(http://nationalinterest.

org/article/religion-reason-and-conflict-in-the-21st-century-352)

5 MAY 2014

Religion, Reason and Conflict in the 21st Century

What is the exact nature of the famous "clash" between Islam and the
West? Is it merely sibling rivalry, with each civilization having
derived much of its heritage from Judaism? Westerners are competitive
about everything under the sun; indeed, it is one of the marks of
Western civilization. We compete in sport, in the beauty of women, in
culture and inventions, even in demography. The West has specialized
in being competitive and has invented ways of being--or seeming to
be--superior that no other culture has even dreamt of. One might
indeed think that the recent vogue for suicide bombing is Islam
raising the competitive stakes by advancing a claim to be less afraid
of death than decadent Westerners.

But the predominant Islamic response, at least in recent centuries,

has usually been to reject competition and withdraw into Islam as an
essentially superior identity that has no need to compete on such
trivial levels. Competition--that is, rule-bound conflict--seen as a
healthy endeavor is not an idea that comes naturally to Muslims. If
Allah is your guide, what need of else?

For some few Muslims, however, the clash has been more than a
competition. It has become a kind of duel to the death, after which
only one civilization will survive. Here we have conflict, but no
rules. This has been the attitude of those Muslims who despise the
supposedly corroded spirituality of the West and are confident that
the evident superiority of Islamic values will eventually lead to the
political triumph that evaded the Arabs in 732 at Tours and the
Ottomans in 1683 at Vienna. This alarming expression of sheer will
that we call "fundamentalism" is in evidence when Muslims demonstrate

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in European cities (as they did over the Salman Rushdie affair)
carrying banners reading: "Islam--our religion today, yours tomorrow."

The Western version of such extremism is so much milder and more

concealed that it hardly looks like a bid for triumph at all. Yet
this Western version does exist. It consists in a universalism that
yields nothing in conviction and determination to Islam itself. The
Western version is to be found in the secular scientific rationalism
that is formulated today in terms of human rights and the development
of international legal institutions to the point where they
constitute, if not a world government, then a world system not far
from it. Islam would, of course, survive as a culture within such a
world system, though it could not be the all-enveloping way of life
that it says it is in both its traditional and fundamentalist forms.
And that means, as many if not most Muslims see it, that it would not
survive at all.

This Western secularism emerged in Europe out of conflict with its

own religious roots in Christianity, which it has largely put to
flight in Europe and reduced to a defensive role in the civil society
of the United States. It is entrenched in the universities, floating
upon a conviction that the secularist elite has liberated itself from
the superstitions and prejudices inherited from less enlightened
times. In America it is specifically identified with the political
doctrine of progressive liberalism, and it has exploited the First
Amendment in order to assail Christianity, seen as its own local form
of superstition, with everything from rational argument to satirical
mockery.

Phillip Jenkins, a British subject replanted at Pennsylvania State

University, has bad news for secular rationalists. Christianity may
be losing its appeal in the European West, but it is spreading like
wildfire in Africa, Asia and South America. Jenkins is a master of
the extrapolated statistic and is not content with telling us what
has lately happened. His prophetic vision is focused on 2025 and
2050, and what he has to say will bring as little pleasure to Muslims
as it will to secular rationalists.

The Next Christendom is a piece of demographic fundamentalism that

forces us to switch our attention away from the rich and declining
West (or North, as Jenkins often prefers to call it) toward
developments that have long featured at beston the periphery of our
attention. We are dimly aware of festering trouble over religion in
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such places as Sudan and Nigeria. Jenkins argues that these
peripheral issues are likely to become central to world politics
within the next few decades because population levels and poverty
rates will determine political significance. It has often been
thought that Islam will soon outpace us all demographically, enjoying
what the French Canadians used to call "the revenge of the cradle",
but it now appears that Christians are, if anything, no less fertile.
Knowing that many of us grasp realities in terms of images, Jenkins
wants to discard the image of Christians as being rich and white.
That is the past. Today, most Christian are poor and black, and that
is what, Jenkins argues, will make all the difference. Revenge indeed.

His most dramatic chapters are those in which he discusses religious

conflict--chapters haunted by the history of religious wars in
Europe. It has since become even less possible to separate religious
conflict from political than it was then. It was a striking feature
of 20th-century ideologies that they diffused the general idea that
it is intolerable to have to share the planet with people of unsound
opinions. "Islam is politics or it is nothing", proclaimed the
Ayatollah Khomeini, and that means that it is a total way of life and
brooks no competitors. It is in this light that Jenkins is
understandably haunted by the religious wars of the early modern
period in Europe. One of his more chilling remarks is that overcoming
religious intolerance in order to get on with state-building took
centuries in Europe, and the process is unlikely to be notably faster
in the South.

