Why Talk About Religion?

It has become difficult to avoid religion in discussions of politics and current affairs. A majority of people would claim that religious beliefs are important in their lives and affect their decisions. Our country is rather unique in this context. Perhaps it is because we are about the only country that has never had to live under a state-sponsored religion. Most European countries have had to live under such a regime at one time or another. Most have responded by walking away from religion. That is not happening here. The recent health care debate, and the bill itself, were strongly influenced by people and groups wishing to project their religious beliefs (or disbelief) onto the lives of others. Such issues cannot be ignored. The feelings on both sides of the women’s choice issue are so intense that assassinations of health care providers have occurred. We seem to be moving in the direction of what might be described as a "social civil war."

There is no area in which argument is more futile than that of religious belief. To make a rational argument for disbelief is as productive as making a theological argument against the law of gravity. People are not moved. Why they are not—or cannot be—moved is an interesting discussion for another time. What can be discussed, hopefully, are issues that are not so much driven by religious beliefs as by cultural traditions. Religion and culture can be closely intertwined and over long periods of time the boundary becomes blurred. One of the obvious instances where culture and religion get twisted is in the role of women. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (chronological order) all have the same Semitic roots, and all have an orientation towards male domination. That is understandable, but coming from the same roots they end up with quite different views of how women should be treated. Within sects of a given religion the customs can also be quite different. My point is that while people can come up with doctrinal citations to justify whatever they are doing, in the case of women’s rights the treatment women receive is driven mostly by cultural preferences rather than religious imperative.

Religious documents are written by individuals and these individuals live within an environment and context that effects what they write. When these transitory biases become canonized into a religion’s teachings the results can cause a drift far away from fundamental principles and can have disastrous consequences. Take, for example, Christianity’s relationship with the Jews. The first Christians were Jews who continued to think themselves to be, religiously, Jews. A combination of historical and social events pushed the early Christians from that position to one in which the Jews, who would not accept Christ as their messiah, had to be viewed as an existential enemy. Enemies need documentation to prove that they are worthy of the description "enemy." One can see this transition occurring in the four canonical gospels. They who wrote these gospels were clearly representing their own changing environments. By the time the last gospel, attributed to John, was written, the Christian view was firmly moving in the inflammatory direction of emphasizing that Christ was killed by nasty Jews. One could argue that the Christian Church created and propagated anti-Semitism and is responsible for all the horrendous consequences that have followed. One could also argue that this outcome had nothing at all to do with the teachings of Christ and had nothing whatsoever to do with the basic tenets of Christianity.

I think it is valuable, perhaps necessary, to consider what scholars know about the foundation of the Christian Church and its evolution. Then perhaps we can begin to argue from positions of greater strength. I plan to discuss the book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll. This will be followed at some point by discussions of early Christian writings and how the Bible was assembled. Finally there will be a discussion of how the transmission process has affected current versions of the Bible as teachings moved from an oral tradition to written documents, and then through multiple translations and much hand copying by scribes to the present.

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins

Yes, this is the Gail Collins who is a columnist for the New York Times. If you enjoy her columns and appreciate her gentle but sneakily biting wit, you will enjoy reading this book, America's Women. The wit is more diffuse here than in her columns but she is not able to suppress it entirely. The history she covers extends from pilgrim days through the 1960s. The epilogue quickly brings the reader up to the millennium, but the details she has saved for a follow-up book that has been published (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, 2009). I have not read it yet but I intend to.

If one sets out to write a history of women in America one is faced with a variety of choices. A mile high picture would provide the details of women’s ever so slow and gradual evolution towards equal rights. On a minute scale one could track the trials, tribulations and occasional joys of being a woman, wife, and mother over this span of 400 years. These would be two quite different books. Collins has chosen to cover both in one volume and she pretty much pulls it off. The advantage of her approach is to make sure all the big picture events are placed in an appropriate context. It allows one to see clearly how truly exceptional the exceptional women of a given time period had to be. The other positive from this approach is that the author can pepper the reader with an endless stream of little tidbits about everyday life that will alternately frighten you, make you laugh or scratch your head in bewilderment. The disadvantage is that the book tends to be a bit on the long side. The chosen organization is to march linearly forward in time and at each epoch to scan laterally to look the details related to different classes of women or different social thrusts. For example, for the pre-Civil War period she has to deal with Northern women, Southern women, slave women and immigrant women. Their stories have to be blended with descriptions of the abolitionist movement, and numerous social issues.

My limited experience indicates that the author’s insistence on completeness will lose a couple of male readers, but the women won’t mind at all. Guys—if you expect to learn something good about your gender, you have come to the wrong place. The image of men that emerges from this work suggests they only had a few things on their minds: war, liquor, prostitutes, and tormenting women. My first thought was that this was a bit unfair. But, then again, I wasn’t there. I can only imagine us as the enlightened, progressive chaps we have become. Perhaps we have come a long way too.

I personally found the book fascinating but easy to put down. I ended up reading it in a large number of short sessions. And that was just fine.

Collins suggests in the Introduction a very useful approach to incorporating the history to follow into a single theme.

"The history of American women is all about leaving home—crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own. Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested—they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothea Dix. The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it."
　Overlayed on this internal conflict were the external influences of a male-dominated culture, the overwhelming effort required to run a household over most of our history, and cultural biases that manifested themselves to women’s economic disadvantage. For most of our history economic considerations held women back. In the end, however, it was economics that set them free (approximately).

All the Semitic religions are male dominated. The early settlers in America were intensely religious and their religion told them that women should be seen but not heard— at least not outside of the home. One can encapsulate much of women’s history as a struggle to overcome this bias.

Some fraction of women was never quite satisfied with the role of wife and mother. Those slowly began to try to exert influence in other directions. While women were officially expected to remain silent on church issues, they discovered that the men were either busy on other matters or were just not very interested. Consequently, women began to play an ever larger role in religious matters. One of the first attempts to break out of their assigned roles was to gain entry into schools of divinity. This religious focus led naturally to activism on social issues such as care for indigents, abolition, and temperance. This process of breaking out was not a smooth one. There were many advances followed by partial retreats along the way.
As Collins so aptly put it:

"Whenever there was a sudden demand for literate workers at low pay, women were usually the answer." One of the first, long-lasting breakthroughs was in the field of teaching.

"But as always happened in American history, the dogma of appropriate gender roles gave way to necessity. There simply weren’t enough men available to staff the public schools while the pool of available educated women was huge. And the price was right. In 1838, Connecticut paid $14.50 a month to male teachers and $5.75 to women.....By 1870, of the 200,000 primary and secondary school teachers in America, more than half were women....Although the percentile of women working as teachers at any given time was tiny, a much larger number had the experience at some point in their lives. A quarter of the native-born women in pre-Civil War Massachusetts were current or former school teachers. Thanks to teaching, a large minority of American women knew what it was like to have earned their own bread....The teachers were all single—well into the twentieth century, school systems required women to resign when the got married."The women who found an outlet working as teachers were the lucky ones. There were other opportunities to utilize women as reliable workers at low pay.

"American employers were worried about creating a permanent class of rough, hard-to-handle industrial workers, like the ones who were causing so much trouble in England. Girls did not usually stay long enough to become troublemakers—after a few years, most left to get married. In the meantime they were cheaper than male workers, and easier to control. By the 1820s, New England was full of textile factories where virtually all the workers were women, each making $2 or $3 per week. (The supervisors, who were men, got $12.)"The movement to abolish slavery provided an opportunity for women to exert their influence in the politic arena in a manner and on a scale never seen before. It was an issue that resonated strongly with women, and there were plenty of well-educated and strong-willed women who seemed to be itching for a cause to which they could dedicate themselves. This was one of those periods where historic change was occurring and women’s perceived roles as well as their own view of their place in society would never be the same. As the author points out:

"The antislavery movement did a lot to liberate its female members as well as the slaves."The Civil War, and the political conflict leading up to it, would be a turning point for women. Wars unleash change—change in society, change in politics and change in technology. Of necessity, the war opened up the field of nursing to women.

