A Historian's Faithful Account

'The Terrible Mystery'

Armstrong's mother died a week ago at 84. She was ill and beginning to suffer from dementia. Reluctantly, Armstrong placed her in a nursing home, where she refused to eat and said she wanted to die. "I said, 'She's had enough.' " Still, the nurses tried to treat her. "They felt they had to do it. . . . It was almost an obscenity. She was on view, gibbering; her skin was beginning to rot."

Right before she died, her mother looked at her and said, "Go home." "She stared straight through me. What could curing her have meant? Years in a nursing home unable to recognize anyone? She only died because they couldn't find a vein to medicate her.

"This was the antithesis of the sanctity of life. The person she was had already died. If you say you believe in God, then God works in natural ways."

Armstrong's sadness is apparent as she talks. How does she deal with this kind of grief? "Being spiritual means allowing your heart to break. In the end, death "is the great mystery, the terrible mystery."

Armstrong says she went through a phase of being terrified of death. On her 45th birthday, "I felt the world crashing in on me. The black hole of death." But that feeling went away after she wrote "A History of God," the book that established her as a serious religious scholar. After that, she felt she had contributed something. "Now I feel quite at peace about dying."

She gets a lot of hate mail from "secularists who hate religion and feel I shouldn't be defending this evil stuff. I have no friends in London who are religious at all," she says. "People ask me not to talk about it when I'm invited for dinner. My British publisher asked me when I was going to stop writing about it. They said it was a dead end. Europe is beginning to look endearingly old-fashioned in its secularism," she says, "while the rest of the world is becoming more religious."

"People are always astonished when I tell them how religious Americans are," she says. She is very admiring of American religiosity, except for the religious right. "Like most fundamentalists, they have a pernicious, horrible, paranoid view of the 'other,' " she says. "It used to be that the Soviet Union was the enemy described in the book of Revelation that would bring about the last days. Now, they've switched to Islam. They had to regroup. But you can't equate true religion with hatred."

She mentions the "Left Behind" series about the world ending. "It's a strange thing in this country that people have this view of the world. If these people went to a psychiatrist, they would be diagnosed with a psychological disorder. The fact that so many people subscribe to this shows a profound unease, fear, a feeling of impotence, rage and pent-up fury."

"Here in America," she says, "religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They've lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody."

'Demon-Infested World'

Even though Armstrong grew up Catholic, "Jesus was very uncomfortable for me. I find him a bit daunting and scary."

"He was always gazing at me reproachfully from a crown of thorns. I believed that I had done this to him. He had died for me. It's a heavy trip for an 8-year-old." Even after she had decided to devote her life to Christ, when she prayed, nothing happened. "It was like the emperor has no clothes. But it's hard to admit that if you're a religious person and you're not getting it." Eventually, she left the Holy Child Sisters convent. She was 24.

Most of her friends who left got married right away. She never did. Nor has she ever had children. "It was not a conscious choice," she says wistfully. "I wasn't very appealing to men. It's not about what you look like."