Review of Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). xviii + 557 pp. $27.95.
From First Principles:
Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Russian bolshevism all promised a kingdom very much of “this world” to replace the hope of the transcendent world to come.
Among the “new” things on the ideologues’ progressive side of history was a new anthropology. The modern effort to build heaven on earth began with the ideological reconstruction of a new man. Presupposing that human nature is malleable rather than radically limited, subject to original sin, and transformable only by divine grace, each totalitarian regime promised to build a new man fit for the earthly New Jerusalem.
Burleigh’s comprehensive and disturbing comparative study of political religion adds significant historical documentation to the more abstract interpretations contributed by political theorists and sociologists. In a gripping, often darkly humorous narrative detailing the warped spirituality of the twentieth century’s most notorious regimes, Burleigh operates in a zone between history and journalism, offering a highly personal account in which the author’s voice is always present. This is not a fault, but it does place Burleigh’s work in a category distinct from more detached and dispassionate history. This is a story written by a historian engaged with a usable past that he hopes may offer the West a remedy for its persistent spiritual disease.
Totalitarianism became an ersatz faith for many millions of people. It did more than fill the spiritual void left by a supposedly secularizing civilization. Totalitarian regimes carried farther the determination of nation-states in the nineteenth century to become the locus of man’s primary allegiance. Worship did not go away in the secular age. The nation-state redirected veneration to itself for its own intramundane ends.
Posts
