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Table of contents
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Christians from what is now Syria and Lebanon then the Ottoman Empire emigrated to the United States and other countries. Although Christians are a minority in the Middle East today, more than 75 percent of Americans of Arab descent are Christian. Christianity developed out of the monotheistic tradition of Judaism; Jesus, its founder, was a member of the Jewish community in Roman Palestine.
Its holy scriptures are the Old Testament the Jewish Torah with additions , and the New Testament written by the followers of Jesus after his death and containing the life story of Jesus and other early Christian writings. Jesus is considered the son of God, born to the virgin Mary and come to Earth to offer redemption for mankind's sins. After Jesus was crucified and executed by the Romans, he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. This event is celebrated at Easter, while the birth of Jesus is celebrated at Christmas.
Christians believe in an afterlife where those who have lived a good life will reside in heaven with God, and those who have lived an unrepentant life of sin will be punished in hell. Although Christianity developed out of Judaic texts, Christians do not follow Jewish law. Instead, they believe that the ritualistic Jewish law was abrogated in favor of a universal gospel for all of humanity and the Christian teaching, "Love thy neighbor as thyself. Relationships between Jewish and Christian communities have often been difficult, particularly in Christian Europe.
There, Jewish communities were often subject to discrimination and violence at the hands of Christians. Christianity has also had a problematic relationship with Islam. Christians do not accept Muhammad as a prophet. While many Christians in the Middle East converted to Islam during and after the seventh century, the Church hierarchy in Rome and Constantinople considered Islam to be both a political and theological threat. The Crusades were an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the Islamic conquest of the eastern Mediterranean and the holy places of all three monotheistic religions.
Islam arose in the early seventh century C. It developed from both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the cultural values of the nomadic Bedouin tribes of Arabia. Islam expanded into areas controlled by the Byzantine Empire largely Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian, but with a diverse population and the Sassanian Empire officially Zoroastrian and Persian-speaking, but also diverse. As Islam expanded, the new Islamic societies adapted and synthesized many of the customs they encountered.
As a result, Muslims in different areas of the world created for themselves a wide array of cultural traditions. The culture of Islamic Spain, for example, was so cosmopolitan that some Christian and Jewish parents complained that their children were more interested in developing their knowledge of Arabic than in learning Latin or Hebrew, respectively.
Many elements of Islamic society became integral parts of medieval and Renaissance European culture, like the notion of chivalry, and certain forms of music the lute, the arabesque and poetry. On the eastern end of the Islamic world, many Indonesians converted to Islam between the 15th and 17th centuries.
Preexisting animist beliefs were often incorporated into the local practice of Islam. Within Islam, there are many different communities. Adherents of Islam may be more or less observant, conservative or liberal. Sufism is the mystical tradition of Islam, where direct experience of the divine is emphasized. The 13th-century poet Jalaluddin Rumi is a well-known Sufi figure whose work has become popular in the United States today. Whirling dervishes are dancers who are entranced in their experience of Sufism. Muslims believe that Allah the Arabic word for God sent his revelation, the Quran , to the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century C.
The Quran contains verses surahs in Arabic that tell Muslims to worship one god, and explains how they should treat others properly. Another historical text, the Hadith, written by scholars after the death of Muhammad, describes Muhammad's life as an example of pious behavior, proscribes law for the community based on the Quran and the example of Muhammad, and explains how certain rituals should be performed.
Observant Muslims practice five principles pillars of Islam: orally declaring their faith shahadah ; praying five times a day salat ; fasting in the daylight hours during the month of Ramadan sawm ; giving a share of their income for charity zakat ; and making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime if they can afford it hajj. Many Muslims also observe dietary rules, in origin similar to those of Judaism, that forbid certain foods like pork , outlaw alcohol, and dictate how animals should be slaughtered for food.
The Muslim calendar is lunar, and shifts in relation to the solar calendar. Just as Christians count years starting with the year of Jesus's birth, Muslims count years beginning with Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina in C. Muslim years are labeled as A.
Major Muslim festivals include Id al-Fitr the Fast-Breaking Festival, celebrated at the end of Ramadan and Id al-Adha the Festival of Sacrifice, the commemoration of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Ishmail which takes place during the month of pilgrimage. Muslims believe in a Day of Judgment, when righteous souls will go to heaven and wrongdoers will go to hell. But over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows.
This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation. The Inner Light.
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It is a familiar story, and seems to conclude with a happy ending. But in truth the Great Separation was never a fait accompli, even in Western Europe, where it was first conceived. Old-style Christian political theology had an afterlife in the West, and only after the Second World War did it cease to be a political force. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a different challenge to the Great Separation arose from another quarter.
