Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XX

LOVE

1967: A

BBEY

R

OAD

Sunday, 25 June. In St John’s Wood, one of London’s most affluent neighbourhoods, church-goers were heading to evensong. Not the world’s most famous band, though. The Beatles were booked to play their largest-ever gig. For the first time, a programme featuring live sequences from different countries was to be broadcast simultaneously around the world – and the British Broadcasting Corporation, for its segment, had put up John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The studios on Abbey Road were where, for the past five years, the Beatles had been recording the songs that had transformed popular music, and made them the most idolised young men on the planet. Now, before an audience of 350 million, they were recording their latest single. The song, with a chorus that anyone could sing, was joyously, catchily anthemic. Its message, written on cardboard placards in an assortment of languages, was intended to be readily accessible to a global village. Flowers, streamers and balloons all added to the sense of a party. John Lennon, alternately singing and chewing heavily on a wad of gum, offered the watching world a prescription with which neither Aquinas, nor Augustine, nor Saint Paul would have disagreed: ‘all you need is love’.

God, after all, was love. This was what it said in the Bible. For two thousand years, men and women had been pondering this revelation. Love, and do as you will. Many were the Christians who, over the course of the centuries, had sought to put this precept of Augustine’s into practice.¹ For then, as a Hussite preacher had put it, ‘Paradise will open to us, benevolence will be multiplied, and perfect love will abound.’² But what if there were wolves? What then were the lambs to do? The Beatles themselves had grown up in a world scarred by war. Great stretches of Liverpool, their native city, had been levelled by German bombs. Their apprenticeship as a band had been in Hamburg, served in clubs manned by limbless ex-Nazis. Now, even as they sang their message of peace, the world again lay in the shadow of conflict. Only three weeks before the broadcast from Abbey Road, war had broken out in the Holy Land. The blackened carcasses of Egyptian and Syrian planes littered landscapes once trodden by biblical patriarchs. Israel, the Jewish homeland promised by the British in 1917, and which had finally been founded in 1948, had won in only six days a stunning victory over neighbours pledged to its annihilation. Jerusalem, the city of David, was – for the first time since the age of the Caesars – under Jewish rule. Yet this offered no resolution to the despair and misery of those displaced from what had previously been Palestine. Just the opposite. Across the world, like napalm in a Vietnamese jungle, hatreds seemed to be burning out of control. Most terrifying of all were the tensions between the world’s two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Victory over Hitler had brought Russian troops into the heart of Europe. Communist governments had been installed in ancient Christian capitals: Warsaw, Budapest, Prague. An iron curtain now ran across the continent. Armed as both sides were with nuclear missiles, weapons so lethal that they had the potential to wipe out all of life on earth, the stakes were grown apocalyptic. Humanity had arrogated to itself what had always previously been viewed as a divine prerogative: the power to end the world.

How, then, could love possibly be enough? The Beatles – although roundly mocked for their message – were not alone in believing that it might be. A decade earlier, in the depths of the American South, a Baptist pastor named Martin Luther King had pondered what Christ had meant by urging his followers to love their enemies. ‘Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilisation. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilisation, love even for enemies.’³ King had not, as the Beatles would in ‘All You Need Is Love’, claimed that it was easy. He spoke as a black man, to a black congregation, living in a society blighted by institutionalised oppression. The civil war, although it had ended slavery, had not ended racism and segregation. Lawmen had combined with lynch mobs to ensure that. Thousands were signed up to the Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary organisation that sang hymns, burned giant crosses, and rode down black Americans. White pastors – when they were not actively serving as leaders in the Klan – stood silently by. It was these clergymen and their congregations that King sought to rouse from their moral slumbers. An orator of genius, with an unrivalled mastery of the Bible and its cadences, he also possessed a rare talent for organising peaceful demonstrations. Strikes, boycotts, marches: again and again, King deployed them to force the repeal of discriminatory legislation. Yet these successes, while they made him a national figure, also made him hated. His house was fire-bombed; he was repeatedly thrown into prison. But King never hated in return. He knew that it cost a man to bear witness to the word of God. In the spring of 1963, writing from jail, he had reflected on how Saint Paul had carried the gospel of freedom to where it was most needed, heedless of the risks. Summoning the white clergy to break their silence, and to speak out against the injustices suffered by blacks, King had invoked the authority of Aquinas and of his own namesake, Martin Luther. Above all, though – answering the charge of extremism – he had appealed to the example of his Saviour. Laws that sanctioned the hatred and persecution of one race by another, he declared, were laws that Christ himself would have broken. ‘Was not Jesus an extremist for love?’⁴

The campaign for civil rights gave to Christianity an overt centrality in American politics that it had not had since the decades before the civil war. King, by stirring the slumbering conscience of white Christians, succeeded in setting his country on a transformative new path. To talk of love as Paul had talked of it, as a thing greater than prophecy, or knowledge, or faith, had once again become a revolutionary act. King’s dream, that the glory of the Lord would be revealed, and all flesh see it together, helped to animate a great yearning across America – in West Coast coffee shops as in Alabama churches, on verdant campuses as on picket lines, among attorneys as among refuse-workers – for justice to roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream. This was the same vision of progress that, in the eighteenth century, had inspired Quakers and Evangelicals to campaign for the abolition of slavery; but now, in the 1960s, the spark that had set it to flame with a renewed brilliance was the faith of African Americans. The sound of protest was the sound of the black churches. Evident in King’s soaring preacher’s baritone, it was evident too in the music that could be heard on transistors and stereos across the country. In the 1950s, on picket lines and marches, black protestors had sung songs from the dark days of bondage: about Moses redeeming his people from slavery; about Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho. In the 1960s, it began to seem that voices honed in gospel choirs might transform the world: that a change was gonna come. When James Brown, the most innovative and daring of all black superstars, emerged from poverty to blaze a trail for funk, he drew for his style on a youthful apprenticeship spent in a notably flamboyant evangelical church. Brown, a mercurial man who veered between singing the praises of capitalism and saying it loud that he was black and proud, never forgot the debt he owed the United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith. ‘Sanctified people got more fire.’⁵

