Category Archives: religion

by | 28 January 2006 · 12:36 pm

Protestant Paranoia in Poland in the 1700s

As committed as they may have been to the [Polish-Lithuanian] commonwealth, Protestants remained keenly insecure about their place within the state. They regarded radical Catholics as the greatest threat to their well-being, perceiving in them a tremendous capacity for intolerance and cruelty. The depth of their fear emerges time and again in the journals the Lutheran community maintained. Some entries soberly record improbable hearsay information about Catholic excesses, which the author obviously regarded as factual. During the period of the Confederation of Bar‘s insurrection, for instance, the chronicler lamented the purported plan of the confederates to deliver all Protestants, Jews, and Orthodox Christians “into lifelong slavery to the Turks.” In a subsequent entry the chronicler recorded the case of a certain Malachowski, a monk from a nearby discalced [i.e., barefoot] Carmelite monastery who abandoned cloister life in 1768, fled to Berlin, and converted to the Reformed faith. When Malachowski returned to the Poznan area a year later, the Carmelites supposedly seized him, spirited him off to a monastery, and walled him into a tiny basement cell, providing only a small hole for air and minimal sustenance. He would have suffered there indefinitely had not a contingent of Russian troops under General Roenne passed by the monastery. Hearing foreign voices, Malachowski cried out in French for help and was saved.

This story is difficult to verify, but it illustrates aspects of the Protestant sense of place in Poland. They saw themselves surrounded by a religion as mysterious and towering as the churches and monasteries that Catholics built. Although most Protestants knew little about what actually went on within such churches and behind monastery walls, they were quick to believe the worst. The story also highlights the geopolitical perspective of Poznan’s Protestants. They had long placed their faith in neighboring non-Catholic states to keep the commonwealth’s Catholic establishment in check. Just as the Russian general Roenne had freed Malachowski, so had Poland’s neighbors helped secure greater religious freedoms for minorities. In the eighteenth century Russia, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark had all pressured the commonwealth in this regard. At the same time Protestants also shared a measure of the Catholic population’s ambivalence toward neighboring states. During the Confederation of Bar rebellion, Russian troops occupied Poznan on more than one occasion. They committed numerous excesses against the civilian population, thereby dampening Protestant enthusiasm for their supposed defenders. The Lutheran chronicler took a dimmer view of Prussia. The author identified Prussia’s successful attempt to destabilize the commonwealth’s economy in this period as a “second confederation,” comparing it to the loathed Confederation of Bar.

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. 38-39

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by | 22 January 2006 · 8:09 pm

How Secular Was European Nationalism?

[Religion and the Rise of Nationalism] examines the relationship between religion and nationalism in Poznan from 1793 to 1848. Currently located in western Poland, Poznan long has ranked as one of the largest cities along the linguistic and cultural borderland that separates the German-speaking regions of Central Europe from the Polish-speaking regions to the east. Relations among the city’s ethnic populations were never exactly warm. They grew more strained over the first half of the nineteenth century, a period in which German and Polish Poznanians developed strong attachments to their respective national identities. I explore how religion influenced this process….

The modernist argument has dominated the study of nationalism for good reason: its adherents have marshaled an impressive body of evidence in its favor. In this study I have found many aspects of the modernist argument to be especially helpful in making sense of Poznan’s changing social order. Where I part company with many modernists is over the supposedly secular quality of early European nationalism. It is indeed true that many high-proflle nationalist leaders from this period were avowedly secular, and the fiercest opposition to their agendas often came from religious sources. One can cite the struggles between the Jacobins and the Catholic Church in France, or between Giuseppe Mazzini and the Papal See on the Italian peninsula. But nationalism mattered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because it resonated with large numbers of people and manifested itself repeatedly in mass movements of no small revolutionary potential. Yet Europe’s population of secular urban sophisticates remained rather limited; secularization was only beginning to take its toll on traditional religious practice. In other words, most of the Europeans who rallied behind early nationalist appeals still maintained their traditional religious affiliations.

