on the other hand, which had failed for the most part to denounce the murderous racism that was taking over the country.12 This terrible evidence of the irresponsibility of the church leadership and of the superficiality of the faith and commitment to Christ among the baptized members of the several churches brings to mind the words of Jesus in the parable of the sower: “As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away” (Matt 13:20–21).
To this observation must be added two reminders: first, that the central principle of the Marxist-Leninist agenda, based on a historical analysis that presented itself effectively as a new gospel, was hatred of religion, especially the Christian religion with its Jewish roots—the very religion that had produced the culture of which Marx was a product—and that this dogma has inspired relentless persecution of Christians around the world for the last 100 years, most notoriously, of course, in the Soviet Union, China, and Southeast Asia (such persecution is now also increasingly to be found in Muslim states where extremist Islamism is on the rise); and second, that World Wars I and II, which brought to a head the national antagonisms and racist phobias noted earlier, were both fought primarily, if not exclusively, among European nations rooted in a 3,800-year-old Judeo-Christian tradition, the very tradition that, combined with its Greco-Roman counterpart, had given rise to the moral principles we have highlighted, principles that in turn have contributed to the emergence of political freedom and democracy, surely one of the great achievements of mankind.
II
The Wars of Religion in Europe; Divine Judgment; the Human Project of the New Man
Any visitor from another planet witnessing all this would be obliged to conclude that Western civilization as a whole, in Europe and beyond, is tearing out its own guts and committing suicide by implosion, cutting itself from and crushing its Hebraic taproot and utterly rejecting, in practice and in theory, the Christian gospel that has shaped and nourished it. To the persecution of Jews and Christians perpetrated by adversaries coming from outside the Christian sphere, such as is represented by many communist assaults across the world and by the murder at the hands of the Ottoman Turks of millions of Christian Armenians, Greeks, Arameans, and Assyrians between 1895 and 1923, has been added subversion, corruption, and persecution coming from within. While the twentieth-century genocides, totalitarian ideologies, and two World Wars involved many peoples from traditions other than Christian ones, it is clear that for the most part the protagonists were cultural brothers who had lost any sense of sharing the vital religious heritage whose center is Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, Reconciler of man to God and of man to man. The ever-growing rejection of the church and of the Christian gospel in Europe since the seventeenth century, entailing the loss among the European peoples of a common transcendental and moral vision, led finally to the most horrendous conflicts the world has ever known. The ironies here are sickening.
Undoubtedly the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which arose in response to the Reformation and its intention to reform the decadent late medieval church, were responsible for the first major breach in the basic cultural unity of Europe in the Middle Ages. The church, if not the gospel itself, has much to answer for in making Europe a battleground in these centuries and beyond. It is undeniable that the subsequent gradual disaffection from Christian faith of a large portion of the European population, especially among the intellectual elite, coupled with internal strife centered on questions of religious belief, of the nature and place of the now-divided church, and of the kind of political institutions needed to replace the church-throne alliance, profoundly destabilized European identity. This state of affairs quite naturally gave rise to a contentious, revolutionary spirit which, in the context of the industrial, scientific, and technological developments from the eighteenth century on, nurtured the hostilities and resentments that finally exploded two centuries later.
What is harder, perhaps, for secularized modern people in the West to see or assess adequately is the evidence that the tragic events of the twentieth century, and the unraveling of much that we hold valuable and noble in the Western tradition, are refractions—in some sense, reflections—of the cracks and splits in the Western church and the weakening and distortion of Christian faith over the last centuries. That is to say, they are intimately tied up with the condition of the church in Western society. As suggested above, the fractures of the late medieval church have causal links with what followed. The church’s hunger for worldly power and its frequent substitution, in the course of its history, of political agendas or religious trappings for vital Christian life and witness, and its no less frequent disobedience to its Lord’s commands to love and honor all men and women and to play the role of humble servant, explain, it seems to me, some if not all of the rejection and opposition it has experienced since the seventeenth century and continues to experience in our day. Current liberal efforts to sanitize Christ’s call to repentance and spiritual rebirth, for example, or, in some cases of interreligious dialogue, to play down the uniqueness of Christ and to flatten out, in obedience to the foolish and dangerous doctrine of political correctness, the fundamental differences between, for instance, Islam and Christianity, are misguided enterprises and will not alter the unbelief and frequent contempt that accompany the almost total ignorance, shared by a large percentage of Western men and women in our day, of the real content of the Christian faith.13 I believe that this patent repudiation of Christianity—uninformed though it often is about the true nature of the gospel—is, in part, a manifestation of God’s judgment on his own people within the frame of world history, in the sense that it has arisen to some extent as a consequence of aberrant attitudes and behaviors among those representing Christ’s church.
But there is more to be said here. The church and any society it may be part of are inter-dependent. Its faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the true gospel of Jesus Christ will, under God’s providence, determine to a large extent the course and direction of a given society, whether the leaders of that society are conscious of this or not. Likewise, the society’s treatment of the church and the gospel to which it bears witness will bring blessing or judgment on that society in the short or long term. Both the church and the societies that participated in those terrible events of the last century mentioned here must bear their share of blame.
This is obviously also true with respect to the period of the religious wars in Europe. At this point a caveat needs to be introduced, however, to balance what has been said about the church’s share of responsibility for these wars. In a recent publication, William T. Cavanaugh presents a strong argument that the religious wars were not, as is commonly suggested, “the events that necessitated the birth of the modern state; they were in fact themselves the birth-pangs of the state.”14 That is to say, they were inseparable from the power politics of the age, at a time when the centralized monarchical state was coming into its own and seeking to gain control over the appointments, revenues, and remaining temporal power of the church. In France, the absolutist, bureaucratic state was already fairly well defined when the religious conflicts erupted in the middle of the sixteenth century. All across Europe, the distribution of power was in a state of flux. The royal houses, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie were all struggling for advantage, and used religion shamelessly to extend their influence. “For the main instigators of the carnage,” writes Cavanaugh, “doctrinal loyalties were at best secondary to their stake in the rise or defeat of the centralized state.”15 The strife in France in the sixteenth century and the catastrophic violence of the Thirty Years’ War in the Habsburg Empire in the seventeenth century were not primarily due to religious conviction as such but to rivalries between classes and states all using Christian doctrine and allegiance as a pretext and tool to gain power.
It is not fair to allege, therefore, that the subsequent recourse to the secular state as the source of civil order in Europe, replacing the church, was brought about and rendered necessary simply by the collapse of religious unity and the violence engendered by religious passions. The posture of the modern state as savior of civil society and generator of the peace that the late Medieval Church failed to maintain is a self-serving myth according to Cavanaugh. Far from being the messianic peacekeeper that finally brought order out of confessional strife with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the state was in fact at the root of the religious wars and the source of their atrocious ferocity. Moreover,