Like the perfume of a joss stick, however, the ideals and slogans of the civil rights movement might be inhaled by people who had never seen the inside of a black church. That the Beatles agreed with King on the importance of love, and had refused as a matter of principle to play for segregated audiences, did not mean that they were – as James Brown might have put it – ‘holy’. Even though Lennon had first met McCartney at a church fête, all four had long since abandoned their childhood Christianity. It was, in the words of McCartney, a ‘goody-goody thing’:⁶ fine, perhaps, for a lonely woman wearing a face that she kept in a jar by the door, but not for a band that had conquered the world. Churches were stuffy, old-fashioned, boring – everything that the Beatles were not. In England, even the odd bishop had begun to suggest that the traditional Christian understanding of God was outmoded, and that the only rule was love. In 1966, when Lennon claimed in a newspaper interview that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’,⁷ eyebrows were barely raised. Only four months later, after his comment had been reprinted in an American magazine, did the backlash hit. Pastors across the United States had long been suspicious of the Beatles. This was especially so in the South – the Bible Belt. Preachers there – unwittingly backing Lennon’s point – fretted that Beatlemania had become a form of idolatry; some even worried that it was all a communist plot. To many white Evangelicals – shamed by the summons to repentance issued them by King, baffled by the sense of a moral fervour that had originated outside their own churches, and horrified by the spectacle of their daughters screaming and wetting themselves at the sight of four peculiar-looking Englishmen – the chance to trash Beatles records came as a blessed relief. Simultaneously, to racists unpersuaded by the justice of the civil rights movement, it provided an opportunity to rally the troops. The Ku Klux Klan leapt at the chance to cast themselves as the defender of Protestant values. Not content with burning records, they set to burning Beatles wigs. The band’s distinctive hairstyle – a shaggy moptop – seemed to clean-cut Klansmen a blasphemy in itself. ‘It’s hard for me to tell through the mopheads,’ one of them snarled, ‘whether they’re even white or black.’⁸

None of which did much to alter Lennon’s views on Christianity. The Beatles did not – as Martin Luther King had done – derive their understanding of love as the force that animated the universe from a close reading of scripture. Instead, they took it for granted. Cut loose from its theological moorings, the distinctively Christian understanding of love that had done so much to animate the civil rights movement began to float free over an ever more psychedelic landscape. The Beatles were not alone, that summer of 1967, in ‘turning funny’.⁹ Beads and bongs were everywhere. Evangelicals were appalled. To them, the emergence of long-haired freaks with flowers in their hair seemed sure confirmation of the satanic turn that the world was taking. Blissed-out talk of peace and love was pernicious sloganeering: just a cover for drugs and sex. Two thousand years of attempts to rein in the violence of the passions appeared to be going into reverse. That this was true enough did not, of course, make Christians seem any less square. Preachers, seen through the marijuana haze of a squat in San Francisco, had the look of bigots. Where was the love in short-haired men jabbing their fingers and going puce? Tense and thrumming, the sense of an unbridgeable divide, of opposites locked in an irreconcilable culture war, was always there in the Summer of Love.

Then, the following April, Martin Luther King was shot dead. An entire era seemed to have been gunned down with him: one in which liberals and conservatives, black progressives and white Evangelicals, had felt able – however inadequately – to feel joined by a shared sense of purpose. As news of King’s assassination flashed across America, cities began to burn: Chicago, Washington, Baltimore. Black militants, impatient even before King’s murder with his pacifism and talk of love, pushed for violent confrontation with the white establishment. Many openly derided Christianity as a slave religion. Other activists, following where King’s campaign against racism had led, demanded the righting of what they saw as no less grievous sins. If it were wrong for blacks to be discriminated against, then why not women, or homosexuals? But to ask this was not – as King had done – to prick the consciences of Evangelicals, and to remind them of values to which they already held. Instead, it was to attack the very fundamentals of their faith. That a woman’s place was the home and homosexuality an abomination were orthodoxies, so pastors thundered, that had the timeless sanction of the Bible itself. Increasingly, to Americans disoriented by the moral whirligig of the age, Evangelicals promised solid ground. A place of refuge, though, might just as well be a place under siege. To many Evangelicals, feminism and the gay rights movement were an assault on Christianity itself. Equally, to many feminists and gay activists, Christianity appeared synonymous with everything that they were struggling against: injustice, and bigotry, and persecution. God, they were told, hates fags.

