But the End of the Beginning: on the Centenary of the End of the Great War

More than five years ago now, I noted that the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was already occasioning a slew of new books from publishers. Without in any way pretending to be an historian of that conflict in all its complexity, I have nonetheless read a great deal for many years now, some of it connected with lectures I gave on the centenary of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides of 1915 at the hands of the Ottomans. I am convinced, as many other historians are, that the First World War shaped everything that came after it, and shapes us still. The person who has argued this most persuasively--at least among those I have read--is the Cambridge historian David Reynolds, particularly in the book, The Long Shadow, which I noted here.

In anticipation of today's anniversary of the end of the fighting, I recently finished a book that has been out for some time: Joseph Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax (Random House, 2004). It's a not bad book, though its format takes some getting used to as the author jumps back and forth, sketching individual characters or units on 11 November 1918 and then earlier in the war to see where they were, how they changed, and whether they survived to the end or not.

A just-released book also focuses on this particular day: Guy Cuthbertson, Peace at Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day 1918 (Yale UP, 2018), 304pp. I look forward to reading it.

One of the men in Persico's book, as he is of course in myriad others, is General Haig, a man for whom it is almost impossible to have any sympathy. (I have, I suppose, been influenced in my judgment by the ferocious attack on British army leaders in The Donkeys by Alan Clark--he of the uproarious diaries.) Haig is featured in a new study released this spring by Jonathan Boff, Haig's Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany's War on the Western Front (OUP, 2018).

Boff's book is featured in the history catalogue sent to me in October from Oxford University Press. In it they are featuring a number of new and forthcoming books connected to the end of the war.

Coming out early next year is Owen Davies, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War (OUP, 2019), 304pp. About this book the publisher tells us the following:

It was a commonly expressed view during the First World War that the conflict had seen a major revival of "superstitious" beliefs and practices.

Churches expressed concerns about the wearing of talismans and amulets, the international press paid considerable interest to the pronouncements of astrologers and prophets, and the authorities in several countries periodically clamped down on fortune tellers and mediums due to concerns over their effect on public morale. Out on the battlefields, soldiers of all nations sought to protect themselves through magical and religious rituals, and, on the home front, people sought out psychics and occult practitioners for news of the fate of their distant loved ones or communication with their spirits. Even away from concerns about the war, suspected witches continued to be abused and people continued to resort to magic and magical practitioners for personal protection, love, and success.

Uncovering and examining beliefs, practices, and contemporary opinions regarding the role of the supernatural in the war years, Owen Davies explores the broader issues regarding early twentieth-century society in the West, the psychology of the supernatural during wartime, and the extent to which the war cast a spotlight on the widespread continuation of popular belief in magic. A Supernatural War reveals the surprising stories of extraordinary people in a world caught up with the promise of occult powers.

Davies' book immediately puts me in mind of a similar study, that of Phillip Jenkins' The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, which was published in 2014. It is a fascinating book I have often recommended to others and returned to many times, not least for its insight that Catholics, so hysterical about some apparent happenings in some obscure Portuguese village, were far from alone in claiming divine apparitions: it was a game that everybody got in on, with French atheists in foxholes claiming visions of their dead comrades in arms; Russian Orthodox peasants claiming divine visions; staid German Lutherans and English Anglicans also had their own supposed apparitions; and even Muslims were also claiming to have had visions.

Another book just out this month will also disabuse us of common assumptions today about the supposed origins of "fake news" under Trump. Au contraire, as Gill Bennett suggests in The Zinoviev Letter: the Conspiracy that Never Dies. About this book Oxford tells us this:

This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance nearly a century after it was written: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if genuine it was probably Soviet fake news. Despite this, the Letter still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was written, the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and cropping up in the media as recently as during the Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election.

The Letter, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a "Red Scare" in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. 

The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call "fake news". But it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.

When the war ended, the armistice was of course signed at Versailles. That treaty is the subject of a recent Oxford UP book by Michael Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History. I look forward to reading it in due course.

