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Europe and the legend of secularization

Earthly Powers.The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe From the French Revolution to the Great War.By Michael Burleigh.530 pages. $29.95; £25.00. HarperCollins Publishers.

Among the many stories Europeans tell about themselves, none is more tenacious than the legend of Europe's secularization. It goes something like this. After many dark centuries of cultural backwardness and political tyranny sanctified by Roman Catholicism, followed by a period of maniacal confessional conflict set off by the Protestant Reformation, Europe in the 17th century began a slow but steady exit from religion. By the 18th century the leading lights of the Enlightenment had issued a public declaration of independence from God and his priests, which then became a battle plan for the war of attrition against religion that began with the French Revolution.

The outcome of this conflict was settled from the start, and already in the early 19th century the center of gravity in European life had shifted from problems of faith to those of class, industrialization, urbanization, nationalism and colonialism. The "long" 19th century, from the French Revolution to World War I, culminated in a crisis involving all these new factors, and the result was total war in the 20th. After this catastrophe, Europe was divided geographically and ideologically, but still unified in believing that the challenge of religion was over. Since World War II, Europeans have stared in blank amazement across the Atlantic at a new global power whose citizens and even leaders seem to believe myths about the old bearded man in the sky. They call this American "exceptionalism," on the assumption that living without God is the ultimate destiny of the human race.

Things change. Today we can be forgiven for thinking that Europe, not the United States, is the exception. Wherever we now cast our gaze around the globe, we are met with the spectacle of individuals and whole cultures set spiritually ablaze and eager to spread the flame to others.

The Old World is different: though Christian belief remains strong in some European countries, like Poland, and Islam is a potent force among Muslims across the Continent, contemporary Europe is the closest thing to a godless civilization the world has ever known. Does this place it in the vanguard of world history? That is what many Europeans think, which is why they have been caught off guard by the challenge of radical Islam even in their own back yard. They find it hard to believe that people can still take God seriously and want to shape society according to his dictates.

Yet it was not so long ago that the problem of religion was central to European intellectual and political life, too. Contrary to the legend of steady secularization, 19th-century Europe was seriously divided over the problem, though in a new way. While 19th-century Protestant America was searching for God by immersing itself in the Bible, experiencing one Great Awakening after another, Europe entered an age of anxiety over the prospect of living in a disenchanted cosmos.

Did the disappearance of old forms of worship mean the destruction of traditional social bonds, foreshadowing a dark, atomized future? Or was it mere prelude to the founding of a new kind of religion animating a new kind of society, a utopia in which human beings would finally be reconciled to themselves and with one another? These were the great questions haunting the European mind throughout the 19th century, questions that have returned to haunt us now.

As Michael Burleigh disarmingly admits in the introduction to "Earthly Powers," he tripped across these questions while hunting other game.

Burleigh is an accomplished popular historian specializing in Germany, and is the author of the award-winning book "The Third Reich: A New History" (2000). In this work he casts his net more widely over the whole of Western Europe in the long 19th century. As he states in the introduction, he set out to write a study of totalitarianism as the continuation of modern attempts to reshape human nature through what he calls "political religion," beginning in the civic cults and festivals instituted in postrevolutionary France. What opened up instead was the whole rich landscape of 19th-century religious and political thought.

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