A global fervor
By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 2, 2008 10:55 AM PST
Americans should broaden their primary-season debate about religion and politics. This debate is not just about Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, and it is not limited to our shores. Religion has again become, for better and for worse, a far more visible driving force in world affairs.
Keeping religion out of politics — and vice versa — has seemed a good idea to Americans since the framing of the Constitution. Europeans adopted the same view somewhat later with anti-clerical revolutions that revoked the divine right of kings and czars to rule. Later still, the Muslim world became part of a new secular political system, however haltingly and incompletely, by dividing itself into nation-states and accepting international law as embodied in the United Nations.
But globalization and new opportunities to promote the business of religion for profit have sidetracked or reversed that secularizing trend. The powerful forces of backlash and of telegenic emotionalism now empower radical Islamic jihadists and evangelical Christian proselytizers alike. As the cross-border pressures of intrusive technology collapse traditional family and social structures, individuals seek anchors in religion or, at the other extreme, in an aggressive atheism that is also a backlash phenomenon.
The new era of fervor strikes close to home: The U.S. media by and large once took pride in covering organized religion with the same detachment — if not skepticism — used for politics and other subjects. Now growing segments of my business treat faith in an Almighty as a commodity to bring eyeballs to a television screen or Web site.
The choice by CNN to have candidates in a televised debate address whether they believe every word of the Bible is just one example of this complicity of news- and soul-gatherers. H.L. Mencken would have feasted on the Iowa fracas between Romney and Huckabee over who is the better Republican Christian. Or on the kinder, gentler — but no less pandering — declarations of faith from the stump that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the other Democratic candidates routinely utter.
Instead there is a polite debate about religion and politics that has thus far lacked context and largely misses the global sweep of the psychological sea change that is occurring on the role of religion in state affairs.
President Nicolas Sarkozy raised eyebrows in France when he paid a high-visibility, Christmas-season visit to the Vatican this month to “bear witness” that Catholicism constitutes “one of the major sources of France’s civilization.” The roots of French society “are essentially Christian,” he added.
Previous French presidents have not talked much about their faith. But they did not face the religious polarization in world and national affairs that Sarkozy confronts. For one thing, he vehemently opposes the entry of Turkey, a nation of 70 million Muslims, into the European Union. His remarks underline his concerns about the dilution of Europe’s Christian culture.
Sarkozy and other European leaders are also chipping away at a taboo against talking publicly about religion in general and about the tensions between Muslims and Christians in Europe in particular. The jihadists of al-Qaeda and other movements have helped trigger a new examination in the West of the ideological and strategic roles that religious fervor now plays in global politics.
“A West that does not take religious ideas seriously as a dynamic force in the world’s unfolding history is a West that will have disarmed itself, conceptually and imaginatively, in the midst of war,” George Weigel writes in his challenging new book, “Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism.”
Weigel goes much further than I would in advocating that Christian values be shaped into a global counter-ideology (my word, not his) to fight al-Qaeda and its partners. But he usefully identifies the theological context of the war on terrorism and provides a global view of the effect on the West of the rise of a perverted, extremist version of Islam.
Weigel, a Catholic theologian, cites Father Richard John Neuhaus’s concise definition of jihadism as a religiously inspired ideology built on the teaching “that it is the moral obligation of all Muslims to employ whatever means necessary in order to compel the world’s submission to Islam.”
The book points out that most Muslims can and do reject the justification for killing innocents in the name of Allah. It is the Muslim majority, rather than Christian ideologists, that will find effective teachings based on justice and moderation to counter jihadism.
Fighting religious fire with religious fire is a sure prescription for further disaster.
—The Washington Post Co.
