If your neighbour worships twenty gods: a note on biblical law and religious toleration

Christians are used to seeing secular society - whose institutions favour no particular faith - as a dire threat. To John Piper, for example, '[t]he modern secular world... tries to remove God from his all-creating, all- sustaining, all-defining, all-governing place [and] has no choice but to make itself god'. In other words, a secular society is blasphemous by definition. Against this conservative appraisal, I'll suggest secularism is most fruitfully understood not as a menace destroying western civilisation from within, but as a blessing longed for by those who did not enjoy it, made possible by Jesus' death on the cross.

At the same time, I'll argue that the liberal understanding of secularism is ahistorical and impossible to square with biblical evidence. Here, for example, is the excellent blogger Fred Clark, arguing against the US Catholic bishops' attempt to stop contraceptive services for women:

'It does me no injury,' Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' The advocates of burka-logic [sic] disagree. They insist that the very presence of such irreligious neighbors does them an injury - the injury of constraining their freedom to live unperturbed by the constant reminder of such blasphemies.

This quintessentially liberal argument - my neighbour's religious predilections do me no harm, so I have no business constraining him - cannot survive an encounter with the God of the Old Testament. At Sinai God makes a covenant is with Israel as a community to ensure correct religious observance and moral behaviour in the land (Deuteronomy 1:1-14). The Mosaic Law does not offer any room for religious toleration. Indeed the Israelites are explicitly commanded to destroy all traces of Canaanite paganism if they wish to enjoy the land (Deuteronomy 12:1-4).

Contrary to Jefferson, under Old Testament law my neighbour's heterodox religious observance does pick my pocket and break my leg. The Religious Right's notion of 'individual responsibility' is quite absent in the Bible. God repeatedly threatens to punish people for sins they have not themselves committed, 'visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation' (Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9, and many more). Positively, God considers whole communities more kindly on account of a few righteous people (Genesis 18:22-32, Romans 11:28).

The insistence that Israel is judged as a whole for the actions committed in its midst rather than as individuals is perhaps best encapsulated by Deuteronomy 21:1-9:

If in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. And the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has never been worked and that has not pulled in a yoke. And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither ploughed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley. Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come forward... And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, o LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for.' So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD.

Here the murderer is unknown and unidentifiable, but the nearest settlement is required to offer a sacrifice in atonement for the sin committed lest it be visited upon their heads. The action, not the acting subject, is the primary term. Nor does the Bible consider the motives of offenders. Distinguishing murder from accidental killings, for example, is an innovation of the ninth century, when earnest scholars attempted to settle matters humanius (more humanely) than the often harsh Church Fathers. (So much, incidentally, for the notion that a concern for human welfare reveals a 'man-centred' world-view.)

We tend to take a modern legal understanding of individual responsibility for granted, but it can seriously distort our reading of the Bible. The concept of bloodguilt - that sin, if unatoned, will return to haunt even those who have not themselves committed it - is accepted by New Testament writers (Luke 11:50-51, Revelation 6:10). Augustine's notion that original sin is passed on through biological parenthood - logically consigning those who die in the womb to damnation - would also be impossible without bloodguilt.

But that isn't the whole story. In the New Testament, God's people are not told to enforce obedience among their nonbelieving neighbours. Indeed the New Testament is marked by disinterest in secular power at best, and outright hostility at worst (Revelation 17:1-6). The death of Jesus at the cross changes everything. From that point onwards, it is not biological descent from Abraham but faith that determines membership in the people of God (Romans 9:30). The ethno-religious boundaries of ancient Israel have been shattered. God's people are now of every nation and tongue, no longer identifiable with individual peoples or states.

Secularism - a society no longer compelled to enforce religious obedience among its subjects, on pain of judgment - is thus made possible by the death of Jesus. When an individual puts her faith in Christ she cannot become his without also becoming part of the people of God; God's covenant is made with his people as a whole. There is no salvation for the individual outside the collective salvation of God's people (which is why I continue to find Calvinism's emphasis on Christ's successful purchase of a definite people compelling). It is because of this ingrafting into the people of God that baptism - a public symbol of membership in God's family - is important. But it no longer coincides with membership in an earthly nation or obedience to a set of temporal laws.

If the potential for secularism was present from Jesus' death onwards, that potential had to remain unrealised in pre-modern societies, which functioned through personal relationships and localised hierarchies sealed and enforced through oaths. Public declarations of political and religious loyalty - which are quite superfluous in modern states - were vital to rulers who lacked the centralised bureaucracy necessary to enforce obedience among their subjects. (For example, a modern state knows who all its subjects are and where they live, something the ancients could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.)

