‘Patience in tribulation, offering the other cheek, praying for one’s enemies, loving those who hate us’: such were the Christian virtues as defined by Anselm. All derived from the recorded sayings of Jesus himself. No Christians, then, not even the most callous or unheeding, could ignore them without some measure of reproof from their consciences. That the Son of God, born of a woman, and sentenced to the death of a slave, had perished unrecognised by his judges, was a reflection fit to give pause to even the haughtiest monarch. This awareness, enshrined as it was in the very heart of medieval Christianity, could not help but lodge in its consciousness a visceral and momentous suspicion: that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’

ANTIQUITY

If God was omnipotent, then so too was he all-just. These were twin convictions that the Jews, no matter the patent tension between them, had come to enshrine as the very essence of their understanding of the divine.

Never before had such incongruities been so momentously combined within a single deity: power and intimacy, menace and compassion, omniscience and solicitude. And this god – all-powerful, all-good, who ruled the entire world, and upheld the harmony of the cosmos – was the god who had chosen for his especial favour the Jews. Helpless before the might of Rome’s legions though they might be, unable to prevent a conqueror from intruding upon even their holiest shrine, a people with no prospect of ever winning global rule, they had this consolation: the certitude that their God was indeed the one, the only Lord.

The Lord God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, had granted to the Children of Israel a momentous and unprecedented honour: a covenant. No other people had so much as contemplated that such a thing might be possible. Gods served to witness treaties, after all – not to enter into one themselves. Who were mortals, to imagine that they might contract an alliance with a deity? Only the Jews had dared entertain such a novel, such a blasphemous conceit. That they had entered into an accord with the Lord God provided the foundation-stone of their entire understanding of the divine. It was the Covenant, written on the tablets borne by Moses, that the Ark had been built to contain; it was the Covenant, reverently placed in the Holy of Holies, that lay at the heart of the Temple raised by Solomon. Nor, even after the ruin visited on Jerusalem by the Babylonians, had the treaty between the Lord God and His Chosen People been rendered void. The terms of it endured. The Jewish scriptures, edited and re-edited in the centuries that followed the disappearance of the Ark, had been compiled in large part to enshrine them. Every Jew who studied it renewed the Covenant in his heart.

His manner of teaching, though, was nothing like that of a philosopher. Those who paraded their virtue, and condemned the faults of others, he dismissed as painted tombs heaving with maggots and corruption. The standards of virtue he preached – to love one’s enemy, to abandon all one’s worldly goods – were so demanding as to seem impossible to meet. He was peculiarly tender with sinners. He dined with Jews who violated the law and talked beside wells with adulterers. He had a genius for simile. The kingdom of God was like a mustard seed; it was like the world as seen through the eyes of a child; it was like yeast in dough. Again and again, in the stories that Jesus loved to tell, in his parables, the plot was as likely to be drawn from the world of the humble as it was from that of the wealthy or the wise: from the world of swineherds, servants, sowers. And yet, for all that, they had an eerie quality. Repeatedly, the familiar was rendered strange. Seed falling among thorns; a lost sheep; bridesmaids waiting for a wedding to start: all, in Jesus’ teaching, shed a haunting light on the purposes of God. Yet nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever before been portrayed in literature. The measure of this was that Christians, when they read the gospels, were able to believe that the man whose life they depicted, a man whom they described as weeping, sweating and bleeding, a man whose death they vividly and unsparingly related, had indeed been what Paul claimed him to be: ‘the Son of God’.

A momentous discovery was being put into effect: that to be a victim might be a source of strength. Turn on their heads the guiding assumptions of the Roman authorities, and submission might be redefined as triumph, degradation as glory, death as life.

The willingness of Christians to embrace excruciating tortures – which to those who sentenced them could only appear as lunacy – was founded on an awesome conviction: that their Saviour was by their side. More than the temples and the fields for which the antique heroes of Rome had been willing to sacrifice themselves, Christ’s presence was something real. He was there in the arena, as once he had been nailed to the cross. To emulate his sufferings was to impose a meaning on the blankness and inscrutability of death.

How, when Christians accorded Jesus a status that was somehow divine, could they possibly claim to worship only the single god? Greek philosophers no less than Jewish scholars, when they deigned to take note of the upstart faith, would relentlessly home in on this point. The challenge could not be ducked. The struggle, then, was to find an adequate way of expressing a mystery that seemed to defy expression. It was not just Jesus who had to be integrated into the oneness of God, but his Spirit as well. The solution, by the time Origen came to this puzzle, was already clear in its outline. The unity of God came, not in spite of his Son and Spirit, but through them. One was Three; Three were One. God was a Trinity.

It was Origen, though, more comprehensively and more brilliantly than anyone before him, who drew on the resources of philosophy to fashion for the Church an entire theologia: a science of God. The language he used to explore the paradoxes of the divine was deployed in the full knowledge of the uses to which it had long previously been put by a Xenocrates or a Zeno.

CHRISTENDOM

The rhythms of life and death, and of the cycle of the year, proved no less adaptable to the purposes of the Anglo-Saxon Church. So it was that hel, the pagan underworld, where all the dead were believed to dwell, became, in the writings of monks, the abode of the damned; and so it was too that Eostre, the festival of the spring, which Bede had speculated might derive from a goddess, gave its name to the holiest Christian feast-day of all. Hell and Easter: the garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout. Only because the gods had been toppled from their thrones, melted utterly by the light of Christ, or else banished to where monsters stalked, in fens or on lonely hills, could their allure safely be put to Christian ends. The victory of the new was adorned with the trophies of the old.