But did he? Conservatives, when they charged their opponents with breaking biblical commandments, had the heft of two thousand years of Christian tradition behind them; but so too, when they pressed for gender equality or gay rights, did liberals. Their immediate model and inspiration was, after all, a Baptist preacher. ‘There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’¹⁰ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible. Ambivalences that came to roil Western society in the 1970s had always been perfectly manifest in the letters of Paul. Writing to the Corinthians, the apostle had pronounced that man was the head of woman; writing to the Galatians, he had exulted that there was no man or woman in Christ. Balancing his stern condemnation of same-sex relationships had been his rapturous praise of love. Raised a Pharisee, learned in the Law of Moses, he had come to proclaim the primacy of conscience. The knowledge of what constituted a just society was written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts. Love, and do as you will. It was – as the entire course of Christian history so vividly demonstrated – a formula for revolution.

‘The wind blows wherever it pleases.’¹¹ That the times they were a-changin’ was a message Christ himself had taught. Again and again, Christians had found themselves touched by God’s spirit; again and again, they had found themselves brought by it into the light. Now, though, the Spirit had taken on a new form. No longer Christian, it had become a vibe. Not to get down with it was to be stranded on the wrong side of history. The concept of progress, unyoked from the theology that had given it birth, had begun to leave Christianity trailing in its wake. The choice that faced churches – an agonisingly difficult one – was whether to sit in the dust, shaking their fists at it in impotent rage, or whether to run and scramble in a desperate attempt to catch it up. Should women be allowed to become priests? Should homosexuality be condemned as sodomy or praised as love? Should the age-old Christian project of trammelling sexual appetites be maintained or eased? None of these questions were easily answered. To those who took them seriously, they ensured endless and pained debate. To those who did not, they provided yet further evidence – if evidence were needed – that Christianity was on its way out. John Lennon had been right. ‘It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right.’¹²

Yet atheists faced challenges of their own. Christians were not alone in struggling to square the rival demands of tradition and progress. Lennon, after walking out on his song-writing partnership with McCartney, celebrated his liberation with a song that listed Jesus alongside the Beatles as idols in which he no longer believed. Then, in October 1971, he released a new single: ‘Imagine’. The song offered Lennon’s prescription for global peace. Imagine there’s no heaven, he sang, no hell below us. Yet the lyrics were religious through and through. Dreaming of a better world, a brotherhood of man, was a venerable tradition in Lennon’s neck of the woods. St George’s Hill, his home throughout the heyday of the Beatles, was where the Diggers had laboured three hundred years previously. Rather than emulate Winstanley, however, Lennon had holed up inside a gated community, complete with a Rolls-Royce and swimming pool. ‘One wonders what they do with all their dough.’¹³ So a pastor had mused back in 1966. The video of ‘Imagine’, in which Lennon was seen gliding around his recently purchased seventy-two-acre Berkshire estate, provided the answer. In its hypocrisy no less than in its dreams of a universal peace, Lennon’s atheism was recognisably bred of Christian marrow. A good preacher, however, was always able to take his flock with him. The spectacle of Lennon imagining a world without possessions while sitting in a huge mansion did nothing to put off his admirers. As Nietzsche spun furiously in his grave, ‘Imagine’ became the anthem of atheism. A decade later, when Lennon was shot dead by a crazed fan, he was mourned not just as one half of the greatest song-writing partnership of the twentieth century, but as a martyr.

Not everyone was convinced. ‘Now, since his death, he’s become Martin Luther Lennon.’¹⁴ Paul McCartney had known Lennon too well ever to mistake him for a saint. His joke, though, was also a tribute to King: a man who had flown into the light of the dark black night. ‘Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”’¹⁵ McCartney, for all his dismissal of ‘goody goody stuff’, was not oblivious to the tug of an appeal like this. In 1985, asked to help relieve a devastating famine in Ethiopia by taking part in the world’s largest-ever concert, he readily agreed. Live Aid, staged simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, was broadcast to billions. Musicians who had spent their careers variously bedding groupies and snorting coke off trays balanced on the heads of dwarves played sets in aid of the starving. As night fell over London, and the concert in Wembley stadium reached its climax, lights picked out McCartney at a piano. The number he sang, ‘Let It Be’, had been the last single to be released by the Beatles while they were still together. ‘When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me.’ Who was Mary? Perhaps, as McCartney himself claimed, his mother; but perhaps, as Lennon had darkly suspected, and many Catholics had come to believe, the Virgin. Whatever the truth, no one that night could hear him. His microphone had cut out.

It was a performance perfectly appropriate to the paradoxes of the age.

Long Walk to Freedom

Seven months before Live Aid, its organisers had recruited many of the biggest acts in Britain and Ireland to a super-group: Band Aid. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, a one-off charity record, succeeded in raising so much money for famine relief that it would end up the best-selling single in the history of the UK charts.* For all the peroxide, all the cross-dressing, all the bags of cocaine smuggled into the recording studio, the project was one born of the Christian past. Reporting on the sheer scale of the suffering in Ethiopia, a BBC correspondent had described the scenes he was witnessing as ‘biblical’; stirred into action, the organisers of Band Aid had embarked on a course of action that reached for its ultimate inspiration to the examples of Paul and Basil. That charity should be offered to the needy, and that a stranger in a foreign land was no less a brother or sister than was a next-door neighbour, were principles that had always been fundamental to the Christian message. Concern for the victims of distant disasters – famines, earthquakes, floods – was disproportionately strong in what had once been Christendom. The overwhelming concentration of international aid agencies there was no coincidence. Band Aid were hardly the first to ask whether Africans knew that it was Christmas time. In the nineteenth century, the same anxiety had weighed heavily on Evangelicals. Missionaries had duly hacked their way through uncharted jungles, campaigned against the slave trade, and laboured with all their might to bring the Dark Continent into the light of Christ. ‘A diffusive philanthropy is Christianity itself. It requires perpetual propagation to attest its genuineness.’¹⁶ Such was the mission statement of the era’s most famous explorer, David Livingstone. Band Aid – in their ambition to do good, if not in their use of hair dye – were recognisably his heirs.

