Part 14. Religion and Politics

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…

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…

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.…

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 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 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…

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.…

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…

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…

The Holy See is unusual among religious bodies: it is a sovereign subject of international law, it signs treaties, it keeps diplomats, and since 1929 it has had its own territory and its own bank. This double nature has produced…

After the Cold War, religion returned to great-power politics. Russia rebuilt a partnership between the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate. China’s Communist Party moved from tolerating religion to “sinicising” it. Iran’s clerical state and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi monarchy fought a…

Throughout this study, political legitimacy has been bound up with claims to secret or sacred knowledge: Magi, mystery schools, Templars and lodges. The library’s large conspiracy literature turns that theme into an accusation. It holds that a small number of…