The End of Faith (13 page)

At the heart of every totalitarian enterprise, one sees outlandish dogmas, poorly
arranged, but working ineluctably like gears in some ludicrous instrument of death. Nazism
evolved out of a variety of economic and political factors, of course, but it was held
together by a belief in the racial purity and superiority of the German people. The
obverse of this fascination with race was the certainty that all impure
elementshomosexuals, invalids, Gypsies, and, above all, Jewsposed a threat to the
fatherland. And while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately
secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, reli-
gious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every
societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. Daniel Goldhagen has traced
the rise of the German conception of the Jews as a “race” and a “nation,” which culminated
in an explicitly nationalistic formulation of this ancient Christian animus.45 Of course, the religious demonization of the Jews was also a contemporary phenomenon. (Indeed, the Vatican itself
perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)46 Ironically, the very fact that Jews had been mistreated in Germany (and elsewhere) since
time immemorialby being confined to ghettos and deprived of civic statusgave rise to the
modern, secular strand of anti- Semitism, for it was not until the emancipation efforts of
the early nineteenth century that the hatred of the Jews acquired an explicitly racial
inflection. Even the self-proclaimed “friends of the Jews” who sought the admission of
Jews into German society with the full priv- ileges of citizenship did so only on the
assumption that the Jews could be reformed thereby and rendered pure by sustained associa-
tion with the German race.47 Thus, the voices of liberal tolerance within Germany were often as anti-Semitic as their
conservative

opponents, for they differed only in the belief that the Jew was capa- ble of moral
regeneration. By the end of the nineteenth century, after the liberal experiment had
failed to dissolve the Jews in the pristine solvent of German tolerance, the erstwhile
“friends of the Jews” came to regard these strangers in their midst with the same loathing
that their less idealistic contemporaries had nurtured all along. An analysis of prominent
anti-Semitic writers and publica- tions from 1861 to 1895 reveals just how murderous the
German anti-Semites were inclined to be: fully two-thirds of those that purported to offer
“solutions” to the “Jewish problem” openly advo- cated the physical extermination of the
Jewsand this, as Gold- hagen points out, was several decades before the rise of Hitler.
Indeed, the possibility of exterminating a whole people was considered before “genocide”
was even a proper concept, and long before killing on such a massive scale had been shown
to be practically feasible in the First and Second World Wars.

While Goldhagen's controversial charge that the Germans were Hitler's “willing
executioners” seems generally fair, it is true that the people of other nations were
equally willing. Genocidal anti- Semitism had been in the air for some time, particularly
in Eastern Europe. In the year 1919, for instance, sixty-thousand Jews were murdered in
Ukraine alone.48 Once the Third Reich began its overt persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic pogroms erupted in
Poland, Ruma- nia, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and elsewhere.49

With passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935 the transformation of German anti-Semitism was
complete. The Jews were to be con- sidered a race, one that was inimical to a healthy
Germany in prin- ciple. As such, they were fundamentally irredeemable, for while one can
cast away one's religious ideology, and even accept baptism into the church, one cannot
cease to be what one is. And it is here that we encounter the overt complicity of the
church in the attempted murder of an entire people. German Catholics showed themselves
remarkably acquiescent to a racist creed that was at cross-purposes with at least one of
their core beliefs: for if baptism truly had the

power to redeem, then Jewish converts should have been considered saved without residue in
the eyes of the church. But, as we have seen, coherence in any system of beliefs is never
perfectand the German churches, in order to maintain order during their services, were
finally obliged to print leaflets admonishing their flock not to attack Jewish converts during times of worship. That a person's race could not be rescinded was underscored as early as 1880, in a
Vatican-approved paper: “Oh how wrong and deluded are those who think Judaism is just a
religion, like Catholicism, Paganism, Protes- tantism, and not in fact a race, a people,
and a nation! ... For the Jews are not only Jews because of their religion ... they are
Jews also and especially because of their race.”50 The German Catholic episcopate issued its own guidelines in 1936: “Race, soil, blood and
people are precious natural values, which God the Lord has created and the care of which
he has entrusted to us Germans.”51