Increasingly, in the depths of the Frankish countryside, there was no aspect of existence that Christian teaching did not touch. Whether drawing up a charter, or tending a sick cow, or advising on where best to dig a well, rare was the priest who did not serve his flock as the ultimate fount of knowledge. The rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, repeated daily across the Frankish empire and beyond, in the kingdoms of Britain, and Ireland, and Spain, spoke of a Christian people becoming ever more Christian. The turning of the year, the tilling, the sowing, the reaping, and the passage of human life, from birth to death – all now lay in the charge of Christ. As generation succeeded generation, so the teachings of priests to labourers in the fields, and to expectant mothers, and to old men and women on their deathbeds, and to children mouthing their first prayers, came to seem ever more set on foundations that transcended time. Christian order could proclaim itself eternal, and be believed.

Battle was the ultimate testing-ground of a god’s authority. Not only that, but the rewards of suing for terms from Christ were evident. To accept baptism was to win entry into a commonwealth of realms defined by their antiquity, their sophistication and their wealth. From Scandinavia to central Europe, pagan warlords began to contemplate the same possibility: that the surest path to profiting from the Christian world might not be to tear it to pieces, but rather to be woven into its fabric.

Priests had to be virginal, like monks. ‘To pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’: such was Gregory’s mission. Never before had a pope made the foundations of the Christian world tremor so palpably.

For too long the rival dimensions of earthly appetites and commitment to Christ, of corruption and purity, of saecularia and religio, had been intermixed. Such pollution could not be permitted to continue. Bishops were servants of God alone, or they were nothing. Church had to be freed from state.

No longer would it be monasteries and nunneries alone that stood separate from the flux of the saeculum, but the entire Church. Bishops who pledged themselves to the radicalism of this vision could reassure themselves that it was in reality nothing new, nothing out of tune with the teachings of their Saviour. In the gospels, after all, it was recorded that Jesus, approached by questioners looking to trip him up, had been asked whether it was permitted to pay taxes to pagan Rome. Telling them to show him a coin, he had asked them whose image was stamped on it. ‘Caesar’s,’ they had replied. ‘Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ Jesus had answered, ‘and to God what is God’s.’ Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the ‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’. A decisive moment.

A model of reformatio had triumphed that, reverberating down the centuries, would come to shake many a monarchy, and prompt many a visionary to dream that society might be born anew. The earthquake would reach very far, and the aftershocks be many. The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution.

The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and all churches’, gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’. Emperors and kings, although they might try to take a stand against it, would repeatedly find themselves left bruised by the attempt.

For decades, a succession of popes had been labouring to enhance the legal resources available in the fight against heresy. Impatient with a tradition that had always tended to emphasise charity over persecution, they had introduced an escalating battery of punitive measures. In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution. Now, in 1231, there came a fresh refinement. A new pope, Gregory IX, authorised Conrad not merely to preach against heresy, but to devote himself to the search for it – the inquisitio. No longer was it the responsibility of a bishop to bring heretics to trial, and sit in judgement on them, but rather that of a cleric especially appointed to the task. Even though, as a priest, Conrad could not himself ‘decree or pronounce a sentence involving the shedding of blood’, he was licensed by Gregory to compel the secular authorities to impose it. Never before had power of this order been given to a campaigner against heresy. Now, when Conrad rode on his mule from village to village, summoning the locals to answer his interrogation of their beliefs, he did so not merely as a preacher, but as a whole new breed of official: an inquisitor.

To those who read him in the decades that followed his death, Aquinas seemed like a voice from the radiance of heaven. To Christians long fearful of heresy he offered a double reassurance: that the teachings of the Church were true; and that the light of that truth was manifest even in dimensions that might seem to threaten it. Aristotle was not the only philosopher cited by Aquinas in his great work. There were other pagans too; there were even Saracens and Jews. His readiness to acknowledge them as authorities was a sign, not of any cultural cringe, but of the opposite: an absolute confidence that wisdom was Christian, no matter where it might be found. Reason was a gift from God. Everybody possessed it. The Ten Commandments served not as prescriptions, but as reminders to humanity of what it already knew. They were manifest in the very fabric of the universe. The love of God for his creation was the centre of a circle, to which all parts of the circumference stand in an equal relation. ‘So orderly has everything been fashioned which wheels through mind and space that to contemplate its harmony is to taste of Him.’

Theologians who justified the masculinity of the priesthood by pointing out that neither Jesus nor any of his apostles had been women could cite an authority even older than the gospels. ‘The female,’ Aristotle had written, ‘is, as it were, an inadequate male.’ Just as the great philosopher had provided inquisitors with a model of how to conduct an interrogation, so had his writings on biology swung the immense weight of his prestige behind a perspective on female inferiority that many clerics were all too ready to embrace. Steeled as they were to see in their own virginity the proof of an almost angelic fortitude, they found in the model of physiology taught by the ancients confirmation of all their darkest, their most festering fears. Women oozed; they bled; like bogs at their most treacherous, they were wet, and soft, and swallowed up men entire. Increasingly, wherever Aristotle was taught, Eve’s daughters were being measured by standards that were less biblical than Greek. Women, physically the weaker sex and formed by nature for pregnancies, could never be reckoned the equals of men.

The virgin mother who had redeemed the fault of Eve, the mortal who had conceived within her uterus the timeless infinitude of the divine, Mary could embody for even the humblest and most unlettered peasant all the numerous paradoxes that lay at the heart of the Christian faith. It needed no years of study in a university, no familiarity with the works of Aristotle, to comprehend the devotion that a mother might feel to her son. Perhaps this was why, the more that scholars laboured to elucidate in vast and intimidating works of theology the subtleties of God’s purpose, fusing revelation and logic in profound and learned ways, so the more, in works of art, were Mary and her son portrayed as joined in simple joy. So too, in scenes of Christ’s death, was the Virgin increasingly represented as the equal in suffering and dignity of her son. No longer was the gaze of the Queen of Heaven as serene as once it had been. Emotions common to all were being rendered that much more Christian. Enshrined at the very heart of the great mysteries elucidated by Christianity, of birth and death, of happiness and suffering, of communion and loss, was the love of a woman for her child.