"Until midcentury, nursing had been a job for men and lower-class women. Florence Nightingale made it respectable for ladies. She was a well-born Englishwoman who became an international heroine in 1855 when she reorganized the nursing care in the Crimean War, reducing the death rate in British field hospitals from 45 to 2 percent. When the Civil War began, one observer noted, ‘there was a perfect mania to act Florence Nightingale’......volunteers who took care of the wounded during the early parts of the Civil War were basically on their own. They determined where the fighting was, wheedled their way through to the front, and did what they could to help....In the first terrible years of the war, wounded men died on the battlefield after lying there for days, untended, in the hot sun. There was no organized system of getting them to a field hospital. It took an enormous leap for well-bred women to enter the gory army hospitals to tend the wounded men, and it’s hard to imagine the kind of daring they must have needed to get to the battlefield unescorted. Yet a number of them managed to do it on their own....After the war, [Clara] Barton became famous as the organizer of the American Red Cross, but her finest hours came in those hectic, disorganized trauma centers of the Civil War’s early years. Her face turned blue from the gunpowder, and her skirts were so heavy with blood that she had to wring them out before she could walk under their weight."Women again demonstrated that they were much more effective than men in caring for the wounded and another career path for women was carved out.

The period between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I was a period of great economic change which provided new opportunities for women to work outside the home and support themselves if they so chose. The arrival of the department store changed women’s lives forever. Besides the obvious pleasures and advantages of browsing and shopping, many new jobs were created—jobs perfect for women. As usual, they were paid much less than men, but it was still much better than working in a factory. The growth in government bureaucracy and economic expansion created a large number of clerical jobs. This converged with the invention of the typewriter to lock in this kind of work for women. The coming of the telephone provided numerous openings for switchboard operators. These positions soon entered women’s portfolio when it was discovered that men had a hard time remaining polite with customers. The general expansion of educational availability increased the demand for literate people to work as librarians, another position ideally suited for the mass of educated but unemployed women.

We see here a pattern that persisted essentially to the mid 1970s. Women were a well-educated resource that had demonstrated a capability to do much more than they were given the opportunity to do. As society or technology or historic events created opportunities, women moved out of the home to take advantage of them only to be forced to retreat if it was determined that they were competing with men for jobs. But the retreats were only partial and the size of the female work force grew over time and continued to expand into new directions as forceful women broke down barriers in the professions. During this period society’s expectations of women varied considerably from period to period. These expectations seem to be determined by men. This male dominance would not begin to be broken down until economic forces intervened to make change inevitable.

The author stops her narrative at the end of the 1960s, but she covers the remainder of the century in a brief epilogue. The 1970s began a period of great societal upheaval. The idea of equal rights for women began to be taken seriously. High divorce rates and longer life spans left women wondering what they would do when their husband or children left home. However, the biggest change occurred due to economic developments.

"Much of this would never have happened—or would not have happened nearly as fast—if the economy had not required it. Just as society suddenly embraced women as the ideal teachers and typists when there was nobody else to do the job, the idea of women working through their lives caught on when the information era succeeded the industrial age. The vast number of educated women was too valuable a resource to let go once they began to have children. Meanwhile the consumer economy developed more and more things that families felt they needed, which they could no longer acquire on the salary of a single breadwinner."The trials, tribulations and triumphs of women entering this new era presumably are the subjects of the author’s subsequent volume.

I have chosen to focus on economic drivers in the evolution of women’s lives. One could have just as easily focused on the struggle for equal rights, or focused on the evolution of conditions for homemakers over the years. Collins presents all that so the readers may enjoy what most interests them.

I have to admit that what I found most pleasing were the little revelations and factoids that the author provided throughout the narrative—and her gentle wit. Here are some examples I found particularly interesting.

Have you ever wondered how colonial women handled the issues related to infants in diapers? Collins wonders too. It seems they tried to toilet train their infants by the age of one month. If you have trouble comprehending how that could be possible, for your enlightenment, the author suggests that a dog and a feather were useful in this task. You will have to read the book if you wish to learn more.

Do you have any friends who are or were librarians? The author extracts this from a journal dated 1891.

"...women who worked as library assistants should expect to make....about half what men made—and be able to write steadily for six or seven hours a day. They should know half a dozen languages.....understand the relation of all arts and sciences to each other and must have....a minute acquaintance with geography, history, art and literature. Women who aspired to be head librarians should expect to work 10 hours a day...but those who are paid the highest salaries give up all their evenings as well."I am sure that by now the average librarian must be up to a full dozen languages.

Women’s suffrage was one of the most significant social changes in our nation in the past century. Many women spent a lifetime pursuing this goal. The author contends that most of the women in the movement were more interested in temperance than in suffrage itself. They viewed acquiring the vote mainly as a means of voting in prohibition. Their hope was that passage would finally prevent men from spending so much of their income on liquor. What the women discovered was that their daughters didn’t want to prevent men from drinking; they just wanted to make sure they got to drink also. Their reward was to see their daughters spend their evenings in speakeasies.

Collins devotes a healthy portion of her history to coverage of slave women and their offspring. As property, slaves could be bought and sold at will. It was often the case that families would be broken up with the father shipped off to a new owner and never seen again. There is also the issue of what kind of role model could a slave father be to a slave son. What could he teach him? Subservience? I know this is a history of women, but I am left wishing to pursue the sociological effects of two hundred years of slavery and another hundred years of discrimination on African-American men.

The abuse women had to endure became more exotic and more extreme once male doctors became prevalent and began prowling for clients. In the early nineteenth century they pushed midwives out of business.

"For the mothers-to-be the change was not necessarily an improvement. The vast majority of births were not problematic, and a skilled midwife believed in letting nature take its course. That was better by far for both mother and child, since the medical profession had yet to embrace the concept of sterility. Anytime a hand or instrument was inserted into a woman’s body, she was in danger of becoming infected, with fatal results. Childbed, or puerperal, fever became epidemic at times in the nineteenth century, particularly in hospitals, where a single doctor could carry infection from one patient to the next....in 1840 at Bellevue in New York, almost half the women giving birth during the first six months of the year contracted the fever. Eighty percent of them died."Collins points out that the sensibilities of the time often precluded allowing the doctor delivering the baby to look between the women’s legs. She points out that one of the most highly regarded obstetricians was actually blind. Medical students were not allowed to observe live births. They had to learn from textbooks or dummies. This apparently did not stop them from taking aggressive measures.

"They sometimes used forceps to speed deliveries, risking both tearing the mother and hurting the baby. A physician might also make use of one of the ‘heroic’ remedies of the day, like bloodletting. William Dewees, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote proudly that in one protracted labor he took ‘upwards of two quarts’ of blood from a woman while she was standing up. The woman, unsurprisingly, fainted, and after that, the doctor said, ‘everything appeared better.’ Bleeding women until they swooned stopped them from crying out, which must have been a relief for the doctor and family members waiting nearby."It was not long before "practicing" doctors were addressing other conditions with the same skill. The closest things they had to anesthetics were alcohol and opium. They soon discovered that their patients were more pleased with their service if they shot them up with opium before they left. Some of the "treatments seem utterly bizarre today.

