What fuels religious wars today?

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Europe’s passage from feudal to modern was attended by some of humanity’s greatest horrors. Can the rest of the world’s passage avoid them?

The Thirty Years War is claimed to have reduced the population of Germany by 40% from 1618–48; a higher percentage than were killed by the Black Death. I lose track of how many hundreds of millions died by genocide and war in the 20th century, not all European of course, but Europe caused most of the trouble.

One result of the religious/political wars in Europe (like those that are now lumped together as the Thirty Years War) was disgust with religious certitude in politics. In their different ways, the Europeans and North Americans kicked or edged religion out of politics as far as they could.

By the 20th century, religion was so out of favour that sociologists, almost as a profession, predicted its death. The new certitudes that drove people to slaughter each other in service of higher ends were known as ‘secular ideologies’: officially atheist (Marxism) or romantically pagan but effectively secular (Nazism). By the 1950s, a number of western intellectuals were saying that communism was a substitute religion. It claimed the mana, the modern sacredness, of science. But they argued it was in fact a faith, complete with a dream of heaven (on earth), a priesthood, sacred texts, etc.

By the 21st century, secular ideologies were so out of favour that media pundits, almost as a profession, informed us of their death. Arts & Letters Daily, the intellectual reader’s digest on the web, regularly promotes articles on the death of socialism. (But we should recall that few faiths ever die – they just subside in the cultural mix. The number of death-of-socialism articles merely indicates that it isn’t subsiding fast enough for some tastes.)

What rules instead? When it comes to domestic politics in rich countries, everything is now pragmatic. The left is issue-oriented, reformist. Commercial interests buy influence where they can. To capture the centre is everything. Intellectuals appreciate nuance, complexity, irony, paradox, arcane disputes.

The greatest irony, then, is the re-emergence of religion in all its ferocity. Why? Why? Why? Don’t they know we did that?

Unstable bridges between stable worlds

Rajeev Bhargava gives a stimulating answer in his openDemocracy column on the religious massacres in Gujarat. But what is terrifying about his answer is the implication that can be drawn: that the rest of the world may be prone to undergo this whole horror show of genocidal certitudes in its turn. Western intellectuals thought the world had matured from religious warfare to secular ideologies to an end-of-history calm in regulated markets and social democracy.

Wrong. Even if that’s the destination, most of the world still has to make the ride. Francis Fukuyama is right that Bush has a decidedly liberal imperial dream: that he can use US power to impose western versions of democracy on the laggards. Bhargava is wiser than Bush. He attends to the psychology of people coming out of traditional societies. They aren’t so easily whipped into a new shape.

Bhargava argues that the elites in traditional society are ‘egoists’, commanding others to their bidding. The lower classes are ‘altruists’ when they comply. And they do comply, because they believe they are inferior. You can quibble with the word ‘altruist’ (I do), but it nicely echoes the famous tirade against the passivity of British building workers by the socialist Robert Tressel, whose novel accused his fellow workers of being ‘Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’.

Bhargava’s main point is about what happens when traditional society is radically disrupted by a more modern, globalising economy. The belief in the ‘given’ quality of the hierarchy breaks down. It dawns on the inferior that even they are capable of rising. Their desires could be met! They could have material goods, their children could be professionals. They become egoists. But what do they believe in? Initially, their collective egoism coalesces around those of their traditional ideas they can still hold on to, or new interpretations of those beliefs. So as they emerge as actors on the public stage, they vociferously trumpet what are all too often narrow sectarian agendas. At the same time, the first suspicions grow on them, that their views may be one-sided. It’s a recipe for popular involvement in furious sectarianism. The old taboos and restraints on behaviour have been lifted, and new ones based on more universal respect for others have not been acquired. They haven’t yet scared themselves to death with their own modern religious or ideological wars.

So it is the psychological difficulties of moving whole populations from the measured obeisance and self-restraint of old hierarchies to the measured selfishness and consumerism of the new that throw up these movements of mass nastiness. Two relatively stable worlds, but no stable bridge between them. Globalisation creatively destroys the old world and promises riches, but typically cannot provide the material security, the new sense of self or the faith that can help the masses calmly over that bridge.

