Introduction

“We stand all alone in this. We are different from all around us.
Reform historians ... poets fare seen as great men by all the others].” Even in the Jewish state the Haredim were isolated.
“Streets are named for historical figures whom we see in an utterly negative light. We stand all alone.”
The Haredi rebellion against rational modernity consists largely of retreat. But in this period, the Lubavitch Hasidim, who had long nurtured a militancy in the Habad yeshiva in Russia, went on the offensive. The Bolsheviks had virtually annihilated the Habad in Russia. Jewish schools and yeshivot were closed, Torah study was condemned as counterrevolutionary, and defiance meant starvation, imprisonment, or death. The Sixth Rebbe (Joseph Isaac Schneerson, 1880--1950) could only see these measures as the “birth pangs of the Messiah.” It was not enough for the religious to retreat from the world; Hasidim must try to conquer the modern world for God. In Russia, the Rebbe organized a Jewish underground, where the graduates of the Habad yeshiva gave Torah and Talmud classes, and taught young Jews to observe the commandments. He was exiled, but continued his work from Poland, reorganizing and centralizing his court on modern lines, and using the new communications technology to keep in touch with the Lubavitch all over the world. When the Rebbe was forced to flee Hitler and arrived in the United States, he continued his mission and began a propaganda campaign to reclaim Jews who had assimilated or felt deracinated in the New World. Instead of withdrawal, there was outreach. In 1949, the Rebbe took the remarkable step of founding Kfar Habad, the first Hasidic settlement in Israel. He had not abated his hostility to Zionism one whit, but believed that in these Last Days, his mission must also reach the Jews in the defiled land of Israel.
In 1950, the Rebbe died and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1904--94). This was an astonishing development, which must reflect the Habad’s willingness to embrace the secular world in an attempt to convert it. The Seventh Rebbe had not been educated in a yeshiva, but had received a modern education. He had studied Jewish philosophy in Berlin and marine engineering at the Sorbonne. When he arrived in the United States in 1941, he had worked for the Navy, but had also assisted in his father-in-law’s mission.
Here was a Rebbe who was a product of the modern world, and able to mobilize his Hasidim in a vastly efficient media campaign to redeem Jews all over the world. Now it was not only the yeshiva students who were to be soldiers in the Rebbe’s army but every single Habad Jew. The Rebbe carefully prepared his campaign, and in the 1970s launched an immense counteroffensive against secularization and assimilation.
Thousands of young Lubavitch, male and female, would be dispatched to found Habad houses in distant cities, where Jews were either wholly secularized or in a minority. The house would be a “drop-in” center which provided information about Judaism, hosted Sabbath and festival ceremonies, and held lectures and classes. Other young Hasidim would be sent out onto the campuses and streets of America, where they would accost passing Jews and persuade them to perform one of the commandments in public, such as putting on tefillin and reciting a prayer. The idea was that the rite would touch the divine “spark” lodged in the soul of every Jew and awaken his or her essential holiness.
The Rebbe was at home in the world. His scientific knowledge coexisted with the old mythos of Habad Hasidism. His studies in marine biology had not robbed him of his vision of the divine sparks; he would develop a strong messianism, and won the election to the leadership of Habad by claiming to be in mystic communion with the deceased Sixth Rebbe. In his spirituality, logos and mythos were complementary sources of insight. He interpreted the Bible as literally as any Protestant fundamentalist, convinced that the world had been created by God in six days just under six thousand years ago. But he also believed that the discoveries of modern science about the connection between body and soul, or matter and energy, were leading human beings to a new appreciation of the organic unity of reality, which, in turn, would predispose them to monotheism. His immense campaign was organized upon modern lines, and he understood how to exploit his resources and speak to secularized men and women. It seems, however, to have been the mythology and mysticism of Habad that gave the Lubavitch the confidence to sally forth into the world instead of retreating defensively from it. Recent rebbes had turned against the spirit of the Enlightenment, but Rabbi Schneur Zaiman, the First Rebbe and founder of Habad, had helped his Hasidim to cultivate a positive view of the world of their day. The Seventh Rebbe seemed to have returned to this original spirit, using his rational powers within a mythical context, as Zaiman himself had done. Habad had refused to accept the modern separation of sacred and profane. Everything, however base and mundane, held a spark of the divine. There was no such person as a “secular Jew,” and even the goyim had a potential for holiness. Toward the end of his life, convinced of the imminence of the Last Days, the Rebbe began a mission to the gentiles of America, which, he acknowledged, had been good to Jews. The Lubavitch had suffered greatly in the modern period and had even faced extinction, but the Rebbe trained them not to see the Galut in a wholly demonic light, not to nurture fantasies of hatred and revenge, but to see the world as a place to which they could reintroduce the divine.