This was not, though, how their single was marketed. Anything that smacked of white people telling Africans what to do had become, by the 1980s, an embarrassment. Admiration even for a missionary such as Livingstone, whose crusade against the Arab slave trade had been unstintingly heroic, had come to pall. His efforts to map the continent – far from serving the interests of Africans, as he had trusted they would – had instead only opened up its interior to conquest and exploitation. A decade after his death from malaria in 1873, British adventurers had begun to expand deep into the heart of Africa. Other European powers had embarked on a similar scramble. France had annexed much of north Africa, Belgium the Congo, Germany Namibia. By the outbreak of the First World War, almost the entire continent was under foreign rule. Only the Ethiopians had succeeded in maintaining their independence. Missionaries, struggling to continue with their great labour of conversion, had found themselves stymied by the brute nature of European power. How were Africans to believe talk of a god who cared for the oppressed and the poor when the whites, the very people who worshipped him, had seized their lands, and plundered them for diamonds, and ivory, and rubber? A colonial hierarchy in which blacks were deemed inferior had seemed a peculiar and bitter mockery of the missionaries’ insistence that Christ had died for all of humanity. By the 1950s, when the tide of imperialism in Africa had begun to ebb as fast as it had originally flowed, it might have seemed that Christianity was doomed to retreat as well, with churches crumbling before the hunger of termites, and Bibles melting into mildewed pulp. But that – in the event – was not what had happened at all.

Did Africans, as Band Aid stormed its way to the top of the UK charts, know that it was Christmas? Not all of them, perhaps. Many were pagan; many more were Muslim. In 1984, though, some 250 million of them were Christian. In 1900, the total had been a bare ten million. The rate of growth, far from going into decline with the end of colonial rule, had exploded. Nothing quite like it had been seen since the expansion of Christendom in the early Middle Ages. As then, so now, the worship of Christ had spectacularly slipped the bonds of a vanished imperial order. Even in the early years of the twentieth century, when the European empires had seemed invincible, Africans had found in the Bible the promise of redemption from foreign rule. Just as Irish hermits and Anglo-Saxon missionaries had once claimed an authority that, deriving as it did from heaven, instilled in them the courage to upbraid kings, so in Africa, native preachers had repeatedly confronted colonial officials. There were some who had led armed uprisings, and been put to death; some, obedient to the commands of angels, who had only had to enter a village for idols to go up in flames; some who had cured the sick, and raised the dead, and ended up clapped in irons for it by twitchy chiefs of police. To many white missionaries, these prophets, with their wild talk of the Spirit and of the powers of darkness, had appeared the very essence of savagery: hysterics who risked polluting the pure waters of Christianity with their primitive superstitions. This, though, had been the nervousness of Europeans who could not imagine their faith arrayed in any garb other than their own. African Christians, far from compromising with the paganism of their ancestors, tended to dread it far more than any foreign missionary might do: for they could recognise in it, just as Boniface had once done, the worship of demons. Decades after the end of colonial rule, there were clergymen across Africa who continued to despair of the condescension shown them by Europe. ‘We thank her for what she has done to us, and we appreciate her worries and anxieties about us.’ So Emmanuel Milingo, the Catholic archbishop of Lusaka, had declared in 1977. ‘But we believe that she, as a grandmother to us, should now worry much more about her problems of old age, than about us.’¹⁷

Milingo’s belief in the reality of evil spirits, and his conviction that – with God’s blessing – they might be cast out from those they afflicted, had seen him, throughout the 1970s, perform spectacular feats of exorcism across Zambia. Summoned to Rome in 1982 by a suspicious Vatican, he had promptly established a no less successful healing ministry in Italy. That church leaders in Europe seemed to have stopped believing in the reality of the demonic was their problem, not his. To rid the sick of demons was no sin, after all. Rather than apologise for performing what Christ himself had repeatedly performed, Milingo preferred instead to charge European bishops with a faith grown too desiccated to accept the reality of the miracles and terrors revealed in the Bible. To be African was no impediment to fathoming the Christian message. Rather, it was a positive advantage. ‘If God made a mistake by creating me an African, it is not yet evident.’¹⁸ Implicit in such defiance was a conviction that Africa, far from owing the revelation of Christ’s light to white missionaries, had always been touched by its fire. Any notion that Ethiopians might never have heard of Christmas was worse than mistaken – it was grotesque. The Psalms themselves had foretold that Ethiopia would submit to God – and so it had proved.¹⁹ Christianity had been the country’s state religion since the age of Constantine. For 1700 years it had endured as a Christian realm. What European kingdom could claim as much?

