Where politics and dogma meet

Remember when we thought religion was done for? That the philosophical and scientific revolutions of the Enlightenment couldn't help but replace the folly of faith with the fact of freedom? Mindless dogma was on the way out, rationality was the way forward. The program was progress, and you could no more not get with it than you could stop breathing. If only. As Michael Burleigh's previous book, "Earthly Powers" -- a history of Europe from the French Revolution to the First World War -- showed, the Age of Reason was as much about idolatry as it was ideology. In his latest work, "Sacred Causes," he brings the story up to date, demonstrating that the past century has been no less steeped in the fantastical.

"Sacred Causes" begins in Germany after its defeat in World War I. Struck dumb by self-pity, the country is ready to be lectured -- and there is no shortage of charlatans and ranters ready to slice the baloney good and thick. Chief among them is Adolf Hitler, a soi-disant superman promising everyone that they, too, can don cape and tights. Riding shotgun was Joseph Goebbels, a man so bowled over by his boss' orations that he claimed to see "a white cloud [take] on the form of a swastika" during them. Afterward, "there was a flickering light in the sky, which could not be a star. -- A sign of destiny." Still, inflamed with passion though he might have been, Goebbels was coolheaded enough to know that not everyone would be won over by Hitler's invective. The boss needed an aura -- and there was no better place to steal one from than the church. So were born the rituals of Nazism -- the cathedral of Nuremberg, the processions of jackbooted storm troopers -- and its sacred text: "Mein Kampf."

So far, so liturgical. Burleigh is hardly the first person to notice Hitler's messianic thrust. He is on more contentious ground when he defends the Catholic Church's dealings with the Führer. For the past six decades or so, Pope Pius XII has been hauled over the coals for his lenient relations with the Nazis. Burleigh, though, has no time at all for what he sees as this calumny. While acknowledging that the Catholic Church did sign a concordat with the Nazis in the 1930s, he points out that the then-Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII) denounced Hitler's "vulgar and brutal campaign" against both Jews and Catholics. And anyway, he states, had the church not signed that agreement, it would simply have been unable to function. That it did go on functioning meant it could help out in the war effort, lending covert support to Allied action against Hitler's regime. And in 1943, after Mussolini's fall, Jewish refugees were welcomed into Italy with open arms by the pope, who even went so far as to turn his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo over to them. Amen to that, though it is hard to ignore the feeling that for all Burleigh's plaudits, the pope's war effort was as much pragmatic as committed. Nor does it help that Burleigh seems blind to Christianity's own long tradition of anti-Semitism.

But Burleigh is too busy coming down hard on secular humanists, calling them a "liberal elite" and pointing out that their litany of buzzwords -- diversity, human rights, tolerance -- are less the product of enlightenment than of a "deeper Christian culture based on ideas and structures that are so deeply entrenched that most of us are hardly aware of them." Well, maybe. But just because some of your beliefs were originally expressions of a Christian culture, it doesn't follow that you have to sign up to that culture's every belief. Pace Chesterton, at least one of Christianity's beliefs is open only to those capable of believing anything. Nor do you have to know the history of an argument in order to know on which side of it you stand. You and I aren't against anti-Semitism because we've read up on the history of anti-Semitism. We're against anti-Semitism because we're pro-human. Not many people are anti-human, of course, but the bulk of those who are tend also to be pro-God. Just ask Osama bin Laden.

No one deplores the decadent wasteland of our spirituality-free world more than I, but that doesn't mean I have any idea what I would rather have in its place. Burleigh does -- an insight that comforts him no end while invalidating all the good work he has done in this book and its predecessor. Which isn't to say that "Sacred Causes" is less than required reading. Any historian who can refer to Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness as having "got his legal training while packing bacon in James Doherty's butchers shop," who can call Bob Geldof a "mouthy sloven" and who deplores a culture in which " 'wisdom' [is] represented by the lyrics of John Lennon" is worth reading. And if not everything he says is true, well, that only makes him resemble all the more the Christianity on which he places so much hope.