The Penguin History of the World

It seems more revealing, perhaps, that in 1947 the timing of the ceremony marking the establishment of Indian independence was only settled after appropriate consultation with the astrologers, even though India has a constitution that is non-confessional and, theoretically, secular. Around the world, too, confessional states or established religions are now unusual outside Muslim countries (though England and some of the Nordic countries still have state churches). This reduction need not mean, however, that the real power of religious belief or of religions over their adherents has declined everywhere. The founders of Pakistan were secular-minded, westernized men, but in a struggle with the conservative ulema after independence, they often lost. Some of the same could be said for Israel, another state created by a secular élite but on a religious basis.

It may well be true that today more people give serious attention to what is said by religious authorities than have ever done so before: there are more people alive, after all, even if the adherence to any formal religion has declined in parts of the West. Many people in Britain were startled in the 1980s when Iranian clergymen denounced a fashionable author as a traitor to Islam and pronounced a sentence of death upon him; it was a surprise to bien pensant and progressive circles to discover that, as it were, the Middle Ages were still in full swing in some parts of the world, without their having noticed it. They were even more startled when numbers of their Muslim fellow citizens appeared to agree with the fatwa.

‘Fundamentalism’, though, is a word borrowed from American religious sociology. Within Christian churches, too, it expresses a protest against modernization by those who feel threatened and dispossessed by it. Nevertheless, some believe that here as elsewhere, western society has indicated a path that other societies will follow, and that conventional western liberalism will prevail. It may be so. Equally, it may not be. The interplay of religion and society is very complex and it is best to be cautious. That the numbers of pilgrims travelling to Mecca have risen dramatically may register a new fervour or merely better air travel facilities.

Alarm has been felt recently over the vociferous reassertion of their faith by many Muslims. Yet Islam does not seem able to avoid cultural corruption by the technology and materialism of the European tradition, though successfully resisting that tradition’s ideological expression in atheistic Communism. Radicals in Islamic societies are frequently in conflict with westernized and laxly observant Islamic élites. Islam is, of course, still an expanding and missionary faith and the notion of Islamic unity is far from dead in Muslim lands. It can still nerve men to action, too, as it did in India in 1947 or in Iran in 1978. In Ulster and Eire, sectarian Irishmen long mouthed their hatreds and bitterly disputed the future of their country in the vocabulary of Europe’s seventeenth-century religious wars, though a truce has now been made there. Although the hierarchies and leaders of different religions find it appropriate to exchange public courtesies, it cannot be said that religion has ceased to be a divisive force. Doctrine may have become more amorphous, but whether the supernatural content of religion is losing its hold in all parts of the world, and is important today merely as a badge of group membership, is contestable.

What is less doubtful is that within the world whose origins are Christian, which did so much to shape today’s world, the decline of sectarian strife has gone along with the general decline of Christian belief and, often, with a loss of confidence. Ecumenism, the movement within Christianity whose most conspicuous expression was the setting up of a World Council of Churches (which Rome did not join) in 1948, owes much to Christians’ growing sense in developed countries that they live in hostile environments. It also owes something to widespread ignorance and uncertainty about what Christianity is, and what it ought to claim. The only unequivocally hopeful sign of vigour in Christianity has been the growth (largely by natural increase) in numbers of Roman Catholics. Most of them are now non-Europeans, a change dramatized in the 1960s by the first papal visits to South America and Asia and the presence at the Vatican Council of 1962 of seventy-two archbishops and bishops of African descent. By 2010 only a quarter of the world’s Catholics lived in Europe, and the faith was growing faster in Africa than anywhere else.