Populated by many of the most iconic figures of the twentieth-century, Sacred Causes provides a brilliant examination of how religion has shaped twentieth-century Europe from the Great War until the modern-day 'War on Terror'. Beginning with the chaotic post-World War I landscape in which religious belief was one way of reordering a world knocked off its axis, 'Sacred Causes' is a sweepingly assured critique of how religion has often been camouflaged by politics.
Covering a vast canvas, Burleigh examines the many 'secular' religions the twentieth-century produced, analysing how successive totalitarian leaders fantasised and aped the hierarchy, rites and ritual of the churches in the desire to return to the day where ruler and deity were one. All the many bloody regimes and movements of the century are here, from Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain through to the modern scourge of terrorism the current 'War on Terror'. Often blackly comic, the book shows how the church has been swayed by -- and contributed to -- conflicting secular currents. He traces religious beliefs and institutions from a time when the church, disenchanted with both democracy and fascism, began to search for political alternatives. During the Second World War, the churches faced agonising dilemmas, notably how to respond to the Holocaust.
Combining the deeper workings of history with an urgent sense of the contemporary relevance of his material, Burleigh challenges his readers to consider why no-one foresaw the religious implications of massive Third World immigration, as well as what is driving current calls for a 'civic religion' with which to counter the terrorist threats which have so shocked the West.
About the Author
Michael Burleigh is Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History at Cardiff University. He is the author of seven well-received books, including Earthly Powers and The Third Reich , for which he was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001.
Industry Reviews
Mix monotheisms and mammon, and you have an unholy mess - and the present age.So the reader might conclude after touring British historian Burleigh's continuation of the project begun in Earthly Powers (2006): to "write a coherent history of modern Europe primarily organized around issues of mind and spirit rather than the merely material." World War I brought psychic trauma that saw Europe and America reviving the deity while at the same time religion was losing its force; afterward, in an era of revolution and totalitarianism, many churches became partnered with the authoritarian state, driving liberals and libertarians further away. The less tolerant states made secular religions of themselves; thus Burleigh entertains the notion that a future archaeologist might one day conclude that early-20th-century Europe "witnessed a regression to the age of megaliths and funerary barrows before it succumbed to a more general primitive fury." Atheists became members of the sanctified Bolshevik church, Lutheran pastors became priests of Nazism, Catholic leaders became complicit in crimes against humanity, even as the totalitarian regimes set about on a thorough program of "de-Christianization and massacres"; the first half of the century was a strange time indeed. The second half saw further strange bedfellowing, as with the rise of the European Christian Democratic parties, "whose sole raison d'etre was to occupy and hang on to power at any price." Burleigh casts a cold eye on all these regrettable goings-on, heating up when he arrives at the 1960s, whereon he fulminates about the general going to hell of Western civilization as "chippy girls like Cilla Black, Lulu, and Twiggy set forth on their forty years of stardom." The turn in mood seems fitting, though, for Burleigh closes with an unhappy consideration of the current clash of civilizations and what he suggests is an official European habit of conceding whenever tasked by aggrieved religious minorities.Of a piece with Paul Johnson's Modern Times and other conservative-tending intellectual histories. (Kirkus Reviews)