It came from a wholly new kind of political theology heavily indebted to philosophy and styling itself both modern and liberal. And the questions they posed were good ones. While granting that ignorance and fear had bred pointless wars among Christian sects and nations, they asked: Were those the only reasons that, for a millennium and a half, an entire civilization had looked to Jesus Christ as its savior? Or that suffering Jews of the Diaspora remained loyal to the Torah? Could ignorance and fear explain the beauty of Christian liturgical music or the sublimity of the Gothic cathedrals?
Could they explain why all other civilizations, past and present, founded their political institutions in accordance with the divine nexus of God, man and world? That certainly was the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who did more than anyone to develop an alternative to Hobbes. Human beings, he thought, have a natural goodness they express in their religion. There is much we cannot know about God, and for centuries the pretense of having understood him caused much damage to Christendom.
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But, for Rousseau, we need to believe something about him if we are to orient ourselves in the world. Among modern thinkers, Rousseau was the first to declare that there is no shame in saying that faith in God is humanly necessary. Religion has its roots in needs that are rational and moral, even noble; once we see that, we can start satisfying them rationally, morally and nobly. In the abstract, this thought did not contradict the principles of the Great Separation, which gave reasons for protecting the private exercise of religion.
But it did raise doubts about whether the new political thinking could really do without reference to the nexus of God, man and world. If Rousseau was right about our moral needs, a rigid separation between political and theological principles might not be psychologically sustainable. Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and morality is inseparable from politics.
By the early 19th century, two schools of thought about religion and politics had grown up in the West.
Let us call them the children of Hobbes and the children of Rousseau. For the children of Hobbes, a decent political life could not be realized by Christian political theology, which bred violence and stifled human development. The only way to control the passions flowing from religion to politics, and back again, was to detach political life from them completely. This had to happen within Western institutions, but first it had to happen within Western minds. A reorientation would have to take place, turning human attention away from the eternal and transcendent, toward the here and now.
The old habit of looking to God for political guidance would have to be broken, and new habits developed. For Hobbes, the first step toward achieving that end was to get people thinking about — and suspicious about — the sources of faith. Debate would continue over where exactly to place the line between religious and political institutions, but arguments about the legitimacy of theocracy petered out in all but the most forsaken corners of the public square. There was no longer serious controversy about the relation between the political order and the divine nexus; it ceased to be a question.
No one in modern Britain or the United States argued for a bicameral legislature on the basis of divine revelation. The children of Rousseau followed a different line of argument.
The conflict of ages
Medieval political theology was not salvageable, but neither could human beings ignore questions of eternity and transcendence when thinking about the good life. When we speculate about God, man and world in the correct way, we express our noblest moral sentiments; without such reflection we despair and eventually harm ourselves and others.
That is the lesson of the Savoyard vicar. View all New York Times newsletters. The recent wars had had nothing to do with political theology or religious fanaticism of the old variety; if anything, people reasoned, it was the radical atheism of the French Enlightenment that turned men into beasts and bred a new species of political fanatic.
Hegel went further still, attributing to religion an almost vitalistic power to forge the social bond and encourage sacrifice for the public good. These ideas had an enormous impact on German religious thought in the 19th century, and through it on Protestantism and Judaism throughout the West. In modern Britain and the United States, it was assumed that the intellectual, and then institutional, separation of Christianity and modern politics had been mutually beneficial — that the modern state had benefited by being absolved from pronouncing on doctrinal matters, and that Christianity had benefited by being freed from state interference.
No such consensus existed in Germany, where the assumption was that religion needed to be publicly encouraged, not reined in, if it was to contribute to society. It would have to be rationally reformed, of course: the Bible would have to be interpreted in light of recent historical findings, belief in miracles abandoned, the clergy educated along modern lines and doctrine adapted to a softer age. But once these reforms were in place, enlightened politics and enlightened religion would join hands.
Protestant liberal theologians soon began to dream of a third way between Christian orthodoxy and the Great Separation. They had unshaken faith in the moral core of Christianity, however distorted it may have been by the forces of history, and unshaken faith in the cultural and political progress that Christianity had brought to the world. Christianity had given birth to the values of individuality, moral universalism, reason and progress on which German life was now based.
There could be no contradiction between religion and state, or even tension. The modern state had only to give Protestantism its due in public life, and Protestant theology would reciprocate by recognizing its political responsibilities. If both parties met their obligations, then, as the philosopher F. Among Jewish liberal thinkers, there was a different sort of hope, that of acceptance as equal citizens. After the French Revolution, a fitful process of Jewish emancipation began in Europe, and German Jews were more quickly integrated into modern cultural life than in any other European country — a fateful development.
For it was precisely at this moment that German Protestants were becoming convinced that reformed Christianity represented their national Volksgeist.