Protestant fundamentalists in the United States would eventually launch a counteroffensive against the modernity that had defeated them, but during the period currently under discussion, they concentrated, like Haredi Jews, on creating their own defensive counterculture. After the Scopes trial, Protestant fundamentalists retreated from the public arena and withdrew to their own churches and colleges. The liberal Christians assumed that the fundamentalist crisis was over. By the end of the Second World War, the fundamentalist groups seemed marginal and insignificant, and the mainstream denominations drew most of the believers. But instead of disappearing, the fundamentalists were putting down strong roots at the local level.
There was still a considerable number of conservatives within the mainstream denominations; they had lost all hope of expelling the liberals, but they had not relinquished their belief in the “fundamentals” and held aloof from the majority. The more radical formed their own churches, especially the premillennarians, who believed it to be a sacred duty, while waiting for Rapture, to separate themselves from the ungodly liberals. They began to found new organizations and networks masterminded by a new generation of evangelists. By 1930, there were at least fifty fundamentalist Bible colleges in the United States. During the Depression years, another twenty-six were founded, and the fundamentalist Wheaton College, in Illinois, was the fastest-growing liberal arts college in the United States. Fundamentalists also formed their own publishing and broadcasting empires. When television arrived during the 1950S, the young Billy Graham, Rex Humbard, and Oral Roberts began their ministries as “televangelists,” replacing the old traveling revivalist preachers. A huge, apparently invisible broadcasting network linked fundamentalists together all over the nation. They felt themselves to be outsiders, pushed to the periphery of society, but their new colleges and radio and television stations gave them a home in a hostile world.
In the counterculture that Protestant fundamentalists were creating, their colleges were safe, sacred enclaves amid the surrounding profaneness. They were attempting to create holiness by means of segregation. Bob Jones University, founded in 1927 in Florida, and moving to Tennessee before finding its final home in Greenville, South Carolina, epitomized the ethos of the new fundamentalist institution.
The founder, an early-twentieth-century evangelist, was no intellectual, but wanted to found what he called a “safe” school, which would help young people preserve their faith while they prepared to fight the atheism which, he believed, now pervaded the secular universities. Students were taught “common sense Christianity” alongside the liberal arts. Everybody was obliged to take at least one Bible course each semester, to attend chapel, and to adhere to a “Christian” lifestyle, with strong rules governing dress, social interaction, and dating. Disobedience and disloyalty were, Bob Jones insisted, “unpardonable sins” and were not tolerated. Staff and students alike had to conform. Bob Jones University was a world unto itself: it made the difficult decision not to seek academic accreditation, believing any such compromise with the secular establishment to be sinful. This sacrifice enabled the university to exert tighter control over admissions, curriculum, and library resources.
This discipline was essential, for BJU students knew that they were at war. As a recent undergraduate catalog explains, the school is against “all atheistic, agnostic and humanistic attacks upon the Scripture”;
all “so-called Modernist,”
“Liberal,” and “Neo-Orthodox” positions, and the “unscriptural compromise of the “New Evangelicals’ and the unscriptural practices of the “Charismatics.”