Even the Roman state, often praised for its tolerance, could not solve the problem of religious diversity by becoming secular - atheist as a state - but only by being radically inclusivist, declaring all faiths valid and adding foreign deities to its pantheon. Still, it required that its subjects subordinate their loyalties to the imperial cult, and those who could not comply - Christians, most famously - had to suffer its wrath. Pre-modern societies that did not compel everyone's conversion (the political entities of the Islamic world, for example) nonetheless had to privilege one faith.

It was only with the vastly increased capacity of the state from the French Revolution onwards, and its sweeping aside of motley feudal ties and privileges, that overwhelmingly Christian societies could provide freedom of religion for their subjects without breaking down. Our nonconformist forebears - the very people from whom modern evangelicalism is descended - ardently campaigned and prayed for a secular state that would not exclude them on the basis of religion, and eventually obtained that sweet freedom.

Of wolves and men

Properly done, historical fiction ought to be fascinating. It tells us, after all, how we came to be, and evokes a time and place very different from our own yet startlingly familiar. Unfortunately, though, it's usually not properly done. As someone who's passionate about history, here are some personal bugbears:

(1) Ideological anachronism. This is probably the single most widespread phenomenon in historical fiction. The hero will inevitably be the one character whose views are most similar to the dominant assumptions of early twenty-first century society, while everyone else is dismissed. For examples see Kingdom of Heaven and, in Germany, anything written by Rebecca Gablé.

(2) Soapboxing mixed with wish fulfilment. Hate Christianity with the fury of a thousand suns? Write a novel in which - reality be damned - all Christians are prudish, venal, effeminate caricatures to be derided and killed by your manly pagan heroes and make millions like Bernard Cornwell! Also applicable if you dislike feminism, pacifism and democracy, because in ye olden days men were still real men, just like your own warrior soul would be if it wasn't trapped by the political correctness brigade shoving rights for women and black people down everyone's throats.

(3) The influence of the bodice-ripper. Reducing complex historical processes to sex is tempting: it's much easier to write than all that politics and religion, and it'll sell like hot cakes. But bodice-rippers are notorious for their misogynistic bent. Their women long to be mastered by a manly man - sometimes to the point of rape apologia. At the same time, bodice-rippers refuse to take real women seriously and concede they might have something worthwhile to offer beside bedroom stories. For every Margaret Elphinstone writing terrific female-centred novels like The Sea Road, there are ten Philippa Gregory paperbacks.

It's before this background that Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall matters. It's not that it's high-brow as opposed to the low-brow fare outlined above: it's that this is what popular fiction should look like, and to hell with the fraudsters who'd have you accept less. Winning both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Wolf Hall was the most critically acclaimed historical novel in quite a long time. But it left historical fiction aficionados confused - witness the book's three-and-a-half stars rating on Amazon - by the almost total absence of the blood, guts, and graphic sex one has come to expect from the Tudors in works ranging from Gregory's novels to, er, The Tudors.

Instead we get an honest-to-God fascinating central character: Thomas Cromwell, first seen as a teenager in 1500 being beaten within an inch of his life by his choleric father Walter, a Putney blacksmith. Thomas flees to Europe to become a mercenary, and by 1527 he's established himself as a London lawyer and right-hand man to Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor. When Wolsey falls from power over his failure to procure a papal annulment of Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Cromwell stays behind to look after his patron's cause in his ill-fortune.

After Wolsey's death, Cromwell rises to influence at Henry's court by advancing the case of Anne Boleyn, who longs to finally displace the obstreperous Katherine and become queen. This is only accomplished by flagrantly disregarding the pope, and after Henry's marriage to Anne Cromwell pushes forward the creation of an English national church with Henry at its head. In his private life, meanwhile, he mourns the loss of his wife and daughters to disease while acquiring an extended household of protégés and becoming a surrogate father to the wards he takes in.

Mantel writes all this in the present tense and third person, while never leaving Cromwell's perspective. He's a self-taught multilingual scholar, but his rise to power is due mostly to a pragmatic ruthlessness: if Henry's cause is best advanced by schism, Cromwell will choose that course. He can never quite leave his low birth behind and is haunted by the ghosts of his father and his own family, but he's unafraid to push aside aristocrats and churchmen alike to make Henry supreme ruler of his country.