This work develops a nuanced and variegated portrait of the relationship between early European nationalism and religion. While many early nationalists were in fact estranged from organized religion, it was not uncommon for adherents of this new ideology to remain faithful to their religious traditions and to draw from these traditions in articulating their nationalist visions. Religion and nationalism could peacefully coexist and fruitfully interact with one another on a number of levels, as I demonstrate through a detailed study of one fascinating case: the city of Poznan in the first half of the nineteenth century. During this time Poznan emerged as an important center of Polish and German nationalist ferment as residents explored their heritage and agitated for a new political order based upon their nationalist assumptions. These processes culminated in an uprising during the “Springtime of Nations” in 1848, a period of revolutionary enthusiasm across the continent that stands as a touchstone of early nationalism. In Poznan in the years leading up to and including 1848, calls for greater political enfranchisement and national self-determination routinely intersected with the symbols, offices, and concerns of organized religion….

In exploring the relationship between religion and early nationalism, this book also contributes to an understanding of the evolution of nationalism. To account for the developmental trajectory of nationalist movements, historians long have drawn binary distinctions between early nationalism and its later manifestations. In its early phase, commonly reckoned as extending well into the second half of the nineteenth century, nationalist movements typically were spearheaded by liberal bourgeois elites, whose political interests and values set the tone within such movements. Sometime around 1870, however, the tenor of nationalism started changing. Conservative political establishments across Europe, long opposed to the revolutionary principles associated with nationalism, adopted new strategies vis-a-vis the phenomenon. Rather than resisting nationalism, they co-opted it and made it serve their reactionary ends. In this later phase, the rhetoric of nationalism demonstrated a greater sympathy for premodern values and institutions. It tended toward chauvinism as well, highlighting the virtues of the nation by disparaging ethnic or religious outsiders such as Jews, minority groups, or foreign workers. Such tendencies tapped into the xenophobia of the masses, gready expanding the popular appeal of nationalism.

An influential example of this typology can be found in Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1992). Hobsbawm describes the years from 1830 to 1880 as the “classical period of liberal nationalism,” when nationalism was viewed by both its supporters and detractors as a new and progressive force closely associated with the liberal ideology that had emerged during the era of the French Revolution. But in the decades following 1880, nationalism changed considerably. Most notably, it “mutated from a concept associated with liberalism and the left, into a chauvinist, imperialist and xenophobic movement of the right.” In his recent study of Polish nationalism, Brian Porter reiterates this same progression. Early Polish nationalism, he argues, was an inclusive movement focused on the emancipation of Poland and the rest of humanity from oppression of various forms. In the 1870s and 1880s, though, a much narrower conception of the nation emerged that was defined by a conscious hatred of outsiders. This animus was employed to promote the disciplined adherence to national values in the face of outside threats and to buttress established hierarchies of power. [Some have suggested that liberal internationalism is now mutating along the same lines in the face of threats to its established hierarchies of national and international power.–J.]

I do not deny the utility of generalizing about the differences between early and later forms of nationalism, especially when theorizing on a grand scale as Hobsbawm does. It is important, though, to consider counterpoints that remind us of the gap between the ideal type and historical reality. The actual development of specific nationalist movements routinely violated the explanatory models later developed to describe them. As my study demonstrates, the attempt by conservative establishments to commandeer nationalist movements was not strictly a late-nineteenth-century phenomenon. The Prussian regime and conservative nobles sought the same goal before 1848. Likewise, early nationalist leaders employed a rhetorical range that extended well beyond calls for equality, self-determination, and international solidarity. Events in Poznan make clear that Polish and German nationalists understood how the demonization of ethnic and religious outsiders could motivate core supporters….

I agree with the majority view that nationalism is a distinctly modern phenomenon whose origin is tied to political, cultural, and socioeconomic development unique to the modern era. And yet I dissent from the current vogue, inspired in particular by the postmodern approach of Benedict Anderson, of seeing national identities as raw inventions. Nationalisms have been capable of invoking intense passion in part because they lay reasonable claim to preexisting ethnic identities and historical and cultural legacies that are of genuine, compelling substance.

