Unholy warriors

Taming the Gods is an extended essay about the secular state, something which would until recently have been regarded as a non-issue by English-speaking readers. The separation of Church and State is taken so much for granted in the West, that one can easily forget how recent and local its origins are. Religious beliefs, wrote Edward Gibbon, are ‘considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful’.

As usual, Gibbon was fathering on the Romans the instincts of enlightened Englishmen of his own day. For the secular state was born in 18th-century England, and adopted by Revolutionary France. It marked the reaction of educated elites in both countries against the murderous religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the oppressive political power of the established Christian churches in most of the major European states. From England and France, it was spread across Europe by the Napoleonic conquests and across much of the rest of the world by European colonists.

Yet for most of human history, the idea that religious belief and practice belonged exclusively to the domain of private life would have been dismissed as absurd. Divine endorsement was the indispensable source of political legitimacy. Organised religion was regarded as an essential part of the life of the state. It seemed axiomatic that religious belief was the only possible foundation for any durable moral standards. All of these beliefs have been jettisoned in Europe and most of them in the United States as well. But they are back on the agenda with a vengeance now, because of the growing significance of Islam, with its root-and-branch rejection of the secular state and God-free morality.

For Ian Buruma, the question which these developments pose is far more fundamental than the social dilemmas traditionally associated with large-scale immigration.