This is an important observation, for while Christians may think of

themselves as "competing" with Islam in the Third World, Muslims see
it as a war to the death. Under sharia law, Christian missionary work
is forbidden and death is prescribed for the apostate who re-nounces
Muslim belief. Muslims have a history of voting the party line, so to
speak, and even attempts to encourage Muslim minorities in Europe to
disavow such practices as stoning women allegedly found in adultery
have often fallen on deaf ears. Islam, like any complex religion, has
resources of tolerance both in doctrine and in practice, but as
Jenkins observes, "the long-term prognosis for interfaith relations
is not good."

The veil of political correctness has recently been extended to cover

Muslims out of an understandable fear of popular outrage, and
tolerant liberals have contrasted historic episodes of Muslim
tolerance of religious minorities--not least of Jews--with episodes
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of religious persecution in Europe. The simple truth, however, is
that religions are not usually tolerant. In the Topkap Museum in
Istanbul, one may see the sword of the Prophet and the swords of the
first three Caliphs. Islam did not prosper from an excess of
mildness. Christianity is a religion of peace--no one would ever
discover the sword of Jesus--but Christian history is a testimony to
the ferocity with which lovers of peace can respond to what they
conceive to be a challenge. I have never forgotten the Rev. Adam
Clayton Powell pioneering a new bit of Third World theology in
remarking: "Jesus never said what you should do if he strikes the
other cheek."

Jenkins is well aware that Muslim-Christian conflict is by no means

the only fault line between religions. Indian untouchables, for
example, are coming to espouse Christianity and Islam in a way highly
displeasing to the Hindu majority. No one has a grip on human
realities who forgets that races and religions don't much like each
other. Even liberal rationalists get hot under the collar about
racists, sexists and homophobes--not to mention Christians.

THE Jenkins version of demographic fundamentalism is that population

is the measure of political significance. He is fully aware that
Africa has a lot of people in it but is politically significant at
all only as a matter of courtesy. Without economic sophistication,
constitutional stability and military efficiency, states have little
capacity to project their influence on the world. For Jenkins,
however, the most important fact about the Christians of the South is
that they are poor. This leads him to a lengthy but uncritical
treatment of liberation theology. He seems to indulge a sympathy even
for such revolutionary priests as the Colombian Camilo Torres, who
thought many communists were true Christians, and who wrote that

"[t]he revolution is the way to obtain a government which will feed

the hungry, clothe the naked, teach the ignorant, fulfill the works
of charity, of love of neighbor...etc."

The idea--whether Torres' or Jenkins'--that governments feed anybody

is a ripe piece of dottiness. Indeed, since governments grow no food,
the idea that they do is a virtual invitation to kleptocracy. In
Christian terms, the vision of governments bringing about a heaven on
earth is the Gnostic heresy that Eric Voegelin used to call
"immanentizing the eschaton." Anything to do with liberation seems to
have a disorienting effect on Jenkins. Treating in one brief sentence
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the Peruvian government in combat with the Shining Path, he has the
guerrillas conducting a "fierce" campaign but the military indulging
in a suppression described as "bloody." What otherwise might a
military campaign be--sweaty?

There is an alarming simplicity of mind in Jenkins' treatment of

Third World issues, and the reason seems to be that he has picked up
the kind of religious managerialism favored in recent Papal
Encyclicals. The belief is that poverty and war are social problems
that can be "solved" if only those in authority could be induced to
behave decently. I am no theologian, but I suspect that this kind of
salvation by politics is profoundly unchristian--not to mention
irrational.

It is an aspect of this distortion of reality that Jenkins seems to

agree with liberation theologians that Pentecostalists are favored by
South American dictators because they are "submissive", in accordance
with Romans 13 ("The powers that be are ordained of God . . ."). The
Calvinists of the early modern period were no less keen on Romans 13,
at a point where they were also tearing Europe apart. The connection
between doctrine and reality is always oblique. The liberationist
judgment seems like an echo of the 1960s illusion that "taking part
in politics" was tantamount to being honorifically active, while
merely doing one's duty and looking after one's own interests was
"passive" or "submissive." It would be hard to find a belief more
convenient to demagogues.