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. xiii-xxi

See also Robert E. Alvis, “A Clash of Catholic Cultures on the German-Polish Border: The Tale of a Controversial Priest in Poznan, 1839-1842,” The Catholic Historical Review 88 (2002), pp. 470-488 (Project Muse subscription required)

UPDATE: Nathanael of Rhine River, who knows a thing or two about mixed identities, middle grounds, minority cultures, and the uses of nationalism and religion, comments:

I’ve never found the dichotomy of nationalism and religion convincing except in a few cases. A better way of looking at the problem is how nationalists ‘nationalize’ religion or religious issues, such as with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Kulturkampf, or how pro-Church movements came to defend democratic rights (like the Catholic Liberals or Zentrum.)

I forgot to add a couple questions about the role of religion in contemporary European nationalism: Was Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla more a religious or a national leader? To what extent did he remain a Polish nationalist even after he became Catholic Pope John Paul II?

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by | 22 January 2006 · 6:42 pm

Secular Nationalism: Received Wisdom

Over the past several decades the idea that religion and nationalism can and do mix has been obvious to anyone who reads the newspaper. Around the world a series of powerful movements have sought to redefine societies and rework international boundaries in ways that emphasize the importance of religion within the political logic of nationalism and nation-states. Examples are abundant: the agenda of Hindu nationalists in India; the increasing centrality of Buddhism in the political discourse of the Sri Lankan government; the demands of “fundamentalist” Jewish groups that the Israeli government and society adhere strictly to Jewish law and the boundaries of the ancient Israelite kingdom; the powerful dovetailing of religious and ethnic identity that helped fuel the carnage in the former Yugoslavia; and drives across the Muslim world to bring governments into greater accord with the teachings of Islamic law. Such developments inspired the sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer to write a widely read study in which he argues that the encounter between older “secular” nationalisms and newer “religious” nationalisms has emerged as the most troubling source of conflict in our time. In its early incarnation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, he argues, nationalism was secular in nature, “based on the idea that the legitimacy of the state was rooted in the will of the people, divorced from any religious sanction.” The secular nationalist ideology became hegemonic in the West and eventually spread around the globe, particularly during the era of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. Religious nationalism, in which religious identity is integral to the concept of nation, is a more recent phenomenon, he asserts, typically developing in the non-Western world as a conscious reaction to the perceived failures of secular nationalism to deliver on its promise of modernization and prosperity.

In building his argument, Juergensmeyer draws upon the received wisdom of scholars engaged in the study of nationalism. Although evaluations of the subject are many and diverse, most scholars have articulated versions of the “modernist” argument. According to this argument, nationalism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, originating in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stimulated by the powerful forces that were transforming European society at that time…. While differing over primary causes, adherents of the modernist view tend to view nationalism–at least in its early phase–as indelibly linked to the liberal values associated with the modern era. Premodern European society was rigidly hierarchical, and its highest echelons claimed as their birthright a preponderant share of wealth and political influence. Nationalism represented a new and more egalitarian understanding of community. Its proponents championed the view that national heritage trumped all other forms of social identity. The status of one’s parents, be they noble, bourgeois, or peasant, paled in comparison to one’s nationality, and the boundaries of nation included all who exhibited its telltale characteristics. Nationalism thus served as a powerful tool for challenging the privileges of the elite establishment and pushing for more democratic forms of government. Summing up the predominant view of early nationalism, Anthony D. Smith writes: “At the outset, nationalism was an inclusive and liberating force. It broke down the various localisms of region, dialect, custom and clan, and helped to create large and powerful nation-states, with centralized markets and systems of administration, taxation and education. Its appeal was popular and democratic. It attacked feudal practices and oppressive imperial tyrannies and proclaimed the sovereignty of the people and the right of all peoples to determine their own destinies.”

A great many scholars also include secularism among the modern values associated with early European nationalism. Under the ancien regime, the argument often runs, Europe’s ruling dynasties allied themselves with the dominant church or churches of their realms in order to enhance their power. The churches were granted numerous privileges, and in exchange church officials encouraged followers to believe that the political elite ruled according to God’s all-wise design. In their struggle against the social and political order of the ancien regime, early nationalists also took on organized religion, dismissing its political theology as so much superstition, unsuited for the progressive new era that was thought to be unfolding. Scholars often have portrayed early nationalists as secular-minded urban sophisticates, disenchanted with the religious worldview with which they had been raised….