But Versailles was preceded by half a year of hard slogging among various powers in Paris. That process was covered by the superlative and unsurpassable book by  Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. which I have read three times with delight. It has justly won several awards.

The End of the Endless Great War

Almost five years ago now, I noted that we were gearing up for the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, which was already in 2013 occasioning a steady publication of new books, which only accelerated in the following year. For general histories, see the link at the top. For a specifically theological analysis of the war, I noted here Philip Jenkins' surprising, almost shocking, book on the war as a holy war.

And now, as this interesting photo array at The Atlantic reminds me, we are coming upon the centenary of the end of the war. 

The war may have ended nearly a century ago now, but as the always-fascinating Cambridge historian David Reynolds has shown, that war has had very long shadows. Eastern Christians are aware of that only too well, living in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its genocides against Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christians.

As we come to the centenary of the end of the war, and then to the abysmal legacy of the peace conference afterwards, I draw your attention once more to a splendid book by the Anglo-Canadian historian (and great grand-daughter of David Lloyd George) Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. 

This book tells a complicated story with great insight and panache. She allows the major characters--especially Clemenceau, George, and Wilson--to come alive alongside an equally fascinating set of other leaders in Paris--e.g., the Greek prime minister Venizelos, various minor Romanian royals, and others. And the sarcastic comments made by Clemenceau against George and Wilson are revealing and hilarious in about equal measure--and far from undeserved. It is a fascinating history sure to delight.

If She Was Silent, Why are Her Followers So Gruesomely Garrulous?

As we move further into 2017, we must be prepared for a likely avalanche of apocalyptic emoting about Fatima as the centenary of that concatenation draws near. Already pestilential agitators are seeking to use the anniversary year as a pretext for what, more than six years ago, I called "Marian Mischief Making." Let us have no more of that. They have no arguments for sane or serious people, and they would do nothing but harm.

Among the many things that could be said about the supposed goings on at Fatima, perhaps the first point is contextual: war (and the rumour of war, and the aftermath of war) brings out an hysterical-apocalyptical complex in just about everybody. This point is abundantly illustrated in a book I have previously noted on here: Philip Jenkins' The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade.

Jenkins, a widely published and respected historian, makes two points in this book that would be equally shocking to most Christians today: the first pertains to the gung-ho enthusiasm for the war, and the bloodthirsty language one heard from pulpits of every tradition (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim) and in every country, each insistent that God was blessing their side and going to smite their enemies. Libido dominandi was the order of the day, not the soft pacifism on the cheap one so often finds on the lips of prelates, preachers, and people today.

The second was equally ecumenical: everybody was claiming visions of some sort--French atheists in foxholes claiming visions of their dead comrades in arms; Russian Orthodox peasants claiming divine visions; staid German Lutherans and English Anglicans got in on the act with their own supposed apparitions; and even Muslims were also claiming to have had visions! So the Roman Catholic visions that supposedly manifested themselves at Fatima were entirely unsurprising and just one of many during the Great War. All these others quickly faded.

Why Fatima did not fade but took off raises all sorts of questions:

