Was the decline of faith a factor in the bloodbath that started a century ago?
By B.C.
AS the anniversary of the first world war draws closer, we will be hearing more and more arguments about the causes, both long- and short-term, of the global bloodbath. Was it just a battle between rival powers over markets and resources? Did class conflict play a role? Was it a clash between different ideologies? Or was some spiritual malaise at work? A conservative public intellectual, George Weigel, is advancing the latter theory. He thinks the collapse in the restraining power of religion helped to push the world into the era of total war.
Given that we are all products of the more secular age which "the war to end all wars" ushered in, many people will find his theory pretty far-fetched. But as one of America's leading "theocon" thinkers, Mr Weigel has the gifts of erudition and persuasion to make a respectable case. And as he points out, in an article (pay-wall) in the journal First Things, he is in distinguished, if rarefied, company. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had once asked why, in 1914, a Europe "bursting with health and abundance" had "fallen into a rage of self-mutilation"; and the Russian writer offered the same explanation as he did for all the disasters of the early 20th century: man had "forgotten God".
Anyone will agree that there was a decline in the importance of religion during and after the first world war. Theocratically-based regimes, notably the Russian and Ottoman empires, were replaced by secular ones. In western Europe, Protestant and Catholic clergy struggled to explain the seemingly senseless horrors of the war to their flock. It is more contentious to argue that secularisation was a cause as well as an effect of war.
But in his article, elaborating on an earlier lecture, Mr Weigel lists the secular ideas that were supplanting religion before 1914. They include racial theories based on the superiority of the Slavic or Teutonic peoples, and their incompatibility with each other; Friedrich Nietszche's glorification of destruction and power; distorted forms of Darwinism which saw the survival of the fittest as a prescription for an endless arms race. He thinks that religion itself was corrupted by secular nationalism, to the point where many of Europe's clergy saw nothing but merit in killing fellow Christians of a different nation.
Mr Weigel does acknowledge one counter-argument that would be offered by anybody who knows a bit of European history. The whole political order of modern Europe arguably has its roots in a benign project to stop the endless sectarian conflict which devastated the continent in the 17th century. But he insists that "the erosion of religious authority in Europe...created a European moral-cultural environment in which politics were no longer bound and constrained by a higher authority operative in the minds and consciences of leaders and populations."
It's true, of course, that in different circumstances religion can either restrain the urge to fight or exacerbate it. Both factors are sometimes underestimated by people of a secular cast of mind. And sometimes, both factors are at work simultaneously. Religion can mitigate conflict within a large group (say, Christendom or the Muslim ummah) but also increase the chances of conflict between those large groups. A century on from the Great War, religion seems in many places to have retained its power to exacerbate strife but lost its capacity to calm and restrain.