A sexual order rooted in the assumption that any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferiors, to use the orifices of a slave or a prostitute to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal, had been ended. Paul’s insistence that the body of every human being was a holy vessel had triumphed. Instincts taken for granted by the Romans had been recast as sin. Generations of monks and bishops, of emperors and kings, looking to tame the violent currents of human desire, had laboured to erect great dams and dykes, to redirect their flood-tide, to channel their flow. Never before had an attempt to recalibrate sexual morality been attempted on such a scale. Never before had one enjoyed such total success.

Here, in this sacral understanding of marriage, was another marker of the revolution that Christianity had brought to the erotic. The insistence of scripture that a man and a woman, whenever they took to the marital bed, were joined as Christ and his Church were joined, becoming one flesh, gave to both a rare dignity. If the wife was instructed to submit to her husband, then so equally was the husband instructed to be faithful to his wife. Here, by the standards of the age into which Christianity had been born, was an obligation that demanded an almost heroic degree of self-denial. That Roman law – unlike the Talmud, and unlike the customs of most other ancient peoples – defined marriage as a monogamous institution had not for a moment meant that it required men to display life-long fidelity. Husbands had enjoyed a legal right to divorce – and, of course, to forcing themselves on their inferiors – pretty much as they pleased. This was why, in its long and arduous struggle to trammel the sexual appetites of Christians, the Church had made marriage the particular focus of its attentions. The double standards that for so long had been a feature of marital ethics had come to be sternly patrolled. Joined together under the watchful eye of Christ, men were commanded to be as faithful to their wives as their wives were to them. Divorce – except in the very rarest of circumstances – was prohibited. To cast off a wife was to ‘render her an adulteress’. So Jesus himself had declared. The bonds of a Christian marriage, mutual and indissoluble as they were, served to join man and woman together as they had never been joined before.

It was consent, not coercion, that constituted the only proper foundation of a marriage. The Church, by pledging itself to this conviction, and putting it into law, was treading on the toes of patriarchs everywhere. Here was a development pregnant with implications for the future. Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love. Inexorably, the rights of the individual were coming to trump those of family. God’s authority was being identified, not with the venerable authority of a father to impose his will on his children, but with an altogether more subversive principle: freedom of choice.

The Church, in its determination to place married couples, and not ambitious patriarchs, at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins. Only relationships sanctioned by canons were classed as legitimate. No families were permitted to be joined in marriage except for those licensed by the Church: ‘in-laws’. The hold of clans, as a result, had begun to slip. Ties between kin had progressively weakened. Households had shrunk. The fabric of Christendom had come to possess a thoroughly distinctive weave. Husbands, wives, children: it was these, in the heartlands of the Latin West, that were increasingly coming to count as family.

Luther had come to believe that true reformatio would be impossible without consigning canons, papal decrees and Aquinas’ philosophy to the flames. Then, in the wake of his meeting with the cardinal, he had come to an even more subversive conclusion. It was not enough merely to renovate the fabric of the Church: to fix its abuses, to clean up its scandals. Its very architecture was rotten through. The whole structure needed to be condemned, demolished.

Even at its very best, the Roman Church was a perversion of what Christianity should properly be. Far from bringing the Christian people closer to God, it had seduced them into paganism and idolatry.

Luther’s summons was to all the Christian people. For centuries, priests had been deceiving them. The founding claim of the order promoted by Gregory VII, that the clergy were an order of men radically distinct from the laity, was a swindle and a blasphemy. ‘A Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all, and subject to none.’ So Luther had declared a month before his excommunication, in a pamphlet that he had pointedly sent to the pope. ‘A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’ The ceremonies of the Church could not redeem men and women from hell, for it was only God who possessed that power. A priest who laid claim to it by virtue of his celibacy was playing a confidence trick on both his congregation and himself. So lost were mortals to sin that nothing they did, no displays of charity, no mortifications of the flesh, no pilgrimages to gawp at relics, could possibly save them. Only divine love could do that. Salvation was not a reward. Salvation was a gift.

Luther, precisely because he scorned to think of himself as a lawyer, took for granted much of what, over the course of long centuries, had been achieved by the very legal scholars whose books he had so publicly burned. Rulers who embraced Luther’s programme of reformatio had little option but to do the same. Anxious to govern their subjects in a correctly Christian manner, they settled on a simple expedient: to appropriate large portions of canon law and make it their own. The result was not to dissolve the great division between the realms of the profane and the sacred that had characterised Christendom since the age of Gregory VII, but to entrench it. Rulers inspired by Luther, laying claim to an exclusive authority over their subjects, were able to set about designing a model of the state that no longer ceded any sovereignty to Rome. Meanwhile, in the privacy of their souls, true Christians had lost nothing. In place of canon lawyers, they now had God. Subject though they might be to a newly muscular understanding of the secular, liberty was theirs in a parallel dimension: the one dimension that truly mattered. Only those who opened their hearts to the gift of divine grace, to a direct communion with the Almighty, could feel themselves truly free. No longer was it the religiones – the monks, the friars, the nuns – who had religio. All believers had it – even those who, lacking Latin and speaking only German, might call it ‘religion’.

A century on from Luther, Protestants could cast themselves as the heirs of a revolution that had transformed Christendom utterly. No longer merely a staging post in a lengthy process of reformatio, it was commemorated instead as an episode as unique as it had been convulsive: as the Reformation. It had been, in the opinion of its admirers, a liberation of humanity from ignorance as well as error. Once, when the world had been lost to darkness, there had been no limit to the stories of marvels and wonders that Christians had greedily swallowed; but then, ‘when the mist began to clear up, they grew to be esteemed but as old wives’ fables, impostures of the clergy, illusions of spirits, and badges of Antichrist’. If God was to be found in the interior experience of individual believers, then so also could he be apprehended in the immensity and complexity of the cosmos. The truest miracles needed no popery to be rendered miraculous.