1. How is it that she who silently pondered in her heart (cf. Luke 2:19) the staggering Incarnation via her womb would suddenly become garrulous 19 centuries later in predicting the depredations of Russia? Why then, and why Russia? Why not 1914 in attempting to avert war? Or why not later, in predicting the rise of Hitler? (Cf. q. 4 below.)
2. How can such a focus on Russia be seen and interpreted in anything other than the context of geopolitics at the time, in which context one must include Western hostility to Bolshevism, longstanding hysteria (recently revived in our own day) about Russia (even to the extent that two ostensibly Christian powers--England and France--would side with a Muslim empire against her in the Crimean war), and Catholic hostility to "schismatic" Orthodoxy, above all in Russia? 
3. How could she who is portrayed so often iconographically as the hodegetria, the pointer of the way to Christ, suddenly develop a taste for narcissistic and repetitive demands for devotion to be pointed to herself and, especially--bizarrely--her "Immaculate Heart"? Devotionally this seems very close to fetishism.
4. How, if Fatima did indeed consist of "prophetic" messages foretelling future disasters, was a Jewish woman apparently so anxious about as-yet unseen Russian dangers, but would see and say nothing about the impending Shoah? 
5. How can we not see Fatima in any other context than that of the mounting personality cult surrounding the papacy, so amply documented by eminent historians such as Eamon Duffy (himself a Catholic) and Owen Chadwick? How, that is, can 1917 be interpreted without recourse to the 1854 definition of Pius IX, the 1870 definition of papal infallibility, and continuing on through other so-called apparitions from the 19th century? Can the papal-centric rhetoric in Fatima (and all the hysteria surrounding the supposed "third secret") be interpreted without regard for this novel ecclesiology of which it is a part? 
6. How much damage to its own credibility did the papacy inflict on itself by tendentiously dragging Fatima through the 20th century, dangling prospects of the revelation of the "third secret," before dashing all that to the ground in the year 2000 with a conveniently retroactive rubbishing of the whole thing: 

Insofar as individual events are described, they belong to the past. Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed. Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith in general cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity. What remains was already evident when we began our reflections on the text of the “secret”: the exhortation to prayer as the path of “salvation for souls” and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion.  

If this is all that Fatima is--just a convenient reminder to pray, fast, do penance, and convert to the gospel of Jesus Christ--then it is of course entirely unobjectionable. But in too many hands for too long it was turned into a spectacle, almost a fetish, and wrapped up in a gauze of apocalypticism. Let 2017 pass without any more commentary. It edifies nobody.  

How Foreign a Country is the Past? How Can We Access it Without Abuse?

I have been having a lot of fun this summer doing a course with my students on ISIS and the Crusades. Those who read ISIS propaganda, especially their slick but tiresome magazine Dabiq, or watch their videos, as I have with studied if horrified fascination for several years now, will note how ritualistically, how constantly, and (of course) how tendentiously they invoke "the Crusades" or the "Crusaders" to justify their various atrocities--whether beheading Japanese hostages, immolating Jordanian pilots, or decapitating, drowning, or torturing many others whose background so obviously precludes them from ever having had any connection whatsoever to the Crusades as historical events rather than ciphers for current iniquities. So this has been a course in historiography as much as in studying the Crusades.

Along the way, my students have found enormously profitable the reading of two books that treat the uses and abuses of history in general, and then the uses and abuses of Crusade history in particular. In the first instance, we have Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, which is short and accessible, but full of the lucid erudition that marks MacMillan's other wonderful books, especially Paris 1919 and The War that Ended Peace: the Road to 1914.

Then we have turned our attention to the doyen of Crusades scholars, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and his short but equally accessible book The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. Re-reading this nearly a decade after it came out and before ISIS was really commanding the attention it does, is an interesting experience in itself, perhaps especially for Riley-Smith's last chapter in which he shows that a good deal of the responsibility for the problematic "re-remembering" of the "Crusades" by Muslims in the last several decades comes at the hands of Christians, especially French Catholics and German Lutherans, who wanted, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to revive the Crusades as examples of Christian glory in conquest. So by no means do Christians have clean hands in the competition to use and abuse history.

I find it striking, however, that the language of glory and conquest which many Christians used as recently as a century ago is now regarded by almost all Christians with abject horror. This was true not just in revisionist accounts of the Crusades, but in the rhetoric leading up to, and all throughout, the First World War. Philip Jenkins, as I noted on here a while ago, is especially useful in his book  The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade in showing how profoundly bloodthirsty Christian preachers were--whether in Westminster Abbey, First Presbyterian in Boston, Trinity Lutheran in Berlin, St. Basil's in the Kremlin, Notre Dame in Paris, or a thousand other pulpits of all traditions. Everybody was invoking God to crush their enemies, and using chilling rhetoric to demonize their (fellow Christian) enemies. Find me even three preachers today in an Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Orthodox pulpit who are willing to say such things even in the mildest terms--to suggest God wants them to smite their enemies. Indeed, for most Christians the language of enemies is itself reprobated and incomprehensible.

