Abstract
Under the conditions of late modernity, when a secular worldview has diminished the plausibility of affirmations of a transcendent truth or reality governing human affairs, the world’s major religious traditions have spawned religious subcultures driven by narrowly political theologies. The result has been a constriction of conceptions of divine glory and majesty; these aggressive fundamentalist and religious-nationalist movements idolize the near-absolute power of the secular modern state. This elimination of options within the religious community, including the option of separatism or withdrawal from worldly political calculations, robs the religious imagination of a vital pluralism and reduces “power” to ideology.
On September 8, 1907 the Vatican published the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis: On the Doctrines of the Modernists, one in a series of official documents and rulings promulgated during the pontificate of Pope Pius X as part of a sustained crusade against “modernism,” which Pascendi called “the synthesis of all heresies.” Subsequently, priests were required to swear an oath against modernism, and vigilance committees were established in dioceses around the world to root it out. At stake was no less than the radical transcendence of the Divine.
According to the pope, God’s absolute sovereignty over human affairs was being compromised by certain modern Biblical exegetes and critical historians whose writings downplayed, or even denied outright, external or “extrinsic” revelation from God, in favor of human experience as the source of sacred truth. Holy Scripture and Church dogma has emerged over time as the result of evolving human awareness under shifting circumstances. The sources of revelation, in short, were reduced to fallible historical artifacts subject to “development.” Were the modernists to prevail, Pascendi warned, the authority of the magisterium (and, by extension, the infallibility of the pope) would be threatened.
Singled out in the encyclical for special opprobrium was the error of “vital immanence,” a doctrine which “ … in the Modernist acceptation holds and professes that every phenomenon of conscience proceeds from man as man. The rigorous conclusion from this is the identity of man with God, which means Pantheism.” This egregious conflation of divine revelation and inspiration in all its majesty, on the one hand, and everyday human emotion and intuition, on the other, would make every man a prophet, every person a pope. Confusion, chaos and the proliferation of sects and heretical spinoffs would inevitably ensue.
The Modernists were condemned, but modernism of a kind survived and thrived. One hundred years after Pascendi, the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor could write compellingly, in A Secular Age, of life lived by most moderns within a purely immanent frame, a condition of belief based on the assumption of the individual subject’s inner depths, unmoored from an external or extrinsic referent or source beyond time and space. The immanent frame reflects what Taylor calls “the naturalistic rejection of the transcendent” (Taylor Citation2007, 548).
If Taylor is correct, how did moderns acquire this shared sense of self? And how does the “immanent frame”—the confinement of the social and religious imaginary within a secular horizon of possibility—affect the sensibilities of religious actors? This essay opens a window on these questions by sketching, first, the cumulative impact of succeeding generations of technoscientific “progress” on the modern religious imagination; and, second, by noting the roughly simultaneous rise of militant religious subcultures and movements that seek to emulate or channel the power of the modern secular state as a way of glorifying God.
At this point I want to borrow the concept of “late modernity” from the social theorist Anthony Giddens, employing it to encompass not only the highly developed global societies of today, but also their immediate predecessors of the late 19th and 20th centuries (Giddens Citation1990). These societies had undergone or were in the process of undergoing “The Great Western Transmutation” (GWT), to use the phrase coined by the historian Marshall Hodgson. Originating in early modern Western and Islamic discoveries and inventions, the GWT, over the course of centuries and at different times in different regions, catapulted civilizations into a whirlwind called “modernity,” characterized at its zenith by a self-propelling acceleration in transnational, trans-societal transformative encounters via increasingly widespread global communications, travel, trade, markets, and cultural exchange (Lawrence Citation2014). Today, we “late moderns”—we, that is, who still cling to techno-scientific rationality, in contrast to “postmoderns,” who have undermined or abandoned what they see as the illusion of order and stable foundations of knowledge—are the inheritors of all that has been wrought by the GWT whirlwind.