“ Students and staff retreated from the world to protect their faith from the assaults of these enemies. This “separation,” according to Bob Jones’s son (Bob Jones the second), was “the very foundation and basis of a fundamental witness and testimony.” From this bastion of faith, students would militantly defend “biblical authority and infallibility” by attacking “the enemies of the faith.” B.J.U. had little influence on American academia, but great influence on the Christian nation. Bob Jones University has become the largest supplier of fundamentalist teachers in the country;
graduates are known for their self-discipline and self-motivation, if not for their broad education.
The Bible colleges and the fundamentalist universities created during these years were, like the Haredi yeshivot, separatist citadels.
Fundamentalists felt that their faith was imperiled; they had been displaced from the center of American life, and were taught to regard themselves as “outside the gate.” The militancy expressed deep anger. This surfaced in the utterances of the more extremist Christians in these years, who voiced many of the fears, hatreds, and prejudices of the most marginalized sectors of the population. Gerald Winrod, a Baptist who organized the Defenders of the Christian Faith to combat the teaching of evolution during the 1920s, traveled in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and returned determined to expose the “Jewish menace” to the American people. At the same time, he denounced Roosevelt’s “Jewish New Deal” as satanic. With Carl Mclntyre and Billy James Hargis, Winrod condemned every “liberal” trend in the United States.
Fundamentalists blamed liberals of any hue, secularist or Christian, for the marginal status of the “true” Christians. They were beginning their swing to the political Right. In the nineteenth century, evangelicals had seen patriotism as idolatrous. Now it became a sacred duty to defend the American way of life. Hargis, the founder of the Christian Crusade, an anticommunist ministry, saw the Soviet Union as demonic, and battled tirelessly against what he regarded as communist infiltration: the liberal press, leftist teachers, and the Supreme Court were all, in his view, part of a conspiracy to turn America “red.” Carl Mclntyre, who seceded from the Presbyterian Church to found the Bible Presbyterian Church and the Faith Theological Seminary, saw hidden enemies everywhere. The mainline denominations themselves were part of a satanic plot to destroy Christianity in America. In the 1950s, Mclntyre joined Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade.
These extremists were not typical, but they were influential. By 1934, some 600,000 people subscribed to Winrod’s Defender Magazine; 120,000 took Mclntyre’s Christian Beacon. Mclntyre reached thousands more in his Twentieth Century Christian Hour, a radio program which condemned all Christians who did not subscribe to his theology of hatred, and all liberal clergy, who might seem loving and Christian to the uninformed, but who were really “atheistic, communistic, Bible-ridiculing, blood-despising, name calling sex-manacled sons of green-eyed monsters.
“ Fundamentalism was becoming a religion of rage, but, as in Haredi Judaism, this rage was rooted in deep fear. This was evident in the premillennialism that became a hallmark of the movement during this period.
By the Second World War, only premillennialists still called themselves “fundamentalists”; other conservative Christians, such as Billy Graham, preferred to call themselves “evangelicals”: the duty of saving souls in this rotten civilization demanded some degree of cooperation with other Christians, whatever their theological beliefs. Fundamentalists proper, however, insisted on separatism and segregation. The war years seemed to prove that the postmillennial optimism of the liberals had been deluded; fundamentalists regarded the new United Nations in as negative a light as they had the old League of Nations. It would prepare the world for the dictatorship of Antichrist and the ensuing Tribulation. There could be no world peace.
“The Bible contradicts such a Utopian dream,” wrote Herbert Lockyear in 1942. “This is not to be the last war. Present horrors are but the spawn to produce still more terrible anguish. “ This was a vision diametrically opposed to the view of the liberal establishment. There were “two nations” in America, unable to share each other’s vision of the modern world. The premillennial vision endorsed the fundamentalists’ feeling of utter helplessness.
