The recent assault upon religion by Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great, has its points. He brings up things not a lot of people knew, such as the 25% per cent of SS men who were practising Catholics. Putting all those people into railway trucks between one sacrament and the next, it makes you think.
He also argues that the Catholic church was a key supporter of fascism across Spain, Portugal and Croatia in the 30s. This last, Croatia, is certainly true. It was not by chance that the Vatican organised the escape from justice in 1945 of the Jew- and Serb-murdering Ustasha which had ruled Greater Croatia since 1941. This was a specifically Catholic movement, especially blessed by the Archbishop of Sarajevo. The mini-nation's fervently devout leader, Ante Pavelić, declared that they would convert who they could to Roman Catholicism, and for the rest they had "three million bullets". He would find refuge in Franco's Spain; others lived quietly in the Ireland of the fervently devout Eamon de Valera. The Vatican, looking after its own, put them there.
All the evidence taken together makes religion look dreadful. But religious faith, the prime mover of evil?
The response to such a grand, archdeacon-annihilating sweep of the arm must be a prolonged, grown-up "Steady on." Rebuttal begins at personal goodness. Put in evidence San Carlo Borromeo and William Mompesson. Both, Catholic Archbishop and Anglican Vicar, discharged for puritan views, faced bubonic plague - in Milan 1576 and Derbyshire 1665/6, respectively. Borromeo refused to follow the great body of the well-to-do into the clean air of exile, but stayed, cared and expended his own fortune - something he had already done during a major famine in 1572. Mompesson, the Puritan, told his parishioners that if they fled the village of Eyam for somewhere free from pestilence, they would only spread their sickness to other people and resolutely stayed himself, to tend the victims.
Both acts of resolute human goodness sprang from religious conviction, and one can add to them at generous length: Lord Ashley of the ten-hour bill, so objectionable to free-market principles, Clarkson and Wilberforce taking on the comfortable iniquity of slavery. They did so because their Christianity implied the equality of all before God. Consider also the Religious Society of Friends, interpreters of Christianity as renunciation of all killing and all wars; a source of evil - the Quakers?
Incidentally, we should distrust this word "fascist". Hitchens and his friends, like the newly sirred Sir Salman, are very keen to call the al-Qaida element "Islamo-fascists". But al-Qaida, like the Ustasha, is so much worse than authentic Latin European fascism that this is not the insult intended. Al-Qaida cuts the heads from living bodies, the Ustasha regularly gouged eyeballs from victims on its killing circuits of borderland Serbian villages. (They used to send the gougings, nicely parcelled up, back to HQ as proof of quotas met, Christian duty fulfilled.) But compared with either phenomenon, the expressly Christian and the expressly Muslim, Mussolini's fascism was something out of light opera.
The religion-driven forms of extremism were and are incomparably worse than anything done by Mussolini or Salazar - Franco by contrast murdered quite a lot of people. And degree apart, there is a difference in kind. "Fascism" has a self-definition, the corporate state, in which representatives of all social and economic interests advise and supposedly legitimise a single unelected leader. They also performed and won friends like Winston Churchill in the 20s and 30s as precursors of that great American thing, "bastions against Communism". (The US and Israel now look to bastions against Muslim extremism!) In Italy fascism looked back to notable Romans, particularly Cincinnatus. Though their practice, after a spurt of useful swamp-draining and Mafia-dispersing, became corrupt before falling into transalpine company unimaginably worse. But read The Garden of the Finzi-Continis which tells the tale of a Jewish family living in Ferrara through the "before" and "after" of Mussolini's seduction by Hitler. This time for the family was the difference between relaxed acceptance and a creeping exclusion which, in Nazi hands, will lead to death.
The very word "fascist", used so sloppily by Hitchens and company, is the mark of that perfectly decent thing, the old far-leftist, everything that this crowd once were. The far left would attach "fascist/ fascism" to anything: liberal fascism, economic fascism, cultural fascism. As an undergraduate Gaitskellite, I remember with some pleasure being called a social fascist.
Incidentally there is a mighty contradiction between the doings of Franco or Pavelic and the teachings of Jesus. "Love your enemies." "Do good to them that hate you." "Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor. And the maimed, and the halt and the blind." Both from St Luke's gospel. Such a gap surely also lies between the central invocation, "Allah, the merciful, the compassionate one" and current practices.
Such words, so many dead; such exultant killings in their name. How are they reconciled? Quite easily. For what Hitchens passes by in his rush to pronounce is power. Power and the lust for it created the wars of recent centuries. Clive wanted to master a sub-continent, Napoleon moved in 1807 beyond consolidation of defence to open-ended empire and lost the far-seeing Talleyrand when he did. Kaiser Wilhelm yearned to use his superb war machine to win something; Hitler had specific objects in the despised Slavonic East. And as power infected the weakest or nastiest rulers, so it infected the church. How remote are the Crusader Popes from the gospels? So unchristian are the makers of the thirty-years War, a conflict in which the final Catholic/ Protestant balance would decide the division of mastery. Cuius regio, eiuus religio goes the tag; to govern a state was to choose its faith.
The three days' slaughter of St Bartholomew's Eve in Paris 1571 was about religion; indeed, it helped preserve the Church's political hold on France. And apart from what Miss Prism might have called "the sensational aspect of religion," you have the dear old Church of England, "Religion, Christless Godless, a book sealed", which conducted no massacres, but gave its revenues, rights to tithes and primacy over other churches precedence over the self-abnegating virtues of the gospels. The English power evil was mild enough, but this was a church cherishing petty forms of it. Power over the faithful is another measure; the Irish clergy cherishing the fear and abjection of parishioners, banning books, separating lovers from embrace in dance halls, imposing (and enjoying) a quiet despotism. Incidentally, the present, much weakened Church of England, crowed over for being weaker, is also through the person of Rowan Williams, of indeed most of its higher clergy, unimaginably nicer, more Christian than the church of flogging headmasters and privilege conservers. The loss of power has been a sort of cleansing, the pride has fallen away with the right of command. This is increasingly true of the Roman Catholic Church - outside the Vatican.
Unhappily, power is an evil which now appeals to Hitchens and his friends. Look at the Blair cabinet, at the conduct of the American elections and especially at the interventions into things and remote countries not understood, in which power-holders delight and which power worshippers applaud. Hitchens and Sir Salman speak contemptuously of people, very many of them Christians, who did not embrace the bombing of Baghdad, or accept the Fallujah attack and its white phosphorus. George Bush may be a malign ninny, with nearly three quarters of million dead on his blundering initiative, but he is seized of very great power. He happens to be a Christian, but is not a fascist, and to his new supporters not even a Christian-fascist.
Power has been called an aphrodisiac, which I doubt. It is more of a grand alibi, a cloak under which every worst instinct, the non-sexual ID of human desire, takes refuge. People who imagined themselves pacific, liberal creatures of the Enlightenment, have discovered that making war is good, delightful - and morally right. "Now God be thanked, who has matched us with his hour," wrote that crying fool, Rupert Brooke, in 1914.
Only delete poor God, the universal squash wall of human motive, and you have the sentiments of the people now engaged in justifying what you might properly call a crusade. It is a crusade for western values, which values through money, weaponry and the ready instruction of a power-loyal press, hope to prevail. Religion just doesn't have the thrill of it.