The prose is beautiful: as precise as Cromwell's mind, it's sophisticated but never excessively flowery. What pleased me most is the effusion of detail, all the little touches of Tudor England: the liturgical year (All Hallows Eve is 'the time when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead', p. 154), Christmas decorations ('wreaths of holly and ivy, of laurel and ribboned yew', p. 169), the harrowing and subtle description of the aftermath of a Lollard's death at the stake ('When the crowd drifted home, chattering, you could tell the ones who'd been on the wrong side of the fire, because their faces were grey with wood-ash', p. 355).

Mantel takes the period seriously, refusing to reduce it to the Tudor Theme Park popular entertainment presents. Her characters' lives are extraordinarily full and complete, while she is also a master of economy in sketching them. Wolf Hall is a masterclass in the importance of character, its large cast never seeming less than real human beings, from the coarse, relic-obsessed Duke of Norfolk to the generous, violent, charming, approval-craving Henry, and right down to the common people.

That's true of the world of ideas, too. Instead of simply ignoring the issue of the Reformation, as much popular Tudor fiction does, Wolf Hall spends long pages dealing with Tyndale's writings smuggled across the Channel, with Thomas More, Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer discussing Purgatory and the role of the Church (the fact that the dispute between Reformers and Catholics was at bottom an ecclesiological one is brought out quite clearly). Cromwell himself appears clear-eyed and thoughtful, contemptuous of superstitions while attempting to retain a Catholic orthodoxy and a church hierarchy loyal to the sovereign.

In contrast to the pessimistic Thomas More, Cromwell is consciously creating a new England, one in which the monarchy will stand above all, sweeping aside the manifold entrenched privileges and powers of the middle ages: no pope, bishop or duke is to stand in the way of the king's importance and untrammelled power. The final vision of this new kingship is well articulated in Hamlet 3.3-7-23:

GUILDENSTERN We will ourselves provide.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.
ROSENCRANTZ The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armour of the mind
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cess of majesty
Dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it; or it is a massy wheel,
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which when it falls
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh but with a general groan.
(Edition: Thompson and Taylor, London: Arden, 2006, based upon the 1604-5 Second Quarto Text)

This royal supremacy, however, is not asserted easily or totally. When he sends out ambassadors to compel all subjects to swear allegiance to Henry's new position as Head of the Church, Cromwell knows that he won't be able to vanquish the old powers completely:

[B]eneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, which he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future. (p. 575)

Cromwell may, and does, ultimately neutralise those in his path. (He's more merciful than Henry: while the king is happy to have More executed, Cromwell expends much energy trying to save the unrepentant papist from the block.) But when the powers and authorities have been destroyed bodily they live on as ghosts, lingering over Cromwell's new England, hiding in the shadows cast by the Tudors' resplendent majesty.

Property crowned and uncrowned

The classes team up to take down the monarchy.

 

According to the Guardian, sixty-seven per cent of Britons believe the monarchy is 'still relevant'. That figure, of course, is rather worthless since it tells us nothing about approval. We'll all agree that Nelson Mandela is 'relevant'; so, I'm sorry to say, is David Cameron. The point stands, however: the monarchy does not inspire abject hatred. But neither are most Britons of the flag-waving loyalist variety. Before the royal wedding, only 37% professed interest in the event; according to YouGov, 35% would do their 'best to avoid' the whole affair. Indifference seems to be the prevailing attitude towards the House of Windsor.

Among sections of the Left there's a long-standing puzzlement about the British monarchy. It is assumed that a democratic republic is the 'typical' form of bourgeois government and that, accordingly, Britain represents an anomaly. A more Marxist response, surely, would be to argue that 'typical' forms of government hardly exist and that historical materialism is a critical method rather than a template for understanding every historical event. Indeed, the notion that republics are natural forms of government under capitalism can be quite easily refuted. Before the First World War, of the Great Powers only France and the United States were republics; Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia and Britain were all monarchies of varying types. Indeed new monarchies were constantly being created at the height of nineteenth-century capitalism. In the century following the Congress of Vienna, new monarchies were installed in France (which didn't last), the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece; both Germany and Italy were unified under conquering monarchies. Where these crowned heads fell at the end of the Great War, this was caused by proletarian revolutions that threatened the entire propertied order.

