The Transformation of the World (190 page)

Religious Fervor in the United States

Although major doubts have been raised whether, by most of Hugh Mc-Leod's criteria, secular tendencies actually asserted themselves before 1910 in the non-Western world, a glance at the United States shows that the West, too, followed a number of different paths. In Western Europe, the cautious secularization after the turn of the century was by no means a linear continuation from the decline of religion around 1800. The Age of Revolution, when the greatest minds from Kant to Jefferson and Goethe serenely distanced themselves from belief in supernatural powers, gave way in the name of Romanticism to a rediscovery of the religious among large sections of the European intelligentsia. “Godlessness” was with some justification imputed to the underclasses living from hand to mouth in the heartlands of early industrialization, but a middle-class way of life, at least in the Protestant countries, included a new culture of piety and Christian moralizing. As we saw in
chapter 17
, one of its by-products was the successful antislavery movement. The religious dynamic in England, a pioneer of the new tendencies, was at first concentrated in revivalist groups outside the state church (which was seen as spiritually sterile
and morally degenerate) and later in an opposition inside the Church of England. Wherever it took root, this evangelism emphasized the ubiquity of spiritual conflicts, the active intervention of Satan in the workings of the world, the personal sinfulness of the individual, the certainty of a coming Last Judgment, the possibility of salvation through belief in Jesus Christ, and the unrestricted authority of the text of the Bible. At the individual level, the experience of awakening and conversion to true “living” Christianity was fundamental; then came the obligation to prove oneself in the world.
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This evangelical revival got under way in the 1790s, and after a few decades it began to abut against reform initiatives within the Anglican establishment itself. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the rapturous zeal cooled down and passed into the secular tendencies described above, which in England were only slightly more hidden than elsewhere in Europe. In the United States, a similar revival occurred among Protestants, continuing a chain of energizing movements that had punctuated the eighteenth century; it ran parallel to a prophetic mobilization among Indians in the Northwest, led by the Shawnee warrior prince Tecumseh (1768–1813) and his inspired brother Tenskwatawa. The Great Awakening (as historians later called it) of the early nineteenth century grew into a vast self-Christianizing movement among North Americans, which, unlike in Europe, was never reined in by ecclesiastical establishments but preserved its dynamism in a fluid landscape of churches and sects. Between 1780 and 1860, when the population of the United States increased eightfold, the number of Christian communities rose by a factor of 21, from 2,500 to 52,000.
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This permanent revival, lasting in essence to the present day, made the United States an intensely Christian nation that sees itself as morally and materially “civilized,” and in which the greatest religious pluralism has prevailed.
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Immigrants from all around the world sought to stabilize their identity through religion. Migration in general not only spreads religious forms spatially but often modifies them and deepens the practices associated with them. Irish carried their Catholicism wherever they went, and the church sent priests out with them from Ireland. Thanks to Irish and southern European immigrants, the share of Catholics in the total population of the United States increased from 5 percent in 1850 to 17 percent in 1906.
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The trend reversal toward secularism that became unmistakable in Europe toward the end of the century did not happen among either Protestants or Catholics in the United States. The American case also shows that religious vitalization—or what Enlightenment critics referred to as
Schwärmerei
(raptured enthusiasm)—did not inevitably lead back into theocracy, fanatical social controls, and irrationalism in other areas of life. The consequences of religious excitement can be contained if the distinction between private and public space has already been solidly established at an earlier stage.

Religion, State, and Nation

Western Europe trod a separate path in the nineteenth century, in the sense that church influence on the internal politics of nation-states became only here a central conflict of the age. What was at issue was not essentially the secular character of the modern state; that had already been secured after protracted struggles at the end of the revolutionary period. Europe's last theocracy disappeared in 1870, when the Italian Republic annexed the Papal States. Only in Russia did the Orthodox Church and tsarism form a symbiotic relationship, but this only alienated the emerging liberal public from the church and ultimately failed to prop up imperial rule. The conflicts in continental western Europe—Britain was affected only by the problem of Home Rule in Catholic Ireland—resulted from a combination of three factors: (1) the aversion that liberalism, at the height of its influence in midcentury, felt toward the Catholic Church; (2) the strengthening of the papacy, especially under Pius XI (r. 1846–78), which set itself openly against the national and liberal tendencies of the age and tightened the leash on national churches; and (3) the homogenizing tendencies involved in building nation-states, which made external, “ultramontane” masterminding of any section of the population unacceptable even in the eyes of nonliberal politicians. Catholics in the United States, for example, found themselves in a long-lasting conflict of loyalties. As citizens, especially if they were of Italian origin, many could not hold back their sympathy with the founding of a liberal Italian nation-state; but as members of the Roman Church, they were sworn to support the papacy in its battle against that nation-state and its founding principles.
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Three issues kept flaring up in Europe: the right to appoint bishops, the recognition of civil marriage, and influence in the education system. In the 1860s and 1870s, this tangled conflict escalated into a struggle between church and state of almost pan-European dimensions. In countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, education was for decades at the top of the domestic political agenda.
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We can see today that it was all a matter of rearguard actions. The years between 1850 and 1859 were, in the words of the great church historian Owen Chadwick, “the last years of Catholic power in Europe.”
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The political power of the papacy collapsed in 1859, when its two protectors—Austria and France (then under the far-from-devout Napoleon III)—ended their alliance with each other. In individual countries, a compromise solution was found over time. The battles over church and culture had fizzled out by 1880. However, even after the passing of the mulish Pius IX (“Pio Nono”), the Catholic Church had difficulty adjusting to the modern world: small wonder in an institution that could still afford the hoary authority of the Inquisition and even had a “Grand Inquisitor” post until 1929.