MODERNITAS

It was Calvin himself who had proposed that true obedience to God should be grounded in liberty. Spinoza, when he pushed the case for toleration, was participating in a debate that had always been fundamental to Protestantism. This did not mean, however, that he saw himself as bounded by it. Quite the opposite. Spinoza’s ambition was to demonstrate that to quarrel at all over religion, let alone to fight over it, was idiocy. By profession a lens grinder, fine-tuning glasses for both telescopes and microscopes, he knew what it was to hone an instrument that could reveal wonders invisible to the naked eye. Spinoza beheld the cosmos, not as a Christian, still less as a Jew, but as a philosopher. Rather than pick at the Gordian knot of theology, he sought instead to cut directly through it. Already, by 1662, rumours of his shocking opinions had begun to swirl around Amsterdam. Spinoza, it was reported, believed every substance to be infinite, and incapable of producing another. That being so, there could exist only a single substance. God was ‘nothing other than the whole universe’. He did not exist beyond the laws that governed the cosmos, and which generations of natural philosophers had committed themselves to identifying: he was those laws. Abelard, declaring that ‘everything that originates without miracles can be adequately accounted for’, had spoken more truly than he had ever imagined. Miracles did not exist. They were an impossibility. There was only nature, and all God’s decrees, all his commandments, all his providence, were in truth only nature’s order. No less than Calvin, Spinoza saw the destiny of every human being as irrevocably preordained. God, though, was no divine judge. He was geometry. ‘For all things follow from God’s eternal decree with the same necessity as from the essence of a triangle it follows that its three angles are equal to two right angles.’

Whether in Edinburgh or in Naples, in Philadelphia or in Berlin, the men most celebrated for their genius were increasingly those who equated churches with bigotry. To be a philosophe was to thrill to the possibility that a new age of freedom was advancing. The demons of superstition and unwarranted privilege were being cast out. People that had been walking in darkness had seen a great light. The world was being born again. Voltaire himself, in his more sombre moments, worried that the malign hold of priestcraft might never be loosened; but in general he inclined to a cheerier take. His age was a siècle des lumières: ‘an age of enlightenment’.

Ever since the time of Luther, attempts by Christians to repair the torn fabric of Christendom had served only to shred it further. The charges that Voltaire levelled against Christianity – that it was bigoted, that it was superstitious, that its scriptures were rife with contradictions – were none of them original to him. All had been honed, over the course of two centuries and more, by pious Christians. Voltaire’s God, like the Quakers’, like the Collegiants’, like Spinoza’s, was a deity whose contempt for sectarian wrangling owed everything to sectarian wrangling. ‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, that is the very foolish daughter of a wise and intelligent mother.’ Voltaire’s dream of a brotherhood of man, even as it cast Christianity as something fractious, parochial, murderous, could not help but betray its Christian roots.

The roots of Christianity stretched too deep, too thick, coiled too implacably around the foundations of everything that constituted the fabric of France, gripped too tightly its venerable and massive stonework, to be pulled up with any ease. In a realm long hailed as the eldest daughter of the Church, the ambition of setting the world on a new order, of purging it of superstition, of redeeming it from tyranny, could hardly help but be shot through with Christian assumptions. The dreams of the philosophes were both novel and not novel in the slightest. Many before them had laboured to redeem humanity from darkness: Luther, Gregory VII, Paul. Christians, right from the very beginning, had been counting down the hours to an upheaval in the affairs of the earth. ‘The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.’

That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic – no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think – was the book of Genesis. The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation.

The Middle Ages had been a breeding ground of superstition, and that was that. Unsurprisingly, then, there was much enthusiasm among Jacobins for the customs and manners that had existed prior to the triumph of Christianity. The role played by the early Church in the imaginings of the Reformation was played in the imaginings of the French Revolution by classical Greece and Rome. Festivals designed to celebrate the dawning of the new age drew their inspiration from antique temples and statuary; the names of saints vanished from streets in Paris, to be replaced by those of Athenian philosophers; revolutionary leaders modelled themselves obsessively on Cicero. Even when the French Republic, mimicking the sombre course of Roman history, succumbed to military dictatorship, the new regime continued to plunder the dressing-up box of classical antiquity. Its armies followed eagles to victories across Europe. Its victories were commemorated in Paris on a colossal triumphal arch. Its leader, a general of luminescent genius named Napoleon, affected the laurel wreath of a Caesar. The Church meanwhile – grudgingly tolerated by an emperor who had invited the pope to his coronation, but then refused to be crowned by him – functioned effectively as a department of state. Salt was rubbed into the wound when a saint named Napoleon was manufactured in honour of the emperor, and given his own public fête. Augustus would no doubt have approved.

Progress, that venerable Christian ideal that Abelard had cherished and Milton hymned, was no less a fantasy for having provided revolution with its battle-cry. In 1814, eleven years after Sade’s incarceration in a lunatic asylum, the monarchy was restored to France. Napoleon, whose ambitions had shaken thrones across Europe, was exiled to an island off Italy. Aristocrats returned to Paris. That September, when foreign ministers arrived in Vienna to negotiate a new balance of power in Europe, there was no wild talk of a brotherhood of man. Too many doors that should have been kept locked had been prised open. It was time to close them again, and slide the bolts across.