Instead, in 2016, we find discussions among Catholics and other Christians about even revising or eliminating altogether the tradition of a "just war," thereby testifying to how far Christians, in barely a century, have changed their assessments of the morality of violence, lethal force, and war. My operative assumption here is that a good deal of that re-assessment has had little if anything to do with theological considerations rationally worked out. Rather, most of it is a reaction-formation, steeped in guilt, to the horrors of the First and then the Second World Wars, and then a ritualized invocation of "War no more!" (as several popes have said at the UN in the last 50 years) which is little more than a species of wish-fulfillment.

All this leads me to mention a recently released revised edition of a book which, a quarter-century ago, became an almost instant classic: David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge UP, 2015), 676pp.

About this book we are told:

The past remains essential – and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

Christians and the Great War

I have finished one of the most interesting and satisfying studies of the Great War, viz., Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (Harper Collins, 2014).

Jenkins is one of the leading historical scholars of our time, author of such earlier works as:

• The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died
• The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity 
• Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis.

Jenkins writes with great care and insight, sympathetic to those he is describing without ever crossing over into outright advocacy or an unduly politicized reading of events.

I hope to post a longer review of this excellent book in the coming days, but for now, let me warmly recommend it to those interested not just in the Great War, but also in the dramatic changes in Christianity in the West from 1914 to the present. Reading the reactions of many pastors and hierarchs, as well as the behavior of soldiers in the trenches, it seems the war took place not just a century ago, but a millennium, and on a different planet, too. 

100 Years Ago Today....

As you've no doubt heard by now, today is the centenary of the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his consort in Sarajevo, the event that, through twists and turns, led to the greatest catastrophe of the last century, World War I. I write only to draw your interest to the many books I discussed nearly a year ago now, in anticipation of this sad centenary. I've had a chance to read many of the new ones mentioned last year, and commend them to your interest, especially McMeekin's book, which really turns on its head a lot of the received mythology about the causes of the outbreak of the war. In addition, as you would expect from so fine an historian, Philip Jenkins new book, noted here, is an outstanding and near-singular work, wholly welcome to Eastern Christians especially.

I'm working my way through another book right now, from the Cambridge historian David Reynolds: The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (Norton, 2014), 544pp.

This is a fascinating study of the differing perceptions of the war in different countries. Reynolds notes that the Anglo-American view differs considerably from, of course, the Austrian, German, and Russian views, inter alia, to say nothing of the French. It is a finely detailed study offering a wide survey of views from around the world.

Reynolds, of course, is the author of numerous other studies, including his immensely interesting and enjoyable book In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War which was a study of how Churchill wrote his six-volume history-cum-memoir-cum-political-manifesto about the Second World War. In lesser hands a book about the writing of another book (six of them actually) could be a leaden and deadly thing to read, but this is a wonderfully written tale and, surprisingly (given the vast and endless stream of books about Churchill) one of the few studies (until recently) of The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor--as well, of course, as Noble-prize winning historian manqué . 

Religious Aspects of the Great War

The historian Philip Jenkins, author of a number of books of interest, has a new book coming out in May on--what else in this centenary year?--World War I. His book, however, takes a directly theological angle, as evidenced by the title: The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (HarperOne, 2014), 448pp.

About this book we are told:

On the centennial of the outbreak of World War I, historian and religious expert Philip Jenkins delivers a groundbreaking and controversial look at the hidden religious motivations that sparked the conflict and reveals how it reshaped religion for the next century. The Great and Holy War presents a new theory of religious change—mirroring the biological theory of punctuated equilibrium in which long periods of stability are interrupted by a sudden, cataclysmic event—showing how the years of the First World War, 1914-1918, constituted a worldwide spiritual revolution that created the world’s religious map as we know it today.