Late modernity in its spreading ubiquity is increasingly difficult to escape; so, too, is the secular habit of mind described by Taylor—so much so, I argue, that even the world’s great multi-generational religious traditions have spawned subcultures, enclaves and social movements that partake—inadvertently and ironically—in “the naturalistic rejection of the transcendent.” “Vital immanence” is in the air they (and we) breathe, even as they amass resources and attack infidels, in a pyrrhic effort to restore the sovereign deity to his throne.
The way these militant religious subcultures think about and “operationalize” the ancient practice of “giving glory to God” exemplifies the phenomenon. Within the world’s religious traditions, one can easily trace practices designed to create and reinforce a culture of supplication to the sacred. What is owed to the gods first and foremost is a communal outpouring of praise and glory, a ritualized recognition of the majesty and absolute power of the divine. Obedience to divine commands, petitions in pursuit of divine favor, accompany and depend upon a variety of behaviors extolling Divine Power or Divine Glory. By performing x or y rite, or by enacting x or y service or other ethical obligation, the community or the individual is understood to be giving glory and praise to God. Under the conditions of late modernity, the temptation is to see oneself as sharing in divine Glory.
The religious acts warranted by, or expressive of, divine power and glory range from the communal or individual recitation of simple prayers, to the ritual sacrifice of animals (or human beings), to the launching of military or terrorist attacks on the field of battle. Across this behavioral spectrum the holiness and majesty of God is equated with, dependent upon, or manifest by Divine Power. Under the sway of late modernity, moreover, the religious subcultures in question, increasingly captive to a narrowly mundane religious imagination, have interpreted Divine Power as merely the extrapolation of earthly power, as the pure, unfettered essence of the kind of power wielded by the modern state—namely, the power to command, to control, to master, to dominate. Subtler traditional notions of what constitutes divine majesty, of how one best serves the glory of God, have struggled to gain a foothold in these newly ascendant religious subcultures. The transcendent majesty of God has given way to a shabby immanence.
On the face of it, this conflation of the petty machinations of mortals and the awesome grandeur of the sacred is a curious phenomenon requiring explanation.
The term glory or its cognate varies in meaning historically; the word which is used for glory in the Hebrew Bible has the simple meaning of “heaviness” or “weight.” It was used in everyday speech to express the worth of a person in the physical or material sense. Over time, the term came to express the ideas of importance, greatness, honor, splendor and, not least, power. These associations can be found in the French and Latin roots of the term.
Though not included in most New Testament accounts of the prayer Jesus taught his followers, the earliest Christians, and many still today, recite the following coda at the end of the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, now and forever.” Indeed, Christian religious language is abounding in reference to the glory, power and might of the Most High. The Gloria, a hymn sung or recited most weeks in Catholic Mass, begins “Glory to God in the highest” … and goes on to praise God “for your glory.” Countless acts of generosity, love and self-sacrifice, large and small, are dedicated to the glorification of God.
Muslims recite the now well-known and multivalent Arabic phrase, Allahu Akbar (الله أكبر)—“God is Greater!”—in various situations, including the Salah or obligatory daily prayers; but it has also entered into popular lexicon as a result of being invoked by some extremist Muslims engaged in highly public acts of violence intended to exalt Allah. The exclamation, which also serves as an invocation, has a unique and complex history beyond its early use and conception; what concerns us here is the transmutation of such traditional and time-honored paeans to the glory of God into rallying cries of religious extremists.
What conception of the Divine lies behind this ubiquitous insistence on giving glory to God, on adoring and exalting God’s majesty and dominant power? Does the Holy One in some way need the praise of His creatures? Or does the significance of attributing power and glory to the Most High lie not in a divine but a very human need, such that the believer is somehow brought to greater depths of fulfillment or to greater heights of holiness by extolling and somehow partaking of the glory and power of the: Creator, Redeemer, Avenger, Destroyer, and so on.