"To cure nervous complaints, doctors injected water, milk and linseed into the uterus. For infections, they cauterized it with silver nitrate, or even a hot iron. They put leeches on the vagina, and even on the rectum. (A famous English gynecologist, whose work was studied by American doctors, advocated placing leeches right on the neck of the uterus, but he cautioned his readers not to let the leeches wander off into the organ itself. ‘I think I have scarcely ever seen more acute pain than that experienced by several of my patients under these circumstances,’ he wrote.) Leeches were actually a moderate approach compared with doctors who tried to bring down a patient’s temperature by opening a vein and drawing blood. Salmon B. Chase, Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, watched doctors take 50 ounces of blood from his fever-stricken wife before she died."And then there were the surgeons. I have to recount this one tale that the author included because when I read it I had a hard time believing it.

"Other invalids suffered from an awful malady called vesico-vaginal fistula. During childbirth, the wall between their vagina and the bladder or rectum ripped, leaving them unable to control the leakage of urine or feces through the vagina. The condition had been recognized for centuries, but some historians believe that it increased when doctors began delivering babies and inserting their instruments into the womb."

"J. Marion Sims, an Alabama physician, devised an operation that successfully closed the fistulas and let these tormented women resume their lives. But the discovery came at a horrifying cost...He experimented with surgical techniques while the [slave] women balanced on their knees and elbows, in order to give them a better view of what he was doing....Four years later he finally succeeded in repairing the fistula of a slave named Anarcha....It was Anarcha’s thirtieth operation, all of them performed without anesthetics.....Sims claimed that the women had begged him to keep trying his experiments and it’s possible that was true....But they were still slaves with no real option to say no, and Sims chose to work on them in part because he believed white women could not endure the kind of pain he was inflicting."The next time you think you’ve received some rough treatment from your doctor, just remember how it used to be.

Let us finish on a lighter note.

Collins takes great delight in skewering Thomas Jefferson. This take on Jefferson’s advice to his daughter is a good example of the author’s wit.

"Remember...not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much" wrote Thomas Jefferson, demonstrating once again that he could always find just the wrong thing to say to a devoted daughter....(Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)"If you think modern problems are new problems, consider this description from the pre-Civil War era and think again.

"Worst of all was the corset, which was worn everywhere from the breakfast table to the ballroom in the perpetual and generally hopeless pursuit of the ideal 20-inch waist. Preadolescent girls wore corsets and old women wore corsets, and mothers-to-be wore corsets even in the advanced stages of pregnancy....One commentator claimed that it was not unusual to see ‘a mother lay her daughter down upon the carpet, and placing her foot on her back, break half a dozen laces in tightening her stays.’ Comparisons to Chinese foot binding were rife and stories were passed around about deformed babies born with corset lines imprinted in their flesh....While virtually everything women read told them that corsets were bad, everything they saw stressed how essential they were. Magazines pictured women with tiny waists and dresses that sported long, tight sleeves......"Or, how about this concern from the beginning of the twentieth century:

"The white middle class was worried about ‘race suicide.’ The best-educated native-born women were failing to reproduce while immigrant families had tons of healthy babies. President Theodore Roosevelt was a particular fretter: ‘If Americans of the old stock lead lives of celibate selfishness.....or if the married are afflicted by that base fear of living which....forbids them to have more than one or two children, disaster awaits the nation."Recall that the immigrants of that era were Irish, Italian, Jewish, German and Scandinavian. How many of their descendents remember that they were once considered undesirable rabble? How many of their descendents are today worrying that too many Hispanics having too many babies are ruining their nation?

I have presented a few of the insights and revelations contained in this volume. There are many more. Read it and decide which have the most meaning for you.

And God Created Woman

In wrestling with the task of how to organize my thoughts on Gail Collin’s excellent book America’s Women, I suddenly found myself possessed by a demon. She made me write the following.

If one wants to try to define a single theme for women to carry away from this book it should be "never again let your life be determined or defined by a man." The struggle for equality was basically a struggle to lift the heavy burden of prejudice and ignorance provided by a male-dominated society. Since the book starts with the pilgrims let us begin there also. Recall that the pilgrims came to this country not to create religious freedom but to eliminate it. Their preferred form of government was a theocracy based on Biblical teachings that told men that they were dominant and women were little better than indentured servants.

It should be noted that this "Christian" attitude toward women derives not from the teachings of Christ, but from the desires of early Christian men (actually, just about all Christian men) that that was the way they wanted it to be. These men were of course influenced by the misogynist traits of the Hebrews. Consider the story of God’s creation of man and woman. It was clearly written by a man.

There are those who look at nature and the complicated life that abounds and claim that its complexity is in itself proof that it could only have been created by God. God thus becomes the chief engineer proud of the cleverness with which he creates a world that will astound and mystify his creatures. We are then asked to believe that this God-engineer would design man as his ultimate creation and consider woman an afterthought. This is not very credible. If a woman had written that description it would most likely have gone something like this.



"And God created his creature and looked upon it with satisfaction. ‘The complexity, the functionality, every part has its purpose, and it is attractive in appearance. The exquisite chemical balance required for it to function properly will befuddle and astonish my creatures and leave them in awe at the cleverness of my design. With this creature I will propagate the earth with the multitudes that will honor me. I will call it woman.’ And then God paused and said ‘I have one more task to perform. I must create a vessel in which to carry seeds. I will call it man, a simple name nicely consistent with its humble and sole function’."Alas, this did not happen and men came to write the Bible and made a confusing mess of it. People have been killing each other over its interpretation for thousands of years.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming......

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

This is one of the most informative, stimulating and relevant books that you will encounter. It provides us with a thorough history of the religious and cultural evolution of what might be called the "Muslim world" from the time of the prophet Mohammed to the present day. The author provides sufficient detail to grasp the complexity of this history without deadening the senses. His writing style is clear and easy to follow, and the occasional flashes of humor add to the enjoyment. The story he tells fills in many gaps in our knowledge of Islam and its history but, perhaps, the author’s most important contribution is to stop the narrative at various points and remind us that at that time the state of the world looked quite different depending on whether it was seen through Muslim eyes or Western eyes. This combination of increased knowledge and improved understanding should allow the reader to produce better informed opinions on topics ranging from freedom of religion to the war in Afghanistan. Some of the particularly interesting topics discussed by the author are presented below.

The Success of Islam as a Religion

Islam began in the seventh century with one man in the Arabian Peninsula who claimed he was God’s messenger. Within 100 years it had overwhelmed the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires and its religious and political reach extended from Spain, across northern Africa, throughout the Middle East and into western Asia. What was it about Islam that made it so successful? According to the author it was a combination of a number of factors.

It of course starts with Mohammed, his character, and his message. Mohammed established what are called the five pillars of Islam. All one had to do to become a Muslim was to attest that there is only one God and Mohammed is his messenger, perform a certain prayer ritual five times each day, give a certain fraction of one’s wealth to the poor each year, fast from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan each year, make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.

The author points out that, at least on the face of it, this is more a prescription for how to live your life rather than a complicated or demanding belief system. The goal of these requirements was to provide a more perfect community of believers. Islam was a path to a better social system. This concept of society must have been attractive to the peoples who encountered it, easing the acceptance of the new religion.

The military successes seem to have benefited from a convergence of factors. The Muslims had on their side the fervor of recent converts, the lure of plunder from conquered lands, and surprisingly adept military leaders. The timing of the Islamic emergence was also favorable. It came at a time when the surrounding empires were in decline. The Muslims were surprised by their military success. It inspired in them even greater religious fervor for surely it proved that God was on their side. They even formulated a justification for the militant spread of Islam.

"...the idea that the world was divided into the mutually exclusive realms of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, ‘the realm of peace’ and ‘the realm of war.’ This schema depicted Islam as an oasis of brotherhood and peace surrounded by a universe of chaos and hatred. Anything one did to expand Dar al-Islam constituted action in the cause of peace, even fighting and bloodshed, because it shrank the realm of war."

