The Case for God (47 page)

In 1920, Dixon, Reuben A. Torrey, and William B. Riley officially
established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to fight for the survival of both Christianity and the world. That same year, at a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention, Curtis Lee Lewis defined the “fundamentalist” as a Christian who fought to regain territory already lost to the Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.”
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The movement spread. Three years later, the fundamentalists were riding high, and it seemed as if they would succeed in gaining the upper hand in most of the Protestant denominations. But then a new campaign caught their attention, which brought fundamentalism, at least for a few decades, into disrepute.

In 1920 the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860— 1925) launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges; almost single-handedly, Bryan was responsible for ousting the Higher Criticism from the top of the fundamentalist agenda and putting Darwinism in its place.
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He saw the two issues as indissolubly linked but regarded evolution as by far the more dangerous. Two books—
Headquarter Nights
(1917) by Vernon L. Kellogg and
The Science of Power
(1918) by Benjamin Kidd—had made a great impression on him. The authors reported interviews with German soldiers, who had testified to the influence that Darwinian ideas had played in Germany’s determination to declare war. This “research” convinced Bryan that evolutionary theory heralded the collapse of morality and decent civilization. His ideas were naive, simplistic, and incorrect, but people were beginning to be suspicious of science and he found a willing audience. When Bryan toured the United States, his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism” drew large crowds and got extensive media coverage. But an unexpected development in the South threw the campaign into even greater prominence.

At this date, the fundamentalist movement was chiefly confined to the northern states, but southerners had become concerned about evolution. In 1925, the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana passed laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In response, John Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, decided to strike a blow for free speech, confessed that he had broken the law, and in July 1925 was brought to trial. The new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist campaigner
Clarence Darrow (1857–1938). When Bryan agreed to speak in defense of the anti-evolution law, the trial ceased to be about civil liberties and became a contest between religion and science.

Like many fundamentalist disputes, the Scopes trial was a clash between two incompatible points of view.
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Both Darrow and Bryan represented core American values: Darrow, of course, stood for intellectual liberty and Bryan for the rights of the ordinary folk, who were traditionally leery of learned experts, had no real understanding of science, and felt that sophisticated elites were imposing their own values on small-town America. In the event, Bryan was a disaster on the stand and Darrow was able to argue brilliantly for the freedom that was essential to the scientific enterprise. At the end of the trial, Darrow emerged as the hero of lucid rational thought, while Bryan was seen as a bumbling, incompetent anachronism who was hopelessly out of touch with the modern world: he compounded the symbolism by dying a few days later. Scopes was convicted, the ACLU paid his fine, but Darrow and science were the real victors at Dayton.

The press had a field day. Most notably, the journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) denounced the fundamentalists as the scourge of the nation. How appropriate it was, he crowed, that Bryan, who loved simple country people, including the “gaping primates of the upland villages,” had ended his days in a “one-horse, Tennessee village.” Fundamentalists were everywhere: they are “thick in the mean streets behind the gas works. They are everywhere learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry, even the vague pathetic learning on tap in the little red schoolhouse.” They were the enemies of science and freedom and had no legitimate place in the modern world.
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The author Maynard Shipley argued that if the fundamentalists seized control of the denominations and imposed their bigoted views on the people, America would be dragged back to the Dark Ages.
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At Dayton, the liberals had felt threatened when the rights of free speech and free inquiry were in jeopardy. These rights were sacred, not because they were “supernatural” but because they were now central to the modern identity, and as such inviolable and nonnegotiable. Take these rights away, and everything would be awry. For the fundamentalists, who feared modernity and knew that some of its most vocal exponents had vowed to destroy religion, the new doctrine of
biblical inerrancy was sacred, not just because of its supernatural sanction but because it provided the sole guarantee of certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. There would in the future be similar clashes between people at different stages of the modernization process who had competing notions of the sacred. The religious had struck a blow for a value that they felt was imperiled, and the liberals had struck back, hard. And at first the liberal assault appeared to have paid off. After the Scopes trial, the fundamentalists went quiet and seemed suitably vanquished. But they had not gone away. They had simply withdrawn defensively, as fundamentalists of other traditions would do in the future, and created an enclave of Godliness in a world that seemed hostile to religion, forming their own churches, broadcasting stations, publishing houses, schools, universities, and Bible colleges. In the late 1970s, when this countercultural society had gained sufficient strength and confidence, the fundamentalists would return to public life, launching a counteroffensive to convert the nation to their principles.

During their time in the political wilderness, the fundamentalists became more radical, nursing a deep grievance against mainstream American culture.
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Subsequent history would show that when a fundamentalist movement is attacked, it almost invariably becomes more aggressive, bitter, and excessive. Rooted as fundamentalism is in a fear of annihilation, its adherents see any such offensive as proof that the secular or liberal world is indeed bent on the elimination of religion. Jewish and Muslim movements would also conform to this pattern. Before Scopes, Protestant fundamentalists tended to be on the left of the political spectrum, willing to work with socialists and liberals in the disadvantaged areas of the rapidly industrializing cities. After Scopes, they swung to the far right, where they have remained.