But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its will- ingness to open its
genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby enable them to trace the extent of a
person's Jewish ancestry. A historian of the Catholic Church, Guenther Lewy, has written:

The very question of whether the [Catholic] Church should lend its help to the Nazi state
in sorting out people of Jewish descent was never debated. On the contrary. “We have
always unselfishly worked for the people without regard to gratitude or ingratitude,” a
priest wrote in Klerusblatt in September 1934. “We shall also do our best to help in this service to the people.” And
the co- operation of the Church in this matter continued right through the war years, when
the price of being Jewish was no longer dis- missal from a government job and loss of
livelihood, but deporta- tion and outright physical destruction.52

All of this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church was in very real opposition to much
of the Nazi platform, which was bent upon curtailing its power. Goldhagen also reminds us
that not a single

German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, “after committing
crimes as great as any in human history.” This is really an extraordinary fact. Throughout
this period, the church continued to excommunicate theologians and scholars in droves for
holding unorthodox views and to proscribe books by the hundreds, and yet not a single
perpetrator of genocideof whom there were countless examplessucceeded in furrowing Pope
Pius XII's censorious brow.

This astonishing situation merits a slight digression. At the end of the nineteenth
century, the Vatican attempted to combat the unorthodox conclusions of modern Bible
commentators with its own rigorous scholarship. Catholic scholars were urged to adopt the
tech- niques of modern criticism, to demonstrate that the results of a meticulous and
dispassionate study of the Bible could be compatible with church doctrine. The movement
was known as “modernism,” and soon occasioned considerable embarrassment, as many of the
finest Catholic scholars found that they, too, were becoming skeptical about the literal
truth of scripture. In 1893 Pope Leo XIII announced,

All those books ... which the church regards as sacred and canon- ical were written with
all their parts under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Now, far from admitting the
coexistence of error, Divine inspiration by itself excludes all error, and that also of
necessity, since God, the Supreme Truth, must be incapable of teaching error.53

In 1907, Pope Pius X declared modernism a heresy, had its expo- nents within the church
excommunicated, and put all critical studies of the Bible on the Index of proscribed
books. Authors similarly dis- tinguished include Descartes (selected works), Montaigne (Essais), Locke (Essay on Human Understanding), Swift (Tale of a Tub), Swe- denborg (Principia), V oltaire (Lettres philosophiques), Diderot (Encyclopedic), Rousseau (Du contrat social), Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), Paine (The Rights of Man), Sterne

(A Sentimental Journey), Kant (Critique of Pure Reason), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), and Darwin (On the Origin of Species). As a cen- sorious afterthought, Descartes' Meditations was added to the Index in 1948. With all that had occurred earlier in the decade, one
might have thought that the Holy See could have found greater offenses with which to
concern itself. Although not a single leader of the Third Reichnot even Hitler himselfwas
ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.

In the words of the present pope, John Paul II, we can see how the matter now stands:
“This Revelation is definitive; one can only accept it or reject it. One can accept it,
professing belief in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus
Christ, the Son, of the same substance as the Father and the Holy Spirit, who is Lord and
the Giver of life. Or one can reject all of this.”54 While the rise and fall of modernism in the church can hardly be considered a victory for
the forces of rationality, it illustrates an important point: wanting to know how the
world is leaves one vul- nerable to new evidence. It is no accident that religious
doctrine and honest inquiry are so rarely juxtaposed in our world.

When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off
disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in
public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating
about the nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think
anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years. Indeed, it is also well
known that certain Vatican officials (the most notorious of whom was Bishop Alois Hudal)
helped members of the SS like Adolf Eichmann, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Mueller, Franz
Stangl, and hundreds of others escape to South America and the Middle East in the
aftermath of the war.55 In this context, one is often reminded that others in the Vatican helped Jews escape as
well. This is true. It is also true, however, that Vatican aid was often con- tingent upon
whether or not the Jews in question had been previ- ously baptized.56

There were, no doubt, innumerable instances in which Euro- pean Christians risked their
lives to protect the Jews in their midst, and did so because of their Christianity.57 But they were not innumerable enough. The fact that people are sometimes inspired to
heroic acts of kindness by the teaching of Christ says nothing about the wisdom or
necessity of believing that he, exclu- sively, was the Son of God. Indeed, we will find
that we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to feel compassion for the
suffering of others. Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human
beings from coming to harm. Geno- cidal intolerance, on the other hand, must inevitably
find its inspi- ration elsewhere. Whenever you hear that people have begun killing
noncombatants intentionally and indiscriminately, ask yourself what dogma stands at their
backs. What do these freshly minted killers believe? You will find that it is alwaysalways preposterous.