Surely a major factor in the successful spread of Islam was the wisdom and relative benevolence with which they ruled the conquered peoples.

"Omar’s treatment of Jerusalem set the pattern for elations between Muslims and the people they conquered. Christians found that under Muslim rule they would be subject to a special poll tax called the jizya. That was the bad news. The good news: the jizya would generally be less than the taxes they had been paying to their Byzantine overlords—who did interfere with their religious practices.....The idea of lower taxes and greater religious freedom struck Christians as a pretty good deal, and so Muslims faced little or no local resistance in former Byzantine territory. In fact, Jews and Christians sometimes joined them in fighting the Byzantines."

"Conquest led the surge but conquest was kept separate from conversion. There was no ‘conversion by the sword.’ Muslims insisted on holding political power but not on their subjects being Muslims."

This description may come as a surprise to those used to hearing the current shouts of "death to the infidels." The history of Islam is complex and one needs a book such as this to lead one from these beginnings to the state of the Islamic world today.

Islam and Fundamentalism

One must understand the origins and the history of the Muslim peoples in order to appreciate the tendency towards what we would call fundamentalism: an unswerving dependence on revelation to determine all aspects of a believer’s life. Consider the path of Christianity. Christ was on the public scene for a few years and never had a large following. His sayings are transmitted to our times through translations from multiple languages by authors of unknown identity with unknowable accuracy. The Catholic branch of Christianity resolves uncertainty by allowing the Pope to provide the appropriate interpretation of Christ’s intentions, thereby avoiding the threat posed by ambiguity. The Protestant branch has bifurcated. One path views the Christian Bible as a generally correct guide to what they should believe and how they should live their lives, but it is viewed as a vehicle subject to interpretation. Only the Fundamentalist Protestant path tends toward a view of the Bible as the literal truth, an attitude that is much in the same spirit as the Muslim community and its acceptance of the Qur’an.

Mohammed was a known religious figure for about 20 years. As the messenger from God he defined Islam as a religion. However, he was also a political and social leader.

"Once Mohammed became the leader of Medina, people came to him for guidance and judgments about every sort of life question, big or little: how to discipline children...how to wash one’s hands...what to consider fair in a contract...what should be done with a thief...the list goes on. Questions that in many other communities would be decided by a phalanx of separate specialists, such as judges, legislators, political leaders, doctors, teachers, generals, and others, were all in the Prophet’s bailiwick here."

Mohammed preached that not only was he God’s messenger, he was God’s last messenger. There would be no further revelations. When Mohammed died, his successors had to decide what to do. They had become used to depending on the word of the Prophet on all matters. It was decided that it was necessary to continue along that path.

"Unlike older religions—such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Christianity—Muslims began to collect, memorize, recite, and preserve their history as soon as it happened, and they didn’t just preserve it but embedded each anecdote in a nest of sources, naming witnesses to each event and listing all persons who transmitted the account down through time to the one who first wrote it down, references that function like the chain of custody validating a piece of evidence in a court case."

Given that Mohammed is God’s messenger and that his preaching and sayings are assumed to be documented, one is left with little wiggle room. Islam is inherently a religion of fundamentalism. All questions are to be referenced to a pronouncement of the Prophet. That, of course, becomes harder to do as the world evolves and new circumstances appear. The next step was to attempt to decide what the Prophet would have decided by looking for analogous situations to apply, but that becomes more uncertain and subject to interpretation. The result is that one ends up with factions that passionately believe they are following the revealed truth but arriving at different conclusions. The situation becomes explosive when one factors in a decision by Mohammed’s immediate successor.

"But Abu Bakr responded to the crisis by declaring secession to be treason. The Prophet had said ‘No compulsion in religion,’ and Abu Bakr did not deny that principle. People were free to accept or reject Islam as they pleased; but once they were in, he asserted, they were in for good. In response to a political crisis, Abu Bakr established a religious principle that haunts Islam to this day—the equation of apostasy with treason."

This provides some explanation for why Sunnis and Shiites get along better with Christians and Jews than with each other.

To understand how this relatively benign religion developed the radical strains that bedevil the world today requires some knowledge of Muslim history. This the author provides. To make a long story short, the Muslim world suffered two major classes of catastrophe. The first might be referred to as invasions by barbarians. The first wave consisted of Turks moving down from their ancestral homelands (the central Asian steppes north of Iran and Afghanistan).

"Rude Turks came trickling south in ever growing numbers: tough warriors, newly converted to Islam and brutal in their simplistic fanaticism. Accustomed to plunder as a way of life, they ruined cities and laid waste to crops. The highways grew unsafe, small-time banditry became rife, trade declined, poverty spread. Turkish mamluks fought bitterly with Turkish nomads—it was Turks in power everywhere."

The actions of the ruling Turks would help induce the next wave of assaults.

"At this time the Muslim world knew as little of Western Europe as Europeans later knew about the African interior. To Muslims, everything between Byzantium and Andalusia was a more or less primeval forest inhabited by men so primitive that they still ate pig flesh. When Muslims said ‘Christians,’ they meant the Byzantine church or the various smaller churches operating in Muslim controlled territory. They knew that an advanced civilization had once flourished further west: a person could still make out traces of it in Italy and parts of the Mediterranean coast, which Muslims regularly raided; but it had crumbled during the Time of Ignorance, before Islam entered the world, and was now little more than a memory."

"Then the Seljuk Turks wrested control of Palestine away from the tolerant Fatimids and the indolent Abbasids. As new converts, these Turks tended towards zealotry. They weren’t zealous about sobriety, modesty, charity, and the like, but they ceded second place to none when it came to expressing chauvinistic disdain toward followers of other religions, especially those from faraway and more primitive lands...Christian pilgrims began to find themselves treated rather shabbily in the Holy Lands. It wasn’t that they were beaten, tortured or killed—nothing like that. It was more that they were subjected to constant little humiliations and harassments designed to make them feel second-class."

Reports of such treatment made their way back west and contributed to the notion of a crusade to regain control of the Holy Lands. The result was about 200 years of sporadic, but bloody battles that further disturbed the Muslim regions and pushed them yet further from their goal of the ideal society.

"Some modern-day Islamic radicals (and a smattering of Western pundits) describe the crusades as a great clash of civilizations foreshadowing the troubles of today. They trace the roots of modern Muslim rage to that era and those events. But reports from the Arab side don’t show Muslims of the time thinking this way, at least at the start. No one seemed to cast the wars as an epic struggle between Islam and Christendom—that was the story line the Crusaders saw. Instead of a clash between two civilizations, Muslims saw simply a calamity falling upon...civilization. For when they looked at the Franj (crusaders), they saw no evidence of civilization."

Eventually the crusades petered out and a far worse tragedy befell the Muslim world. This time the invaders were the Mongols coming from the east under the leadership of Genghis Khan.

"Then he marched on Khorasan and Persia, and here the Mongols attempted genocide. No other word really seems appropriate.....When the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi wrote a description of western Iran, northern Afghanistan, and the republics north of the Oxus River a few years before the Mongol invasion, he described a fertile, flourishing province. A few years after the invasion, it was a desert. It still is."

This sequence of disasters provoked a theological crisis in the Muslim world.

"The crisis was rooted in the fact that Muslim theologians and scholars, and indeed Muslims in general, had long felt that Islam’s military successes proved its revelations true. Well, if victory meant revelations were true, what did defeat mean?....Another major Muslim historian speculated that the coming of the Mongols portended the end of the world. According to yet another, the Mongol victories showed that God had abandoned Muslims."