Throughout history, secular disasters—wars and natural catastrophes—have ignited influential new movements, fundamental shifts in religious consciousness, fervent revivalism and awakenings, and apocalyptic expectation. As Jenkins connects numerous remarkable incidents and characters, from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, he creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as never before and shows how religion informed and motivated circumstances on all sides of the war. As it illuminates the dramatic changes initiated by the First World War, The Great and Holy War offers fresh and much-needed insight into the religious, political, and cultural climate that gave rise to the devastation of 1914-1918. Illustrated with 40-50 black-and-white images throughout.

Given my abiding interest in military history in general, and the Great War in particular, I look forward to reading this book later in the spring.

Muslim and Christian Violence

There is a certain tedious regularity to some people who, when confronted with the latest of myriad examples of violence committed in the name of Islam, resort to a knee-jerk "What about Christians shooting abortion doctors?" or "Yes, but what about the Christians and the Crusades," about which of course almost everyone today is maddeningly ignorant. This overlooks many things, not least that individual Christians who commit gratuitous violence today are always vanishingly small in number and always do so in clear violation of the example given by Christ Himself who  unequivocally rebukes those who use violence in His defense, famously saying that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword (Matt. 26:52; cf. Luke 22:49-51). 

The same, of course, cannot be said of Mohammad, whose own life precisely refuses to separate the things of "Caesar" from those of God, and who himself took up the sword in vicious, bloody, and lethal military campaigns against his enemies, which are credibly and amply documented. His example remains influential (some Muslims call him the "perfect man") in shaping the views and, worse, the behavior of some Muslims today. The point in mentioning all this is not to exonerate one tradition at the expense of another, or to exaggerate or whitewash the offenses of either, but only to say that the two track-records are vastly different and any responsible telling by serious scholars must acknowledge this. The archbishop of Canterbury has not responded--and will not respond--to Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh's monstrous and demonic fatwa by demanding the destruction of all British mosques; the pope of Rome has not called--and will not call--on the Italian government or Roman Catholics to blow up all the mosques in Rome and the Italian peninsula; the patriarch of Moscow has not called--and will not call--on Russian Orthodox Christians or the Russian government to destroy the houses of worship of Russia's largest minority religion, Islam. And the reason none of them would countenance violence is because doing so would be direct and obvious disobedience to Christ. 

This raises an interesting question: does the media's willingness to react so swiftly and often simplistically to Christian violence, and to take such absurd pains to downplay or dismiss Muslim violence (e.g., the obfuscation around the religion of the Toulouse murderer of four Jews last month) reflect the fact that the media knows--but will not admit--that violence is supposed to be an anomaly for Christians, but also knows--and perforce will not admit--that violence is a justifiable commonplace for many Muslims? Several new books take up these questions. For Muslims, Jeffry Halverson's forthcoming volume looks promising: Searching for a King: Muslim Nonviolence and the Future of Islam (Potomac Books, August 2012), 192pp. 

About this book we are told:

At a time when violent images of the Muslim world dominate our headlines, Western audiences are growing increasingly interested in a different picture of Islam, specifically the idea of Muslim nonviolence, and what it could mean for the world. But is nonviolence compatible with the teachings of Islam? Is it practical to suggest that Muslim societies must adopt nonviolence to thrive in today’s world? Where is the Muslim equivalent of a Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.? Searching for a King offers a comprehensive look into Islamic conceptions of nonviolence, its modern champions, and their readings of Islam’s sacred texts, including the Qur’an and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Jeffry R. Halverson asserts that the foundation for nonviolence in Islam already exists. He points to the exemplary lives and teachings of modern Muslim champions of nonviolence, little known in the Western world. Using rich historical narratives and data from leading international agencies, he also makes the case that by eliminating the high costs of warfare, nonviolence opens the door to such important complementary initiatives as microfinancing and women’s education programs. Ultimately, Halverson endorses Muslim champions of nonviolence and argues for the formulation of a nonviolent version of jihad as an active mode of social transformation.

