Just last week, Richard Dawkins debated Cardinal George Pell in another installment of the interminable debates which convince atheists that atheism is best and theists that theism is best. Pell, on par for the theist course, argued that atheism leads to bad things like Hitler and the Nazis. Dawkins responded by observing that Hitler wasn’t an atheist.

This exchange, unenlightening though it was, at least generated useful commentary by an historian familiar with the debates about Nazis and religion. He notes that scholars are of three schools of thought: (1) the Nazis were neo-pagans, (2) Naziism was a political religion, or (3) Nazis were peculiar Christians. Based on everything I’ve read over the years, all three descriptions seem to be correct — they aren’t mutually exclusive. Hitler himself admired the Catholic Church and used it as a model for his own movement.

One thing is clear: Hitler wasn’t an atheist and almost no Nazis were. However idiosyncratic, Hitler clearly had creationist ideas:

Hitler argued for a critical review of the Bible, to discover what sections met an “Aryan” spirit. In these same notes, he took a “biogenetic” history as the main biblical emphasis, arguing that original sin was solely racial degeneration – sin against the blood. He also argued in favour of the notion of a creator, a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing. This again came back to race, and meant that he argued in Mein Kampf that one could not avoid the “commands” of “eternal nature” or the “Almighty Creator”: “in that I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

For theists this sort of thing is best ignored, as is the fact that 99% of Germans were avowed Christians during the Nazi era. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this debate is its relationship to evolution. Aside from mistakenly believing that Nazis were atheists, most theists assume that the Nazis were Darwinian evolutionists. They weren’t.

As Coel Hellier documents in this superb post, Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist, and opposed to evolution. After an extensive examination of Nazi ideas, Hellier concludes:

The main ideas of Darwinism are that natural selection, operating over lengthy time periods, can cause species to transform into other species, and that all modern mammals descend from a common ancestor. Both of these notions the Nazis explicitly rejected, finding them abhorrent, materialistic notions that would strip man of his soul and of his special status. The Nazis preferred, as do many other religious people, to see man as God’s special creation. It was seeing, in particular, the Aryan race as “God’s handiwork” that led the Nazis to consider it sinful to allow the destruction of the Aryan race by allowing racial inter-marriage, and hence the necessity for removing the possibility by finding a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

Thus nothing in Nazi ideology derives from Darwinism. The few aspects in common were pre-Darwinian; the ideas that originated with Darwin were anathema to and rejected by the Nazis. The widespread blaming of Darwinism as an inspiration for Nazi crimes has no support in historical evidence and instead derives purely from a desire on the part of the religious to smear Darwinism.

The labeling of the Nazis as “atheistic” is similarly motivated and is also the exact opposite of what the evidence says. The Nazi ideology was theistic and religious and an offshoot of Christianity, merging Christianity with Nazi racial theory. It is true that the Nazified Christianity was opposed to more mainstream Christian views, and thus that the Nazis wanted radical reform of the Christian religion, but in no sense was it “atheistic.”

It would be splendid if, before the next debate, the theist representative would read Hellier’s piece and leave the Hitler-Nazi-atheist canard out of it.

But before Kadri gets to these issues, he takes us on colorful ride through the mystical backwaters of Sufi-inspired syncretic Islam. In doing so, he clearly destabilizes the notion that Islam is singular and there is some essential form of it. Here he sets the stage:

The North Indian city of Badaun is barely known beyond the subcontinent, but among the Muslims of India it has a great reputation. Seven ancient Islamic shrines encircle the town, collectively drawing visitors from miles around, and one spiritual specialty has always brought them immense local renown: they are said to facilitate the exorcism of jinns. That is a weighty claim among the poor, the credulous, and the desperate. Genies of the region are not popularly imagined to be the bountiful servants of lamp-rubbing legend. They are mercurial creatures, capable of wreaking havoc, who routinely seize control of people’s lives. Victims are suddenly plunged into depression or discontent, possessed of unusual ideas, and urged to speak, to lash out, even sometimes to kill. Entire families suffer as a consequence, and dozens are therefore to be found at the largest of the shrines, where they camp out in a shanty-filled cemetery pending miraculous interventions on behalf of their afflicted relatives. The scene is permanently alive, serviced by a nearby market, and it swells into something of a carnival as day-trippers arrive by the hundreds on the eve of Friday prayers. The spectacle had horrified and fascinated me in roughly equal measure ever since I first visited Badaun—my father’s birthplace—in 1979, at the age of fifteen. Elderly relations had warned me then to steer well clear of the place after dark on a Thursday night. In the spring of 2009, I finally got round to disobeying them.

