Earthly Powers & Sacred Causes

I am currently finishing up a two book read that is just the best combined compilation of the involvement of faith in politics around the western world I have ever read.

Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War & Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror, both by Michael Burleigh, both recount the many weird, wonderful, and terrible manifestations of corrupt and brutal state power working through the auspices of one faith or another.

Burleigh writes about history and the movement of faith within it as if he is telling us a story, vast as centuries but as close as the neighbors, and it is a very compelling story, as he notes:

“If Robert Owens was the first person to use the term ‘socialism’ in print, in 1827, the first documented use of the word ‘Communism’ was by a conservative German newspaper in March 1840 which darkly noted: ‘The Communists have in view nothing less that a leveling of society, substituting for the presently existing order of things the absurd, immoral and impossible utopia of a community of goods.’ Such people had existed in France for a decade, though there was nothing so formal as a ‘Communist Party’ as opposed to a halfway house for displaced intellectuals and exiled artisans.

“Communists emphasized equality and identified with the most drastic, Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. On these grounds Communism was distinct from utopian socialism, which had little time for equality, rejected violent revolution and was more concerned with how to achieve harmony that with how to capitalize upon human strife. What it could not ignore in socialism was that it had got there first in providing workers with rudimentary organization. In a zoomorphic sense, Communists resembled those aggressive African bees that colonize and transform more placid hives.”

(Earthly Powers, pp. 243-244)