The ridicule of the press proved to be counterproductive, since it made the fundamentalists even more militant in their views. Before Scopes, evolution had not been an important issue; even such ardent literalists as Charles Hodge knew that the world had existed for a lot longer than the six thousand years mentioned in the Bible. Only a very few subscribed to so-called creation science, which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail. Most fundamentalists were Calvinists, though Calvin himself had not shared their hostility to scientific knowledge. But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism
became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science became the flagship of the movement. It would become impossible to discuss the issue rationally, because evolution was no longer merely a scientific hypothesis but a “symbol,” indelibly imbued with the misery of defeat and humiliation. The early history of the first fundamentalist movement in the modern era proved to be paradigmatic. When attacking religion that seems obscurantist, critics must be aware that this assault is likely to make it more extreme.

The Second World War (1939–45) revealed the terrifying efficiency of modern violence. The explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of
Homo technologicus
. Our ability to harm and mutilate one another had kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific progress, and we seemed to lack either the wisdom or the means to keep our aggression within safe and appropriate bounds. Indeed, the shocking discovery that six million Jews had been systematically slaughtered in the Nazi camps, an atrocity that had originated in Germany, a leading player in the Enlightenment, called the whole notion of human progress into question.

The Holocaust is sometimes depicted as an eruption of premodern barbarism; it is even seen as an expression of religious impulses that had been repressed in secular society. But historians and social critics have challenged this view.
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It is certainly true that Christian anti-Semitism had been a chronic disease in Europe since the time of the Crusades; and while individual Christians protested against the horror and tried to save their Jewish neighbors, many of the denominations were largely and shamefully silent. Hitler had never officially left the Catholic Church and should have been excommunicated; Pope Pius XII neither condemned nor distanced himself from the Nazi programs.

But to blame the entire catastrophe on religion is simply—and perhaps even dangerously—inaccurate. Far from being in conflict with the rational pursuit of well-organized, goal-oriented modernity, the hideous efficiency of the Nazis was a supreme example of it. Rulers had long initiated policies of ethnic cleansing when setting up their modern, centralized states. In order to use all the human resources at
their disposal and to maintain productivity, governments had found it necessary to bring out-groups such as the Jews into the mainstream, but the events of the 1930s and 1940s showed that this tolerance was merely superficial and the old bigotry still lurked beneath. To carry out their program of genocide, the Nazis relied on the technology of the industrial age: the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and rationalized bureaucracy and management. The camp replicated the factory, the hallmark of industrial society, but what it mass-produced was death. Science itself was implicated in the eugenic experiments carried out there. The modern idolatry of nationalism had so idealized the German
volk
that there was no place for the Jews: born of the new “scientific” racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate in social engineering in what has been called the modern “garden culture,” which simply eliminated weeds—the supreme, perverted example of rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, clearly defined objective.
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Perhaps the Holocaust was not so much an expression as a perversion of Judeo-Christian values.
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As atheists had been eager to point out, the symbol of God had marked the limit of human potential. At the heart of the Nazi ideology was a romantic yearning for a pre-Christian German paganism that they had never properly understood, and a negation of the God who, as Nietzsche had suggested, put a brake on ambition and instinctual “pagan” freedom. The extermination of the people who had created the God of the Bible was a symbolic enactment of the death of God that Nietzsche had proclaimed.
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Or perhaps the real cause of the Holocaust was the ambiguous afterlife of religious feeling in Western culture and the malignant energies released by the decay of the religious forms that had channeled them into more benign, productive outlets.
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In Christian theology, hell had traditionally been defined as the absence of God, and the camps uncannily reproduced the traditional symbolism of the inferno: the flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking; the distorted bodies; the flames and stinking air all evoked the imagery of hell depicted by the artists, poets, and dramatists of Europe.
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Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being—whoever he or she may be—is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.

The Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel believed that God died in Auschwitz. During his first night in the camp, he had watched the black smoke curling into the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were being consumed. “Never shall I forget those moments,” he wrote years later, “which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”
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He relates how one day the Gestapo hanged a child with the face of a “sad-eyed angel” who was silent and almost calm as he climbed the gallows. It took the child nearly an hour to die in front of the thousands of spectators who were forced to watch. Behind Wiesel, one of the prisoners muttered: “Where is God? Where is He?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him saying in response: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”
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This story can also be seen as an outward sign of the death of God announced by Nietzsche. How do we account for the great evil we see in a world supposedly created and governed by a benevolent deity? For the Jewish writer Richard Rubenstein this conception of God is no longer viable. Because Jews so narrowly escaped extermination, Rubenstein does not believe that they should jettison their religion, as this would cut them off from their past. But the nice, moral God of liberal Jews seems too anodyne and antiseptic: it ignores life’s inherent tragedy in the hope that things will improve. Instead, Rubenstein is drawn to the self-emptying God of Isaac Luria, who had not been able to control the world he had brought into being. The mystics had seen God as Nothingness; Auschwitz had revealed the abysmal emptiness of life, and the contemplation of Luria’s En Sof was a way of entering into the primal Nothingness from which we came and to which we all return.
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The British theologian Louis Jacobs, however, believed that Luria’s impotent God could not give meaning to human existence. He preferred the classic solution that God is greater than human beings can conceive and that his ways are not our ways. God may be incomprehensible, but people have the option of putting their trust in this ineffable God and affirming
a
meaning, even in the midst of meaninglessness.