The atomic bomb, they believed, had been foretold by St. Peter, who had predicted that on the last day, “with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burnt up.” There was no hope of averting the final holocaust, David Grey Barnhouse reflected in Eternity magazine in
I945:
“the divine plan moves forward to its inevitable fulfillment.” In his best-seller The Atomic Age and the Word of God (1948), the fundamentalist author Wilbur Smith argued that the bomb proved that the literalists had been right all along.” The exact predictions of the atomic explosion in Scripture showed that the Bible was indeed inerrant and must be read according to its plain sense.
Yet this fatalistic scenario also gave the fundamentalists, who felt despised and ostracized by the mainstream culture, a sense of confidence and superiority.
They had privileged information, denied to the secularist or liberal Christian, and knew what was really going on. The catastrophic events of the twentieth century were really heading toward Christ’s final victory.
Moreover, the atomic holocaust would not affect the true believers, since, as we have seen, they were convinced that they would be raptu red up to heaven before the End. It was only the apostates and unbelievers who would suffer those final tortures. Premillennialism was, therefore, fueling the resentment experienced by fundamentalists by allowing them to cultivate fantasies of revenge that were quite out of keeping with the spirit of the Gospels. There was contradiction too in their apparently positive vision of the new State of Israel.
The Jewish people had been central to the vision of John Darby, the founder of premillennialism. Fundamentalists had been thrilled by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the actual creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was seen by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell as “the greatest... single sign indicating the imminent return of Jesus Christ”; he saw May 14, 1948, when Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel, as the most important day in history since the ascension of Jesus into heaven.
Support for Israel became mandatory; Israel’s history was beyond human influence and control, determined by God from all eternity. Christ could not return, the Last Days could not begin, unless the Jews were living in the Holy Land.” Protestant fundamentalists were enthusiastic Zionists, but their vision had a darker side. ]ohn Darby had taught that Antichrist would slaughter two-thirds of the Jews living in Palestine in the End-time:
Zachariah had predicted this, and, like all such prophecies, his words must be interpreted literally. Some fundamentalists had seen the Holocaust as God’s last effort to convert the Jews, and a foretaste of worse to come. In Israel and Prophecy, the prolific fundamentalist writer John Walvoord gave a detailed timetable of this final persecution of the Jews, based on a patchwork of prophecies.
Antichrist would help the Jews to rebuild their Temple and convince many of them that he was the Messiah; but then he would set up his own image in the new Temple as an object of worship. After this apostasy, 144,000 Jews would reject Antichrist, be converted to Christianity, and die as martyrs.
Then Antichrist would unleash a hideous persecution and Jews would die in ghastly numbers. Only a few would escape and be present to greet Jesus at his Second Coming. At the same time as Protestant fundamentalists celebrated the birth of the new Israel, they were cultivating fantasies of a final genocide at the end of time. The Jewish state had come into existence purely to further a Christian fulfillment. The Jews’ fate in the Last Days is uniquely grim, since they are doomed to suffer whether or not they accept Christ.
American Protestants had not suffered like the Jews, but their vision of modernity was also dark and doomed. They had evolved their literal and “scientific” reading of scripture in response to the rationalistic spirit of the modern world, yet if the true test of a religious vision is that it helps believers to cultivate the cardinal virtue of compassion (a teaching that informs the Gospels and the letters of St.
Paul, if not the Book of Revelation), Protestant fundamentalism seemed to be failing as a religious movement, just as at the Scopes trial its science had proved to be defective. Indeed, their literal reading of highly selected passages of the Bible had encouraged them to absorb the Godless genocidal tendencies of modernity.
Muslims had as yet produced no fundamentalist movement, because their modernization process was not yet sufficiently advanced. They were still at the stage of reshaping their religious traditions to meet the new challenge of modernity and using Islam to help the people understand the spirit of the new world. In Egypt, a young teacher brought the ideas of Afghani, Abdu, and Rida, whose reforms had always been confined to a small circle of intellectuals, to the more ordinary people. This in itself was a modernizing move. The older reformers had still been shaped by the conservative ethos, and, like most premodern philosophers, they had been elitists and did not consider the masses capable of abstruse thought. Hasan al-Banna (1906--49) found a way to turn their reforming ideas into a mass movement.
