Strange Gods Read online

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  Alger Hiss and the Battle for History

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  Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

  Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past

  Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge

  The Possible She

  Inside Soviet Schools

  Moscow Conversations

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Jacoby

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to ICS Publications for permission to reprint an excerpt from Life in a Jewish Family by Edith Stein, translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., copyright © 1986 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites. Reprinted by permission of ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln Road, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002-1199 (www.icspublications.org).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jacoby, Susan, [date]

  Strange gods : a secular history of conversion / Susan Jacoby.

  pages ; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-375-42375-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 978-1-101-87096-9 (eBook).

  1. Conversion—History. I. Title.

  BL639.J33 2016 204'.2—dc23 2015019062

  eBook ISBN 9781101870969

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover image: The Conversion of St. Paul, 1601, by Caravaggio. Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, Italy/Bridgeman Images

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Susan Jacoby

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note on Language

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Part I: Young Christendom and the Fading Pagan Gods

  Chapter 1: Augustine of Hippo (354–430)

  Chapter 2: The Way, the Truth, the Life, the Empire

  Chapter 3: Coercion, Conversion, and Heresy

  Part II: From Convivencia to the Stake

  Chapter 4: Bishop Paul of Burgos (C. 1352–1435)

  Chapter 5: Impureza de Sangre: The Crumbling of the Convivencia

  Chapter 6: The Inquisition and the End

  Part III: Reformations

  Chapter 7: John Donne (1572–1631)

  Chapter 8: “Not with Sword...but with Printing”

  Chapter 9: Persecution in an Age of Religious Conversion

  Part IV: Conversions in the Dawn of the Enlightenment

  Chapter 10: Margaret Fell (1614–1702): Woman’s Mind, Woman’s Voice

  Chapter 11: Religious Choice and Early Enlightenment Thought

  Chapter 12: Miracles Versus Evidence: Conversion and Science

  Chapter 13: Prelude: O My America!

  Part V: The Jewish Conversion Question: Where Christianity Stumped Its Toe

  Chapter 14: Heinrich Heine (1797–1856): Convictionless Conversion

  Chapter 15: The Varieties of Coercive Experience

  Chapter 16: Edith Stein (1891–1942): The Sainthood of a Converted Jew

  Part VI: American Exceptionalism: Toward Religious Choice as a Natural Right

  Chapter 17: Peter Cartwright (1785–1872): Anti‑Intellectualism and the Battle for Reason

  Chapter 18: Remaking the Protestant American Compact

  Interregnum: Absolutism and Its Discontents

  Chapter 19: True Believers

  Part VII: The Way We Live Now

  Chapter 20: “The Greatest”: Muhammad Ali and the Demythologizing Decade

  Chapter 21: American Dreaming

  Conclusion: Darkness Visible

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  For Rose Glennon

  A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

  Readers will notice that I use the title “Saint,” as designated by the Roman Catholic Church, only when not using it would create confusion. If, for example, I were to refer to Christopher, the patron saint of travelers in Catholic lore, and the late writer and atheist Christopher Hitchens in the same sentence (I actually cannot imagine how or why I would do that), I would apply the title “Saint” to the traveling Christopher to make it clear that Hitchens has not been posthumously canonized.

  Sainthood is a specific, Roman Catholic concept, not accepted by most of the world’s religions or by those who do not believe in any religion. Calling Augustine of Hippo “Saint Augustine” is a value judgment made by the Catholic Church, as is the sainthood of Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who entered the Discalced Carmelite Order, took the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was murdered at Auschwitz, and was canonized by Pope John Paul II. Readers may judge for themselves, after reading the writings of men and women like Augustine and Stein, whether they believe in saints as a special, elevated category mediating between God and humanity. In a book on the subject of religious conversion in the West, the honorific “saint” comes up more often than it normally would, because conversion itself was long considered an important step on the road to sainthood by the Catholic Church.

  Throughout this book, I have used standard English transliterations of the names of important historical figures in the history of religious conversion. Garry Wills, in his brilliant short study Augustine’s Confessions, transliterates the name of Augustine’s mother, Monica, as “Monnica,” but “Monica” is the more recognizable spelling.