It was at this point that the first hints of what we would today identify as "radical Islamic fundamentalism" began to emerge. The thoughts taking root were that these tragedies did not indicate any failure in their religion, but in their practice of the religion. The defeats could be blamed on the Muslims themselves for having drifted away from the practice of "true Islam." The meaning of the word "jihad" also began to acquire a new meaning. The author said the word is most directly translated with the meaning of "struggle," and in the early days of Islam it was associated with the struggle of the religion to survive and spread. Now the word was beginning to be used to include armed struggle against enemies of Islam, a category that included non-Muslims, heretics, apostates and schismatics. According to Ansary, this world-view did not take hold initially but never died away either. It was left to ferment across several hundred more years of Muslim humiliation.

The second catastrophe that befell the Muslim world was the economic and technical domination by the Western nations that yet continues. The invasion in this case was not military but economic. The invaders were merchants, flush with money, looking to buy and sell things. This influx of cash into the relatively simple and, by Western standards, backward economies of the Muslim nations caused severe dislocations to which the local citizens were not able to effectively respond. The net result was that the individual regions became beholden to that Western wealth, and subservient to those who controlled it. The exact path to subservience, or colonization, was different in different regions. The author’s description of the effect on India is representative.

"Around 1600, three gigantic national versions of that first corporation were created in Europe: they were the British, the Dutch, and the French ‘East India Companies.’... Each was chartered by its national government, and in each case the government in question gave its company a national monopoly on doing business with the Islamic east. The actual entities jockeying for advantage in Persia, India, and Southeast Asia, then, were these corporations."

"In Bengal, where the British elbowed out all other Europeans, the East India Company pretty much destroyed the Bengali crafts industry, but hardly noticed itself doing so. It was simply buying up lots of raw material at very good prices. People found more profit in selling raw material to the British than in using those materials to make their own goods. As the native economy went bust, indigenous Bengalis became ever more dependent on the British and finally subservient to them....The East India Company enshrined itself as the Bengali government’s ‘advisors’ nothing more. For the sake of efficiency, the company decided to go ahead and collect taxes on behalf of the Moghul government. And again, for efficiency’s sake, they decided to go ahead and spend the money themselves, directly, locally: what was the point of sending it to the capital and having it come back again? Oh, and henceforth the company’s private army would take care of security and maintain law and order. But the company insisted that it was not now governing Bengal: it was just providing needed services for a fee."

The effects of this invasion (colonization) were more subtle than those produced by the Mongols but just as severe and deadly in the long run.

"In practice, this meant the (powerless) "government" was responsible for solving all problems while the (powerful) company was entitled to reap all benefits but disavowed any responsibility for the welfare of the people; after all, it was not the government. Rapacious company officials bled Bengal dry, but those who complained were referred to ‘the government.’ The plundering of the province resulted in a famine that killed about a third of the population in just two years—we’re talking about an estimated 10 million people here."

The entire Muslim world was invaded/colonized in similar fashion. It was generally not until after World War II that this hold was broken. The Muslim world was then left to reform itself along boundaries drawn by the Western governments. This is itself an interesting story, but the point of this discussion was to demonstrate how the groundwork had been laid for a surge in radical Muslim fundamentalism.

The Muslim theological response to all this history was either to demand that Muslims must "shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form," or to demand that Islam be modified or reinterpreted to allow Muslims to better engage in the modern world. The latter approach became the effective winner in the sense that most countries ended up with governments intent on bringing their people to a state where they could compete with the Western countries. The fundamentalist strain persisted, however, and continued to gain adherents.

Wahhabism is the most familiar of the radical fundamentalist movements. It originated with Abdul Wahhab, an Arabian, born around 1703. He preached religious revival through restoration of Islam in its original state.

"...the local ruler Mohammed ibn Saud welcomed him warmly. Ibn Saud was a minor tribal chieftain with very big ambitions: to ‘unite’ the Arabian Peninsula. By ‘unite,’ of course, he meant ‘conquer.’ In the single-minded preacher Abdul Wahhab he saw just the ally he needed; Wahhab saw the same when he looked at ibn Saud. The two men made a pact. The chieftain agreed to recognize Wahhab as the top religious authority of the Muslim community and do all he could to implement his vision; the preacher, for his part, agreed to recognize ibn Saud as the political head of the Muslim community, its amir, and to instruct his followers to fight for him....The pact produced fruit. Over the next few decades, these two men ‘united’ all the bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi-Wahhabi rule."

This tie between the Saudi family and this extreme fundamentalism continued. In fact, the definition of Wahhabism today owes as much to Saudi implementation as to Wahhab’s preaching. The prime change to Islamic theology, according to Wahhabism, is the specification of jihad, the struggle to defeat the enemies of Islam, as a fundamental obligation of a Muslim.

"And who were the enemies of Islam?...According to Wahhab’s doctrines those who did not believe in Islam were, of course, potential enemies but not the most crucial offenders. If they agreed to live peacefully under Muslim rule, they could be tolerated. The enemies of real concern were slackards, apostates, hypocrites, and innovators."

Thus, what was originally a tolerant religion had, in this manifestation, morphed into an intolerant and potentially violent form. The tie to the Saudi family continues to this day. Saudi Arabia is the font for Wahhabism. It has allowed the country’s immense oil income to be used to support the spread of this form of Islam. A millennium of defeat and humiliation helps produce enough converts to make it a force in the world today.

This book leaves one optimistic about the eventual reciprocal accommodation of Western and Islamic-dominated governments. However, the followers of Wahhabism may not reside in a universe where such accommodation is possible. For example, if the Taliban in Afghanistan are truly Wahhabists, then they have to look around and see that Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan must be the next to go.

The Role of Women in Islamic Societies

The author points out that the role of women provides the most striking example of incompatibility between the societies of the Islamic world and that of the West. He revisits this issue several times as Islam evolves. It would appear that the practice of restricting women’s rights and role in society developed gradually over time and is more a result of cultural and traditional imperatives rather than religious edict. In the time of Mohammed the Arabian culture did not accord women the same rights as men, but they were allowed to participate broadly in society, including running businesses, participating in religious discussions and even going to war. Education was compulsory for both boys and girls. The early religious leaders did dictate that men and women should be separated during prayer in order to avoid sexual distractions. One could foresee this attitude evolving into an ever more restricted role for women. In addition, the Muslims encountered societies in which it was popular for wealthy men to keep their women hidden from view as a mark of their prestige. This practice apparently was gradually adopted by Islamic men for much the same reason.

Ansary seems to view this issue as an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of Islam rather than a tragedy of epic proportions.

"Well meaning folk on both sides believe that no human beings should be oppressed. This is not to deny that women suffer grievously from oppressive laws in many Muslim countries. It is only to say that the principle on which Muslims stand is not the "right" to oppress women. Rather, what the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men’s and a women’s realm and that the point of connection between the two should be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community."

The author quotes a fellow named Ghazali, who is described as an influential early Muslim scholar, in order to indicate what these separate "realms" came to mean. A woman should

　

"remain in the inner sanctum of her house and tend to her spinning; she should not enter or exit excessively; she should speak infrequently with her neighbors and visit them only when the situation requires it; she should safeguard her husband in his absence and in his presence; she should seek his pleasure in all affairs...She should not leave his home without his permission: if she goes out with his permission, she should conceal herself in worn out clothes....being careful that no stranger hear her voice or recognize her personally....She should.....be ready at all times for (her husband) to enjoy her whenever he wishes."

This does not look like a sincere attempt to manage sexuality in society. This appears more like male chauvinism gone berserk. The two realms described are those of master and slave. The whole notion that "separate but equal" can be made to work is inconsistent with everything we learn from history. A recent news broadcast pointed out that the major cause of death for women between the ages of 19 and 44, world wide, was violence inflicted by men. This, of course, includes civil wars, genocides, and other catastrophes. However, this report also pointed out that violence against women is endemic in some societies and stated that 80% of women in Afghanistan are victims of domestic violence. The source for this claim was not given but, knowing how prevalent domestic violence is in open societies where women are allowed to display their bruises and broken bones, one would have to be a little suspicious of men who want to hide their women from view.