On the Christian side, we have two new books looking at violence in Christian Scriptures. The first is a collection: Pieter G.R. de Villiers and Jan Willem van Henten, eds.,  Coping With Violence in the New Testament (Brill, 2012), 305pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Violence is present in the very heart of religion and its sacred traditions – also of Christianity and the Bible. The problem, however, is not only that violence is ingrained in the mere existence of religions with their sacred traditions. It is equally problematic to realise that the icy grip of violence on the sacred has gone unnoticed and unchallenged for a very long time. The present publication aims to contribute to the recent scholarly debate about the interconnections between violence and monotheistic religions by analysing the role of violence in the New Testament as well as by offering some hermeneutical perspectives on violence as it is articulated in the earliest Christian writings.

A second recent book has also taken a look at this problem: Philip Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses (HarperOne, 2011), 320pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions—all are in the Bible, and all occur with a far greater frequency than in the Qur’an. But fanaticism is no more hard-wired in Christianity than it is in Islam. In Laying Down the Sword, “one of America’s best scholars of religion” (The Economist) explores how religions grow past their bloody origins, and delivers a fearless examination of the most violent verses of the Bible and an urgent call to read them anew in pursuit of a richer, more genuine faith.

Christians cannot engage with neighbors and critics of other traditions—nor enjoy the deepest, most mature embodiment of their own faith—until they confront the texts of terror in their heritage. Philip Jenkins identifies the “holy amnesia” that, while allowing scriptural religions to grow and adapt, has demanded a nearly wholesale suppression of the Bible’s most aggressive passages, leaving them dangerously dormant for extremists to revive in times of conflict. Jenkins lays bare the whole Bible, without compromise or apology, and equips us with tools for reading even the most unsettling texts, from the slaughter of the Canaanites to the alarming rhetoric of the book of Revelation.

Laying Down the Sword presents a vital framework for understanding both the Bible and the Qur’an, gives Westerners a credible basis for interaction and dialogue with Islam, and delivers a powerful model for how a faith can grow from terror to mercy.

Jenkins, it should be noted, is not your typical academic drone eager to slag Christianity while cravenly running from the slightest critical word about Islam. He is a highly acclaimed historian who, in some of his previous works, has shown himself an astute defender of Christians as in, e.g., his 2004 book from Oxford University Press, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, a study made all the more remarkable for the fact that its author is not a Catholic himself. 

He has also offered one of the most perceptive accounts I have seen of the shifting centre of gravity within Christianity in his 2002 book (updated in a third edition in September 2011), The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. 

Finally, mention must also be made of his 2009 book God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis, a book that I found useful not least because it introduces some important and welcome nuances into recent discussions about a supposed demographic "take-over" by ostensibly burgeoning Muslim populations in Western Europe, especially France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. 

Jenkins shows that the picture is rather more complicated than some of the more apocalyptic writings of certain figures (e.g., Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West) have led us to believe, and the demographic data are not as inexorable as some may assume. Nevertheless, for all that, Jenkins does paint a disturbing picture of a European Christianity in sharp decline, and that in itself is more than enough to worry about quite apart from Islam. 

Philip Jenkins and Jesus

Philip Jenkins is a prolific fellow whose recent historical work has done much to "popularize" Christian history in general, and to bring attention to parts of the Church that both historically and currently have not always figured prominently in the Western imagination of Christianity and of Christian history. Thus his

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died


did much to make better known how far Eastern Christianity penetrated into Asia along the Silk Road as well as into Africa before it gradually began, for a variety of reasons, to contract and in many cases to be almost entirely extinguished.


Jenkins has also done important and impressive earlier work, including a book on the future of Christianity in the "global south."


Additionally, his book Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis is one of the sanest treatments of the topic I have seen, especially considering it was written by a non-Catholic. Even more impressive on that score was his excoriation of anti-Catholicism in the media and American culture at large.

Now we have another book from him with the provocative title

Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 years

I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies next year.