Of course, then, Ethiopians knew what Christmas was. The example of their Christianity had long been an inspiration across the whole of Africa. Nowhere, indeed, had it been more fruitfully treasured than at the far end of the continent: in South Africa. In 1892, a black clergyman resentful of the paternalism with which white Christians were treating him and his fellow Africans had founded what he named Ibandla laseTiyopiya: the Ethiopian Church. Ninety years on, and the sense of South Africa as a land aflame with holiness was widespread. It was not just to Ethiopia that churches now compared themselves. New Jerusalems were to be found dotted across the country. A second Mount Moria stood in the northern reaches of the Transvaal. The breath of the Spirit was felt from Cape Town to Zululand. Even in the churches brought to South Africa by Europeans, black Christians could rejoice in the distinctive relationship that Africans were believed always to have enjoyed with the divine. ‘It has helped to give the lie to the supercilious but tacit assumption that religion and history in Africa date from the advent in that continent of the white man.’²⁰

Yet Desmond Tutu, even as he made this point, never doubted that he was part of a global communion. As an Anglican bishop, he belonged to a Church that traced its origins back to the reign of a sixteenth-century English king. A natural showman, he delighted in blending the traditions of Canterbury with those of Soweto. In 1986, when he became the first black man to be elected to the archbishopric of Cape Town, he was able to offer himself as a living symbol of how, in Christ Jesus, there was neither black nor white. Yet this was not simply to make a theological statement. Questions about the purposes of God had become, in South Africa, tumultuously, explosively political. Blacks were not alone in seeing the country as a new Israel. So too did many whites. The Dutch Calvinists who in the seventeenth century had settled the Cape – Afrikaners, as they would come to be known – had viewed themselves not as colonists, but as a chosen people brought into a promised land. Just as the Israelites had wrested Canaan from the native heathen, so had the Afrikaners defied the fury of ‘the stark naked black hordes’²¹ to carve out a homeland of their own. Absorption into the British Empire had done nothing to diminish their sense of themselves as a people bound by a covenant with God. In 1948, when a government dominated by Afrikaner conservatives had come to power, it had set to solidifying this conviction into an entire political programme. A policy of apartheid – ‘separateness’ – had been formalised. Racial segregation had become the animating principle of the entire state. Whether it was buying a house or falling in love, getting an education or choosing which bench to sit on in a park, there was almost no aspect of life in South Africa that the government had not aimed to regulate. White rule was enshrined as the expression of God’s purpose. Afrikaner churchmen, incorrectly attributing to Calvin a doctrine that certain peoples were more likely to be saved than others, had enabled supporters of apartheid to view it as Christian through and through. To its supporters, it was an expression not of racism, but of love: a commitment to providing the different races of South Africa with the ‘separate development’ that was needed for them all to come to God. It was not prisons that ultimately served to maintain apartheid, nor guns, nor helicopters, nor police dogs. Apartheid was maintained by theology.

‘Totally un-Christian, evil and a heresy.’²² This condemnation of apartheid, proposed by Tutu, and passed by the Anglican Church, could easily be dismissed by the government’s supporters as hand-wringing waffle. Yet it was in truth something altogether more ominous: a trumpet-blast, of the kind that had brought down the walls of Jericho. If it was as a theological construct that apartheid had been built, then it was as a theological construct that it would need to be dismantled. An unjust regime stood condemned before the throne of God. ‘It is not a legitimate sovereignty, but a usurpation.’²³ So Calvin himself had written. When clergymen both black and white, quoting the theologian most admired by Afrikaners, were able to demonstrate in scrupulous and forensic detail that no possible backing for racial segregation was to be found in his writings, but only the opposite, condemnation stern and uncompromising, a hammer-blow was dealt to the apartheid regime as decisive as anything delivered by armed insurgents.

This was a lesson well understood by Nelson Mandela, most celebrated and formidable of all South Africa’s revolutionaries, and a man who, ever since his conviction in 1964 on charges of sabotage, had been kept firmly under lock and key. In prison, he had slept on damp concrete and been put to hard labour, and had his eyesight permanently damaged by the glare of the quarry in which he had been made to toil; but he had come to recognise, during those long decades of incarceration, that forgiveness might be the most constructive, the most effective, the most devastating tactic of all. Mandela, a Methodist of discreet but committed faith, had time enough in his cell to read the Bible, and to ponder the teachings of Christ. ‘You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.’²⁴ By 1989, with Afrikaner confidence in apartheid as an expression of God’s plan crumbling, and a new president, F. W. de Klerk, desperate to make sense of the divine purpose, Mandela was ready to act on his long years of reflection. Freed at last on 11 February 1990, he returned into the world resolved to be free as well of all his bitterness and hatred. Meeting with those who had kept him a prisoner for twenty-seven years, and oppressed his people for many years longer, he did so with a belief in the redemptive power of forgiveness.

The ending of apartheid and the election in 1994 of Mandela as South Africa’s first black president was one of the great dramas of Christian history: a drama woven through with deliberate echoes of the gospels. Without protagonists long familiar with the script they had been given to speak, it could not possibly have succeeded. ‘When confession is made, then those of us who have been wronged must say “We forgive you.”’²⁵ Had de Klerk not known that Tutu was bound to say this, then perhaps he would never have dared trust his people’s fate to the readiness of black South Africans to pardon them their sins. The same faith that had inspired Afrikaners to imagine themselves a chosen people was also, in the long run, what had doomed their supremacy. The pattern was a familiar one. Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a universal import. When, a month before his inauguration as president, Mandela travelled to the Transvaal, there to celebrate Easter in the holy city of Moria, it was as a Saviour who had died for the whole world that he saluted Christ. ‘Easter is a festival of human solidarity, because it celebrates the fulfilment of the Good News! The Good News borne by our risen Messiah who chose not one race, who chose not one country, who chose not one language, who chose not one tribe, who chose all of humankind!’²⁶