Islam: Science and Scholarship

It is not news that the renaissance era in Europe was nurtured by a reacquaintence with the classic works of Greece and Rome that had been lost to Europeans but salvaged and preserved by the Muslims. Nor is it news that while Europe was going through its dark age, Muslim scholars were making great advances in learning and science. What was surprising was that the author seems to imply that this spurt of learning and research was really theological in nature, and was thus ultimately constrained in what was capable of being learned.

"Muslims were the first intellectuals ever in a position to make direct comparisons between, say Greek and Indian mathematics, or Greek and Indian medicine, or Persian and Chinese cosmologies, or the metaphysics of various cultures. They set to work exploring how these ancient ideas fit in with each other and with the Islamic revelations, how spirituality related to reason, and how heaven and earth could be drawn into a single schema that explained the entire universe."

The author provides two reasons why this quest for knowledge eventually expired. The first is the fundamental conflict between a society based entirely on revelation and unbiased scientific inquiry. The second is the havoc caused by the several catastrophes visited upon Muslim lands.

Islam, Jews and Israel

Ansary provides needed background on this age-old interaction.

"Both the Arabs and Jews were Semitic and traced their descent to Abraham (and through him to Adam). The Arabs saw themselves as the line descended from Abraham’s son Ishmael and his second wife, Hagar. The stories commonly associated with the Old Testament—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark, Joseph and Egypt, Moses and the pharaoh, and the rest of them—were part of Arab tradition too. Although most of the Arabs were pagan polytheists at this point (the time of Mohammed) and the Jews had remained resolutely monotheistic, the two groups were more or less indistinguishable in terms of culture and lifestyle: the Jews of this era spoke Arabic, and their tribal structure resembled that of the Arabs."

"Mohammed considered himself a descendent of Abraham and knew all about Abraham’s uncompromising monotheism. Indeed, Mohammed didn’t think he was preaching something new; he believed he was renewing what Abraham (and countless other prophets) had said...."

Throughout the history presented here there is little indication that Jews and Muslims would have difficulty living side-by-side. That began to change in the 20^{th century when world-wide political turmoil was at its peak and the Jews began to seriously consider the possibility of reestablishing a homeland in Palestine.}

"The new European immigrants did not seize land by force; they bought the land they settled; but they bought it mostly from absentee landlords, so they ended up living among landless peasants who felt doubly dispossessed by the aliens crowding in among them. What happened just before and during World War II in Palestine resembled what happened earlier in Algeria when French immigrants bought up much of the land and planted a parallel economy there, rendering the original inhabitants irrelevant. By 1945 the Jewish population of Palestine almost equaled the Arab population. If one were to translate that influx of newcomers to the American context, it would be as if 150 million refugees flooded in within a decade. How could that not lead to turmoil?"

"In the context of the European narrative, the Jews were victims. In the context of the Arab narrative, they were colonizers with much the same attitudes toward the indigenous population as their fellow Europeans.....Arabs who saw the Zionist project as European colonialism in thin disguise were not inventing a fantasy out of whole cloth: Zionists saw the project that way too, or at least represented it as such to the imperialist powers whose support they needed....The seminal Zionist Theodor Herzl wrote that a Jewish state in Palestine would ‘form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’ In 1914, Chaim Weitzman wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian stating that if a Jewish settlement could be established in Palestine ‘we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there....They could develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.’"

The detailed history of what followed is complex and not actually the subject of the author. His interests are in conveying how all this played out in the Muslim psyche.

"Most Arabs had no stake in the actual issue: the birth of Israel would not strip an Iraqi farmer of his land or keep some Moroccan shopkeeper from prospering in his business—yet most Arabs and indeed most Muslims could wax passionate about who got Palestine. Why? Because the emergence of Israel had emblematic meaning for them. It meant that Arabs (and Muslims generally) had no power, that imperialists could take any part of their territory, and that no one outside the Muslim world would side with them against a patent injustice. The existence of Israel signified European dominance over Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, and over the people of Asia and Africa generally. That’s how it looked from almost any point between the Indus and Istanbul."

This book introduced many historical and cultural topics that would be interesting to pursue further. So many books, so little time!

Born Fighting by Jim Webb

One sees members of Congress marching towards the capital to vote on health care reform. They appear to be marching arm-in-arm. They are surrounded by demonstrators shouting, heckling, racial taunts are heard, a black Congressman is spat upon. What is happening here? Images of the civil rights marches of 50s and 60s are summoned from distant memory. There are no snarling dogs this time, just plenty of snarling white people. A clue? Representatives speak of death threats, of their families being threatened, of rocks being thrown through office windows. On television, recordings of some of the abusive telephone calls are played. Through the cursing and swearing southern accents are clearly heard. Yes, a clue. One recalls the violence associated with the fight for civil rights in the South and asks, incredulously, “Are those people still out there? Has nothing changed in 50 years?” Two days after the vote a poll comes out stating that large numbers of Republicans think that President Obama is a socialist, Muslim, Nazi, non-citizen who may in fact be the anti-Christ. A week later Christian terrorists calling themselves a militia plan on murdering police officers in hopes of triggering an insurrection against the government. This is the twenty-first century. How can people like this still exist? How can a nation function with people like this in it? The Tea Party types—who are they? And why are they the way they are?

The answer may be found in a book by Jim Webb, the Senator from Virginia, who in Born Fighting describes the heritage and dispersion of what he refers to as the Scots-Irish from their roots in Scotland to their migration to northern Ireland and then onto the United States where they mainly settled in the Appalachian regions. We learned from Kevin Philips in his book American Theocracy that the Red States are ethnically dominated by the original settlers of the southern states or by southerners who exited the South after the Civil War. They brought with them their cultural heritage and evangelical religions. These are Webb’s ancestors. He writes of them with affection and claims that they played a great role in determining the attributes of our society. He means that as a compliment. We shall see.


Webb’s thesis is that the Scots-Irish cannot be understood unless one is familiar with their heritage. His description begins in Roman times when Celtic peoples were driven to what is now Scotland and made a stand in defense of their freedom. Their social development, or lack thereof, was determined by the centuries of warfare, by the inhospitable environment they found in Scotland, and by the version of Christianity they adopted.

“...while Scotland’s rough topography made it difficult to conquer, it made it equally difficult to rule.....Not unlike Appalachia, Scotland is a land of difficult water barriers, sharp mountains and deep hollows, soggy moors and rough pastures, and of thin, uncultivable soil that lies like a blanket over wide reaches of granite....the settlements of ancient Scotland grew haphazardly and emphasized a rugged form of survival that had links neither to commerce nor to the developing world. Again we find a cultural evolution and a fundamental lifestyle very much like those that would emerge later in the Appalachian Mountains.”

This is a theme that Webb returns to several times. These people did not pass through the stages of cultural and political development that have been common to most nations. The Scots of interest to us left before Scotland became a stable political entity with renowned universities. By the time they migrated to northern Ireland they had endured many generations of political turmoil at the national level. That and their isolated and harsh environment formed character traits and social responses that Webb argues persist to this day.

“Such turbulence at the center of national government not only empowered the local clan leaders, it also demanded that they be strong, both for their own survival and also for the well being of their extended families. And again a familiar pattern reinforced itself in what would become the Scots-Irish character: the mistrust of central authority, the reliance on strong tribal rather than national leaders, and the willingness to take the law into one’s own hands rather than waiting for a solution to come down from above.”

Of great significance in understanding these people is the development of their religious beliefs. The Scots were the beneficiaries of what Webb describes as the most corrupt version of the Catholic Church to be found anywhere. It seems only natural that they would respond by accepting the most harsh and demanding form of Protestantism based on the teachings of John Calvin.