At the same time scholars have sought to explain the striking affinities between early nationalist practices and traditional religious piety. The sacred aura surrounding nationalist symbols and their capacity to evoke devotion and self-sacrifice from adherents have led many observers to identify nationalism as a kind of ersatz religion…. According to this view, the typical early nationalist may have been estranged from traditional religion, but he or she still experienced spiritual needs long associated with religion, such as a sense of moral purpose and a comprehensive worldview. Nationalism helped fill the void created by the loss of traditional religious faith.

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. xiii-xvi

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by | 22 December 2005 · 9:12 pm

Is Latin America Turning Protestant?

After four Catholic centuries, a new brand of Christianity is catching in the Mission District of San Francisco, in the San Joaquin Valley of California, wherever in the United States there are large populations of Hispanics, and throughout Latin America.

Latin America! The Catholic hemisphere, the last best wine the Church had counted on to see herself through the twenty-first century–Latin America is turning in its jar to Protestantism. At the beginning of this century, there were fewer than two hundred thousand Protestants in all of Latin America. Today there are more than fifty million Protestants. The rate of conversion leads some demographers to predict Latin America will be Protestant before the end of the next century. Not only Protestant but evangelical.

Evangelico: one who evangelizes; the Christian who preaches the gospel. I use the term loosely to convey a spirit abroad, rather than a church or group of churches. There are evangelical dimensions to all Christian denominations, but those I call evangelical would wish to distinguish themselves from mainline Protestantism, most certainly from Roman Catholicism. Catholics may yet be the most communal of Christians; evangelicals are the most protestant of Protestants.

Evangelicals are fundamentalists. They read scripture literally. Most evangelicals in Latin America are also Pentecostals. Pentecostalism is emotional Christianity, trusting most a condition of enrapturement by the Holy Spirit. Pentecostalism is rife with prophecy, charismata, healings, and the babble of sacred tongues. Evangelical spirituality hinges upon an unmediated experience of Jesus Christ.

Protestantism flourished in Europe in the eighteenth century. Protestantism taught Europe to imagine the self according to a new world of cities. Protestantism taught Europe that the central experience of faith was of the individual standing alone before God.

Protestantism increased fivefold in Latin America in the 1940s. Consider what may be a related statistic concerning Mexico during the 1940s. At the start of the decade, 70 percent of Mexico’s population lived in villages of fewer than twenty-five hundred people. Since the 1940s, the population of Mexico has tripled; the countryside has not been able to sustain such life. Seventy percent of the population of Mexico now belongs to the city.

SOURCE: Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, by Richard Rodriguez (Penguin, 1992), pp. 175-177

UPDATE: Lirelou adds some intriguing personal historical perspective in the comments:

Protestantism was in fact part of the underlying reasons for the unrest in Chiapas, where the villages are Mayan. Those who converted to the protestant, usually evangelical, faiths found themselves excluded from their communities. Part of the reason for this exclusion was their refusal to contribute to village religious festivals, which in turn reduced the funds available, and undercut the power of local leaders. In revenge, protestant families were barred from using communal lands, and in some cases physically expelled. I met one pastor who claimed that his two sons had been murdered. Possibly, but I never personally verified that fact. He was also convinced that the catholic church was under the control of a secret order of Freemasons. Latin America may very well go protestant, but the day when other religions, even other versions of christianity, are widely accepted is still a long way off. But then, religious tolerance wasn’t exactly an overnight process in Europe either.

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by | 14 December 2005 · 5:51 pm

Sacred Texts and Talismans in the Digital Age

Michael Hyatt, a religious publisher with a blog, is convinced e-books are the wave of the future, just as soon as the right very, very booklike reading device comes along.

The blogpost compares iPod vs. hardware platforms for distributing music, but the extension of this model to the distribution of books doesn’t seem quite parallel. Some of the comments to his post are pretty interesting, but I’d like to focus on the implications of sacred texts as talismans in the digital age.

