Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (168 page)

Already two legal judgements had infuriated Evangelical voters: the banning of school prayer in America's public schools in 1962, the result of the courts trying to enforce the principle of the American constitutional separation of Church and State, and the
Roe
v.
Wade
judgement effectively legalizing abortion in 1973. Only now did they begin to make the connection to the power of their vote. Sex clinched their feelings: Carter's long-promised White House Conference on the Family pluralized its subject to 'Families', and made thoughtful statements about gay relationships which were beyond the Evangelical pale. Angry Evangelical leaders met in 1979 and stumbled across a resonant title for an organization to do something about their anger: the 'Moral Majority'. By the end of Carter's troubled period in office, he had lost the conservative Evangelical constituency. In 1980 it helped to eject him, voting instead for Ronald Reagan. There was plenty of irony here, for as a Republican Reagan was - in terms of institutional politics - the heir to the party which had defeated the South in the civil war. Moreover, he was a social libertarian of cosily amorphous religious views and his wife regularly consulted an astrologer. In all this, the Reagans were not untypical products of Hollywood, in contrast with the deeply pious Southern Democrat Carter.

Nevertheless the alliance between Republicans and conservative Evangelicals had been struck, and the Republican Party saw the huge electoral advantage of hanging on to it. The Evangelical televangelist turned politician Pat Robertson declared in 1980, 'We have enough votes to run the country . . . and when the people say, "We've had enough" we are going to take over.'
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So far that has not happened, partly thanks to the sheer variety and perennial fissiparousness of American Evangelicalism. Yet the effect of Evangelicalism in American politics hardly needs demonstrating, baffling though it is to Europeans, who overwhelmingly disapprove of their own politicians making a public fuss of their personal religious convictions. On no political issue has this been more significant than American policy towards the State of Israel - the source of so much Arab and Muslim fury and frustration with the West.

For some years after the founding of a state of Israel in 1948, American relations with Israeli governments were dominated by power-political considerations. They were not even particularly cordial, especially at the time of the 1956 crisis, in which the Israelis aligned themselves militarily with the British and French around Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal. When the decisive American swing towards an alliance with Israel came in 1962, it was still motivated by power politics, and was not associated with Republicans but with President John F. Kennedy's liberal Democratic administration, which was furious at the aggressive policies adopted by President Nasser of Egypt.
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At that stage, of course, American politicians were not generally keeping a worried eye on Evangelical political opinion. When in the 1980s they did, they discovered a large constituency emphatically in favour of Israel, for reasons related to the apocalypse. It was the same longing to bring on the Last Days which back in the 1840s had enthused the newly founded Evangelical Alliance and the promoters of the Jerusalem Bishopric (see pp. 836-7), and which derived its particular premillennialist roots from the Millerites and the dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby.
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Millenarianism routed the widespread contrary impulse in American Protestant circles to anti-Semitism, historically seen at its worst in the racism of the Ku Klux Klan.

Now American Evangelicals made common cause with the Jewish community in the United States, and they seemed to care little if at all for the opinions or the sufferings of their fellow Christians in the ancient Churches of the Middle East. Israeli politicians were not slow to exploit this political windfall, caring little for the fact that Evangelical apocalypticism expected the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Likewise the Amsterdam Jews who had encouraged philo-Semitism in Puritan England in the 1650s had not been too worried about Protestant motives when Oliver Cromwell had readmitted the Jewish community to his country (see pp. 773-4). American foreign policy has for decades seemed locked into hardly questioning its support for the State of Israel, even though the consequences for its relations with the Arab and Muslim world, and with others, are almost entirely negative.
⁵⁵
They have been particularly dire for the traditional Christianities of the Middle East. With the exception of Lebanon and a remarkable if complex official fostering of religious pluralism in the Syrian Republic, Christian communities are generally in steep decline in numbers through the region, and Israel/Palestine in particular. Caught between the animosities of a politics which has other concerns, Christians have every incentive to leave, whenever they can, for exile in less dangerous lands, ending a connection with homelands which goes directly back to the first generations of the followers of Christ. It is easy for them to feel abandoned and betrayed by the Christian-based cultures of the West.
⁵⁶