“But Scotland ‘developed the Calvinistic doctrine that civil government, though regarded as a necessity, was to be recognized only when it was conducted according to the word of God.’ This meant not only that the Kirk would have the power to organize religious power at the local level, but also that Scots had reserved the right to judge their central government according to the standards they themselves would set from below.”

Note that at this point you have a people who have never accepted the notion of allegiance to a central government and have lived with the belief that loyalty is to be extended as far as their local clans and churches. You have a culture whose highest educational goal is to be able to read the Bible.


The lot of the Scots who moved to Ireland to populate the Ulster plantation or colony was not a happy one. To make room for them the English dispossessed the local Irish natives of their land. That and the sectarian hatred between Catholics and Protestants set up a situation that required three centuries to resolve itself into a truce. The English had no respect for either the Scots or the Irish and treated both shabbily. Little was changed in the culture of the Scots during this period.

“In Ireland, the Anglicans of the Church of Ireland and the Catholics who were benefiting from a Jesuit emphasis on education would press the importance of academic learning on their parishioners. The Kirks of the Calvinist Ulster Scots would continue to lecture more about discipline and self reliance than on book-fed philosophy.”

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Scots were tired of being dominated by the Anglican English and began heading to America.

“Small groups had begun to migrate across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean from the time James II ascended the throne in 1685, scattering themselves from New Hampshire to South Carolina. But after 1715 the migrations assumed a powerful dynamic, growing in intensity and concentrating almost exclusively on the mountainous areas from central Pennsylvania to the Georgia border....From their inception after 1715 until the American revolution, at least 200,000 and as many as 400,000 would leave Ulster for America.”

What is critical to understand about this migration is that the Scots-Irish would continue in a state of isolation from the major cultural, intellectual and economic developments occurring in Europe and the United States.

“Unfortunately, even as they began their second great migration within the span of a century, as a culture the Ulster Scots were missing out, both on the dawning era of educational enlightenment and on the benefits of the Industrial revolution.”

“In America, the settlers of New England and to a lesser extent those Cavalier societies along the southern coast had already created many great universities that survive even to this day. But the Ulster Scots would head into the mountains with few texts other than the Bible in their canvas sacks, beginning a century of educational regression even as others saw the New World as a land of enlightenment.”

Webb attributes the choice of where the Scots-Irish settled to continued discrimination by the English-dominated settlers who had preceded them.

“....I can sense them looking coolly at the pretenses and attempted restrictions placed upon them by yet another branch of an Anglican establishment that they imagined they had left behind in Ulster, a pervasive aristocracy that in America controlled most of the ‘flatlands’ along the colonial coast. They were told they could practice their religion in the mountains even if it was not ‘lawful’ as long as they did not seek to infect the more ordered societies along the coast. And they were expected to reciprocate by both staying in the mountains and keeping the Indians at bay. These memories burned like fire among people who knew, even nearly three centuries ago, that the Eastern Establishment looked down on them, openly demeaning their religion and their cultural ways, and at bottom sought to use them toward its own ends.”

The Scots-Irish therefore ended up in areas where making a living would always be difficult. The wilderness in which they settled was the zone of conflict between the settlers and the native Indians. Life was not only hard, it was dangerous. Webb talks much of the tradition of gun ownership that persists today and attributes it to both the need for guns for hunting and self-defense, and to what he describes as a cultural/genetic readiness to fight.


One can see in this story the seeds of the “Southern” attitudes and culture that we recognize from our experience or our study of history. Senator Webb has provided a narrative in which one can understand how these attitudes developed. To complete the picture one must dwell more on the religious history of these people.

“Organized religion led by strong ministers was the backbone of the communities, for without it (as later decades proved), many would simply regress into the decadence and spiritual emptiness of the wilderness. Just as important, the churches became vital centers of religious, social, and even political activity. From these pulpits, decade after decade, strong men preached about the power of the individual, decried the evil of a government that sought to interpose itself between man and God, and reminded parishioners of the two centuries of discrimination by the Anglican-English aristocracy against their people, a discrimination that in many ways still existed in America.”

The Civil War was, of course, a defining moment for the South and its people. It is in this time period that the history becomes more familiar and more relevant to the present. It is at this point that Webb’s narrative and his people demand more scrutiny than they perhaps can stand. While his story continues to provide insight into and understanding of the Scots-Irish descendents, the individual reader may decide that insight and understanding are not sufficient to foster sympathy or forgiveness.


Webb makes it clear that he believes the southern secession and subsequent Civil War were not driven solely by the desire to protect the institution of slavery. Clearly that is the case. However, our interest here is in moral decisions and how people rationalize their choices. If one views slavery as inherently evil, then judging people who are willing to tolerate slavery for political, economic, social or religious reasons leaves one to conclude they are either dishonest, greedy, bigoted, or perhaps, merely ignorant and uncivilized.


The author depicts his Scots-Irish as being mostly non-slaveholders whose economic situation was little better than that of the slaves. They are described as being dominated politically by politicians and an aristocracy that cared little for them or their welfare. In fact, the institution of slavery was a mechanism for insuring their continued poverty. Yet, when war came, the Scots-Irish formed the core of the Confederate Army. He is quite proud every time his people fight in a war—any war—because they are so willing to fight.

“It might seem odd in these modern times, but the Confederate soldier fought because, on the one hand, in his view he was provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded, and, on the other, his leaders had convinced him that this was a war of independence in the same sense as the Revolutionary War. For those who can remove themselves from the slavery issue and examine the traits that characterize the Scots-Irish culture, the unbending ferocity of the Confederate soldier is little more than a continuum. This was not so much a learned response to historical events as it was a cultural approach that had been refined by centuries of similar experiences. The tendency to resist outside aggression was bred deeply into every heart—and still is today.”

Let us consider that statement. Here you have a people who are willing to die to defend a system that has discriminated against them for almost 200 years. They are apparently not interested in the moral issues such as slavery, or historical perspectives. If someone—anyone—tells them an outsider is coming to tell them they have to do something, they are ready to kill or be killed. Webb tries to convince the reader that this is an honorable trait. One can grant Webb that his people are brave and fierce. However, being brave while acting against one’s own self-interest is more appropriately characterized as stupid or ignorant rather than honorable. Willingness to kill irrespective of the justice of the cause is dishonorable at best, not honorable. Being culturally or genetically wired for violent response raises a question as to whether these people are fit to live in a modern society.


The post-War behavior of the Southern whites is something even Webb has a hard time stomaching, although he does manage to put most of the blame on the Yankees.

“Instead of hope, inside the region the South’s leadership was now itself running on resentment and galvanizing the white yeomanry by uniting them against the Yankee on the outside and the black family down the road.... ....The near mandatory hatred of those from the outside, either geographically or ethnically, would result in the stifling of all internal dissent as the postwar leadership unified the body politic to fight the Yankee in the only way the region could—through absolute political unity.”

“This last phenomenon—revenge on the powerless—had no historical precedent among the Scots-Irish, no real basis in the now ancient teachings of the Kirk, and the decades of retaliation against those of African descent would prove to be a monstrous mousetrap that cracked their own necks as well.”