The French Revolution was a revolution against royal absolutism - yes, but what does this mean? Was it a revolution against untrammelled executive power, against the constant subordination of the periphery to the centre, of the part to the whole - a revolution for 'checks and balances' as Montesquieu advocated them? (This advocacy led Carl Schmitt to dismiss Montesquieu as, essentially, a medievalist.) On the contrary: the Revolution not only displayed all these characteristics of the ancien régime, it shattered all the obstacles to absolute rule the king had been unable to remove. It is in this sense that the Revolution was fulfilled by Napoleon. Lord Elton was right to claim that the twin principles of the revolutionaries of 1789 were order and equality: the removal of all the inefficiencies, corruption and arbitrariness caused by privilege - and the removal of decision-making from a single, weak individual, controlled by advisers, mistresses and outdated noblemen: in short, the replacement of the unchecked rule of a monarch by the unchecked rule of a class.

The reasons for the creation and fall of the Second French Republic (1848-52) are laid out by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The July Revolution of 1830 had led the bourgeoisie to embrace not republicanism but the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. The July Monarchy, however, struggled against proletarian uprisings and increasing hostility from those sectors of the bourgeoisie that felt left out by a state that mostly represented high finance. The February Revolution of 1848 left no option but a republic as the system that divided Frenchmen least (Adolphe Thiers). It was simply impossible to hand the crown over to yet another dynasty, although Louis Napoleon was waiting in the wings. The uprising of the masses in June 1848 was defeated by the bourgeoisie in alliance with the lumpenproletariat and the petite bourgeoisie. Thereafter the country was run by a parliament mostly composed of monarchists that could not muster the strength to resist Louis Napoleon's bid for power.

As the French bourgeoisie discovered in 1830 and 1848, it is very difficult to have a revolution against monarchy and privilege without opening Pandora's box: revolution, where it happened, constantly threatened to create a maelstrom in which the bourgeoisie, having participated in the overthrow of the old order, would itself be destroyed by the propertyless classes. This happened, of course, in Russia in 1917, and was a distinct possibility in Germany, Hungary and Italy after the First World War, France in 1871, Spain after 1931, and others. The result was that, where it perceived a threat from below, the bourgeoisie would prefer to work with rather than against the old order. Sometimes, of course, the bourgeoisie simply repeatedly failed at wresting power from the ancien régime: thus most infamously in Germany.

The accommodation that the bourgeoisie reached with monarchs as well as aristocratic and ecclesiastical elites removed the need for a republican form of government. Today, in Britain at least none of the main bourgeois parties advocates republicanism, although republican views are presumably more commonly held by Labour and Liberal supporters than they are by Tories and the associated Church-and-King mob of the gutter press.

The conclusion must be that the abolition of the monarchy is now quite impossible without a wide-ranging reconfiguration of British society as a whole: in other words, revolution. (The argument that a socialist society would of necessity be republican need not be made here.) The sort of liberal republicanism that impotently mocks the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in the pages of the Guardian rightly elicits little more than pity from the Right. They may not have chosen it, but republicans and revolutionaries can only achieve their aims together.

Feeding upon majesty

This is less an argument than a musing. In Hamlet 3.3.7-23, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz explain how protecting the King of Denmark from Hamlet's schemes means the salvation of the whole realm:

GUILDENSTERN We will ourselves provide.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.
ROSENCRANTZ The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armour of the mind
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cess of majesty
Dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it; or it is a massy wheel,
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which when it falls
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh but with a general groan.
(Edition: Thompson and Taylor, London: Arden, 2006, based upon the 1604-5 Second Quarto Text)

This is a brilliantly expressed example of the literature that pictures the king's body as microcosm and allegory for the state and nation. Here the king's body underpins those of all his subjects, and the end of the monarchy ('the cess of majesty') spells national doom.

It strikes me that while there are medieval antecedents for this, the supremacy of the monarch in this passage really goes beyond anything that would have been considered acceptable in the middle ages. A medieval monarch's position, while instituted by God, even rhetorically required the support of his nobles, freemen and of course the Church. The early modern exalted position of the monarch, however, sidelines or subordinates (see, for example, the king as head of the Church in Protestant countries) these earlier actors.

Moreover, this elevation of the monarch was connected to a massive growth in the state, which did not truly exist before the late middle ages. Standing armies and hosts of civil servants (arguably petty-bourgeois wage recipients) marked the numerical growth in the state, which from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century greatly expanded its administrative and repressive capabilities. This coincides, of course, with the beginnings of a mercantile and later manufacturing bourgeoisie in the towns and the creation of the first, commercial colonial empires. Why is absolutism linked to the decline of feudalism and the growth of the bourgeoisie? Please do recommend reading and share your thoughts.