I reached the shrine long after dusk, and its neem tree glades were pulsating to the drums and accordions of an ululating troupe of musicians. Picking my way through knots of pilgrims, past shadowy gures who babbled in the darkness or lunged from wooden posts to which they had been chained, I eventually reached the marble courtyard at the mausoleum’s center. The everyday bedlam of India looked to have merged with a scene from The Crucible. In a moonlight that was fluorescent, bright-eyed girls were whipping their hair into propellers while
 older folk, senile or despondent, chattered to tombstones. As I fidgeted with my camera settings, a teenage girl next to me stepped forward, assisted by anxious relatives, to quiver and collapse into the waiting arms of two shrine employees. Others strode forward to swoon in their turn, and were expertly scooped aside to make way for fresh fainters. Whooping children, barely able to believe their luck, cartwheeled around the hysterics and their helpers throughout. It was hours before the chaos gave way to chirrups and a semblance of peace returned to the sepulchers.

This is quite a picture, much at odds with those in the Western media which depict “Islam” through the minimalist lenses of militants and mosques. It is also a strange segue towards a discussion of sharia that somehow works. When Kadri finally gets round to sharia, there is delicious irony. After noting that conservatives have imagined Islamic law as foundational and eternal, Kadri compares this (false) vision with a similar conservative vision:

That claim raises issues similar to those I once encountered in a very different part of the world—the United States. As a law student at Harvard in the late 1980s, I had learned that many American conservatives consider the Founding Fathers of the United States to be possessed of incontestable wisdom. Some went further, arguing that God had manifested His will through their deeds. According to certain lawyers, that could oblige judges to interpret the federal Constitution according to its eighteenth-century meaning, or even require that they consider the Founders’ views when resolving contemporary legal controversies: limits to the death penalty, for example, or governmental restrictions on free speech.

Back then, I had felt that the deference to ancient vocabularies and dead people’s thoughts had the whiff of a séance about it. Pinning down a person’s meaning and motives is hard enough when he or she is alive. The collective intention of a large and diverse group of the deceased is difficult to conceptualize, let alone know. The traditionalist approach toward interpreting the shari‘a does not, on its face, look very different. It seems more akin to ancestor worship than any grave-venerating ritual could be—simply because holy wisdom does not automatically pass down through the generations.

There is indeed more than a bit of ancestor worship and civil religion in American constitutional originalism. It is no accident that most of those who worship at originalism’s altar also worship at other altars.

I’ll be getting Kadri’s book, which has been reviewed here (Guardian) and here (Telegraph), and reporting back on it.

One might think that these tax credits, which result in payments to “private” or religious schools, amounts to state support for such schools. One might also think that such support is prohibited by a long line of Establishment Clause jurisprudence holding that government cannot fund religious organizations and activities.

In the view of five Catholic justices, one would be wrong. Why? They allege there is a difference between tax credit funding and tax funding. In both law and economics, this is a classic distinction without a difference. Justice Kagan, writing for the four justice minority, noted that giving “tax credit funds” to religious schools is no different from giving “tax funds” to religious schools. Both result in tax dollars going to religious schools.

As Garrett Epps (my former law school classmate) uncontroversially observes over at The Atlantic: “The credit funds decrease the amount of money in the state treasury just as surely as a regular expenditure would; the benefit to religion — and the potential insult to Establishment values — is precisely the same.”

Anyone who believes that these five justices — Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy — decided the case “on the merits,” in accordance with legal precedent and without being biased by their Catholic faith, is simply naive.

One of the great fictions of American civil religion, and a pillar of American legal education, is the idea that justice is blind and judges decide cases by applying the law to the facts. No one has greater interest in maintaining this fiction than Supreme Court justices — the high priests of this religion.

The Catholic justices knew what result they wanted. They then searched for law and logic that would support their position, no matter how contorted or ridiculous. In ancient Greece, this was called sophistry. In modern America, it is called law.

At least we can give the Catholic blogosphere credit for calling a spade a spade. The happy headline over at The Catholic Knight declares: “Supreme Court Hands Victory to Catholic Schools.” A more accurate headline would be: “Five Catholic Justices Hand Victory to Catholic Schools.”

Postscript: In an unrelated story, Dahlia Lithwick nicely captured the spirit of this post:  “Because we are a romantic people who want to believe in the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, we also believe that something magical happens to justices and judges when they don the black robes.” Of course nothing magical happens, even if the justices want us to believe otherwise.