This last quote demands a more thorough look at the religion of the South and the role it played. Webb refers often to the Calvinist origins of the religious beliefs of his people. He refers to it as a harsh form of Protestantism. Calvin created a version of Protestantism that was based on predestination and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His teachings are a perfect example of being able to find anything you want in the Bible if you look hard enough. He chose to base this concept of predestination on a few phrases written by an itinerant preacher who had no direct intersection with Christ, while at the same time ignoring most of the teaching attributed to Christ in the Gospels. According to Calvin everyone’s fate—whether they will go to heaven or hell—was decided by God before the world was formed. What he created was a religion whose members could be smug and arrogant in their confidence that they were God’s select while others—nonbelievers—were doomed and there was nothing they could do about it. Calvin was not above burning alive people he considered heretics. One might assume that if they are going to burn in hell for all eternity anyways, why not start them off a little early. Such a religion could be viewed as inherently intolerant and discriminatory. The preachers of the time certainly had no problem using the Bible to justify the enslavement of Africans. For the author to even hint that this was ever a benign religion that would avoid harming the defenseless is a bit ridiculous given the 300 years of slaughter between the Scots-Irish Calvinists and the Catholics in Ireland. Calvin’s ideas have been moderated over time to make the religion more marketable. Calvin seemed to believe that only he and a rather small fraction of the people would be saved. Who would want to join a religion that says you are probably going to hell no matter what you do? One is reminded of Will Durant’s summation of John Calvin.

“But we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.”

The post-war years left the region even more isolated from social and political developments in the rest of the country.

“The level of education fell tragically in these decades. Actual illiteracy increased among the millions. But what was worse was that the state universities ceased in effect to exist for loyal whites in the Thorough period and went for long years thereafter with empty halls and skeleton facilities....If the leadership of the Old South in its palmiest days had been only half-educated even by American standards, the leadership of the land in 1890 would be scarcely better instructed and scarcely less simple in outlook than that of the first generation to emerge from the frontier.”

What Webb has constructed is a history of a people who have lived over a thousand years in relative isolation from the main course of social and economic evolution experienced by the United States and Europe. The South experienced outward migrations over the past two centuries, but it was not until the Second World War that significant numbers of people began to migrate into the region.

“During world War II millions of non-Southerners of all ethnic backgrounds, most of them citizen-soldiers who had been conscripted,....were personally exposed to the twin realities of the South. On the one hand, they were often confronted by an honor-bound but frequently backward white culture that was willing to defend its way of life against all outsiders. On the other, the glaring racial humiliations of segregation were visible for all to see. In many eyes, white poverty was attributed to cultural inferiority rather than the generations of Yankee colonialism that had produced it, while the racial inequities they observed would leave a lasting impression, fueling nationwide support for the desegregation and civil rights efforts that began shortly after the end of World War II.”

Webb decries the racial attitudes developed in his Southern whites, but perhaps is too lenient in trying to blame them on Yankees and carpetbaggers The author seems to be saying that his people are rugged individualists who would never join a worker’s union, but they would band together for the purposes of revenge and discrimination. Webb also comes down hard on civil rights activists. He seems to think everything would have been easier if only the “Yankees” had been astute enough to realize that the vicious, ignorant people they were trying to deal with had a reason for being vicious and ignorant. As if a little sympathy might have helped.

“By working so hard to convert an issue of social injustice designed to eradicate demeaning laws of exclusion into a full blown war against the entire value system of a region, these radical activists terribly misread that region’s basic culture and turned many of the very people who might have worked for racial justice into their most virulent enemies. To provoke and blame disadvantaged whites for the plight of disadvantaged blacks was either naive or politically manipulative. And to expect that the disadvantaged whites would happily assist in revamping the entire social and economic order without attention being paid to their own situation was absurd.”

That statement suggests topics worthy of many books of analysis. However, the purpose of this note is to discuss how a significant section of our population who has lived or been incorporated into the culture that emerges from Webb’s Scots-Irish history might behave in our society. Could the passions and beliefs of the Tea Baggers seem reasonable to those immersed in this culture?


This is an appropriate point to leave a chronological treatment and examine the characteristics that Webb says define the Scots-Irish culture: individualism versus communality, a distrust of authority and educated people, a willingness to fight and wage war, and an intense version of Christianity that informs their political and social views. Consider this statement by the author.

“The great cities of the United States were increasingly filled with Catholics, members of the Orthodox churches and Jews—all professing in one way or another communitarian social values very much at odds with the individualism of the traditional Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic culture.”

One could define communitarian values as those driven by a sense of group solidarity. Webb seems to be saying—proudly—that his people don’t want any of that solidarity stuff here in their country. Those of us who derive from “foreign” cultures are implied to be the outsiders trying to cause trouble. Here, perhaps, lies the main source of political discord in our country. Roughly half the citizenry seems to believe that a modern nation has to be driven by mutually agreed upon efforts to act in unison for the benefit of all. About twenty-five percent believe that any—or at least any new intrusion of community values on their individual rights is tyranny. The remainder vacillates between the two points of view depending upon circumstances.


If one considers the health care debate, the people pushing for reform were driven by the moral imperative to provide health care to all, while those opposed (read Tea Party types) seem unconcerned about others and focused on what the effects might be on their own situation (“Keep your hands off my health care.”). This latter viewpoint would be consistent with Webb’s description of his people. For avowed Christians they seem to hold rather harsh views on social justice that might be somewhat surprising to those raised on stories of a kind and gentle Jesus who always seemed to healing people and telling everyone to be good to their neighbors. But, in fact, in the realm of health care legislation it is the secular types who are pushing for health care reform while those who profess their Christianity the loudest are generally against it. Recall that the first nation to implement a national health plan was Germany. Bismarck, no sentimental softy, described his development of social services, including universal health care in Germany as “a program of applied Christianity.” So what has happened to Christianity in our country? Consider Kevin Philips’ description of Southern evangelical beliefs in the context of race. While Philips’ comments refer explicitly to issues of race they could easily be applied to other social issues with the same result.

“The SBC’s [Southern Baptist Convention] cultural conservatism is not of the sort that inhibits nonwhite conversion and enlistment. What it does propound, though, is a conservatism of evangelical theology preoccupied with saving souls and dismissive of other designs—whether liberal sociology or government-run-social-welfare programs—to ameliorate the ills of society. The answers, say SBC preachers, lie in the Bible and in coming to Jesus; government social-welfare planning and programs, in this view, only get in the way of individuals’ assumption of personal responsibility and salvation....a compelling case that evangelical beliefs support the status quo when they lead white southerners to insist that persons of both races are masters of their own fates and salvation. White evangelists lopsidedly believe that if blacks do not get ahead, it is because of black culture or lack of initiative, explanations which pivot on individual responsibility. Under evangelical theology, social structures are not the real problem, and government action and involvement are rarely the solution—or so white true believers usually conclude.”

What emerges from this book and others we have read is a picture of a subculture with a unique history, a unique character, and a unique religion. Together they produce an approach to life and governance that is almost completely at odds with trends in all modern nations. If one overlays the attitudes of the Tea Party supporters with those indicated by this generalized picture of the Scots-Irish, there is quite a bit of overlap. It would not be fair to say that this totally explains where the Tea party enthusiasm is coming from, or to say that all Scots-Irish agree with Tea Party goals. What one can say is that it is possible to expect that a significant number of people who have lived in the Scots-Irish culture will emerge with the set of attitudes that most of us find bewildering and occasionally frightening. Governing a nation with these people in it is certainly going to be a challenge.


The subject of the Scots-Irish has come up before in Deer Hunting with Jesus, where we were provided a current snapshot of a community of Scots-Irish descent in Virginia, in American Theocracy where the religious beliefs and their effects on our politics were detailed, and in Outliers where a tendency towards violent response to any kind of slight was attributed to this Scots-Irish heritage. Senator Webb’s book provides a coherent framework in which the Scots-Irish can be viewed and evaluated. This is a highly personal rendering by Webb. He uses his own family and ancestors as examples of the character and history of his people. He is justifiably proud of his family, although it is not clear that they are truly representative of the Scots-Irish as a whole. The book is well-written and easy to follow. Like any good book, it leaves one wanting to pursue further the topics that arose in the reading.