Ironically, however, even as Mandela was hailing Easter as a festival for all the world, elites in the old strongholds of Christendom were growing ever more nervous of using such language. This was not because they had ceased to believe in the universality of their values. Quite the opposite. The collapse of apartheid had been merely the aftershock of a far more convulsive earthquake. In 1989, even as de Klerk was resolving to set Mandela free, the Soviet empire had imploded. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary: all had cast off the chains of foreign rule. East Germany, a rump hived off by the Soviets in the wake of the Second World War, had been absorbed into a reunified – and thoroughly capitalist – Germany. The Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist. Communism, weighed in the scales of history, had been found wanting. To de Klerk, pious Calvinist that he was, all this had manifestly appeared the writing of God’s finger on the affairs of the world. This was not, however, how it tended to be seen by policy-makers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx had turned out instead to be closer to a hell only emphasised the degree to which the true fulfilment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism, it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Hindu, or Confucian, or Muslim. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road.

The end of history had arrived.

The Management of Savagery

‘Why do they hate us?’

The president of the United States, in his address to a joint session of Congress, knew that he was speaking for Americans across the country when he asked this question. Nine days earlier, on 11 September, an Islamic group named al-Qaeda had launched a series of devastating attacks against targets in New York and Washington. Planes had been hijacked and then crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thousands had died. George W. Bush, answering his own question, had no doubt as to the motives of the terrorists. They hated America’s freedoms. Her freedom of religion, her freedom of speech. Yet these were not exclusively American. Rather, they were universal rights. They were as much the patrimony of Muslims as of Christians, of Afghans as of Americans. This was why the hatred felt for Bush and his country across much of the Islamic world was based on misunderstanding. ‘Like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.’²⁷ If American values were universal, shared by humans across the planet, regardless of creed or culture, then it stood to reason that Muslims shared them too. Bush, sitting in judgement on the terrorists who had attacked his country, condemned them not just for hijacking planes, but for hijacking Islam itself. ‘We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not.’²⁸ It was in this spirit that the President, even as he ordered the American war machine to inflict a terrible vengeance on al-Qaeda, aimed to bring to the Muslim world freedoms that he believed in all devoutness to be no less Islamic than they were Western. First in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, murderous tyrannies were overthrown. Arriving in Baghdad in April 2003, US forces pulled down statues of the deposed dictator. As they waited to be given sweets and flowers by a grateful people, they waited as well to deliver to Iraq the dues of freedom that Bush, a year earlier, had described as applying fully to the entire Islamic world. ‘When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations.’²⁹

Except that sweets and flowers were notable by their absence on the streets of Iraq. Instead, the Americans were greeted with mortar attacks, and car bombs, and improvised explosive devices. The country began to dissolve into anarchy. In Europe, where opposition to the invasion of Iraq had been loud and vocal, the insurgency was viewed with often ill-disguised satisfaction. Even before 9/11, there were many who had felt that ‘the United States had it coming’.³⁰ By 2003, with US troops occupying two Muslim countries, the accusation that Afghanistan and Iraq were the victims of naked imperialism was becoming ever more insistent. What was all the President’s fine talk of freedom if not a smokescreen? As to what it might be hiding, the possibilities were multiple: oil, geopolitics, the interests of Israel. Yet Bush, although a hard-boiled businessman, was not just about the bottom line. He had never thought to hide his truest inspiration. Asked while still a candidate for the presidency to name his favourite thinker, he had answered unhesitatingly: ‘Christ, because he changed my heart.’³¹ Here, unmistakably, was an Evangelical. Bush, in his assumption that the concept of human rights was a universal one, was perfectly sincere. Just as the Evangelicals who fought to abolish the slave trade had done, he took for granted that his own values – confirmed to him in his heart by the Spirit – were values fit for all the world. He no more intended to bring Iraq to Christianity than British Foreign Secretaries, back in the heyday of the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery, had aimed to convert the Ottoman Empire. His ambition instead was to awaken Muslims to the values within their own religion that would enable them to see everything they had in common with America. ‘Islam, as practised by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion, a religion that respects others.’³² Bush, asked to describe his own faith, might well have couched it in similar terms. What bigger compliment, then, could he possibly have paid to Muslims?

But Iraqis did not have their hearts opened to the similarity of Islam to American values. Their country continued to burn. To Bush’s critics, his talk of a war against evil appeared grotesquely misapplied. If anyone had done evil, then it was surely the leader of the world’s greatest military power, a man who had used all the stupefying resources at his command to visit death and mayhem on the powerless. In 2004 alone, US forces in Iraq variously bombed a wedding party, flattened an entire city, and were photographed torturing prisoners. To many, it seemed that violence had always been the essence of the West. ‘Europe’s well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians.’³³ So had written Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from the French Caribbean, who in 1954 had joined the Algerian revolution against France, and devoted his life to rousing the colonised against their colonisers. To insurgents impatient with talk of peace and reconciliation, Fanon’s insistence that true redemption from their bondage could only be achieved through armed insurrection had provided a bracing antidote to the pacifism of a Martin Luther King. It was not just among the colonised, however, that his message had cut through. Fanon had come to seem a prophet to many in the West who viewed themselves as the vanguard of the progressive. ‘It is naked violence, and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.’³⁴ Fanon’s analysis of imperialism was, to Bush’s more radical critics, as clear-sighted as it was prescient. The occupation of Iraq was yet another blood-stained chapter in the history of the West’s criminality. To target the forces of occupation with car-bombs or kidnappings was to fight for freedom. Without armed resistance, how were the shackles of imperialism ever to be cast off, and the wretched of the earth set free? To recognise this was to recognise – as the Stop the War Coalition, a British campaign group, put it in the autumn of 2004 – ‘the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends’.³⁵