He had had a modern as well as a traditionally religious education. He had studied at the Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, the first teachers’ training college to provide a higher education in the sciences, but Banna was also a Sufi and throughout his life the spiritual exercises and rites of Sufism remained important to him. For Banna, faith was not a notional assent to a creed;
it was something that could be understood only if it was lived and its rituals were carefully practiced. He knew that Egyptians needed Western science and technology; he also realized that their society must be modernized, politically, socially, and economically. But these were practical and rational matters that must go hand-in-hand with a spiritual and psychological reformation.
As students in Cairo, Banna and his friends were moved almost to tears by the political and social confusion in the city. There was a political stalemate:
the parties engaged in fruitless and vociferous debate and were still manipulated by the British, who despite Egyptian “independence” remained very much in command of the country. When Banna took up his first teaching post in I’mailiyyah in the Suez Canal Zone, where the British were ensconced, the humiliation of his people affected his very soul. The British and other expatriates had no interest in the local population, but kept a firm hand on the economy and public utilities.
He was shamed by the contrast between the luxurious homes of the British and the miserable hovels of the Egyptian workers. For Banna, a devout Muslim, this was not merely a matter of politics. The condition of the ummah, the Muslim community, is as crucial a religious value in Islam as a particular doctrinal formulation in Christianity. Banna was as spiritually distressed by the plight of his people as a Protestant fundamentalist when he felt that the in errancy of the Bible had been impugned, or a member of Neturei Karta when he saw what he regarded as the desecration of the Holy Land by the Zionists. Banna was especially concerned to see the people drifting away from the mosques. The vast majority of Egyptians had not been included in the modernization process, and they were bewildered by the Western ideas they encountered in the numerous newspapers, journals, and magazines that were published in Cairo, which seemed either to have nothing in common with or to be positively hostile toward Islam. The ulema had turned their backs on the modern scene, and could offer the people no effective guidance, and the politicians made no sustained attempt to deal with the social, economic, or educational problems of the masses. Banna decided that something had to be done. It was no good having high-flown discussions about nationalism and Egypt’s future relationship with Europe when the vast bulk of the population felt confused and demoralized. As he saw it, the only way the people could find spiritual healing was by returning to the first principles of the Koran and the Sunnah.
Banna organized a few of his friends to hold impromptu “sermons” in the mosques and coffee houses. He told his audience that the impact of the West and the recent political changes had knocked them off balance, and that they no longer understood their religion. Islam was not a Western-style ideology, or a set of creeds. It was a total way of life and, if lived wholeheartedly, would bring back that dynamism and energy that Muslims had had long ago, before they had been colonized by foreigners. To make the ummah strong again, they must rediscover their Muslim souls. Even though he was only in his early twenties, Banna made an impression. He was strong-minded, charismatic, and could make people follow him. One evening, in March 1928, six of the local workers in I’mailiyyah came and asked him to take action:
We know not the practical way to reach the glory of Islam and to serve the welfare of the Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. So we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are not more than mere hirelings belonging to foreigners. We possess nothing but this blood ... and these souls and these few coins. We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it, or to know the path to the service of the fatherland, the religion and the ummah as you know it.
Banna was moved by this appeal. Together, he and his visitors made an oath to be “troops [jund] for the message of Islam.” That night the Society of Muslim Brothers was born. From this tiny beginning, it spread. By the time of Banna’s death in 1949, there were 2000 branches of the Society throughout Egypt, each branch representing between 300,000 and 600,000 Brothers and Sisters. It was the only organization in Egypt to represent every group in society, including civil servants, students, and the potentially powerful urban workers and peasants. By the Second World War, the Society had become one of the most powerful contestants on the Egyptian political scene.