Defense against the “transnational” disloyalty (real or imaginary) of the Catholic Church was mirrored in the most diverse rapprochements between religion and nationalism. When there was a reasonably unified vision of the nation's
future, a religious legitimation of it was not slow in coming; otherwise, rival blueprints expressed themselves in denominational forms. Little can be found elsewhere in the world that corresponds to this peculiarly European development. Some nationalisms were neutral as to religion and could be effective only by remaining so—for example, the All India movement that appeared in the 1880s, whose always-shaky foundation was unity across the boundaries between religious communities (above all, Hindus and Muslims). Chinese nationalism too, from its beginnings around the turn of the century down to the present day, has had no religious connotations. The United States was a Christian country through and through, but one in which church and state were strictly separate, churches never had deeply rooted privileges or large landholdings, and the state did not subsidize religion. The multiplicity of Protestant sects and denominations, alongside Catholicism and Judaism, prevented the correlation of any specific religion with the nation. American nationalism had a strongly Christian charge, but this remained supradenominational, unlike the Protestant nationalism that had marked the German Empire even after 1879 and the end of the
Kulturkampf
against Catholicism. Its core was a vague sense that white America had been chosen to play a key role in the plan of salvation. And it had to be equally congenial to Methodists and Mormons, Baptists and Catholics.

In no other major country in the nineteenth century was religion such a potent religious force as it was in Japan. Even during the Meiji period, the country's elite remained deeply suspicious of Christianity, which had almost disappeared after it was torn up at the roots in the early seventeenth century. It came as a complete surprise in 1865 when communities totaling some 60,000 “native Christians” were discovered to have kept the faith underground for more than two hundred years in the Nagasaki region. But this was more a curiosity than the prelude to a new growth of Christianity in Japan. After the ban on Christian proselytism was lifted in 1873, Catholic, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox missions had little or no success, and the stigmatization of Christianity as “un-Japanese” in the rising nationalist tide of the 1890s reduced its public presence still farther. The Japanese elite mobilized resources of its own to endow the newly created imperial state with religious and nationalist legitimacy, placing the indigenous Shinto tradition at the center of national religious life.

Before 1868, Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples existed alongside each other on an approximately equal footing, and thousands upon thousands of local shrines serving to honor divine spirits (
kami
) were integrated into people's everyday lives. The new Meiji oligarchy decided to create an orderly national hierarchy out of the chaos and to establish State Shinto as the basis for a new cult of the emperor. Right at the top was the Ise shrine dedicated to the goddess Amaterasu, the mythical ancestor of the emperor's family and protector of the whole nation. The imperial and national shrines were lavishly funded by the central government, their priests acquired the status of civil servants, and every household was officially allocated to a shrine. New sites such as the Yasukuni
shrine in Tokyo would later be used for war-remembrance ceremonies. The old religious landscape of Japan, locally fragmented and remote from politics, was reshaped from above and pressed into a national mold. Buddhism was humiliated, its monasteries and temples reined in amid a kind of religious
Kulturkampf
. Within a few years, one-fifth of Buddhist temples were closed down, many thousands of monks and nuns were forced out into the world, and large numbers of cult objects and artistic treasures were destroyed. If US museums today house the largest stocks of Japanese Buddhist art outside Asia, it is because American collectors seized the opportunity for a bargain and saved numerous objects from destruction. New charismatic religions that had emerged in the early nineteenth century also had to yield to State Shinto.

The Japanese state intervened in religious life more than any other state in the nineteenth century. State Shinto standardized the practice of religion by means of a new ritual calendar and a nationwide liturgy, while the Shinto clergy became an important pillar of the political order. The state founded new religious traditions, and the sacralization of rule went far beyond any alliance of throne and altar imaginable in the most conservative parts of Europe. This laid the basis for the nationalism that saw the wars of aggression between 1931 and 1945 as the fulfillment of a divine mandate to a chosen master people.
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State Shinto was not the result of a transfer from abroad. The young leaders of the Meiji Renewal understood that their goal of national integration could scarcely be achieved without ideological centralization under state control. The idea of a nation-state was vaguely known to them from contemporary Europe, but their ideological blueprint drew more on the traditional concept of
kokutai
, which the scholar Aizawa Seishisai had revived in 1820s. Since its golden age of antiquity, the theory suggested, Japan had stood out by virtue of its harmonious fusion of state and religion.
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Kokutai
, with its myth of a “national essence,” gave a religious gloss to the elevation of the Meiji Emperor as the key bonding figure; nothing then really stood in the way of a racist-imperial interpretation of this concept of unity. Japan's new integral nationalism did not lag behind Western precedents. It was ahead of its time.

Shinto, as the national integration project of the Meiji period, stands in a paradoxical relationship to other tendencies of the age. It was a state-prescribed cult, demanding little in the way of faith or “piety” from those who observed it—more an orthopraxis than a theologically developed orthodoxy. In this sense it fit well into the cooling of religious sentiment, being the very opposite of a revivalist movement. On the other hand, since State Shinto was not one religion among others (or a “world religion”) but the national religion of Japan, it conflicted with the tendency toward pluralism in modern conceptions of religion. Completely subordinate to state objectives, it was the antithesis of a view of religion as a matter of private religiosity and one sphere of the social among others. The contrast with China, where both the late imperial state and the Republic (1912–49) invested little in religion, could not be greater—unless, that is, we
wish to regard the official Marxism (or “Maoism”) of the three decades after 1949 as a functional equivalent of State Shinto.

3 Religion and Empire