Religious War & Peace
A recent article in Britain’s New Statesman magazine warned that, as Britain’s culture war heats up, the religious groups that threaten public tranquility are mostly being supported either by the United States or by Saudi Arabia, two nations that the magazine assumes to be equivalent in extremism. “Puritanical yet wealthy, convinced of their God-given mission to the rest of the world, sure of a divinely inspired history,” the article, titled “Faith Invaders,” declared,
Saudi Arabia and the United States are surprisingly similar in their mixture of religion, politics and interference in other countries’ affairs. Saudi Arabia has Wahhabi Islam, Middle America has evangelical Christianity. Historically, they hate each other. Yet both see themselves as exponents of the purest version of their faith. Both are suspicious of modernity. Both see no distinction between politics and religion.”
Threatening Values
The equating of Christians with Wahhabis is reminiscent of the assertion of the moral equivalence of the West and the Soviet Union that we so often heard from the European and American left during the Cold War.
Such relativism sees little difference between the religious tyranny of the Wahhabi-backed Saudi monarchy, which violently oppresses not only non-Islamic religions but other forms of Islam, and the thriving religious pluralism of the United States, where Muslims have far more freedom than they have in Arabia, and where formerly bitter religious differences, such as the chasm that once separated Protestants and Catholics, have become more like amiably held differences of opinion.
Viewing the subject from a strictly secularist perspective, the article tended to see any cooperation among religions as a threat to its own values rather than as a welcome step towards civil peace.
A new, cross-faith conservatism is in the air: witness how Catholics, Anglicans, Jews and Muslims supported the Conservative Party Leader’s call for a cut in the time limit for abortion; how Muslims joined Christians in the unprecedented protests against the BBC’s screening of Jerry Springer: the opera; how evangelical Christians supported the banning of a play offensive to Sikhs; how Jewish leaders opposed the BBC’s cartoon series Popetown.
Plays should not be banned just because some group takes offense, but it is encouraging to learn that Catholics, Anglicans, Jews, Muslims, and Evangelicals can agree on so many important issues, and that they are solicitous of each other’s feelings.
The article concluded with a different warning, this time about the possible effect of overzealous secularizing in sparking corresponding excesses in religion. Britain has entered “uncharted territory” with a growing and politicized Muslim community and a Christian community “fed up with seeing its values trashed by the metropolitan liberal establishment.”
It is for the secular establishment to meet the challenge of stopping the attack on our way of life. It has to recognise that religion now identifies many people in the way race once did; that ignorance of religion is therefore dangerous; and that marginalising people of faith will simply push them towards extremists who are eager to take over them, and ultimately the rest of us.
Telling Good from Bad
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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