On 8 February 1815, eight powers in Europe signed up to a momentous declaration. Slavery, it stated, was ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’. The language of evangelical Protestantism was fused with that of the French Revolution. Napoleon, slipping his place of exile three weeks after the declaration had been signed, and looking to rally international support for his return, had no hesitation in proclaiming his support for the declaration. That June, in the great battle outside Brussels that terminally ended his ambitions, both sides were agreed that slavery, as an institution, was an abomination.

The irony was one that neither Protestants nor atheists cared to dwell upon: that an age of enlightenment and revolution had served to establish as international law a principle that derived from the depths of the Catholic past. Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights that Europe would proclaim its values to the world.

In ancient Greece, the story had been told of a robber named Procrustes, who, after inviting a guest to lie down on a bed, would then rack his limbs or amputate them, as required to ensure a trim fit. It was in a very similar spirit that British scholars, confronted by all the manifold riches, complexities and ambivalences of Indian civilisation, set to shaping out of them something that might be recognisable as a religion. Inevitably, there was much stretching and editing of definitions.

Hindus who used words such as religion, or secular, or Hinduism were not merely displaying their fluency in English. They were also adopting a new and alien perspective on their country, and turning it to their advantage. Evangelicals were not alone in opposing the immolation of widows. There were Hindus who opposed it as well. For centuries, praise of the sati had alternated with forthright condemnation. A thousand years and more before the self-immolation of Ambabai, a Hindu poet had denounced deaths such as hers as ‘a mere freak of madness, a path of ignorance’. The British conviction that there existed in India a religion named Hinduism, comparable to Christianity, complete with orthodoxies and ancient scriptures, provided Hindus fluent in English with the perfect opportunity to shape what this religion should look like. Brahmins, because of their reputation for learning, enjoyed a particular advantage.

That there existed a religion called Hinduism, and that it functioned in a dimension distinct from entire spheres of human activity – spheres called ‘secular’ in English – was not a conviction native to the subcontinent. Instead, it was distinctively Protestant. That, though, would not prevent it from proving perhaps the most successful of all British imports to India. In time, indeed – when, after two centuries, Britain’s rule was brought at last to an end, and India emerged to independence – it would do so as a self-proclaimed secular nation. A country did not need to become Christian, it turned out, to start seeing itself through Christian eyes.

The days of an independent Jewish state were long gone. In place of Israel, Jews now had Judaism. This word – Christian invention that it was – was one that they had never thought to use until the prospect of emancipation began to glimmer before them. Pressed by Protestant theologians to accept a status for Jewish law as something merely private and ceremonial, they were being pressed to accept something more: that they belonged not to a nation, but to a religion.

The great claim of what, in 1846, an English newspaper editor first termed ‘secularism’ was to neutrality. Yet this was a conceit. Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. That there existed twin dimensions, the secular and the religious, was an assumption that reached back centuries beyond the Reformation: to Gregory VII, and to Columbanus, and to Augustine. The concept of secularism – for all that it was promoted by the editor who invented the word as an antidote to religion – testified not to Christianity’s decline, but to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution.

British abolitionists knew better than to trumpet their sense of Protestant mission too loudly. Slavery was widespread, after all, and had made many in Portugal, Spain and France exceedingly rich. A campaign against the practice could never hope to be truly international without the backing of Catholic powers.

The result was an entire apparatus of law – complete with treaties and international courts – that made a virtue out of merging both Protestant and Catholic traditions. In 1842, when an American diplomat defined the slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’, the term was one calculated to be acceptable to lawyers of all Christian denominations – and none. Slavery, which only decades previously had been taken almost universally for granted, was now redefined as evidence of savagery and backwardness. To oppose it was to side with progress. To support it was to stand condemned before the bar, not just of Christianity, but of every religion.

Here, perhaps, lay the ultimate demonstration of just how effective the attempt by Protestant abolitionists to render their campaign universal had become. A cause that, only a century earlier, had been the preserve of a few crankish Quakers had come to spread far and wide like the rushing wildfire of the Spirit. It did not need missionaries to promote evangelical doctrines around the world. Lawyers and ambassadors might achieve it even more effectively: for they did it, in the main, by stealth. A crime against humanity was bound to have far more resonance beyond the limits of the Christian world than a crime against Christ. A crusade, it turned out, might be more effective for keeping the cross well out of sight.

All of which promised great advantage to the empire that had first launched it. The British had not begun their campaign to stamp out the slave trade in any mood of cynicism. At odds with their immediate interests, both geopolitical and economic, it was also extremely expensive. Nevertheless, the more the tide of global opinion turned against slavery, so the more the prestige of the nation that had first recanted it was inevitably burnished.

Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilisation, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set Homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration.

Here, then, lay a striking paradox. Although the concept of science, as it emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, was defined by men who assumed it to be the very opposite of novel, something timeless and universal, this was conceit of a very familiar kind. Science, precisely because it was cast as religion’s doppelgänger, inevitably bore the ghostly stamp of Europe’s Christian past.

In cool and dispassionate language, Krafft-Ebing put the seal on a revolution in the dimensions of the erotic that was without parallel in history. Paul, by twinning men who slept with men and women who slept with women, had set in train a recalibration of the sexual order that now, in an age of science, attained its apotheosis. ‘Homosexuality’ was not the only medical-sounding compound of Greek and Latin to which Psychopathia Sexualis introduced the world. There was a second: ‘heterosexuality’. All the other categories of sexual behaviour that Krafft-Ebing had identified – sadism, masochism, fetishistic obsessions – were mere variations of the one great and fundamental divide: that which existed between heterosexual and homosexual desire. Categories that had taken almost two millennia to evolve were now impregnably defined. Soon enough, the peoples of Europe and America would forget that they had ever not been there. Exported by missionaries and embedded within colonial legal systems across the world, a way of conceptualising desire that had originated with an itinerant Jew back in the reign of Nero would come to enjoy a global sway. In the sexual order as in so much else, the roots of modernity reached deep into Christian soil.