MY PURPOSE in this chapter has been to intimate, in as concise a manner as possible, some of the
terrible consequences that have arisen, logically and inevitably, out of Christian faith.
Unfortu- nately, this catalog of horrors could be elaborated upon indefi- nitely.
Auschwitz, the Cathar heresy, the witch huntsthese phrases signify depths of human
depravity and human suffering that would surely elude description were a writer to set
himself no other task. As I have cast a very wide net in the present chap- ter, I can only
urge readers who may feel they have just been driven past a roadside accident at full
throttle to consult the lit- erature on these subjects. Such extracurricular studies will
reveal that the history of Christianity is principally a story of mankind's misery and
ignorance rather than of its requited love of God.

While Christianity has few living inquisitors today, Islam has

many. In the next chapter we will see that in our opposition to the worldview of Islam, we
confront a civilization with an arrested his- tory. It is as though a portal in time has
opened, and fourteenth- century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are
now armed with twenty-first-century weapons.

The Problem with Islam

WHILE my argument in this book is aimed at faith itself, the differ- ences between faiths are as
relevant as they are unmistakable. There is a reason, after all, why we must now confront
Muslim, rather than Jain terrorists, in every corner of the world. Jains do not believe
anything that is remotely likely to inspire them to commit acts of suicidal violence
against unbelievers. By any measure of normativ- ity we might wish to adopt (ethical,
practical, epistemological, eco- nomic, etc.), there are good beliefs and there are bad
onesand it should now be obvious to everyone that Muslims have more than their fair share
of the latter.1

Of course, like every religion, Islam has had its moments. Mus- lim scholars invented
algebra, translated the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and made important contributions
to a variety of nascent sciences at a time when European Christians were luxuriating in
the most abysmal ignorance. It was only through the Muslim conquest of Spain that
classical Greek texts found their way into Latin trans- lation and seeded the Renaissance
in western Europe. Thousands of pages could be written cataloging facts of this sort for
every religion, but to what end? Would it suggest that religious faith is good, or even
benign? It is a truism to say that people of faith have created almost everything of value
in our world, because nearly every per- son who has ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail
has been a devout member of one or another religious culture. There has been simply no one
else to do the job. We can also say that every human achievement prior to the twentieth
century was accomplished by

men and women who were perfectly ignorant of the molecular basis of life. Does this
suggest that a nineteenth-century view of biology would have been worth maintaining? There
is no telling what our world would now be like had some great kingdom of Reason emerged at
the time of the Crusades and pacified the credulous mul- titudes of Europe and the Middle
East. We might have had modern democracy and the Internet by the year 1600. The fact that
religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument
in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its
adherents made foundational contribu- tions to human culture.

Given the vicissitudes of Muslim history, however, I suspect that the starting point I
have chosen for this bookthat of a single sui- cide bomber following the consequences of
his religious beliefsis bound to exasperate many readers, since it ignores most of what
commentators on the Middle East have said about the roots of Mus- lim violence. It ignores
the painful history of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It ignores the
collusion of Western pow- ers with corrupt dictatorships. It ignores the endemic poverty
and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world. But I will argue that we
can ignore all of these thingsor treat them only to place them safely on the shelfbecause
the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of
terrorism, indeed who would never commit terrorism of the sort that has become so
commonplace among Muslims; and the Muslim world has no shortage of educated and prosperous
men and women, suffering little more than their infatuation with Koranic eschatol- ogy,
who are eager to murder infidels for God's sake.2

We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our
political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not
merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been “hijacked” by
extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is pre- scribed to all
Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the lit-

erature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet. A future in
which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in
which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians
have learned to do. Such a transformation is by no means guaran- teed to occur, however,
given the tenets of Islam.