I want to suggest that these connotations of the idea of the power and glory of the sacred, propelled by the social dynamics and structural conditions of late modernity, play a central role in the modern religious imaginary. For certain religious subcultures, giving and receiving “glory” is associated with secular conceptualizations of prosperity, honor, and success, and with manifestations of power by the modern state. These subcultures, in turn, have spawned movements and networks that display an activist, aggressive, and militant form of religiosity. In their ideological traits and organizational dynamics, these proliferating militant movements reflect the merging of modern secular and traditionally religious sensibilities, practices, and goals.
The emergence of Religious Zionism in Israel during the latter half of the 20th century illustrates the blending of traditional religious and modern secular notions of divine power and glory, with its profound implications for religious agency. The awe, fear, and trembling with which the people of Israel encountered the ferocious power of YHWH is on display throughout the Hebrew Bible, most dramatically, perhaps, in the Book of Exodus and the Book of Job, where the gulf between absolute divine power and human contingency is vast, and where the Deity seems to crave publicity and supplication. Moreover, vengeance upon His enemies is reserved for the Lord God of Hosts; the classis text is Deuteronomy 32:35, but the theme reappears throughout, in Leviticus, Numbers, Proverbs, and in other books. On the one hand, there is ample scriptural evidence that the Lord authorizes iconic figures such as Moses and David to serve his purposes through miracles, wily calculation, and temporal rule; biblical-era Judaism developed several political models, including priestly theocracy. Alongside the rise of Jewish councils and other forms of religious and communal self-government during the rabbinic and medieval periods, on the other hand, the political environment dictated, and one sees, a delicate and halting approach to political power and to secular authorities.
Throughout Jewish experience, in any case, there is a thread of profound hesitation to connect the dots, that is, to leap to the conclusion that the necessary exercise of Jewish self-governance in this or that dispensation should be taken to correspond in some neat, obvious, or “linear” fashion to God’s plan of salvation for the people of Israel.
In the 20th century, following the Holocaust and the migration to Palestine, as Jews of various stripes were imagining the state of Israel into existence, this vein of trembling and fear before the transcendent power and inscrutable purposes of the Lord resurfaced in the modern Haredi movement, which rejected and denounced secular Zionist pretensions to establish an authentically Jewish state, and which isolated itself in enclaves dedicated to awaiting passively on the arrival of the Messiah.
In the 1970s in the wake of the near-disastrous Yom Kippur War, there emerged an aggressive, confident, militant band of “Religious Zionists”—the Gush Emunim or Bloc of the Faithful. Convinced that the founding and survival of the State of Israel was prominent among the signs of the advent of the Messianic era, the nucleus of the group sought by their illegal settlements in territories occupied by Israel after the Six Day War of 1967, and by their provocations of both Palestinian Arabs and the political leaders of the Israeli state, not only to hasten but actually to implement the Divine plan. The movement’s initial success in luring the government to consolidate its extra-legal incursions and to build state-funded settlements as part of a plan eventually to expand the borders of the state of Israel—Gush Emunim dreamed of an expansion to encompass the Biblical Whole Land of Israel, “from the Nile to the Euphrates”—was due in large part to its very hybridity. The early core of the movement included both graduates of the Merkaz Harav yeshiva, disciples of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, and also secular activists hailing from previous Land expansion campaigns. The operational wing of the movement placed modern communications and organizational technology at the service of irredentist Messianism; underground elements studied and adopted modern terrorist tactics. Over time the movement was “domesticated,” with numbers of its early members serving in the Knesset and eventually assimilating into the Israeli political establishment (Aran Citation1991).
Known today as Ne’emanei Eretz Yisrael (“those who are faithful to the Land of Israel”), the group, by one view, is a member of a global “family” of modern religious nationalists. Religious nationalists of our day exceed the limits of mundane ultra-nationalism in two ways. First, they explicitly present the nation as sacred or as partaking of the sacred. Here the discourse of divine power and glory is pervasive. Second, the overt sacralization of the nation is practiced and believed by religious nationalists such as the Gush Emunim or the Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) movement in India as a vital step toward realizing the fulfillment of the religion itself—Judaism, in the former case, Hinduism in the latter.