This national-security state derived its raison d’être from — and vigorously promoted a belief in — the existence of looming national peril. On one point, most politicians, uniformed military leaders, and so-called defense intellectuals agreed: the dangers facing the United States were omnipresent and unprecedented. In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, a professor of sociology at Columbia, dubbed this perspective “military metaphysics.”

This metaphysic insidiously piggybacks on neurological structures that are evolutionarily ancient.  The amygdala or its equivalent is found in all vertebrate lineages and is over 500 million years old.  With proper sensory inputs, the amygdala generates avoidance behaviors and in humans, fear responses.

In a world filled with predators, fear is unequivocally adaptive.  Too much fear, however, quickly becomes maladaptive and debilitating.  In humans, too much fear — a state of constant alarm or irrational assessment of risk — is known as phobia.

The trick, for anyone interested in sustaining a certain kind of political or religious order, is to generate just enough fear — on a constant basis — to keep everyone in line.  If the fear can be internalized then all the better.  As a process, it brings to mind the twinned notions of habit and hegemony from Of Revelation and Revolution, the 1991 classic by Jean and John Comaroff:

This kind of nonagentive power proliferates outside the realm of institutional politics. What is more, it may not be experienced as power at all, since its effects are rarely wrought by overt compulsion. They are internalized, in their negative guise, as constraints; in their neutral guise, as conventions; and, in their positive guise, as values.

[T]he making of hegemony involves the assertion of control over various modes of symbolic production. That control, however, must be sustained over time and in such a way that it becomes, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

For it is only by repetition that signs and practices cease to be perceived or remarked; that they are so habituated, so deeply inscribed in everyday routine, that they may no longer be seen as forms of control — or seen at all.

Therein lies not only the genius but also the longevity of such metaphysics.  Fear becomes so internalized and habitual it is scarcely noticed, yet is so deeply insinuated in society and mind it generates a kind of discipline that masquerades as virtue.  It is deliciously dialectical that the love of something, whether it be gods or countries, must be rooted in and regulated by fear.

[I]t is pleasing to report that two social scientists, Robert Putnam of Harvard University and David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame, have just written a book that examines a powerful source of American unity. Perhaps unexpectedly, the unifying force they focus on is religion.

America’s religiosity has been extensively documented and should surprise no one. More than eight out of ten Americans say they belong to a religion.

What is a surprise—or should be, when you think about it in the way Messrs Putnam and Campbell have—is that religion in America is not more divisive. They argue in “American Grace” (Simon & Schuster) that religion gives Americans a sort of “civic glue, uniting rather than dividing”.

The unifying impact of religion would not be so puzzling in a country where people were pious but where there was only one dominant religion—Catholic Poland, say. Americans, by contrast, hold intense religious beliefs but belong to many different faiths and denominations. That should in theory produce an explosive combination. So why doesn’t it?

The easy and right answer is this: there is not much religious diversity in the United States.  The vast majority of religious Americans profess a form of Christian faith.  Different denominational preferences within a single faith tradition do not amount to different “religions,” however one defines the term.

Christianity and its closely related cousin, nationalism, are indeed powerful unifying forces in America.  There is no need to posit an “Aunt Susan effect” as an explanation for something (i.e., “American religious diversity”) that does not exist.

Although I find the history and etymology of “kumbaya” (and the song from which it comes) interesting and worthy, it is more than a bit churlish to suggest, as Freedman and others do, that current usage is offensive or racist.  Words have something like a natural history or phylogeny all their own, and the unfolding of this history might be analogized to natural selection: nothing is predetermined and the process is not conscious.

I find it even more churlish to suggest, as does UNC-Chapel Hill professor of anthropology Glenn Hinson, that:

“The song in white hands was never grounded in faith.  Its words were simplistic; its tune was breezy. And it was simplistically dismissed.”

I am all for recognizing excellence, soul, and passion when it comes to music, but this brazen and overly general assertion is a bit much — even if it might be true for some.  “White hands” is not a valid category and indeed is pernicious in its own way.

A roll of the dice takes [players] around the 130 countries where the pope traveled — among them the Italian Alps, which he visited for clandestine skiing trips. As they land at the places John Paul visited, players collect cards with information on them and the messages he took there.

If the manufacturer makes an English version, I’ll have to get one and invite my Catholic friends over for a pontifical board game party, no betting allowed.

On the other hand, Poles are voting for politicians we can believe in.  As The Economist reports, this pop starlet candidate for office touts herself as “beautiful, independent and competent.”  She probably likes board games that come with messages:

“God’s words, the concept of godly government, are woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of our nation and this Constitution. It’s rightly called the Miracle in Philadelphia.”