  I capitalize “God” because this is common English usage—though not when I am referring to a particular god among many, or to an individual’s idea of a personal god—i.e., “My god is bigger than your god.” Unlike Catholic saints, God is God with a capital “G” to most people who read and write English. Who am I to deprive Him or Her of a capital letter in the orthographic universe?

  PROLOGUE

  And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus and the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem. And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?…

  —

  And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did he eat nor drink. And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord….

  —

  And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

  —THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, CHAPTER 9, VERSES 1–4, 8–10, 17–18

  INTRODUCTION

  I come from a family of religious converts, spanning three
generations and more than a century on both my mother’s and father’s sides. My father was born in 1914 into a nonobservant Jewish family whose ancestors had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1849 and settled in New York City. My Jacoby grandfather and grandmother did not convert to Christianity, but they did send their children to a Lutheran Sunday school in Brooklyn. Although my father and his siblings were never baptized in childhood and knew that their family was Jewish, they were taught nothing about Judaism as a religion. My father’s uncle, Levi Harold Jacoby, professor of astronomy at Columbia University, and one of the few Jews (religious or nonreligious) on the faculty in the early twentieth century, married an Episcopalian and did convert, dropping his undeniably Jewish first name along the way. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he was listed as “Levi Harold” in official records, but by the time he became a member of the faculty, he was plain Harold. He was a frequent source for New York newspapers, trying to explain new scientific developments, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, to the reading public. In those articles, too, there was no trace of the Jewish first name his parents had given him.

  My father and his elder brother and sister took another path in the middle of the twentieth century by marrying Irish American Catholics and converting to the Roman Catholic Church. My brother and I, as children in the Middle West in the 1950s, were told that my father had converted from the Episcopal Church—a handy falsehood possibly derived from the background of the cousins descended from Levi Harold (always referred to within my branch of the family as “the other Jacobys”). When I was growing up, I could not possibly have known that in the first half of the twentieth century, mainstream Protestantism was a much more common choice than Catholicism for American Jews wishing to conceal their origins, because Protestants occupied a higher social and economic rung than Catholics in the American class hierarchy.*1

  This book is titled Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion precisely because most histories and personal accounts of conversion have been written by believers in the supernatural, who understandably view changes of faith mainly in terms of their spiritual origins and significance. William James (1842–1910), in his extensive discussion of conversions in The Varieties of Religious Experience, presents a psychological exploration of the conversion experience that holds up well, for the most part, even though his famous lectures were delivered more than a century ago at the University of Edinburgh. The important exception is James’s avoidance of external social influences on conversion. With his rare combination of medical and philosophical training, as an intellectual of the first generation exposed to both Darwin and Freud, James nevertheless viewed conversion almost entirely as an individual rather than as a social experience—and he never quite made up his own mind about what goes on in the minds of ardent converts. “Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view,” he acknowledged, “with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down man’s liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities.” Then he observed, in a cagey fashion that stopped just short of contradicting his earlier statement, that such conversions often produce “an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies and endurances are shown.” Through such conversions, James argued, “personality is changed, the man is born anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particular shape to his metamorphosis.”*2 Translated from early medico-psychological language that had not yet evolved into modern psychobabble, what James seems to be saying is that a man who goes to bed believing in one god or no god at all and wakes up believing in a new form of divine truth may be mentally or emotionally unstable (or at least highly unusual) by ordinary standards, but the weirdness of the process can nevertheless lead to a positive personality transformation. This ambiguous attitude toward conversion reflects the inconsistencies in James’s own form of religion, which involved the troublesome intellectual compromises required of a man who came of age as a liberal nineteenth-century Christian while trying to make room for a psychological explanation of emotional experience that did not fit comfortably into the realm of either faith or reason.

  I would never deny that an intense emotional desire to believe in something true—to see “face to face,” as Paul, Christianity’s first great proselytizer, put it—motivates many conversions and plays an important role in their outcome. But so do other, more earthly needs and longings, which bear only a tangential relationship, if any, to what theologians and many philosophers (including James) call the soul, consciousness, or the spirit. All of the factors that entered into conversions in my family—the desire to improve one’s class status and economic prospects, to fit in with the majority, to please a mate’s family and smooth the way for a mixed marriage, to gain admission to a desired social group—tend to be left out of narratives that view conversion almost entirely as a search for truth and exclude social motivation from consideration. Skepticism about conversion, especially in post-Enlightenment societies that have long eschewed physical force in matters of religion, tends to come mainly from minorities, like Jews, in which every loss of a believer to another faith diminishes the religious strength of a small group already attenuated by historical persecution and modern secularism.