In the past several decades virtually all the major religious traditions have spawned movements dedicated to the temporizing of divine power, manifested by decidedly human empire-building. Such movements are weary of waiting for the Lord to intervene dramatically and decisively; they have become convinced they are called to enact his will.
“While the Lord tarries,” was a favored locution of Bob Jones, Jr., the second president and chancellor of Bob Jones University, the Christian fundamentalist university in Greenville, South Carolina. Jones recited this phrase regularly to explain and justify why he and other Christian pastors had vowed not to wait upon the vengeance of the Lord, but to fight back against the 20th century onset of a hegemonic godless culture desacralizing American institutions at the behest of an aggressive secular state. Put simply: the Lord was tarrying, postponing his prophesied and long anticipated return to Earth in power and glory, and so the devout Christian must clear the threshing floor, create the social and political conditions that would, as it were, lure the Lord into fulfilling his promise of a triumphant return marked by a righteous display of purifying power.
These millennialist imaginings have their dark side. Whether the triumphant Second Coming of Christ would usher in the End Times prophesied in the Bible (premillennialism) or cap the thousand years of Christian reign (postmillennialism), only the born-again believer would escape the withering judgment of the Lord. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s in America, popularized this apocalyptic fever-dream, according to which current events (e.g. the establishment of the State of Israel and the subsequent expansion of its geographical borders) presaged the rapture of fundamental Christians directly into heaven before the rise of the satanic Anti-Christ. Twenty-five years later Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins launched a series of 16 bestselling Christian novels (published between 1995 and 2007, 60 million copies sold worldwide), setting forth in elaborate and bloody detail the tribulations endured by those remaining on earth after the rapture (the Left Behind series, as it is known). The series imagines an underground network of converts waging a violent campaign against the (secular-liberal-Jewish) “Global Community”—which is eventually annihilated by an avenging Jesus, returning on clouds of glory, death rays emanating from his visage.
For our purposes, what is noteworthy in this fabulous tale and its variants, is the necessary, if not sufficient, role of the true believers in the unfolding of God’s glorious victory. They are not merely passive, awaiting on the “tarrying” Lord to return; rather, they hasten his coming by their strenuous efforts to spread the gospel and to fight back against the godless. As scholars of late modern Christian eschatology have noted, from the 1960s onward there is a drift toward a kind of postmillennialist activism: the decisive manifestation of divine power and glory is in some way dependent upon the efforts of the remnant community on earth. Indeed, in building a robust and sprawling religious subculture in the United States, the fundamentalists used various tactics, but strict separatism—withdrawal from the fray, leaving the end times to God, letting God be God—faded as a viable option. Evidence of a similar narrowing of the religious imagination to an immanent or merely mundane frame is found, mutatis mutandis, among modern Roman Catholic and Islamic subcommunities as well.
Until fairly recently, the doctrine of the transcendent sovereignty of God shaped mainstream currents within Judaism, Sunni Islam, and Protestant Christianity; each in their own ways, these communities honored the vast gulf between the absolute power of God, on the one hand, and the feeble striving of the sinful or disobedient human subject, on the other. Meanwhile, for Roman Catholics, Shi’a Muslims, and Hindus the boundaries between human and divine agency were more porous. The analogical imagination of Catholicism, for example, authorizes forms of imitatio Christi. According to this shared family resemblance, or common general perspective on the sacred, saints, martyrs, and other religious virtuosi are believed to be participants in the Divine drama, partakers of Divine glory, avatars of the transcendent. If the metaphor became military, they were soldiers of Christ, the vanguard of Allah, volunteers to the cause of the Lord Ram.
The question is whether this diversity of religious worldviews and behaviors has collapsed under the pressure of “late modernity.” It may well be that separatism, that a quietist withdrawal from political belligerence, is simply no longer an option available to modern religious actors who feel increasingly besieged by the encroachments of an undiluted, state-sponsored secularism. This certainly seemed to be the conclusion of the Shi‘ite followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who cast off a long tradition of political quietism observed during the long centuries while the Hidden Imam “tarried.”