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the first president since Jimmy Carter to declare himself born-again, the nexus between the Republican Party and conservative Evangelical Christianity reached unprecedented proportions. It extended across the range of apocalyptic Evangelical concern (chiefly sex) and also lack of concern (chiefly the environment). Faced with the continuing world crisis over the twentieth century's newly emerged sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS, the Bush administration diverted funds for prevention into abstinence-only programmes. President Bush's Pentecostal Christian Attorney-General John Ashcroft promised after his nomination to wind up a task force established by the Clinton administration to protect abortion clinics from violent protests; he had to abandon that commitment after much public alarm, but as attacks on clinics escalated, continued government protection for them was noticeably slow to materialize. In an interview with the
New York Times
just before his first victorious presidential election, George W. Bush also identified himself with that century-old fundamentalist angst, the status of the creation stories in the Book of Genesis, when he commented that 'the jury is still out' on evolution.
⁵⁷

It has been common for those expecting the imminent Last Days to deny the reality of global climate change or its connection with human agency. In any case, given the imminent reign of Christ, attempts to fortify humanity against such signs of the times would be pointless, not to say disrespectful to God (as well as unhelpful to some of the financial backers of the Republican Party in industry). Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, an Evangelical Republican who opined to the Senate on 4 March 2002 that Al Qaeda's destruction of New York's World Trade Center in 2001 was divine punishment for the inadequacy of America's support for Israel, on 28 July 2003 described global warming to the Senate as 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people' and the Federal Environmental Protection Agency as a 'Gestapo'.
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Nevertheless, religious movements at the moment of success tend to fragment and diversify, especially when they are already as diverse as American conservative Evangelicalism, and there have been signs that a new generation within the movement is less inclined to sign up to the agenda which won the Republicans electoral success in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Environmental concerns are one of the chief issues on which fragmentation is perceptible. What seems unlikely to shift is the vigorous presence of Evangelicalism in American public life, in a form unimaginable before 1977.

If Jimmy Carter's election marked a new phase in American politics and public religion, so did the unexpected election of Pope John Paul II the following year. His election was in a hasty conclave, subdued by the sudden death of John Paul I only a month after enthronement (a tragedy so ineptly handled by the Vatican as to give rise to a great deal of silly conspiracy theory). The choice of a Polish pope broke with more than four centuries of choices from among the Italian episcopate, and it could be taken as a fitting symbol of the rapid changes now occurring within the Catholic Church. The youngest pope at election since Pius IX in 1846, and destined to have the second-longest pontificate in the papacy's history so far, Karol Wojtyla was a heroic figure, survivor of struggles against two tyrannical regimes which were conscious enemies of the Church. He was also extrovert, articulate and a born actor. His qualities were never better demonstrated than in an assassination attempt on him in 1981, which he not only survived but turned into a notable example of forgiveness.
⁵⁹