When Carnegie’s family had travelled to America from Scotland they had brought with them, just as the Pilgrim Fathers had once done, the knowledge that regeneration did not come easily to fallen humanity. A man had to live in obedience to his calling. Only if he laboured as though everything were dependent on his own exertions would reward then come from God. Carnegie, even if he doubted the existence of a deity, never doubted that his efforts to enrich himself brought with them a stern responsibility. John Winthrop, sailing to the New World, had warned what calamity might follow were he and his fellow settlers ‘to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for our selves and our posterity’. Carnegie, two centuries on and more, was shadowed by the same anxiety. A thoughtful man, he declared, would as soon leave his son a curse as a dollar. The article in which he wrote this had a pointed title: ‘The Gospel of Wealth’. Charity was only pointless if it failed to help the poor to help themselves. ‘The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise.’ It was in obedience to this maxim that Carnegie, having spent his career making fabulous amounts of money, devoted his retirement to spending it. For all that he believed in helping the poor to become rich, rather than – in ‘imitation of the life of Christ’ – living in poverty himself, he was recognisably an heir of Paulinus. Parks, libraries, schools, endowments to promote the cause of world peace: Carnegie funded them all. Self-aggrandising though these gestures might be, they were not primarily self-interested. The concern they showed to improve the lives of others was one of which John Winthrop would surely have approved.

‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution as it applies to organic matter, so Marx discovered the law of evolution as it applies to human history.’ Communists could be certain of their cause, not because it was moral, or just, or written – as Marx himself had mockingly put it – ‘in vaporous clouds in the heavens’, but because it was scientifically proven. For years he had sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum, crunching the numbers and analysing the data that had enabled him to identify, at last, the inexorable and unconscious forces that shape human history. Once, in the beginning, man and woman had lived in a condition of primitive equality; but then there had been a fall. Different classes had emerged. Exploitation had become the norm. The struggle between the rich and the poor had been relentless: an unforgiving tale of greed and acquisition. Now, under the blood-stained reign of capital, in the era of plutocrats like Carnegie, it had become pitiless as never before. Workers were reduced to machines. Marx, sixty years previously, had foretold it all: what the clamouring, hammering genius of capitalism had revealed. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’ In the great, the climactic convulsion of the class struggle that, since the very dawn of civilisation, had determined history’s course, there could be only one possible outcome. Capitalists like Andrew Carnegie were the grave-diggers of their own class. It was capitalism itself that would give birth to the classless society.

Naturally, now that Marx had succeeded in providing a scientific basis for the processes of history, there was no need for God. To believe in a deity was, for any human being, to exist in a condition of humiliating dependence. Religion, like opium, lulled its addicts into a condition of soporific passivity, numbing them with fantasies of providence and an afterlife. It was, as it had always been, merely a cipher of the exploitative classes. Marx, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a Lutheran convert, dismissed both Judaism and Christianity as ‘stages in the development of the human mind – different snake skins cast off by history, and man as the snake who cast them off’. An exile from the Rhineland, expelled from a succession of European capitals for mocking the religiosity of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he had arrived in London with personal experience of the uses to which religion might be put by autocrats. Far from amplifying the voices of the suffering, it was a tool of oppression, employed to stifle and muzzle protest. The ambitions of Christianity to change the world, its claims to have done so, were delusions. ‘Epiphenomena’, Marx termed them: mere bubbles thrown up on the heaving surface of things by the immense currents of production and exchange. The ideals, the teachings, the visions of Christianity: none had independence from the material forces that had generated them. To imagine that they might in any way have influenced the processes of history was to slumber indeed in an opium den. Now that Marx had issued his wake-up call, there could be no possible excuse for remaining addicted to such a baneful narcotic. The questions of morality and justice that for so long had obsessed Christians were superseded. Science had rendered them superfluous. Marx had pondered the workings of capitalism as a man unclouded by moral prejudices. Not so much as an incense-hint of the epiphenomenal clung to his writings. All his evaluations, all his predictions, derived from observable laws. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ Here was a slogan with the clarity of a scientific formula. Except, of course, that it was no such thing. Its line of descent was evident to anyone familiar with the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had need.’ Repeatedly throughout Christian history, the communism practised by the earliest Church had served radicals as their inspiration. Marx, when he dismissed questions of morality and justice as epiphenomena, was concealing the true germ of his revolt against capitalism behind jargon. A beard, he had once joked, was something ‘without which no prophet can succeed’. Famously hirsute himself, he had spoken more truly, perhaps, than he knew. Dispassion was a tone that – despite his efforts – he found impossible to maintain. The revulsion that he so patently felt at the miseries of artisans evicted by their landlords to starve on the streets, of children aged before their years by toiling night and day in factories, of labourers worked to death in distant colonies so that the bourgeoisie might have sugar in their tea, made a mockery of his claims to have outgrown moral judgements. Marx’s interpretation of the world appeared fuelled by certainties that had no obvious source in his model of economics. They rose instead from profounder depths. Again and again, the magma flow of his indignation would force itself through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose. For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil. Communism was a ‘spectre’: a thing of awful and potent spirit. Just as demons had once haunted Origen, so the workings of capitalism haunted Marx. ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ This was not the language of a man emancipated from epiphenomena. The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class struggle – ‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’, ‘avarice’ – owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it.

Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’ Enthusiasts for the Enlightenment, self-proclaimed rationalists who imagined that men and women possessed inherent rights, Nietzsche regarded with contempt. It was not from reason that their doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith that they believed themselves – in their conceit – to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead – but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. For centuries, perhaps, it would linger. Christianity had reigned for two millennia. It could not easily be banished. Its myths would long endure. They were certainly no less mythical for casting themselves as secular. ‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith. ‘To devise something which could even approach the seductive, intoxicating, anaesthetising, and corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross”, that horrific paradox of the “crucified God”, that mystery of an inconceivably ultimate, most extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion undertaken for the salvation of mankind?’ Like Paul, Nietzsche knew it to be a scandal. Unlike Paul, he found it repellent. The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them – the strong and the healthy, the beautiful and the brave, the powerful and the self-assured – that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth. ‘Helping and caring for others, being of use to others, constantly excites a sense of power.’ Charity, in Christendom, had become a means to dominate. Yet Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Its ideals of compassion and equality before God were bred not of love, but of hatred: a hatred of the deepest and most sublime order, one that had transformed the very character of morality, a hatred the like of which had never before been seen on earth. This was the revolution that Paul – ‘that hate-obsessed false-coiner’ – had set in motion. The weak had conquered the strong; the slaves had vanquished their masters.

Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly proclaimed his movement to be Christian, had come to regard Christianity with active hostility. Its morality, its concern for the weak, he had always viewed as cowardly and shameful. Now that he was in power, he recognised in the claim of the Church to a sphere distinct from the state – that venerable inheritance from the Gregorian revolution – a direct challenge to the totalitarian mission of National Socialism.

The churches had had their day. The new order, if it were to endure for a millennium, would require a new order of man. It would require Übermenschen. By 1937, then, Hitler had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all.

Christians, confronted by a regime committed to the repudiation of the most fundamental tenets of their faith – the oneness of the human race, the obligation of care for the weak and the suffering – had a choice to make. Did the Church, as a pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer had put it as early as 1933, have ‘an unconditional obligation towards the victims of any social order, even where those victims do not belong to the Christian community’ – or did it not? Bonhoeffer’s own answer to that question would see him conspire against Hitler’s life, and end up being hanged in a concentration camp. There were many other Christians too who passed the test. Some spoke out publicly. Others, more clandestinely, did what they could to shelter their Jewish neighbours, in cellars and attics, in the full awareness that to do so was to risk their own lives. Church leaders, torn between speaking with the voice of prophecy against crimes almost beyond their comprehension and a dread that to do so might risk the very future of Christianity, walked an impossible tightrope.

Yet there were many Christians too, seduced by evil, who entered into the realm of shadow. The Nazis, when they portrayed Jews as a pestilence, simultaneously backward and over-educated, verminous and smoothly plausible, were not, of course, weaving their propaganda out of nothing. The myths that they drew upon were Christian myths. Biologists who deployed the rational formulations of science to identify Jews as a virus were drawing as well upon stereotypes that reached back ultimately to the gospels. ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’ That the Jews had willingly accepted responsibility for the death of Christ was a doctrine that repeatedly, over the course of Christian history, had seen them condemned as agents of the Devil.

‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.’ Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history, had warned what confusions were bound to follow from the death of God. Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated. Even committed Nietzscheans might flinch before their discovery of what this meant in practice.

Conservatives, when they charged their opponents with breaking biblical commandments, had the heft of two thousand years of Christian tradition behind them; but so too, when they pressed for gender equality or gay rights, did liberals. Their immediate model and inspiration was, after all, a Baptist preacher. ‘There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible. Ambivalences that came to roil Western society in the 1970s had always been perfectly manifest in the letters of Paul. Writing to the Corinthians, the apostle had pronounced that man was the head of woman; writing to the Galatians, he had exulted that there was no man or woman in Christ. Balancing his stern condemnation of same-sex relationships had been his rapturous praise of love. Raised a Pharisee, learned in the Law of Moses, he had come to proclaim the primacy of conscience. The knowledge of what constituted a just society was written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts. Love, and do as you will. It was – as the entire course of Christian history so vividly demonstrated – a formula for revolution.

The ending of apartheid and the election in 1994 of Mandela as South Africa’s first black president was one of the great dramas of Christian history: a drama woven through with deliberate echoes of the gospels. Without protagonists long familiar with the script they had been given to speak, it could not possibly have succeeded. ‘When confession is made, then those of us who have been wronged must say “We forgive you.”’ Had de Klerk not known that Tutu was bound to say this, then perhaps he would never have dared trust his people’s fate to the readiness of black South Africans to pardon them their sins. The same faith that had inspired Afrikaners to imagine themselves a chosen people was also, in the long run, what had doomed their supremacy. The pattern was a familiar one. Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a universal import.

With the rout of communism, it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Hindu, or Confucian, or Muslim. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived.

Germany remained, in its assumptions about how a society should best be structured, profoundly and distinctively Christian. As in the nineteenth century, when Jews had won citizenship of Prussia, Muslims who wished to integrate into German society had no choice but to become practitioners of that decidedly Christian concept: a ‘religion’. Islam – which traditionally had signified to those who practised it merely the activity of submission – had to be moulded, and twisted, and transmuted into something very different. This was not, of course, a process that had begun in 2015. For a century and a half, ever since the heyday of European colonialism, it had been picking up speed. Its progress could be measured by the number of Muslims across the world brought to accept that laws authored by humans might trump those authored by God; that Muhammad’s mission had been religious rather than political; that the relationship of worshippers to their faith was, in its essentials, something private and personal. Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belonged in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences.

Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on ‘the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man’ was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context. In Europe, the secular had for so long been secularised that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just that bit more Christian. Merkel, welcoming Muslims to Germany, was inviting them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam.