  In the West, the normative conversion narrative—certainly when written by non-Jews—has basically been a pro-Christian narrative. There are exceptions, the most notable being Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which he portrays the triumph of Christianity as an important factor in the erosion of Roman power. It is a fair criticism—one made by many historians—that Gibbon is too secular (or too anti-Christian and too inclined to believe in pagan society’s tolerance) in attributing as much importance as he does to one element in the slow collapse of a mighty, far-flung empire with a great many economic and social problems. Nevertheless, powerful new religious ideas certainly do have powerful social consequences—especially when the religion is welded to political power and, to a greater or lesser degree, forced on others. This certainly did happen at various points in late antiquity, in ways fueled by many of the same secular discontents and longings that lead to conversion not only in socially unstable, decaying empires but in more democratic societies undergoing rapid and unsettling social change.

  •

  My mother’s family offered the perfect example of socially influenced conversion at a time when the United States—especially in its large cities—was experiencing immense cultural upheaval as a result of immigration. In 1919, my Lutheran grandmother, the daughter of German immigrants who settled in Chicago, converted to Catholicism when she married my Irish Catholic grandfather. This switch from one branch of Christianity to another seems unremarkable in today’s America, in which approximately half of the adult population has changed religions at least once since age eighteen, but it was considerably more unusual when my grandparents married.*3 My grandmother was required to take months of instruction in the faith and to promise that any children would be raised as Catholics before she could be married at the altar of the parish church. Had she not converted, she and my grandfather would have had to settle for the second-class status of a wedding in the rectory. Gran took a completely pragmatic, nontheological stance toward her adopted religion. “It made your gramps’s mother happy,” she told me fifty years later, “and it didn’t make any difference to me. After all, it’s the same God whatever church you go to.”

  Gran had taken roughly the same stance in 1944, when my father, after asking my mother to marry him, felt obliged to reveal what he still considered the shameful secret of his Jewish origins to her parents. It is undeniable that a marriage between a Christian and a Jew (secular or religious) in 1944—at a time when anti-Semitism was a far more powerful social force in the United States than it is today—would have been more of a shock to the average American family than a marriag
e between two different kinds of Christians. “When your dad told Gramps and me there was something about him we didn’t know, my first thought was maybe he had been married before,” Gran recalled. “I was so relieved when he said he was Jewish, and I told him, ‘Is that all? You can always convert if you want to, and if you don’t, that’s fine with us too.’ ” My grandfather, a benevolent patriarch whose familial power was only enhanced by his lack of sternness, was equally unconcerned. He was happy because he fully accepted the stereotype that Jews don’t drink, don’t beat their wives, and don’t ignore their financial responsibility to their families—and that they therefore make good husbands. (This conviction was based largely on Gramps’s friendship with a rabbi who played poker with him but never drank a beer, whether he was winning or losing. Also, my mother had previously been married to a Catholic alcoholic—a union that was eventually annulled by the Catholic Church—so the stereotypical abstemiousness of Jewish men was a particular point in my dad’s favor.) My father did not convert to Catholicism until I was seven years old, and my grandparents had nothing to do with his decision. At the time, he explained his conversion in simple terms: it would be a good thing for the family to attend Sunday Mass together, and we could all go out to breakfast afterward. Nothing to it.

  My entire family’s attitudes toward both religious conversion and religious belief can only be described as laissez-faire, and my upbringing at home was markedly at odds with what I was taught in Catholic school about the indisputable monopoly on truth held by the church. One might well ask why my parents, whose attitudes toward changes in religious affiliation seemed largely opportunistic to me when I was young (an opinion I never had any reason to revise as an adult), sent their children to schools that tried to imbue every child with the conviction that Catholicism was the One True Church—or, as anyone brought up Catholic in the 1950s will recall, “the only the Church.” My mother never explained her reasons to me, although she stopped attending church in her seventies and, before she died at age ninety, told me she did not want a priest to conduct her funeral. (The willingness of my mother to jettison the religion of a lifetime is yet another family mystery, now beyond the reach of daughterly or writerly inquiry.)