Misplaced Faith

Misplaced Faith: Why no one questioned the implications of bringing large Muslim populations into a secularizing West

Excerpts:

Although many observers predicted that religion would enter a pattern of terminal decline in the 20th century, events took a different course. Religion not only revived but found expression in unexpected forms. The theologian Paul Tillich noted the way in which people invested worldly things, especially politics, with transcendent meaning. In a 1937 speech, Winston Churchill described communism and Nazism as "non-God religions" that aimed to reignite old religious wars. In "Sacred Causes," Michael Burleigh tracks the fate of religious and secular forces in the 20th century, registering their collisions and their effects on the culture we live in today.

By undermining European stability, Mr. Burleigh notes, World War I created a space for radical alternatives to the bourgeois norms that had gone before. He shows how the Protestant middle classes in Germany, for instance, distanced themselves from their churches, viewing traditional religious observance as the remnant of a discredited past. Science and culture, along with militant nationalism, filled the role that churches had once played, and the pattern replicated itself beyond Germany. A traditional outlook gave way to cultural pessimism, intensifying throughout the 1920s.

In such a cultural atmosphere, Adolf Hitler emerged as a prophet of neo-paganism. Mr. Burleigh highlights the sheer weirdness of dropouts in Germany who seized upon social disruption to make their fortunes, playing to an apocalyptic mood and crying for a purifying upheaval. Once Hitler took power, the Nazi Party became a new civil religion.

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