Only those who believed in the foundation myths of secularism – that it had emerged as though from a virgin birth, that it owed nothing to Christianity, that it was neutral between all religions – could possibly have believed that they were. In January 2015, after two gunmen had forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices and shot dead twelve of the staff, Muslim sensitivities were repeatedly weighed in the balance by a bewildered and frightened public, and found wanting. Why the murderous over-reaction to a few cartoons? Why, when Catholics had again and again demonstrated themselves capable of swallowing blasphemies directed against their faith, could Muslims not do the same? Was it not time for Islam to grow up and enter the modern world, just as Christianity had done? Yet to ask these questions was, of course, to buy into the core conceit of secularism: that all religions were essentially the same. It was to assume that they were bound, much like butterflies, to replicate an identical life cycle: reformation, enlightenment, decline. Above all, it was to ignore the degree to which the tradition of secularism upheld by Charlie Hebdo, far from an emancipation from Christianity, was indelibly a product of it. Three days after the shootings, as world leaders marched alongside millions of demonstrators through the heart of Paris, placards declared solidarity with the murdered journalists: ‘Je suis Charlie’. As a spectacle, it was a powerful demonstration of what had become the West’s guiding orthodoxy: one that had been millennia in the evolving. Back in the age of Otto, there had been no settling in Christendom for pagan chieftains without baptism. Now, in the age of Charlie Hebdo, Europe had new expectations, new identities, new ideals. None, though, was neutral; none was anything other than the fruit of Christian history. To imagine otherwise, to imagine that the values of secularism might indeed be timeless, was – ironically enough – the surest evidence of just how deeply Christian they were.

The divisions satirised by The Handmaid’s Tale were in truth very ancient. They derived ultimately, not from the specifics of American politics in the twenty-first century, but from the very womb of Christianity. Blessed be the fruit. There had always existed, in the hearts of the Christian people, a tension between the demands of tradition and the claims of progress, between the prerogatives of authority and the longing for reformation, between the letter and the spirit of the law. The twenty-first century marked, in that sense, no radical break with what had gone before. That the great battles in America’s culture war were being fought between Christians and those who had emancipated themselves from Christianity was a conceit that both sides had an interest in promoting. It was no less of a myth for that. In reality, Evangelicals and progressives were both recognisably bred of the same matrix. If opponents of abortion were the heirs of Macrina, who had toured the rubbish tips of Cappadocia looking for abandoned infants to rescue, then those who argued against them were likewise drawing on a deeply rooted Christian supposition: that every woman’s body was her own, and to be respected as such by every man. Supporters of gay marriage were quite as influenced by the Church’s enthusiasm for monogamous fidelity as those against it were by biblical condemnations of men who slept with men. To install transgender toilets might indeed seem an affront to the Lord God, who had created male and female; but to refuse kindness to the persecuted was to offend against the most fundamental teachings of Christ. In a country as saturated in Christian assumptions as the United States, there could be no escaping their influence – even for those who imagined that they had. America’s culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.

The tracks of Christian theology, Nietzsche had complained, wound everywhere. In the early twenty-first century, they led – as they had done in earlier ages – in various and criss-crossing directions. They led towards TV stations on which televangelists preached the headship of men over women; and they led as well towards gender studies departments, in which Christianity was condemned for heteronormative marginalisation of LGBTQIA+. Nietzsche had foretold it all. God might be dead, but his shadow, immense and dreadful, continued to flicker even as his corpse lay cold. Feminist academics were no less in thrall to it, no less its acolytes, than were the most fire-breathing preachers. God could not be eluded simply by refusing to believe in his existence. Any condemnation of Christianity as patriarchal and repressive derived from a framework of values that was itself utterly Christian. ‘The measure of a man’s compassion for the lowly and the suffering comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul.’ It was this, the epochal lesson taught by Jesus’ death on the cross, that Nietzsche had always most despised about Christianity. Two thousand years on, and the discovery made by Christ’s earliest followers – that to be a victim might be a source of power – could bring out millions onto the streets. Wealth and rank, in Trump’s America, were not the only indices of status. So too were their opposites. Against the priapic thrust of towers fitted with gold-plated lifts, the organisers of the Women’s March sought to invoke the authority of those who lay at the bottom of the pile. The last were to be first, and the first were to be last. Yet how to measure who ranked as the last and the first? As they had ever done, all the multiple intersections of power, all the various dimensions of stratification in society, served to marginalise some more than others. Women marching to demand equality with men always had to remember – if they were wealthy, if they were educated, if they were white – that there were many among them whose oppression was greater by far than their own: ‘Black women, indigenous women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women.’ The disadvantaged too might boast their own hierarchy.

Christianity, it seemed, had no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish. Whether this was an illusion, or whether the power held by victims over their victimisers would survive the myth that had given it birth, only time would tell. As it was, the retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values. Quite the contrary. Even in Europe – a continent with churches far emptier than those in the United States – the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion. Had it been otherwise, then no one would ever have got woke.

‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species. To insist otherwise is to cling to the shattered fragments of religious belief. Yet the implications of this view – which the Nazis, of course, claimed as their sanction for genocide – remain unsettling for many. Just as Nietzsche had foretold, free-thinkers who mock the very idea of a god as a dead thing, a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still piously hold to taboos and morals that derive from Christianity. In 2002, in Amsterdam, the World Humanist Congress affirmed ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others’. Yet this – despite humanists’ stated ambition to provide ‘an alternative to dogmatic religion’ – was nothing if not itself a statement of belief. Himmler, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity. The humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together was just that: an assumption. Without the biblical story that God had created humanity in his own image to draw upon, the reverence of humanists for their own species risked seeming mawkish and shallow. What basis – other than mere sentimentality – was there to argue for it? Perhaps, as the humanist manifesto declared, through ‘the application of the methods of science’. Yet this was barely any less of a myth than Genesis. As in the days of Darwin and Huxley, so in the twenty-first century, the ambition of agnostics to translate values ‘into facts that can be scientifically understood’ was a fantasy. It derived not from the viability of such a project, but from medieval theology. It was not truth that science offered moralists, but a mirror. Racists identified it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism – ‘that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others’ – found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.