Month: October 2026

The same year that brought a Shi’a jurist to power in Tehran (Chapter 144) also set in motion the Sunni forces that, over two decades, produced al-Qaeda and, after another decade, the Islamic State’s caliphate of 2014. This chapter follows…

In 1979 a Shi’a jurist took control of a modern state, and a doctrine developed over centuries in the seminaries of Qom and Najaf became the constitution of a nation of some forty million. This chapter follows that change through…

No modern political question carries more religious weight than the one that began when a secular Viennese journalist proposed a state for the Jews and the British Empire promised them a “national home” in a land holy to three faiths.…

The United States combines a constitution that names no God and forbids an established church with a public life full of prayer, oaths and the motto “In God We Trust”. This chapter traces that mix through four layers. The first…

The French Revolution’s Cult of Reason lasted barely a year. The Marxist-Leninist states made atheism a permanent doctrine of state for most of the twentieth century. This chapter starts from Marx’s own sentence and its misreadings. It then follows state…

The French Revolution was the first time a European state set out to take apart the public power of Christianity and, briefly, to put a religion of its own making in its place. The library’s sources read this break in…

The papal claim to dispose of kingdoms, examined in the previous chapter, reached its widest extent when Europe crossed the oceans. A pope divided the newly found world between two Catholic crowns. Theologians debated whether its inhabitants were fully human.…

In the medieval West the question of who may command took the form of a contest between two institutions, each claiming to hold its authority from God. The papacy claimed supremacy over all Christians, kings included. Emperors and kings claimed…

Every religious system examined in this book also answers a political question: who may command, and why must others obey? The earliest states placed the ruler inside the sacred order itself, as a god incarnate, a god’s son or the…

This final chapter of the part brings the story to the present and turns to the response to cults: parents’ associations, deprogrammers, exit counsellors, courts, and the scholars who opposed them all. On the “cult” side the cases include a…