John Paul's election was a catalyst for a renewed joyful self-confidence in the Polish Catholic Church, already the most vigorous in the Soviet bloc in its confrontation with Communism. His insistence on returning to his native country in 1979, made possible by a fatal irresolution in the Polish government, remains a moment to savour in the history of resistance to oppression as ecstatic crowds, up to a third of the population, met him in an outpouring of self-expression. Without that visit, the formation of the Solidarity movement and the process which within a decade led to a peaceful establishment of real democracy in Poland, and indeed throughout Eastern Europe, could not have happened. It is an achievement to celebrate and admire. Moreover, it was coupled with John Paul's personal ability to rise above chauvinist Polish nationalism. As the Greek Catholic Church emerged from the shadows after the fall of Communism (see pp. 1001-2), the Pope was a good deal more generous towards its efforts to rebuild its institutions and regain its church buildings than some of his fellow Polish Catholic clergy and laity. In one Galician Polish city called Przemysl, they not only ignored his order for the restitution of a church to the Greek Catholics, but saw to the demolition of its dome on the grounds that it was unacceptably 'eastern' - it was in fact modelled on St Peter's in Rome.
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That incident illustrates that the Poland which Wojtyla represented was a very different country from the pluralist Commonwealth of the early modern age. Its Jews had been wiped out, its Protestantism reduced to the margins and its Catholic Church had long forgotten the sturdy conciliarism and suspicion of Rome which had characterized the medieval kingdom.
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The Pope's very rock-like strength, so precious an asset in confronting tyranny, became less unambiguously valuable in dealing with the nuances of other cultures and societies. He took to a passionate, joyfully reckless extreme the bleak commitment expressed by Paul VI: 'my duty is too plain: decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd'.
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John Paul II had a liking for the word '
magisterium
', which, though not in the repertoire of biblical writers, had since the nineteenth century stealthily acquired a technical theological meaning as 'authoritative teaching', particularly thanks to Pius XII's propensity to deploy it. Now it peppered Vatican pronouncements; John Paul used it in a way which almost suggested that
magisterium
was a person, like the Holy Spirit.
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The Pope was determined to teach Catholics what Catholicism was about, and was also determined to stop anyone else telling them something different. So within a year of John Paul's enthronement, the Swiss theologian Hans Kung, exponent of a dynamic development of the teaching of Vatican II, was deprived of his licence to teach as a Catholic. Kung's former university colleague Josef Ratzinger, his own explorations of such views long behind him, arrived in the Vatican in 1981 as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - a title which was a further creative rebranding of the Roman Inquisition.

The Pope's instinctive anti-Communism made him react with hostility towards liberation theology, whose expression he had encountered directly at the Puebla episcopal conference early in his papacy in 1979. He had difficulties even with those Latin American clergy who had found themselves drawn, through their pastoral experiences, to campaigning for the poor. One of the most difficult cases was that of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, a priest of conservative instincts who nevertheless had come into increasingly bitter confrontation with the authoritarian and exploitative regime of El Salvador, to the point that he excommunicated members of the government after the murder of priests and nuns. There were representations to the Vatican from El Salvador, and Romero was about to be moved elsewhere when, in 1980, a right-wing gunman murdered him while he was celebrating Mass in his own cathedral.

The Pope could hardly ignore this outrage, so parallel to the fate of the Church's classic archiepiscopal martyr Thomas Becket (see pp. 375-6), yet he could not bring himself to use the martyr-word itself when addressing the Conference of Latin American Bishops in 1992 - he removed it from the prepared text of his speech.
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He showed himself to be in deep conflict over the Latin American situation, because he could also recognize in it the malign work of the unbridled capitalism which he deplored as much as Communism. Notably, he was able to show respect for the Afro-Portuguese syncretism of
Candomble
, even submitting on his visit to Brazil in 1980 to a ritual cleansing conducted by a
Candomble
priest, a
pai de santo
. Evidently ordinary people's construction of their own religion could be tolerated, while it was dangerous to allow the same latitude to intellectuals or clergy (see Plate 53).
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Behind the long papacy of John Paul II was a programme which could never be made too explicit: to reverse a raft of changes launched by Vatican II. As we have seen, Wojtyla had remained at best sceptical about some of the council's major results. His right-hand man, Ratzinger, had felt his parallel doubts confirmed by the subsequent wave of European student protest in 1968 which had deeply unsettled him when he was a professor in the University of Tubingen.
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There was a difficulty here, given the momentum that had built up since the end of the council, and the prestige which it still retained, and so official Catholic statements habitually continue to exhibit a raft of reverent references to the spirit of Vatican II. In the partly veiled struggles which revolved around that problem, a number of coded substitutes for partisanship were necessary developments. John Henry Newman, that prince among Anglican converts of the nineteenth century, Cardinal of the Church, was a name whom conservatives could hardly dismiss, yet his reservations about the first Vatican Council were clear in his writings, and the celebration of his memory could therefore well be seen as a celebration of the values of Vatican II. His cult has progressed slowly towards sainthood, after an embarrassing shortage for a considerable time of the necessary confirmatory miracles.
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