Fields of Blood (55 page)

Industrialization also gave birth to the nation-state.
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Agrarian empires had lacked the technology to impose a uniform culture; the borders and territorial reach of premodern kingdoms could be only loosely defined and the monarch’s authority enforced in a series of overlapping loyalties.
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But during the nineteenth century, Europe was reconfigured into clearly defined states ruled by a central government.
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Industrialized society required standardized literacy, a shared language, and a unified control of human resources. Even if they spoke a different language from the ruler, subjects now belonged to an integrated “nation,” an “imaginary community” of people who were encouraged to feel a deep connection with persons they knew nothing about.
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Religiously organized agrarian societies had often persecuted “
heretics”; in the secularized nation-state, it was “
minorities” who had either to assimilate or disappear. In 1807
Jefferson had instructed his secretary of war that the
Native Americans were “backward peoples” who must either be “exterminated” or driven “beyond our reach” to the other side of the
Mississippi “with the beasts of the forest.”
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In 1806
Napoleon made
Jews full citizens of
France, but two years later he issued the “
Infamous Decrees” ordering them to take French names, privatize their faith,
and ensure that at least one in every three marriages per family was with a gentile.
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This forcible integration was regarded as progress. Surely, argued the British philosopher
John Stuart Mill (1806–73), it was better for a Breton to accept French citizenship “than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage remnant of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.”
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But the English historian
Lord Acton (1834–1902) deplored the notion of nationality, fearing that the “fictitious” general will of the people that it promoted would crush “all natural rights and all established liberties for the purpose of vindicating itself.”
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He could see that the desire to preserve the nation could become an absolute used to justify the most inhumane policies. Even worse,

His reservations about
nationalism would prove to be all too well grounded.

The new nation-state would labor under a fundamental contradiction: the
state
(the governmental apparatus) was supposed to be secular, but the
nation
(“the people”) aroused quasi-religious emotions.
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In 1807–08, while
Napoleon was conquering
Prussia, the German philosopher
Johann Gottlieb Fichte had delivered a series of lectures in Berlin, looking forward to the time when the forty-one separate German principalities would become a unified nation-state. The Fatherland, he claimed, was a manifestation of the divine, the repository of the spiritual essence of the
Volk
and therefore eternal. Germans must be ready to die for the nation, which alone gave human beings the immortality they craved because it had existed since the dawn of time and would continue after their deaths.
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Early modern philosophers, such as
Hobbes, had called for a strong state to restrain the violence of Europe, which, they believed, had been solely inspired by “religion.” Yet in France, the nation had been evoked to mobilize all citizens for war, and Fichte now encouraged
Germans to fight French
imperialism for the sake of the Fatherland. The
state
had been devised to contain violence, but the
nation
was now being used to release it.

If we can define the sacred as something for which one is prepared to die, the nation had certainly become an embodiment of the divine, a supreme value. Hence national mythology would encourage cohesion, solidarity, and loyalty within the confines of the nation. But it had yet to develop the “concern for everybody” that had been such an important ideal in many of the spiritual
traditions associated with religion. The national mythos would not encourage citizens to extend their sympathy to the ends of the earth, to love the stranger in their midst, be loyal even to their enemies, to wish happiness for all beings, and to become aware of the world’s pain. True, this universal
empathy had rarely affected the violence of the warrior
aristocracy, but it had at least offered an alternative and a continuing challenge. Now that religion was being privatized, there was no “international” ethos to counter the growing structural and military violence to which weaker nations were increasingly subjected. Secular
nationalism seemed to regard the foreigner as fair game for exploitation and mass slaughter, especially if he belonged to a different ethnic group.

In America, the colonies and later the states had lacked the manpower to maintain productivity, so by 1800 between ten and fifteen million
African slaves had been forcibly transported to North America.
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They were subdued brutally: slaves were repeatedly reminded of their racial inferiority, their families were broken up, and they were subjected to hard labor, flogging, and mutilation. None of this seemed to bother the
Founders, who had so proudly asserted that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those who would object did so by invoking not
Enlightenment principles but Christian morals. In the northern states, Christian
abolitionists condemned
slavery as a blot on the nation, and in 1860 president-elect
Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) announced that he would prohibit it in any newly conquered territory. Almost at once South Carolina seceded from the Union, and it was clear that other Southern states would follow.