Electronic editions seem best for periodicals and reference works, but not for novels, and not for bath or toilet reading. Religious publications seem to be expanding in both print and electronic media. A lot of people have bought Bible-concordance software packages in addition to the more talismanlike print edition. Concordance software is a powerful tool, especially for matching translations with originals, but it’s harder to make the transition to treating a CD or an e-book as a sacred talisman.

Two problems for e-Bibles:

1. “Do you swear, on this electronic device, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

2. When I was a kid, Baptist Sunday schools classes sometimes used to have “sword drills”–competitions to unsheathe our Bible “swords” and find the page on which a particular book, chapter, and verse was located before anyone else did. I don’t know how that would work if Bibles were handheld electronic devices. I suppose the competition could be to input the best combination of search terms to make the shortest possible list of search results to choose from.

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by | 7 December 2005 · 9:39 am

Individualization of Modern Urban Christianity

A priest I once heard in a white middle-class parish defended the reformed liturgy by saying that it had become necessary to ‘de-Europeanize’ the Roman Catholic Church. He said that Catholicism must translate God’s Word into the many languages and cultures of the world. I suppose he is right. I do not think, however, that the primary impetus for liturgical reformation came from Third World Catholics. I think rather that it came in response to a middle-class crisis of faith in North America and Western Europe. The new liturgy is suited especially to those who live in the secular city, alone in their faith for most of the week. It is not a liturgy suited to my parents or grandparents as much as to me.

When I go to church on Sunday I am forced to recognize a great deal about myself. I would rather go to a high ceremonial mass, reap for an hour or two its communal assurance. The sentimental solution would be ideal: to remain a liberal Catholic and to worship at a traditional mass. But now that I no longer live as a Catholic in a Catholic world, I cannot expect the liturgy–which reflects and cultivates my faith–to remain what it was. I will continue to go to the English mass. I will go because it is my liturgy. I will, however, often recall with nostalgia the faith I have lost.

And I will be uneasy knowing that the old faith was lost as much by choice as it was inevitably lost. My education may have made it inevitable that I would become a citizen of the secular city, but I have come to embrace the city’s values: social mobility; pluralism; egalitarianism; self-reliance. By choice I do not confine myself to Catholic society. Most of my friends and nearly all of my intimates are non-Catholics. With them I normally will observe the politesse of secular society concerning religion–say nothing about it. By choice I do not pray before eating lunch in a downtown restaurant. (My public day is not divided by prayer.) By choice I do not consult the movie ratings of the Legion of Decency, and my reading is not curtailed by the [Papal] Index. By choice I am ruled by conscience rather than the authority of priests I consider my equals. I do not listen to papal pronouncements with which I disagree.

Recently, bishops and popes who have encouraged liturgical reforms have seemed surprised at the insistence of so many Catholics to determine for themselves the morality of such matters as divorce, homosexuality, contraception, abortion, and extramarital sex. But the Church fathers who initiated rituals that reflect a shared priesthood of laity and clergy should not be surprised by the independence of modern Catholics. The authoritarian Church belonged to another time. It was an upper-class Church; it was a lower-class Church. It was a hierarchical Church. It was my grandparents’ Church.

SOURCE: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, by Richard Rodriguez (Bantam Books, 1982), pp. 114-115

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by | 7 December 2005 · 9:24 am

Privatization of Medieval Christianity

The biomedical devastation [of the Black Death] had a strange and complex impact on the Church. It may have reinforced a trend away from optimism to pessimism, from a God who could be partly encapsulated in reason and was a mighty comfort and fortress, to one whose majesty and planning and rationale were impenetrable, although that pessimistic inclination was already rising in intellectual circles thirty years before the Great Pestilence.

The century after the Black Death was marked–in England, France, the Low Countries, and Germany–by what may be called the privatization of medieval Christianity. This took both organizational and spiritual forms. Organizationally there was a rush by the affluent upper middle class to found chantries, private chapels supported by one family or a small group of families. The great lords and millionaire gentry and merchants had always had private chapels. Along with the capability of having three hundred people for dinner in your household, it was the signal conspicuous consumption of great wealth.

In the more plebeian chantries, the rising middle class imitated their betters. Even the workers organized into craft guilds got into the act. The labor corporations also became confraternities that sustained private chapels and provided burial benefits to their members.