Putting this rhetoric in its shadow, however, was a familiar irony. On what basis was it assumed that empires were evil? In Iraq, of all countries, evidence for the timelessness of imperialism lay everywhere. Persians, Romans, Arabs, Turks: all had taken for granted their entitlement to rule. The readiness of anti-war activists to condemn the West for its colonialist adventuring derived from the heritage not of the colonised countries, but of the colonisers. This was evident enough in the career of Fanon himself. Although he had been born and bred on Martinique, his education was impeccably French. His vision of terror as a means of purifying the world, of banishing oppression, of raising up the poor and casting down the rich, would have been perfectly familiar to Robespierre. Yet Fanon, a man of rare intellectual honesty, had recognised as well the ultimate source of this revolutionary tradition. Although contemptuous of religion as only a man who had spent his schooldays in a library emblazoned with the name of Voltaire could be, he had been raised a Catholic. He had read the Bible. Explaining what was meant by ‘decolonisation’, he had turned to the words of Jesus. ‘Its definition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: “The last shall be first.”’³⁶

To imagine, then, that the insurgency in Iraq was a campaign of decolonisation such as Fanon would have understood it was to view the Muslim world through spectacles barely less Christian than those worn by Bush himself. Insurgents fighting the Americans tended not to object to empires per se – only to empires that were not legitimately Islamic. Muslims, like Christians, had their dreams of apocalypse; but these, amid the killing fields of Iraq, tended to foster fantasies of global conquest rather than of social revolution. As the world had once been, so it would be again. The fighting against the Americans was a mirror held up to the fighting, back in the early centuries of Islam, against the Romans and the crusaders – and fore-shadowed what was yet to come. ‘The spark has been been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.’³⁷ This vaunting prophecy, delivered by an insurgent named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi two weeks before Stop the War gave him and his fellow paramilitaries their backing, articulated a venerable yearning: for the whole world to be brought to submit to Islam. Dabiq was a small town in Syria, where – according to a saying attributed to Muhammad – the armies of Christianity were destined to be annihilated in a final, climactic defeat. Islam’s empire would then span the world. The end days would arrive; God’s plans would be fulfilled at last.

Al-Zarqawi claimed that in a dream he had seen a sword descend to him from the heavens. The reality was more sordid. A thug and a rapist, he had a taste for atrocities so gruesome that even al-Qaeda would eventually denounce him. There was method, though, to his bombings and beheadings. Although barely literate, he had received a formidable education from one of the most influential of all Muslim radicals. In 1994, arrested for planning terrorist offences in Jordan, al-Zarqawi had stood trial alongside a Palestinian scholar named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. For five years, while serving his prison term, he had been tutored by al-Maqdisi in the crisis that was facing Islam. Muslims, despite God’s gift to them of a perfect and eternal law, had been seduced into obeying laws authored by men. They had become, al-Maqdisi warned, like Christians: infidels who took legislators as their lords ‘instead of God’.³⁸ Governments across the Muslim world had adopted constitutions that directly contradicted the Sunna. Worse, they had signed up to international bodies that, despite their claims to neutrality, served to foist on Muslims alien law codes. Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God. Muslim countries, by joining the United Nations, had signed up to a host of commitments that derived, not from the Qur’an or the Sunna, but from law codes devised in Christian countries: that there should be equality between men and women; equality between Muslims and non-Muslims; a ban on slavery; a ban on offensive warfare. Such doctrines, al-Maqdisi sternly ruled, had no place in Islam. To accept them was to become an apostate. Al-Zarqawi, released from prison in 1999, did not forget al-Maqdisi’s warnings. In 2003, launching his campaign in Iraq, he went for a soft and telling target. On 19 August, a car bomb blew up the United Nations headquarters in the country. The UN’s special representative was crushed to death in his office. Twenty-two others were also killed. Over a hundred were left maimed and wounded. Shortly afterwards, the United Nations withdrew from Iraq.

‘Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith.’³⁹ President Bush’s reassurance, offered before the invasion of Iraq, was not one that al-Zarqawi was remotely prepared to accept. What most people in the West meant by Islam and what scholars like al-Maqdisi meant by it were not at all the same thing. What to Bush appeared the markers of its compatibility with Western values appeared to al-Maqdisi a fast-metastasising cancer. For a century and a half, ever since the first Muslim rulers had been persuaded to abolish slavery, Islam had been on an ever more Protestant course. That the spirit trumped the letter of the law had come to be widely accepted by Muslims across the globe. It was what had enabled reformers to argue that any number of practices deeply embedded in Islamic jurisprudence, but offensive to the United Nations, might in fact not be Islamic at all. To al-Maqdisi, the spectacle of Muslim governments legislating to uphold equality between men and women, or between Islam and other religions, was a monstrous blasphemy. The whole future of the world was at stake. God’s final revelation, the last chance that humanity had of redeeming itself from damnation, was directly threatened. The only recourse was to return to scripture: to rid Islam of all the nettles and brambles that, over the centuries, had come to choke the pure revelation that the first Muslims – the ‘Ancestors’, or Salaf – had known. What it needed was a reformatio.

