything that
Caudillo
Franco had stood for - hence the glorious inappropriateness of those two bronzed wreaths. There was an unconscious symbolism about the clash of styles embodied in their presence which might make historians regret their disappearance. The last half-century of Christian experience has witnessed a war of cultures whose result still remains in doubt.

Cardinal Roncalli, a former Vatican diplomat enjoying the honourable semi-retirement of the Patriarchate of Venice, was elected John XXIII in 1958 largely because he had few enemies, and because no one involved in the election thought that he could do much harm; he was seventy-six and it was (rightly) thought that he would not enjoy a long period in office. After the last exhausted years of Pius XII, it was sensible to look for a man of peace who would give the Church a chance to find a decisive leader to set an appropriate direction for the future. Certainly Roncalli had proved good at defusing conflict throughout his career, but that might have provided a hint that he was unlikely to perpetuate the embattled, adversarial style which had characterized the papacy since its trials in the French Revolution - one need only recall the combative, denunciatory language of the
Syllabus of Errors
, or the frightened tirades against Modernism and Communism from Pius X and Pius XI.

The new pope's ebullience and boundless curiosity, so disconcerting to churchmen conscious of papal protocol, was matched by a shrewd ability to get what he wanted. What he wanted did not coincide with the wish of prominent members of the Vatican's Curia to defend old certainties without much further discussion. Instead, to the horror of Curial officials, in 1959 he threw everything open to discussion by announcing his intention of calling a new council to the Vatican.
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The Vatican machine, resigned to the inevitable meeting, knew what to do in such circumstances: keep strict control of the agenda through the Holy Office (the more emollient term then preferred for the Roman Inquisition). The spirit would not simply be that of Vatican I but rather that of Trent, with its stern anathemas of ideas which no good Catholic should hold. As Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office spelled out to the council in its early stages, 'You need to be aware that the style of councils is concise, clear, brief, and is not the same as for sermons, or for some bishop's pastoral letter, or even for the encyclicals of the Supreme Pontiff. The style proper to a council is the style that has been sanctioned by the practice of the ages.'
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