The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World. - book reviews

The futile superficiality of dissecting contemporary religious movements along the lines of "left wing" and "right wing," terms largely borrowed from American political reporting, may not survive the publication of the French best seller, La Revanche de Dieu. Gilles Kepel, a renowned French scholar of contemporary Islam, reminds us that by 1980, in the very land where the inexorable progress of the Enlightenment and secularism had seemed most secure, all three candidates for the American presidency, though separated by profound political differences, were publicly professing their allegiance to Evangelical Christianity. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and John Anderson would not have employed Kepel's exact language but all three were attempting to tap into the massive popular discontent with certain aspects of secularism and the Enlightenment legacy. Though it was little noticed at the time and is still barely comprehended today, Kepel masterfully documents how this discontent with the values and ideology of secularism, far from confined to American culture, was rampant among peoples in lands as disparate as Egypt, Algeria, Italy, and the Jewish populations of the occupied territories.

Two years before the 1980 American election, Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Krakow, had been elected to the papacy. A year after the campaign, Anwar Sadat would be assassinated by Islamic radicals bent on the restoration of Islam iD a secularized Egypt. Major credit for the victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 would be assigned to the emergence of evangelical Christians as a political force in the United States. By 1980, Israel's Likud government was utilizing strongly biblical arguments for its claim over the occupied territories as part of the historical Land of Israel (Eretz Israel).

Kepel persuasively demonstrates that, by the end of the '70s, major elements in all three of the monotheistic religions, concurrently but not in concert, recognized the spent force of secularism as a compelling worldview. Plumbing the depths of their own scriptural traditions, dissenting groups set out to create new societies that would reflect their religious visions. In Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Catholic church played a significant role in the demise of communism. But, Kepel reminds us, it was a revived Islam, in Egypt and elsewhere, that first drove back the ideology of Marxism. Using a resurgent Islam as a prism for viewing religion in the modern world, Kepel argues that for Westerners "A detour via the experience of something culturally far removed from us has the advantage of overturning mental laziness and illusion of familiarity...." This view of ourselves from another culture will at first seem congenial to academic proponents of multiculturalism and foes of Western hegemony. Most, however, will not want to follow Kepel very far in his assertions about the resurgence of religion or the bankruptcy of secularism. Yet it is on these two points that Kepel builds his most startling and provocative claims, calling into question our basic assumptions about religion and modernity.

Beginning in the last century, a tide of modernization began to influence the three Abrahamic religions. Each sought an accommodation with the ongoing process of secularization. But around 1975, Kepel maintains, "this whole process went into reverse." The emergence of new religious leaders in the late 1970s, including the election of Karol Wojtyla in 1978, came at a time of widespread confusion and dissatisfaction with the results of the Enlightenment. New leaders along with new religious movements "aimed no longer at adapting to secular values but at recovering a sacred foundation for the organization of society--by changing society if necessary .... The theme was no longer aggiornamento but a |second evangelization of Europe'; the aim was no longer to modernize Islam but to |Islamisize modemity.'"

The break with the Enlightenment occurred in very distinct and usually unrelated ways in the three Abrahamic traditions. Still, Kepel discovers two substantial affinities in all three. First, unlike many religious revivals of the past, these new movements are most successful in attracting the allegiance of very well educated and technologically proficient young people. The Islamic revival, Catholic movements like Communion and Liberation, the evangelical awakening among American Protestants, and the upsurge of Orthodox Judaism have had their greatest success among younger people. These young people reject the overall results of modernity yet use modem technological methods in the cause of religious renewal.

How do these technologically advanced believers remain so unaffected by modernity? How do they finesse their immersion in the seemingly antagonistic worlds of secular technology and religious faith? What do young American evangelists and young Islamic activists really have in common? Unfortunately, Kepel does not adequately grapple with these contradictions.

Second, in America and Europe, these religious movements have retreated from public engagement and regrouped after a series of failures to secure popular electoral majorities for their programs. In the United States, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority has withdrawn from explicit political activity. In Europe, similar Catholic political efforts failed in the electoral politics of Italy and Poland. In Israel, the religious parties have succeeded only in attaining some legislative veto power. And in Islamic societies, the absence of democracy or of a tradition of separation between church" and state led Islamic activists to oppose the incursion of modem, Western influences. Only Iran offers an example of some success, but obviously at a very high cost. In all three traditions, there has been a subsequent embrace of what Kepel describes as a strategy "from below," seeking to establish a religious underpinning for the whole society by focusing attention on the more immediate, local, and personal experiences of people. Thus in the U.S. the battleground for religious activists has shifted largely from the national scene to local school boards, abortion clinics, and family life.

Although Catholicism and the papacy of John Paul 11 are not the exclusive focus of his work, Kepel offers John Paul as a premier example of a religious leader who intuitively understands the bankruptcy of secularism, not only in his native Eastern Europe but even more importantly in the dominant Western cultures. According to Kepel, John Paul, who as a young Polish bishop participated in the Second Vatican Council, understands the council as the vehicle for retrieving the sources of Christian revelation as the basis for reforming society. Similarly, Cardinals Joseph Ratzinger and Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris both view the twentieth-century horrors of Hitler and Stalin as the natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment project of enthroning a mechanistic rationalism in the place of God and religious absolutes.

Certainly it is true that John Paul, Ratzinger, and Lustiger have formulated bold critiques of the Enlightenment. Yet all three also speak well of religious liberty, societal pluralism, and democracy. Kepel is finally not persuasive that John Paul's views represent a complete break with the Enlightenment tradition. Contemporary Catholicism's complicated and nuanced relationship with the modem world is, I would suggest, more adequately explained by sociologist Peter Berger's model of cognitive bargaining." Nonetheless, Kepel's fundamental argument that current Catholic leaders are not enthralled by the Enlightenment legacy is doubtless true and also helps to explain the hostility the church often encounters among secular elites.

The Revenge of God will induce horror among those who are determined to relegate all religion to a purely private and innocuous realm. For those Christians, Jews, and Moslems who understand religion as having a public and societal relevance, Kepel's work will provoke a profound rethinking of many common assumptions about religion and society.

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