The strategy of the Iranian revolutionaries, the Israeli Jewish settlers, the Christian fundamentalists, the Hindu nationalists, seems to be: If you can’t beat undiluted secularism, then dilute it, join it, so to speak, but in so doing, refine it, turn it to religious ends—to the glorification of the Lord Ram, as the phalanx of young Swayamsevaks (“volunteers” of the Hindu nation) chanted as they marched on the iconic Babri mosque in 1992 in order to demolish it.
The Divine majesty and the Power emanating therefrom is now placed at the service of identifying, protecting and militarizing the elect, the chosen ones, the elite spiritual vanguard, and casting all others into the fire. This is the way to glorify God. In this aspiration in itself, there is nothing new or “modern.” But I want to call attention to the specific ironies, reversals, and unintended outcomes incumbent on those who have chosen to evoke “ancient hatreds” though the means of modern political ideologies and enabling technologies.
The members of the multi-layered Hindutva movement, for example, seek to reify the historically sprawling and disparate practices of the Indus valley region and beyond, precisely as a “religion”—called Hinduism—in order to lend plausibility to their portrayal of polyglot, religiously plural India as a “Hindu nation.” This dual move—sacralizing the nation, and glorifying it as the cornerstone or summit of “orthodox” or “orthoprax” religion—lends a transcendent or metaphysical depth to exclusionary social norms and discriminatory politics that mere irredentism or “politics as usual” could not provide. The nation is absolute because it partakes of the sacred; the sacred is bound up in the destiny of the nation.
One can readily see how the definition of the nation as co-terminus with the history and prerogatives of a particular ethno-religious and racial subset of the population is abetted by the construction of that subset as the originally “chosen people.” The politics of exclusion fed by radical populism and right-wing nationalism becomes ever more powerful, then, when minorities are depicted as displacing the rightful heirs of the sacred trust and are thereby easily demonized, not merely as “aliens,” “foreigners” and “outsiders,” but as “impure” and somehow less than fully human—and, therefore, presented as justifiable targets of violence and other forms of coercion—violence which, in the eyes of the Hindu soldiers, gives glory to the Lord Ram.
In short, over the last several generations one can trace a weakening of these historically divergent and heterogeneous Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian theologies, religious anthropologies, practices, and worldviews. Within and across multigenerational modern religious communities, indeed, we have seen the rise of an alternative mode of religiosity, labelled variously fundamentalism, ultra-orthodoxy, or neo-traditionalism. Whatever we call it, this ideologically-driven instrumentalization of the relationship between human agency and divine power has reduced this richly allusive mode of religious imagination to the merely mundane or secular imperatives of a narrow political theology.
Meanwhile the separatist, world-renouncing option, a withdrawing from political action into the domain of prayer, service, and community-building, has become increasingly difficult to realize. Authorized by the via negativa—God is nothing like man, and so man must fall on his knees in supplication and adoration—this humbler religious way refuses to identify the majesty and glory of the Almighty with the ideologies and mundane political calculations of the religious nationalist. The consequent diminishment of divine majesty is an irony lost on the most zealous of the self-styled true believers.
Acknowledgements
This essay is an adaptation of a lecture I delivered to the annual conference of the European Academy of Religion Conference, June 2020.
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R. Scott Appleby
R. Scott Appleby is professor of history and the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He earned the PhD from the University of Chicago in 1985. The author or editor of 15 books on modern religious history, including The Ambivalence of the Sacred and the five-volume Fundamentalism Project series, Appleby is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the recipient of four honorary doctorates.
References
- Aran, Gideon. 1991. “Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim).” In Fundamentalisms Observed, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, 265–344. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
- Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. London: Polity Press.
- Lawrence, Bruce. 2014. “Genius Denied and Reclaimed: A 40-Year Retrospect on Marshall G.S. Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam.” The Marginalia Review of Books. https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/retrospect-hodgson-venture-islam/.
- Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap.