Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: Krise der Kirche (Spanien); Statistik

Kurzinhalt: The Jesuits lost a third of their members in a decade; the majority of Catholic clergy espoused political positions that were congruent with those of the semi-Marxist intelligentsia

Textausschnitt: 367a The Church itself was in crisis. Religious vocations plummeted. In 1963 some 167 priests had opted for the secular life; by 1965 that had reached 1,189, and then an all-time high of 3,700 four years later. The Jesuits lost a third of their members in a decade. In the Basque country and Catalonia, many priests made common cause with local autonomists, inexcusably including the Marxist terrorist organisation ETA, while others exchanged their spiritual vocation for various forms of social radicalism, making fiery sermons and taking part in protests that often ended in violence. According to a survey conducted in 1977, apart from an intransigent minority, the majority of Catholic clergy espoused political positions that were congruent with those of the semi-Marxist intelligentsia. The Church's espousal of social radicalism meant such novelties as a 'Concordat jail' at Zamora, to hold priests who had stepped too far out of line, and the growth of extreme right-wing anticlericalism directed against the 'Communist pope' and the 'Red clergy'. By the late 1960s financial scandals involving Opus Dei enabled the diehard Falangists to revenge themselves on the organisation, a further sign of growing alienation between the Church and the regime.1 (Fs)

Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: Statistik; Kirche - Niedergang ab 1960

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 345b If Larkin's poem seems prescient with hindsight, at the time Britain's Protestant Churches were basking in a post-war religious revival, as reflected in peak memberships in the years 1955-9.1 In 1954 they received a major boost with the US Evangelist reverend Dr Billy Graham's 'sweep for God through Britain'. In three months, some 1,300,000 people flocked to the greyhound track at Harringay, as part of a crusade that culminated with nearly two hundred thousand people packed into Wembley and White City stadiums. Some 1,200,000 people, or nearly three-quarters of the city's population, also attended Graham's rallies in Glasgow. In the following year, the Jehovah's Witnesses attracted forty-two thousand people to rugby's Mecca at Twickenham.2 According to the leading British Church historian Hugh McLeod, this revival can be generalised across the West:
In most parts of the Western world these were years when organised Christianity had a high profile, whether because of the size of congregations, the numbers of new churches being built, the huge participation in evangelistic rallies, Christian influence in the fields of sexual morality, family life and gender-roles, the role of the churches in education and welfare, or the political strength of Christian Democratic parties, then at the height of their power.3 (Fs)

346a This was about to change.

This revival proved evanescent in England as well as elsewhere. After a long period of constancy between 1890 and 1960, all the major indices of formal involvement with the Churches went into a sharp decline in the 1960s. Ordinations to the clergy fell by a quarter, Anglican confirmations by a third; baptisms fell below 50 per cent of live births, and less than 40 per cent of marriages were celebrated in church. Attendances at Sunday Schools, which had grown in the 1950s, plummeted a decade later. In 1900 over 50 per cent of children had attended these schools; by 2000 this was true of only 4 per cent of them, which indicates that one of the major means for transmitting the Christian faith had virtually been extinguished, although in the meantime others have developed and proved highly popular, such as the 'Alpha' courses.4 (Fs) (notabene)

346b The 1960s were the crucial turning point. It is a decade that still uniquely polarises opinion, especially among the middle aged and elderly, who are divided for and against. This is either because posterity lives with that decade's real (and imagined) consequences, or, on the contrary, because those nostalgic for those times regard them as a golden age of energy, exuberance and irreverence before the present 'age of anxiety'. Since novelty has its limits, many of today's teenagers have revisited forms of expression that seem remarkably like those of the 1960s-notably four young people with three guitars and a set of drums. (Fs)

Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: 1960; neues Lebensgefühl; Studenten

Kurzinhalt: revolution ultimately revolved around liberated sexual mores

Textausschnitt: 347c At the time, many people felt that they were experiencing a revolution of attitudes and values, and that revolution ultimately revolved around liberated sexual mores, the development whose effects have been most enduring, because of its long-term impact on women. In 'Annus Mirabilis' Larkin identified the major enthusiasms, although it is relevant that his poem was the work of a provincial librarian who had been in a sexually liberated relationship for the previous fifteen years and was at that time acquiring a supplementary long-term mistress:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

[...]


349b In various European centres, juvenile revolutionary sectarians turned forests into a flurry of leaflets, while throwing up a few toy barricades and behaving boorishly to eminent professors, viscerally reminding some of the latter of the antics of Nazi students in the 1930s. Other professors tried to curry favour with the insurgent young or in the case of some gurus incited them; junior-ranking academics often behaved with the customary amoralism of the desperate. Across Europe and the US a series of inconsequential confrontations took place, whether in protest against university overcrowding or against the tons of bombs raining down in south-east Asia. (Fs)

349c The immediate effects of these gestures, memory of which still excites tenured radicals, were as nothing compared with the subsequent march of these formerly militant students through major institutions, notably the universities themselves, which thenceforth were dominated by people with little or no experience of what is popularly (and properly) called 'the real world'. Unlike their predecessors, future generations of academics had no experience of code-breaking, being parachuted into France or Greece, or commanding a tank squadron on the Normandy beaches. Instead they inhabited a peculiarly trans-temporal space where the quest for vicarious rejuvenation often meant remaining juvenile into one's retirement, sometimes manifested through vampiric interest in female students.8 (Fs)

[...]

350b By identifying themselves as the future, whose deleterious long-term potential consequences they rarely thought through, the 'innovators' and self-styled 'revolutionaries' of the 1960s had an easy time of it with culturally conservative opponents, who readily lent themselves to caricature and satire that was rarely applied to the revolutionaries themselves. What plausible defence could one mount for the prosecution barrister Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who during the 1960 trial of Penguin Books over the alleged obscenity of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, pompously invited the jury to ponder whether it was 'a book that you would have lying around in your house ... a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?'1 (Fs)

Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: 1960; Weitergabe des Glaubens; Wandel in der Liturgie

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 354a The most significant changes were among the screaming young girls to whom film-makers obligatorily cut away in their star-focused films. Changes that were infinitely subtle can only sound rather mechanical. Because of the progressive feminisation of piety in the preceding hundred years, mothers and grandmothers were primarily responsible for instilling religious values in their children. Now the cycle was broken, in the sense that, as a contemporary investigation has shown, religious parents only have a fifty-fifty chance of replicating their beliefs among their children, thereby giving those beliefs a 'half-life', whereas non-believing parents are successful in transmitting their own non-belief. This process did not arise overnight.1 During the 1960s a distinctive youth culture fuelled by recent relative affluence displaced older ideals of domesticity, one consequence being that traditional religion lost the main site for its transmission through the generations, based as that was on the binary stereotypes of pious and respectable women corralling more wayward men into the traditional Christian home and family. According to the historian Calum Brown, author of the most innovative work in this field, almost overnight girls' and women's magazines that celebrated a traditional range of domestic feminine virtues were swept aside by such products as Jackie in which 'Stories focused on the words "you", "love" and "happiness".' Out went the good-deed-doing Four Marys of its predecessor Bunty, and in came making oneself appealing to The Monkees, a US pop group manufactured to subtract market share from the British Beatles. Much of the content of Jackie seems incredibly innocent, from a contemporary vantage point where magazines aimed at very young teenagers speak to concerns hitherto confined to younger adults. A new range of magazines for young women, notably She and Cosmopolitan, the former a product of the 1950s and the latter of the early 1970s, provided more adult versions of the same shift in moral discourse, highlighting women as people with careers or as consumers, while even the more staid Woman's Own, which was primarily aimed at housewives, witnessed an expansion of the range of problems countenanced by their agony-aunt columnists, so as to breach such taboos as female sexual satisfaction, while references to religion disappeared.2 (Fs)

355a The Churches and the more semi-detached tribe of theologians often responded to rapid changes in the wider world by trying to assimilate secular cultural and social enthusiasms, while jettisoning anything that still smacked of 'superstition', sometimes including God as well as the devil. Both tendencies had been evident for a hundred years. Radical German and US theology was sensationally vulgarised for British audiences by bishop John Robinson, beginning with his 1963 book Honest to God. Centuries-old liturgies were abandoned in favour of 'happy clappy' church services, although few ventured as far as the (Catholic) college students whose antics in chapel were fictionalised by David Lodge:

Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: säkularer Liberalismus - Immigration; multikulturelle Gesellschaft; extra ecclesiam nulla salus

Kurzinhalt: ... the translation of people from countries where religion was all-pervasive to a developed society where the dominant creed was secular liberalism with Christian remnants ...

Textausschnitt: 357a Ironically, in view of events across Europe, one major change in the field of religion attracted almost no attention at the time, namely the translation of people from countries where religion was all-pervasive to a developed society where the dominant creed was secular liberalism with Christian remnants. While the arrival of many migrants who were devout Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs (not to speak of Pentecostalist and Seventh Day Adventist Christians from the Caribbean) gave a timely boost to the numbers of religious believers in an otherwise secularising society, the need to acknowledge their faiths (as well as that of the existing Jewish minority) dealt a lasting body-blow to the exclusively Christian Constitution of Britain. The fact that there was no apparent or conceivable challenge to the verities of Western liberalism (except from a lunatic far right and its analogues on the extreme left) meant that the religious implications of mass immigration went unattended. The idea that Britain is a 'multi-faith' society has become so ingrained, often with the explicit encouragement of the Establishment, that it is easy to forget how this development happened. This is mysterious, because what seemed a promising celebration of difference has turned out to be highly divisive.1 (Fs)

[...]

358b The first substantial attempt by a theologian to address these issues was by John Hick, a Presbyterian minister and philosopher at Birmingham, in his 1973 book God and the Universe of Faiths. This rejected the traditional belief in extra ecclesiam nulla salus or 'no salvation outside the Church' and called for a 'Copernican revolution' which would recognise all major religions as 'valid' routes to God. The various creeds were parallel 'ways through time to eternity'. Hick resolved the problem represented by the divinity of Jesus by claiming that the doctrine of the incarnation was a necessary myth.1 While the majority of British people remained directly unaffected by immigration, in such centres as Birmingham the larger question of race relations led to Christian initiatives to defuse tensions, which had briefly exploded into violence, through dialogue with people of other faiths. These meetings were of a very informal kind, and were as much about exchanging knowledge, with a few cautious experiments in common worship. It took time for the development of forums of the kind that had long existed to facilitate dialogue between Christians and Jews, even though the latter had in the interim been eclipsed as Britain's main religious minority. (Fs)

Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: New Age

Kurzinhalt: New Age beliefs are generally eclectic, holistic and self-centred

Textausschnitt: 359b The late 1960s prepared much of the ground for what have come to be called 'New Age' beliefs, which fused snippets of Eastern mysticism, astrology and occultism, environmentalism and psychotherapy, and whose eclectic philosophies nowadays adorn entire walls in bookstores. New Age beliefs are generally eclectic, holistic and self-centred. They appeal overwhelmingly to white middle-class people - a Briton of West Indian origin dismissed a New Age event as 'something for poofs' -including a disproportionate number of women, who believe that they will discover their true inner self, suppressed by the combined forces of male-dominated Western scientific rationality and a consumer economy. In a sense, it represents a spiritualised form of the Marxist quest for an end to alienation, although New Age is less coherent than the study of economics. Its powerful ecological component reflected the concerns first articulated by the American biologist Rachel Carson in her 1963 warning against indiscriminate use of DDT and other pesticides, Silent Spring, as well as more heady attempts to fuse science and religion, notably the British chemist James Lovelock's notion that life on earth has a collective consciousness symbolised by the earth-goddess 'Gaia'.1 (Fs)

360a New Age religions often reach backwards to pre-modern (or utterly fantastical) cultures and times - the Native Americans and King Arthur are favourites - or reach outwards to less developed societies. Viewed superficially, the New Age religions seem little more than an updated form of the romantic belief in ex oriente lux, a post-imperial cultural cringe that has replaced the alleged arrogance of Western imperialism with limitless credulity in response to the spiritual beliefs of the underdeveloped world. New Age religions share much of the Western culture of self-repudiation that is evident in other more supposedly rational areas of life. But this is to miss how the Western New Agers have subtly transmogrified these beliefs, leaving out anything that does not chime with their own existing views and desire for Western comforts. Out goes anything resembling stoical acceptance of the insignificance and transience of our lives on earth, for otherwise what would be the point of religions based on self-development? Out goes any notion that reincarnation may involve a judgement on the moral character of one's past or present life, or, put crudely, the prospect that one might accordingly be reborn as a rat or cockroach. Out too goes any notion that the heights of spiritual 'awareness' might require exercises of a kind that might once have taxed an Ignatius Loyola. Instead, spiritual wisdom can be acquired through a weekend at a Scottish or Welsh meditation centre or on a two-week holiday in Thailand. If time is pressing, the distilled experience, can be made available through the crash course as video or DVD package, paid for with a credit card over the internet, in ultimate obeisance to the Western rationalisation of time that the New Age deplores. Ancillary services include such things as feng-shui consultants to check out the presence of gremlins and hobgoblins in a new house. (Fs)