A Fringe without a Center

Many authors have pointed out that it is problematic to speak of Mus- lim “fundamentalism”
because it suggests that there are large doctri- nal differences between fundamentalist
Muslims and the mainstream. The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be
“fundamental- ist” in the Western sense of the wordin that even “moderate” approaches to
Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal and inerrant word of the one true
God. The difference between funda- mentalists and moderatesand certainly the difference
between all “extremists” and moderatesis the degree to which they see political and
military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith. In any case, people who
believe that Islam must inform every dimension of human existence, including politics and
law, are now generally called not “fundamentalists” or “extremists” but, rather,
“Islamists.”

The world, from the point of view of Islam, is divided into the “House of Islam” and the
“House of War,” and this latter designa- tion should indicate how many Muslims believe
their differences with those who do not share their faith will be ultimately resolved.
While there are undoubtedly some “moderate” Muslims who have decided to overlook the
irrescindable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The
only future devout Muslims can envisageas Muslimsis one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed. The
tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the
“enemies of God.”

Like most other religions, Islam has suffered a variety of schisms. Since the seventh
century, the Sunni (the majority) have considered the Shia to be heterodox, and the Shia
have returned the compli- ment. Divisions have emerged within each of these sects as well,
and even within the ranks of those who are unmistakably Islamist. We need not go into the
sectarian algebra in any detail, apart from not- ing that these schisms have had the
salutary effect of dividing the House of Islam against itself. While this mitigates the
threat that Islam currently poses to the West, Islam and Western liberalism remain
irreconcilable. Moderate Islamreally moderate, really crit- ical of Muslim irrationalityscarcely seems to exist. If it does, it is doing as good
a job at hiding as moderate Christianity did in the fourteenth century (and for similar
reasons).

The feature of Islam that is most troubling to non-Muslims, and which apologists for Islam
do much to obfuscate, is the principle of jihad. Literally, the term can be translated as
“struggle” or “striv- ing,” but it is generally rendered in English as “holy war,” and
this is no accident. While Muslims are quick to observe that there is an inner (or
“greater”) jihad, which involves waging war against one's own sinfulness, no amount of
casuistry can disguise the fact that the outer (or “lesser”) jihadwar against infidels and
apostatesis a central feature of the faith. Armed conflict in “defense of Islam” is a
religious obligation for every Muslim man. We are misled if we believe that the phrase “in
defense of Islam” suggests that all Mus- lim fighting must be done in “self-defense.” On
the contrary, the duty of jihad is an unambiguous call to world conquest. As Bernard Lewis
writes, “the presumption is that the duty of jihad will con- tinue, interrupted only by
truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule.”3 There is just no denying that Muslims expect victory in this world, as well as in the next. As Malise Ruthven points out, "The Prophet had been his own
Caesar. ... If imitatio Christi meant renouncing worldly ambition and seeking salvation by deeds of private virtue, imitatio Muham- madi meant sooner or later taking up arms against those forces

which seemed to threaten Islam from within or without."4 While the Koran is more than sufficient to establish these themes, the lit- erature of the
hadith elaborates:

Jihad is your duty under any ruler, be he godly or wicked.

A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah's Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is
better than the world and whatever is in it.

A day and a night fighting on the frontier is better than a month of fasting and prayer.

Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the Hereafter) would wish to come back to
this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr
who, on see- ing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and
get killed again (in Allah's Cause).

He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief.

Paradise is in the shadow of swords.5

Many hadiths of this sort can be found, and Islamists regularly invoke them as a
justification for attacks upon infidels and apostates. Those looking for ways to leaven
the intrinsic militancy of Islam have observed that there are a few lines in the Koran
that seem to speak directly against indiscriminate violence. Those who wage jihad are
enjoined not to attack first (Koran 2:190), since “God does not love aggressors.” But this
injunction restrains no one. Given the long history of conflict between Islam and the
West, almost any act of violence against infidels can now be plausibly construed as an
action in defense of the faith. Our recent adventures in Iraq provide all the rationale an
aspiring martyr needs to wage jihad against “the friends of Satan” for decades to come.
Lewis notes that one who would fight for God is also enjoined not to kill women, children,
or

the aged, unless in self-defense, but a little casuistry on the notion of self-defense
allows Muslim militants to elude this stricture as well. The bottom line is that devout
Muslims can have no doubt about the reality of paradise or about the efficacy of martyrdom
as a means of getting there. Nor can they question the wisdom and rea- sonableness of
killing people for what amount to theological grievances. In Islam, it is the “moderate”
who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable:
convert, sub- jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.