The Iranian scholars Ladan and Roya Boroumand trace in a recent article how totalitarian notions from the European left and right fed into the antecedents of modern Islamism. Following the Boroumands, Fukuyama and Nadav Samin write: ‘Detached from the moorings of tradition, the Islamists have proved adept at manipulating the symbols of faith and appropriating them for their own revolutionary purposes.’ The moorings of tradition. The whole of modern Islamism then, becomes just another of the sidetracks that has delayed the development of modern society, like the isms that contributed to it. Fukuyama and Samin suggest that its destructive potential, including its provocation of western military wrath, may in the end unintentionally serve the modernisation process.

I agree with those who say this is hardly a silver lining. One should not be the least complacent. Nazism and Stalinism were surely avoidable. Worse, they were almost terminal. But how to avoid them? The question raised by Bhargava is not just how to defeat such an ism militarily or even intellectually, but how to enable populations to make that bridge from one safe sense of self and faith to another.

A review of Islam by the journalist David Warren has received some note on the web. He is a Christian who believes his faith superior, but his childhood in Lahore, Pakistan left him nostalgic for the inclusive Islamic community he knew then. He feels that Islamic faith has been eroded. He thinks faith is the answer, and his take on the secular ‘isms’ is so contrary to that of most European readers it is worth quoting:

‘I think one of the reasons Islamism has erupted with such gale force in the Muslim world is indeed the very loss of faith, and the fear that comes from this. They are, again to speak very crudely, in a position a little like that of our own ancestors of the later Victorian and Edwardian era, those many who had lost their faith, but continued to observe the outward forms of religion. It is exactly this kind of mind that creates the biggest welcome for the devil. I have often thought that the violent combustion of Europe in the 20th century was, at the deepest level, the fallout from the loss of faith; of the transformation of spiritual into political energy. Communism and Nazism were themselves pseudo-religions; and indeed all ideological systems, including political Islamism, are pseudo-religions – replacements for the real thing. They take infinite longings and turn them towards finite ends, and seek a new redemption not in heaven but on earth.’

But is this not curiously similar to Bhargava’s analysis? In both his and Warren’s view, people are adrift without traditional faith. The difference is that Warren, like a good missionary doctor, would prescribe the faith he believes actually works. How unattractive to most of us. But even the prescriptive Christian faith of a man such as Warren is more inclusive than the sectarian faiths that have ripped communities apart. He writes: ‘Though I was never tempted to become a Muslim convert, I have some hint of the taste of it. And when I begin to remember this true taste, it fills my heart with love, not hatred.’ In this he comes closer to the standard of the many Muslims who have always shown great respect for other religions.

The universalist bridge

It is a welcome reminder that it is in the universalist aspects of the great religions that the best chance may come for enabling people to find the faith to cross the bridge from traditional to modern. Mahatma Gandhi would surely have argued so; Martin Luther King also. They led great movements of people emerging into modernity from oppression by arousing universal, not sectarian, faith. The Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, were all universalisers in their day, however much their followers may have spat on that memory.

King in turn was attracted to a more universalist faith than traditional Christianity. His widow says now: ‘We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realised we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian.’ They consciously chose to use the traditional faith to lead their people in a universal direction. Better to get a hearing with traditional language, than lose your audience by espousing too novel a vocabulary.

My question is this: are others thinking with as much vision and as much practicality about how to lead whole populations across the bridge? The journey is from a traditional sense of self and faith within the certainties of a small circle, to a modern sense of self within the moral and religious confusion of a global circle. It is no easy trip. It requires acts of collective muscle – as in the trade unions, Ghandi’s salt marches, or King’s Selma Freedom March – but not of collective rage, which too easily descend into terror.

Many have made it, and prospered. Without them, we would have no democracy. In fact, the way you cross the bridge itself determines where you arrive at on the other side. Without mass movements that have faith in democracy, social inclusion, a hopeful future, compassion, human rights, there is no arriving at anything worth having. I believe that those who can adapt traditional vocabulary, both religious and ‘secular’, to express that universalist faith will lead most effectively. Give me King not Cleaver (the Black Panther), Gandhi not Vajpayee or Narendra Modi (respectively Prime Minister of India and Chief Minister of Gujerat, both BJP Hindu nationalists), Keir Hardie (founder of the British Labour Party) not Marx.

Certainly I would like to hear Rajeev Bhargava’s ruminations on how to help people make this crossing. I would like any reader’s suggestions. It seems easier to analyse what is going wrong, than where it has gone well, and why, and whether such experiences might have anything to offer people for whom it is going badly.

Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion here. Or email: dave.opendemocracy@earthlink.net