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Earthly Powers: religion and politics in Europe from the French revolution to the Great War

If Christianity had a mission in the 19th century, it was to restrain the leviathan of the nation state. This book tells the story of its failure. Across Europe, churches were expropriated, corrupted and exploited by more powerful civic structures, and ended the century weaker and smaller than they began it. The stage was set for the horrors of the next hundred years, the godless age par excellence.

Michael Burleigh has another, more complex story to tell. What the churches had to combat between 1789 and 1918 was not just unbelief, but something more insidious, designated here as "political" or "secular" religion. All the great ideologies of the modern world - republicanism, nationalism, socialism - first made their appearance in the guise of religious or quasi-religious cults. Their adherents fabricated rituals, devised catechisms and proclaimed creeds. Their rhetoric was one of martyrdom and redemption, election and damnation. "Thou shall not fornicate," ran the sixth Italian "patriotic" commandment, "unless it be to harm the enemies of Italy." The religious impulse was not quashed, but deflected on to more worldly objects.

The Bible has a language for all this. The prophets rail incessantly at those unfaithful Israelites who bend the knee before Moloch and Baal; Christ proclaims a kingdom "not of this world". A few astute thinkers recognised in the biblical prohi-bition of idolatry an indictment of modern nationalism, with its apotheosis of worldly power, its fusion of God and Caesar. Yet the churches as institutions remained supine in the face of this visibly pagan trend. Earthly Powers explains why.

The Catholic Church, to which Burleigh is clearly partial, was best placed to combat the new religion of nationalism. It was, after all, a supranational corporation, a successor to the Roman empire, laying claim to a universal and timeless truth. Despite their reputation as grim reactionaries, the 19th-century popes had a better appreciation of the moral limits of state power than most liberals. Article 39 of Pius IX's much-derided 1864 Syllabus of Errors denounces the doctrine that "the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits". His successor, Leo XIII, spoke presciently of the "idolatry of the State". During the First World War, the Vatican remained scrupulously neutral, striving where it could to hasten the end of what it regarded as "the collective suicide of a great Christian civilisation"....