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January 2 - March 20, 2022
Religious leaders, especially those in the liberal wing of the Christian church, would answer the call. Ministers in the Church of England held a Church Congress in 1910 in Cambridge, inviting several members of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-Minded to participate.
That same year, the influential Protestant minister F. B. Meyer, author of Religion and Race-Regeneration (1912), warned that the high birthrates of Catholics, Jews, and the feebleminded presented a collective menace to society.
For Tolkien and Lewis, all of this represented a frontal assault on human dignity: a reduction of the individual to mere biology.
Bizarre as it may seem, the “scientific” manipulation of human beings, all under the banner of progress, became the consensus view of the academic communities in England, Germany, and the United States, just as Tolkien and Lewis were launching their careers.
Beginning in 1907, states such as Indiana passed sterilization laws “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.”
The United States acquired the noxious distinction of being the first nation in the West to legalize compulsory sterilization.
Catholics and conservative Protestants resisted these laws, but the eugenic tide appeared to be turning against them.
The conceit of the intellectual elites of the day was that science, and the technology it underwrites, could solve the most intractable of human problems.
Both authors thus reflect the historic Christian tradition: human nature as a tragic mix of nobility and wretchedness.
The result was the birth of Christian nationalism, the near sanctification of the modern state.
The concept of America as an exceptional nation is as old as the republic, and older still. Ever since John Winthrop and his band of Puritans landed at Massachusetts Bay in 1630, Americans have thought of themselves as pilgrims on a divine “errand in the wilderness,” destined to establish a holy commonwealth and “a city on a hill.”
Fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday, as incendiary as a Molotov cocktail, spoke for clerics on both sides of the Atlantic: “If you turn Hell upside down, you’ll find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.”
Germany was also the first nation to use chemical weapons on the battlefield.
On April 22, at Ypres, the Germans released 168 tons of chlorine gas along a four-mile front. French troops watched “awestruck and dumbfounded” as a grey-green mist washed over them, filling the eyes, nose, and throat with a noxious odor.50 By preventing the lungs from absorbing oxygen, chlorine causes its victims to slowly drown in their own fluids.
Many ministers insisted that the war bring about “a complete end” to the German system:
Two young soldiers, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, managed to survive this delirium with their souls intact.
Most of the nations of Europe suffered grievous losses. Russia gave up 1.7 million men, another 5 million wounded. In Germany, roughly 465,000 soldiers were killed each year for the duration of the war. The generation of German men from nineteen to twenty-two years of age was reduced by 35 percent. In France, the casualty rate (dead or wounded) was an astonishing 75 percent. About 2 million French soldiers died, or roughly 25 percent of all the men in France, leaving behind 630,000 war widows. In Britain, 921,000 soldiers were dead, more than 2 million wounded; one of every three British
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The first was Spanish influenza, which originated at a US Army base in Kansas in March 1918.
Like the conflict that helped to launch the epidemic, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults: men and women from fifteen to forty years of age, in the prime of their lives.
Middle-earth is not, Tolkien insisted, an imaginary world, but rather our world—with its ancient truths and sorrows—set in a remote past.
By the end of the First World War, entire empires had essentially collapsed—the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia, and the German Empire—touching off revolutions and colonial rebellions around the world.
Nevertheless, Barth’s “neo-orthodoxy,” as it came to be called, was being rejected by elite opinion throughout Europe and, increasingly, the United States.
“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
