Source Criticism

Before a historian explains the implications of a particular historical event, he or she must first determine what happened. But to do that, a historian must know how to handle the sources; indeed, that is the sine qua non of the historian’s craft. Unfortunately, Tom Mockaitis, a history professor at DePaul University, failed to do this before writing his editorial in yesterday’s edition of the Chicago Tribune.

I do not fault Professor Mockaitis for failing to examine the primary sources that would describe Anders Behring Breivik’s motivation for his murderous rampage. Neither the professor nor I have any time to look carefully at the madman’s manifesto, and I am sure that Professor Mockaitis is no more tempted to slog his way through that sewage than I am. But, of course, there are people who have done so, and it is to them that we should turn. The question arises: what secondary source should we consult?


Professor Mockaitis chose to latch onto a statement made shortly after Breivik’s arrest, in which the deputy Oslo police chief Roger Andresen characterized his prisoner as “a right-wing Christian fundamentalist.” At the same time, the professor chose to ignore an article written by Arne Fjeldstad, a theologian and religion column writer for Aftenposten—Norway’s New York Times—in which he demonstrates how little theology of any kind holds sway in Breivik’s thought and how Breivik disavows that he is personally Christian. Now the term “fundamentalist” has been stretched to mean many things over the years, but if words have any meaning at all, a fundamentalist should take religion more seriously than his average compatriot and his religion ought to shape his thoughts and actions in a major way. By this definition, Breivik cannot be a fundamentalist; indeed, those who think that a religion has no intrinsic merit, care little for the particulars of its creed, and view religion as a placeholder for society’s cultural values are generally called religious “liberals,” not "fundamentalists."

But should we believe Andresen or Fjeldstad? Andresen was acting as a spokesman for the Oslo police department and had not necessarily interviewed Breivik himself. Moreover, the announcement was made shortly after Breivik’s arrest, mainly to squelch the many rumors that the terrorist was a Muslim. (I noticed how quickly the announcement appeared after the arrest, as I was carefully following the news all day on the online versions of Dagbladet and Aftenposten, Oslo’s two main newspapers.) Thus, a police spokesman, with perhaps little firsthand knowledge of the suspect and without the academic training to tell the Trinity from a truncheon, gave a press statement mainly to calm down Norwegian anti-Muslim sentiment. Meanwhile, Fjeldstad, an expert on religion, actually waded into the sewage of Breivik’s 1500 page manifesto in order to see what religious or political thoughts lay behind the attack. Whose evaluation should we believe?

Professor Mockaitis is correct to say that Christians have not been immune to using violence in the name of their faith. But that is not what happened a week ago in Oslo. Relying on poor evidence, the professor has drawn the wrong conclusion and overlooked the real lesson to be learned. He thinks that Breivik’s attack should teach us to be wary of people who are overly religious. In truth, it should teach us to be wary of people who aren’t particularly religious, but may invoke religion now and then to support the secular ideology they really believe in.