The imperative of world conquest is an interesting one, given that “imperialism” is one of
the chief sins that Muslims attribute to the West:

Imperialism is a particularly important theme in the Middle East- ern and more especially
the Islamic case against the West. For them, the word imperialism has a special meaning.
This word is, for example, never used by Muslims of the great Muslim empiresthe first one
founded by the Arabs, the later ones by the Turks, who conquered vast territories and
populations and incorporated them in the House of Islam. It was perfectly legiti- mate for
Muslims to conquer and rule Europe and Europeans and thus enable thembut not compel themto
embrace the true faith. It was a crime and a sin for Europeans to conquer and rule Muslims
and, still worse, to try to lead them astray. In the Mus- lim perception, conversion to
Islam is a benefit to the convert and a merit in those who convert him. In Islamic law,
conversion from Islam is apostasya capital offense for both the one who is mis- led and
the one who misleads him. On this question, the law is clear and unequivocal. If a Muslim
renounces Islam, even if a new convert reverts to his previous faith, the penalty is death.6

We will return to the subject of apostasy in a moment. We should first note, however, that
Lewis' comment about not compelling the conquered to embrace the true faith is misleading
in this context. It

is true that the Koran provides a handbrake, of sorts, for Muslim “moderates”“There shall
be no compulsion in religion” (Koran 2:256)but a glance at the rest of the Koran, and at
Muslim history, reveals that we should not expect too much from its use. As it stands,
this line offers a very slender basis for Muslim tolerance. First, the Muslim conception
of tolerance applies only to Jews and Chris- tians“People of the Book”while the practices
of Buddhists, Hin- dus, and other idolators are considered so spiritually depraved as to
be quite beyond the pale.7 Even People of the Book must keep to themselves and “humbly” tithe (pay the jizya) to their Muslim rulers. Fareed Zakaria observes,8 as many have, that Jews lived for centuries under Muslim rule and had a relatively easy
time of it but this is only compared with the horrors of life under theocratic
Christendom. The truth is that life for Jews within the House of Islam has been
characterized by ceaseless humiliation and regular pogroms. A state of apartheid has been
the norm, in which Jews have been forbidden to bear arms, to give evidence in court, and
to ride horses. They have been forced to wear distinctive clothing (the yel- low badge
originated in Baghdad, not in Nazi Germany) and to avoid certain streets and buildings.
They have been obliged, under penalty of violence and even death, to pass Muslims only on
their left (impure) side while keeping their eyes lowered. In parts of the Arab world it
has been a local custom for Muslim children to throw stones at Jews and spit upon them.9 These and other indignities have been regularly punctuated by organized massacres and
pogroms: in Morocco (1728,1790,1875,1884,1890,1903,1912,1948,1952, and 1955), in Algeria
(1805 and 1934), in Tunisia (1864,1869,1932, and 1967), in Persia (1839, 1867, and 1910),
in Iraq (1828, 1936, 1937, 1941,1946,1948,1967, and 1969), in Libya (1785, 1860,1897,1945,
1948, and 1967), in Egypt (1882, 1919, 1921, 1924, 1938-39, 1945, 1948,1956, and 1967), in
Palestine (1929 and 1936), in Syria (1840, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, and 1967), in Yemen
(1947), etc.10 Life for Christians under Islam has been scarcely more cheerful.

As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one

in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically sub- dued, converted, or put
to sword. The fact that the Muslim world has not been united under a single government for
most of its history, and may never be again, is immaterial where this aspiration for
hegemony is concerned. For each political community within Islam, “it is the task of the
Islamic state to bring about obedience to the revealed law.”11