361a Although the therapeutic culture is probably here to stay, it seems doubtful whether New Age religions will have much greater longevity than the hippies, a few of whom still linger on in tepees in Welsh valleys that time forgot. Some of it will undoubtedly be absorbed into the dominant commercial culture, whether as management technique or as a branch of healing. Pity all those (graduate) corporate employees who have to play motivational games that might excite five-year-olds. The eclectic nature of New Age beliefs also militates against their being easily communicable to fresh generations of adherents, who, as products of conventional education, may react to the beliefs of their middle-aged parents with incredulity. Although Christians may deplore what could be called a soft recrudescence of European paganism with orientalised accretions, it is salutary to remind ourselves that even the most generous estimate of the numbers currently involved in organisations catering to New Age spirituality amounts to a mere third of the worshippers lost to one Christian denomination (the Methodists) over a forty-year period.1 (Fs)

Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: Unterschied: Europa - USA; Intellektuelle, "Mantra": Menschenrechte, Toleranz; Marcel Gauchet; EU; Euroäische Verfassung (Entwurf 2004)

Kurzinhalt: Instead of religion, the liberal elites prefer their monopolistic mantra of 'diversity', 'human rights' and 'tolerance' as if they invented them,

Textausschnitt: 473a In contrast to the US where, despite a formal separation of Church and state designed to preclude 'Establishment', religion has a significant impact on politics, many Europeans are determined to write Christianity out of the picture. They include British leftists, despite Evangelical Christianity being integral to British socialism, and aggressive secularists, in Belgium, France or Spain, who patrol battle lines established a century earlier over such issues as education. Religion in these circles signifies the Basques, Belfast, Bosnia and Bush, at any rate something horrid, like the 'national Catholicism' of Franco. Actually, the Democrat presidents John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were not slow to invoke the Almighty, with genuine conviction in the case of Carter. The ultra-conservative and much maligned Ronald Reagan was not much of a churchgoer, even if rhetorically he appointed Him an honorary member of his cabinet.1 The US religious right did not emerge from nowhere, and nor did it do so without liberal provocation. It is important to recall that the politicisation of conservative American religion began with the 1963 Supreme Court ban on prayers in public schools, and gained momentum through Roe v. Wade a decade later, the Supreme Court decision which struck down state laws against abortion, and that conservatives are as widely represented among America's largest denomination, Roman Catholics, as among the Evangelical Protestants who seem to attract the most media attention. (Fs)

473b In similar fashion, the US right established an impressive array of think-tanks and autonomous centres, largely because they felt, with reason, that their views were excluded from the 'Left university' and much of the media, a process extended through maverick 'bloggers' seeking to balance liberal bias in America's established networks and newspapers.2 (Fs)

473c There are other cultural differences. Although the European media chooses to ignore it, the US has an extraordinary range of religious public intellectuals, such as William Buckley Jnr, Stephen Carter, Richard Neuhaus and George Weigel. By contrast, although Europe has such outstanding figures as Leszek Kotakowski, Hans Maier and Josef Ratzinger, its public culture is dominated by sneering secularists, who set the tone for the rest of the population and can make light work of the average bishop rolled out to confound them, especially in the case of Anglican bishops who share so much liberal common ground. Much of the European liberal elite regard religious people as if they come from Mars, except when they operate within such licensed liberal parameters as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the struggle against apartheid or the US civil rights movement in which Christians, notably Dr Martin Luther King, played a distinguished role.3 'Britain', we are loftily told, 'has not, since the 16th century, been ruled by bishops or mullahs and has been the better for it.' In fact, 'mullahs' have never ruled Britain except in that columnist's imagination. The last truly politically significant English cleric was the seventeenth-century archbishop William Laud. This line neglects the contribution that clergy have made to the public affairs of Britain, and, more worryingly, the fact that it is not only 'fundamentalist lobbies' who 'curse' modern politics, but professional lobbies representing animal rights, gays or the planet (causes that inspire sectarian devotions to the fox or Gaia, so to speak) which could equally be deemed a mixed blessing were it not politically suicidal to say so. Idiot and ignorant actors and playwrights are integral to all these causes.4 Although many European politicians are highly religious, including the leaders of Britain's major political parties, notably Tony Blair, and many parliamentarians, it was thought expedient to let it be known that Downing Street does 'not do God' lest secularists make hay with it as they did when Blair announced that he felt accountable to God. (Fs) (notabene)

[...]

474b Instead of religion, the liberal elites prefer their monopolistic mantra of 'diversity', 'human rights' and 'tolerance' as if they invented them, unaware of the extent to which these are products of a deeper Christian culture based on ideas and structures that are so deeply entrenched that most of us are hardly aware of them. As the great contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet has written: 'Modern society is not a society without religion, but one whose major articulations were formed by metabolising the religious function.'1 (Fs)