Salafists, then, even as they sought to cleanse Islam of foreign influences, could not help but bear witness to them. ‘Modern Islam,’ as the scholar Kecia Ali has put it, ‘is a profoundly Protestant tradition.’⁴⁰ For a millennium, Muslims had taken for granted that the teachings of their deen were determined by the scholarly consensus on the meaning of the Qur’an and the Sunna. As a result, over the course of the centuries, it had accrued an immense corpus of commentary and interpretation. Salafists, in their ambition to restore a pristine form of Islam, were resolved to pull this cladding down. Al-Zarqawi, armed with the bombs and the knives that led him to be known by Iraqis as the Sheikh of the Slaughterers, was certainly exceptional for the savagery with which he set to achieving this. Nevertheless, widely reviled though he was across the Muslim world, there were some who admired his example. His incineration by a US jet strike in 2006 did not serve to kill the hydra. Below the surface of an Iraq that, by 2011, appeared largely pacified, it lurked, and coiled, and bided its time.

Opportunity came that same year, as the hold of the dictatorship that had long ruled Syria began to slip, and the country to implode. Al-Zarqawi’s acolytes seized their chance. By 2014, they had come to preside over an empire that spanned much of Syria and large swathes of northern Iraq. With a bloody punctiliousness, they sought to transform it into a state from which every trace of foreign influence, every hint of alien legislation, had been scoured: an Islamic State. All that counted was the example of the Salaf. When al-Zarqawi’s disciples smashed the statues of pagan gods, they were following the example of Muhammad; when they proclaimed themselves the shock-troops of a would-be global empire, they were following the example of the warriors who had humbled Heraclius; when they beheaded enemy combatants, and reintroduced the jizya, and took the women of defeated opponents as slaves, they were doing nothing that the first Muslims had not gloried in. The only road to an uncontaminated future was the road that led back to an unspoilt past. Nothing of the Evangelicals, who had erupted into the Muslim world with their gunboats and their talk of crimes against humanity, was to remain. Only scripture was to count. Yet the very literalness with which the Islamic State sought to resuscitate the vanished glories of the Arab empire was precisely what rendered it so inauthentic. Of the beauties, of the subtleties, of the sophistication that had always been the hallmarks of Islamic civilisation there was not a trace. The god they worshipped was not the god of Muslim philosophers and poets, all-merciful and all-compassionate, but a butcher. The licence they drew upon for their savagery derived not from the incomparable inheritance of Islamic scholarship, but from a bastardised tradition of fundamentalism that was, in its essentials, Protestant. Islamic the Islamic State may have been; but it also stood in a line of descent from Anabaptist Münster. It was, perhaps, the most gruesome irony in the whole history of Protestantism.

Like Nietzsche, the Islamic State saw in the pieties of Western civilisation – its concern for the suffering, its prating about human rights – a source of terrible and sickly power. Like Sade, they understood that the surest blow they could strike against it was a display of exultant and unapologetic cruelty. The cross had to be redeemed from Christianity. In the Qur’an it served as it had served under the Caesars: as an emblem of righteously sanctioned punishment. ‘The penalty for those who wage war against God and His messenger, and who strive in fomenting corruption on the earth, is that they be killed or crucified . . . ‘ ⁴¹ Wherever the Islamic State brought their justice, up would go rough-hewn crosses. Criminals and pagans would be lashed to them. Birds would gather on the cross-beams. Corpses would rot in the sun. Some prisoners, though, endured an even more public punishment. On 19 August 2014, a video appeared on the internet. It showed an American journalist, James Foley, kneeling in front of a masked man dressed all in black, wielding a knife. The man, speaking with an English accent, arraigned America for its crimes, and then – off-camera – hacked off Foley’s head. More killings, similarly uploaded to the internet, followed over the succeeding weeks. The executioner – revealed the following year to have been a Londoner named Mohammed Emwazi – was known to the unfortunates in his custody as ‘John’. His three fellow guards – all of them, like Emwazi, masked and speaking with English accents – were nicknamed ‘Paul’, ‘George’ and ‘Ringo’. Collectively, they were, of course, ‘the Beatles’.

Within days of Foley’s murder, the as yet anonymous Emwazi was featuring in headlines around the world as ‘Jihadi John’. It was a telling soubriquet. In reports of Foley’s death, little was made of the Catholicism in which he had been raised, and of how, during a previous spell as a hostage, his prayers had enabled him to feel that he was communicating with his mother ‘through some cosmic reach of the universe’.⁴² Mother Mary comes to me. To the outside world, the blasphemy of Foley’s fate was not against the Lord whom, Christians believed, had been humiliatingly and publicly put to death, but rather against something more vague: a conviction that love was all anybody needed, and that peace should be given a chance. ‘It’s bullshit. What they are doing out there is against everything the Beatles stood for.’⁴³ So protested an indignant Ringo Starr. His namesake agreed. Interviewed after his capture, ‘Ringo’ was asked for his response to being nicknamed after a Beatle. ‘I don’t listen to music,’ he replied in a dull monotone, ‘so I’d rather not speak about a rock band.’ But then, after a long silence, he abruptly arched his eyebrows, and darted a quick, sparrow-like glance at the microphone. ‘John Lennon won’t like it much.’⁴⁴

But that, of course, had been precisely the point.