Spiritually and intellectually, the century after the Black Death in England and elsewhere in northern Europe was marked by the rise of intense personal mysticism and separately by a privatist kind of bourgeois behavior in elaborate spiritual exercises….

The Black Death provided an activating psychological context for privatization of late medieval religions. It did not create it.

SOURCE: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made, by Norman F. Cantor (Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 203-206

UPDATE: Up-and-coming medievalist Andrew Reeves comments:

I disagree with this assessment that the plague had much to do with an increased sense of individualized devotion. The real period for “privatization” was the thirteenth century. It was the Church’s emphasis on genuine penance and contrition in the area of sin that began in the twelfth century and reached it’s full articulation in Lateran IV that began it.

Now then, the profusion of pastoralia (manuals of pastoral care, dealing with confession and instruction) in the years around Lateran IV and after was most extensive in England and France north of the Loire, but such materials appear in other parts of Europe as well.

Maybe that accounts for Cantor’s waffling a bit in the final paragraph of the excerpt quoted above.

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by | 6 December 2005 · 5:55 pm

Texas and Nigeria Evangelize Each Other

The Guardian, whose reporters are equally mystified by Higher Beings and Rural Beings, reports on a fair-play turnabout in missionary endeavors: Nigerian missionaries evangelizing rural Texans. I wonder if they would have used the same template to describe all those Southern Baptist missionaries, many (often the richest) of them Texans, who descended upon xenophobic Japan after World War II.

They say that God moves in mysterious ways, but perhaps never more so than when telling the leaders of Africa’s largest evangelical church to build their North American headquarters in Floyd….

The Nigerian church, founded in Lagos in 1952, paid about $1m (£580,000) for 198 hectares (490 acres) of pasture, on which it is planning to build cottages, a 10,000-seat amphitheatre, an artificial lake and possibly a modest waterpark, leading some to dub it a Christian Disneyland. At the moment the only structure is a large conference centre that last month hosted a meeting of more than 1,000 ministers and volunteers….

Ajibike Akinkoye, the regional church leader in Dallas, said that when he arrived in Texas more than 10 years ago a voice spoke to him. “The Lord … said ‘you are not going to build a megachurch church yet. You are going to plant little churches around the Dallas metroplex and then I will give you a camp.'” After a series of what he describes as miracles he was pointed towards Floyd. “God directed us there. Through him now we want to open up things that will be great and everlasting blessing to everybody.”

Mr Akinkoye said that before buying the land he had not known about the history of the area, where until recently the Ku Klux Klan had openly thrived. “It never crossed my mind there could be any opposition or danger,” he said. “But when people pointed that out it made me feel ‘thank God we are there’, because even if they are negative towards us, or violent, or kill one of us, that is not going to stop the work God wants us to do. We have no fear, because whatever happens it is God’s will.”

Judge Joe Bobbitt is everything you would expect a Texas judge to be: a walking giant with a crushing handshake, cowboy drawl and a ready smile. In his office at the courthouse two flags – the Stars and Stripes and the Lone Star of Texas – frame his desk. Continuing the stereotype, you might not expect him to have an entirely tolerate attitude towards outsiders taking over a patch of Texas land. But nothing could be further from the truth. “When they first came here I thought their plans were pie in the sky,” he said. “But I met with the head of their organisation from Nigeria and a gentleman from Dallas, and I’ve done my due diligence on this; there are no negative marks on this organisation.

“I did an internet search, and normally, you know, with an organisation this size, somebody, somewhere has something bad to say. But I haven’t been able to find any negative websites on these people. They’ve repaired the road, put in water and sewage and raised the value of that land for everybody. It’s going to be good for the community.”

via Danny Yee’s blog

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by | 23 November 2005 · 8:13 pm

Secular Condescension, Liturgical Mindfulness

Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers–persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions–the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them–have all treated my parents with condescension. The Church too has treated them badly when it attempted formal instruction. The homily at Sunday mass, intended to give parishioners basic religious instruction, has often been poorly prepared and aimed at a childish listener. It has been the liturgical Church that has excited my parents. In ceremonies of public worship, they have been moved, assured that their lives–all aspects of their lives, from waking to eating, from birth until death, all moments–possess great significance. Only the liturgy has encouraged them to dwell on the meaning of their lives. To think.

SOURCE: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, by Richard Rodriguez (Bantam Books, 1982), p. 96

I’ve certainly done more than my share of condescension toward religious beliefs and believers. My only defense is that I have never done so from a position of authority–unless one grants undue authority on religious matters to those with more years of strictly secular education, which the latter all too frequently arrogate to themselves. (I should say “ourselves” for, here again, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)

I strongly suspect that the strong resurgence of religion in the public sphere over the last few decades is a reaction to the mounting failures of resolutely secular governments–whether communist, socialist, capitalist, or Baathist–whose policies toward religion have ranged from dismissive condescension, at best, to brutal suppression, at worst. The collapse of communism, the most powerful secular religion of the 20th century, was the largest of the secular dominoes to fall.

Of course, theocracies like Iran seem, like others before them, to have managed to create a strong resurgence of secularism. But do we really need to go that far before finding a reasonable balance, with mutual respect?

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by | 30 October 2005 · 5:50 am

Diary of a Tokyo Christian, 9 August 1945

August 9, 1945, Thursday

This morning Nobukazu went off to Gôra and returned in the evening. When he finished dinner, he had to leave again–this time to board a nine o’clock train to Karuizawa, his school’s evacuation site. And so after he finished dinner, he left the house. It was about seven.

The same sort of strange bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima three days ago was dropped on Nagasaki today, and it was wiped out. This bomb possesses extraordinary power. Photographs showed that Chinese ideographs written in black on signs at train stations had burned, and it was explained that white things wouldn’t burn. Up to now, we’ve been ordered not to wear white garments, not even when it was hot, because they were easy for enemy planes to see. Now we’re warned not to wear black garments because they burn easily.

So what in the world is safe for us to wear? We don’t know anymore. The thought of a single aircraft destroying a large city in an instant is driving us to nervous breakdowns, and I feel as though we have no choice but to die or go crazy. I can’t help but hate those responsible for placing human beings in this situation and continuing the war. At this point, continuing the war will save neither us nor our country. When one comes to this point and when those responsible realize that they have no escape and contemplate the punishments they will surely receive, I believe they will continue the war because they simply don’t know whether or not fighting until the last Japanese falls is a good idea. In this country, where human morality is based on the relationship between masters and followers, we submit to our leaders’ will and simply do as we are told. Because ours is a country in which each person lacks any kind of individuality and because our citizenry doesn’t realize that they themselves have the power to revere their own individuality, we have fought this unprofitable war right up to the present, muttering all the while, “We will win, we will win.” At the very start of the war, Japanese declared in unison, “Today we take pride in our good fortune to be born a Japanese.” I myself could only lament “my misfortune at being born a Japanese today.”

If Japanese had not been cursed by this sort of feudalistic thinking, I believe we could have expected our country to have ended the war sooner than Germany or Italy did. At the beginning of the war, I predicted that we would lose in the way that we have and worried about it. My arguing that we should have stopped the war at Singapore was an earnest and heartfelt plea. Those of us who thought this way were called traitors; our beliefs were regarded as unthinkable; and we were seen as potential spies. I blamed this on the ignorance fostered by feudalistic thinking. No matter what, I can’t accept the fact that my own life has been taken from me for the sake of the lawless promoters of this feudalistic way of thinking, and I am not happy about it.

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 186-187

The diarist, Takahashi Aiko, was born in Tokyo in 1894, but her family immigrated to the United States in 1916 or 1917. There she met Takahashi Shôta, a physician practicing in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. They married in 1922 and had two children, Nobukazu and Emii. In 1932, the family returned to Tokyo, where Dr. Takahashi opened a practice. During the war they lived in Hiroo, “a fashionable area in central Tokyo not far from Sacred Heart Girls High School, where their daughter was a student. Takahashi and her husband may have chosen Sacred Heart because they were Christians” (p. 161).

UPDATE: The Marmot and Coming Anarchy have long and relatively well-informed comment threads about questions of effectiveness and war-criminality with regard to both fire bombing, atomic bombing, and other attempts to win the war as well as end it.

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