The political issue—the preservation or dissolution of the Union—was not in doubt, but to their dismay, both Northerners and Southerners
found that the clergy on whom they relied for ideological guidance could find no common ground. Supporters of slavery had a host of biblical texts at their command,
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but in the absence of any explicit biblical condemnation of slave ownership, abolitionists could only appeal to the spirit of scripture. The Southern preacher
James Henry Thornhill argued that slavery was a “good and merciful” way of organizing labor,
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while in
New York
Henry Ward Beecher maintained that it was “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin.”
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But the theological split did not coincide neatly with the North-South divide. In Brooklyn,
Henry Van Dyke argued that abolition was evil because it amounted to an “utter rejection of the Scriptures,”
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but
Taylor Lewis, a professor of Greek and Oriental studies at
New York University, retorted that Van Dyke was not taking “the vastly changed condition of the world” sufficiently into account: it was a “malignant falsehood” to suggest that ancient institutions could be transplanted wholesale to the modern world.
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Lewis’s nuanced approach to scripture was based on a scholarly understanding of ancient slavery that was anathema to
evangelicals in the North, who had led the Abolitionist movement since its founding in the 1830s.
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They still approached scripture with the Enlightenment conviction that human beings could discover the truth for themselves without authoritative or expert guidance, but now, to their dismay, they found that the
Bible that had united the nation after the War of Independence was tearing it apart.
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The evangelicals had failed to guide the nation at this moment of grave crisis. When, however, the political unity of the states foundered with the election of
Abraham Lincoln and the secession of the Confederacy, the problem of slavery was settled by the battles of the Civil War (1861–65), not by the Bible.

This is not to say that wartime saw an eclipse of religious sentiment. On the contrary: though the American state would regard its effort as a principled defense of the Constitution, for the American nation it was a conflict charged with religious conviction. The Civil War armies have been described as the most religiously motivated in American history.
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Northerners and Southerners both believed that God was on their side and that they knew exactly what he was doing.
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And when it was all over, Southerners would see their defeat as divine retribution, while Northern preachers would celebrate their victory as God’s endorsement of their political arrangements. “Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never were before,” Beecher exulted;
“God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event to all the nations of the earth: ‘Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.’ ”
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“The Union will no more be thought of as a mere human compact,” exclaimed
Howard Bushnell at the
Yale Commencement of 1865. “The sense of nationality becomes even a kind of religion.”
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In fact, however, the outcome had been decided not by God but by modern weaponry. Both sides were armed with
Minié rifles, which made it impossible for either to charge—the traditional mode of engagement—without being vulnerable to the gun’s substantial range and suffering horrific casualties.
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Despite the appalling loss of life—two thousand men could be lost in a single charge—generals continued to order their men to take the offensive.
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As a result, in eight of the first twelve battles of the war, the Southern Confederacy lost 97,000 men, and in 1864 the Northern general Ulysses Grant lost 64,000 men in the first six months of his campaign against
Robert E. Lee in the
Wilderness.
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The infantrymen caught on to this problem before the political or military leaders. Because one had to fire the Minié standing up, foot soldiers on both sides started to dig the trenches that would become the hallmark of early industrialized warfare with its protracted stalemates.
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With both sides “dug in,” unable to advance decisively, modern wars would drag on battle after battle.

After the war, the more reflective leaders—such as Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr.,
Andrew Dixon White, and
John Dewey—retreated from the certainties of
Enlightenment Protestantism.
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In Europe too, Enlightenment confidence had been undermined. In
Germany during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholars had applied to scripture the modern historical-critical methodology used to study classical texts. This “
Higher Criticism” revealed that there was no univocal message in scripture; that
Moses had not written the
Pentateuch, which was composed of at least four different sources; that the miracle stories were little more than a literary trope; and that King David was not the author of the psalms. A little later
Charles Lyell (1797–1875) argued that the earth’s crust had not been shaped by God but by the incremental effects of wind and water;
Charles Darwin (1809–82) put forward the hypothesis that
Homo sapiens
had evolved from the same protoape as the chimpanzee; and studies revealed that the revered philosopher
Immanuel Kant had
actually undercut the entire Enlightenment project by maintaining that our ways of thinking bear no relation to objective reality.

In Europe the rising tide of unbelief was born not merely from
skepticism but from a hunger for radical social and political change. The Germans had been enthralled by the
French Revolution, but the social and political situation in their country ruled out anything similar; it seemed better to try to change the way people thought than to resort to violence. By the 1830s, a radical cadre of intellectuals had emerged who were theologically literate, were particularly incensed by the social privileges of the clergy, and saw the
Lutheran Church as a bastion of conservatism. As part of this corrupt Old Regime, they argued, the churches had to go, together with the God who had supported the system.
Ludwig Feuerbach’s atheistic statement
The Essence of
Christianity
(1841) was avidly read as a revolutionary as well as a theological tract.
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