At no point does Jenkins seem to remember the crucial text that "my
kingdom is not of this world", and the result is that his view of
Christianity is tinged with ideological incitements to perfect a
system that is of the world. He seems to favor whatever is passing
itself off as reform rather than making the clear demarcation between
the spiritual and secular life which, worked out over the centuries,
has been the secret, or one of the secrets, of the West's relative
peace and stability. The dangers facing Christian clergy in the Third
World remind Jenkins of Becket and other martyrs of the Middle Ages.
Following this train of thought, he cites the case of the Catholic
Archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa, who was murdered by Rwandan troops
invading Zaire (as it then was called), and draws a conclusion: such
martyrs "were powerful nuisances to secular authority. In death they
became indomitable foes." What principle of order does he imagine
might curb lawlessness, such as that generated by unreconstructed

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African tribalism, if not that of authority? He seems to think
authority is the same as power. It isn't.

The Next Christendom is no doubt a more important book than these

critical remarks suggest. It certainly creates an unfamiliar picture
of the emerging world that will undoubtedly become part of the
framework of our understanding. What I have been emphasizing,
however, is that Third World religious conflicts that now look to be
unavoidable are terrifying enough without gratuitously politicizing
them. Neither Islam nor Christianity will do much to improve the
world unless they operate as real religions, turning attention away
from projects of transforming social systems toward an innerness
focused on duty and goodness. Something like this was how medieval
Christendom generated the moral stabilities out of which the modern
world emerged. Politics today is notoriously impatient, while
patience is one of the great religious virtues. Better that politics
should be moderated by religious virtue than that religion should be
contaminated by political toxins.

These prominent themes in the Jenkins argument are paralleled by a

recessive one of which much more might have been made. It concerns
the status of Christianity in the West.

Jenkins observes that the persecution of Christians occasions very

little attention on the American campus. Underpaid peons sewing Nike
shoes will get students into a lather; a few hundred Christian
martyrs, meanwhile, are a big yawn. Politicians and journalists are
anxious to insist that dangerous Muslim fundamentalists are "a tiny
minority" of Muslims, as perhaps they are, but no such saving
tolerance is commonly accorded to "the Christian right." As Jenkins
remarks: "Liberal Westerners are reluctant to appear anti-Muslim or
anti-Arab, and doubly dubious about taking up the course [sic] of
Third World Christians."

Indeed the situation is worse than that: at both the popular and the
elite levels, American secularists are becoming increasingly hostile
to Christian believers. The same is true in Europe, where such
hostility is even more puzzling because there is a strong feeling
among European rationalists that they have already "won the
argument." Why has hatred for what is believed, rightly or wrongly,
to be a defeated enemy become more intense? This is one of the basic
puzzles in Western civilization today; let me suggest an explanation
for it.
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Secular rationalists in the West believe that their enviable
rationality has emerged only after a long struggle with superstition,
prejudice, obscurantism and all of the intolerance and oppression and
violence they have caused. Building on the rationality of the Greeks,
the modern world has created the empirical viewpoint of modern
science in a long struggle against the repressive authority of the
Christian churches. As rationality, it is believed to be--and I use
"believe" very deliberately--the expression of pure human
intelligence, owing nothing to culture. Whereas religious and social
mores are cultural products, reason is presumed to transcend culture
to become the bridge by which humanity finally achieves the unity
previously frustrated by religious and nationalist conflict. One
might say, ironically, that secular rationalists see themselves as
being on the side of the angels. Secular rationalism (incorporating
the politics of liberalism) thus becomes the appropriate
meta-religion for humanity as a whole.

It is for this reason that the triumph of secular rationalism, in its

long march through the international institutions, has been based
upon treating Christianity quite differently from other religions.
Christianity has been pitted against science as an answer to
scientific questions, and inevitably has been found wanting; for this
reason it can be discarded as outmoded. Other religions, however, are
treated as a part of culture rather than intellectuality, and thus
benefit from the tenets of multiculturalism. They must be respected
as long as they fit into the pluralist constitutionality of the new
world order. If this new world order based on reason is to commend
itself to the wider world, it must be based upon the pure
intelligence of secular rationalism rather than on the inherited
religion of the West, which has a sordid history of conflict with
other cultures.

If the new world order were to be associated with Christianity, it

would be recognized as an arm of imperialism and other forms of
domination, which is why, of course, so many Europeans are so deeply
troubled by George W. Bush's overt religiosity. Secular rationalism
will bring order and progress to the world only so long as it can be
understood as the bubbling into consciousness of pure reason. For
that reason, it must liberate itself from any connection with
Christianity.

Phillip Jenkins has told us a great deal about the various forms of
salvation and redemption that many people thought had been superseded
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by enlightenment. The real situation, however, is not merely that
religion is alive and kicking and that Christianity itself is far
from dead, but that there is a Western, secular, post-Christian
version of redemption also seeking to dominate the world.
Christianity thus finds itself assailed not only by competing
religions in the wider world, but from secular rationalism arisen
within its own camp. The 21st century will be about this clash, too.