Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda

A book by one of Britain’s foremost historians of Nazi Germany about the
relationship between religion and politics, and in particular the role of the
great totalitarian political religions of left and right, should have had something
important to contribute to public knowledge at a time when we are preoccupied
with a new totalitarian threat in the form of Islamist extremism. Unfortunately,
Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators
to Al Qaeda fails to live up to that promise. Too opinionated and polemical to be a
serious history, but lacking the wit and pace to be a decent polemic, it has the vices
of both and the virtues of neither.

View the full article here