Mr. Manship’s own words, in turn, get at the essence of the Tea Party movement, and in particular its chosen role as protector of the Constitution. Rather than viewing the Tea Party as a political phenomenon — rather than wondering if it is populist or Republican or reactionary — one might better understand it through the prism of religion.

Seen through such a frame, the Constitution is the Tea Party’s bible, and that holy book is embraced as an inerrant text.

Those inclined toward biblical literalism are also inclined toward constitutional literalism, which is never a good mixture when combined with the usual ignorance of drafting history and interpretive skills.  Where is Stanley Fish when we need him?

The parties hereto shall not be responsible for failure to perform hereunder due to force majeure, which shall include, but not be limited to, fires, floods, pestilence, earthquakes, riots, strikes, labor disputes, freight embargoes, or transportation delays, shortage of labor, inability to secure fuel, materials, supplies, equipment, or power on account of shortages thereof, or any other cause, all of which shall be beyond the reasonable control of such part.

As Graeme Wood reports for the Atlantic, this concept is completely foreign to many Africans, where nothing happens by chance or act of God:

The classic study of witchcraft in Africa occurred among the Azande, who inhabit the eastern edge of the Central African Republic. The anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard found that the Azande attributed a staggering range of misfortunes—infected toes, collapsed granary roofs, even bad weather—to meddling by witches.

Nothing happened by chance, only as an effect of spell-casting by a wicked interloper. That sentiment remains widespread among Central Africans, who demand that the law reflect the influence of witchcraft as they understand it.

Although Wood’s piece on the law of witchcraft in the Central African Republic is short, it is packed full of observations simply begging for further investigation.  There is so much going on beneath the surface that it is difficult to know where to begin.

Why is there such enormous pressure to confess in witchcraft cases?  Why are there so many cases to begin with?  Why are most defendants from the lower classes?  How does the law of witchcraft ease social tensions?

These questions aside, there is the vexing matter of proof:

“The problem is that in a witchcraft case, there is usually no evidence,” said Bartolomé Goroth, a lawyer in Bangui, who recently defended (unsuccessfully) a coven of Pygmies who had been accused of murder-by-witchcraft in Mbaiki. Goroth said the trials generally ended with an admission of guilt by an accused witch in exchange for a modest sentence.

I asked how one determined guilt in cases where the alleged witches denied the charges. “The judge will look at them and see if they act like witches,” Goroth said, specifying that “acting like a witch” entailed behaving “strangely” or “nervously” in court. His principal advice to clients, he said, was to act normally and refrain from casting any spells in the courtroom.

This procedure has its own strange parallels in American law, and attorneys provide similar kinds of assistance, though it is usually couched in different terms.  More on that some other day.

They are gathered to learn about America and the Constitution from Arizona judge Lester Pearce, but the “secret” history being taught is incredibly odd:

[W]e have to learn the basic truth about the Constitution: God wrote it. It comes directly from the government instituted by Moses when he led the Children of Israel out of Egypt. That system was re-instituted in England around 450 A.D. by the Anglo-Saxon rulers Hengist and Horsa. The Founding Fathers, led by Thomas Jefferson, copied the Constitution directly from the “ancient constitution” of the Anglo-Saxons.

At this point a faint alarm bell should be ringing….But the louder alarm should come from maps and displays in the materials that suggest, without quite saying, that the Anglo-Saxons were in fact the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. On page 20 of our workbook, a map shows an arrow marked “Northern Tribes of Israel,” running from Palestine to the Caucasus region.

That arrow stops in 721 B.C.; another arrow begins at the same place at the same time: “Migration of Celts, Angli, Sacki, etc.” It stretches to Northern Europe and then to England. NCCS Founder W. Cleon Skousen’s big textbook, The Making of America, says that “many have thought the Yinglings, or Anglo-Saxons, included a branch of the ancient Israelites because they came from the territory of the Black Sea . . . and because they preserved the same unique institutes of government as those which were given to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. But whether related or not, there is certainly irrefutable evidence of a cross-fertilization of laws and cultural values between these two peoples.”

Lurking behind these words is the idea that the Constitution is not only a religious document, but a tribal one–written by one kind of people, white Anglo-Saxons, and enshrining their superiority. The Constitution is “ours”; immigrants, non-Christians, Jews, Presidents with funny names are here in “our” country by “our” sufferance, and the time has come to take “our” country back. None of this is quite said; but it hangs in the air. “The divisions are going to become greater and greater,” Lester Pearce warns the students at Our Savior’s Way.

This is the best argument I have yet seen for required anthropology courses at the high school and college level.  Garrett must have been squirming throughout the hours long lesson, with his own alarm bells ringing at full tilt.