Posted on 07/09/2005 6:13:39 AM PDT by rhema
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
Britain faces a serious religion problem, as does the rest of the world. Ignorance of religion is therefore dangerous—including the ignorance that equates Wahhabism and Evangelical Christianity. But I wonder how much help knowledge can provide, unless it enables us to distinguish good religion from bad religion, dangerous religion from the benign form.
To do this requires that we agree upon or impose a standard by which we can determine which religious claims are true or benign, and which are false or harmful. Put another way, we must identify the reasonable people in each religious group and make common cause with them against the fanatics. That assumes that reasonable people are to be found in each tradition, and that they are not completely intimidated by the fanatics.
These assumptions may be incorrect. Extreme rationalists like Richard Dawkins may tell us that fine distinctions are impossible, that all faith in a supernatural reality is false and harmful, and that reasonable religious believers are therefore nonexistent. If that is so, then the only course for rational people is to hold unswervingly to a dogmatic faith: faith in scientific rationalism, if that is not a contradiction in terms, counting on their ability to dominate the presumably irrational religious believers. This approach inherently marginalizes people of faith, so it is ruled out if we don’t want to marginalize anyone.
To many of us, Dawkins-style rationalism is one of the extreme religious positions, not a deliverance of reason that is self-evidently valid or backed by consensus. A better alternative has to be found, but intractable differences and the enduring legacy of nineteenth-century positivism make finding any criteria for judgment very difficult. Any standard we select for distinguishing good from bad in religion may appear to be derived, however indirectly, from one of the competing religious traditions, and may thus look like an establishment of that religion, although I have heard that the Koran itself says that there is to be no coercion in religion, widespread Muslim practice to the contrary notwithstanding.
In a world where the impact of religious activity is enormous and growing, a society can’t do without a standard for distinguishing true or benign religion from false or malevolent religion, but this standard itself may be hard to distinguish from an established religious doctrine, and may be resented as oppressive by those who feel thereby marginalized.
I certainly hope we are not in for a repeat of the religious wars of past centuries, but I do know this: If there are to be rules instead of chaos, somebody has to have authority to make the rules. What I don’t know is how that authority can be established other than by force, unless God should speak in such a tone that everyone recognizes his voice.
Hopeful Meetings
I don’t know what hope there may be for a peaceful agreement, but I can tell one story. A Turkish Muslim man named Mustafa Akyol contacted me about my book The Right Questions, written just after the September 11, 2001 attack, to challenge some things I had written about Islam. I was nervous about this encounter, but as we continued, the conversation grew steadily friendlier and more mutually appreciative.
When Mustafa at last came to my home, we became dear friends, and now are hoping to work together to encourage better relations between Christians and Muslims, starting from what we have in common. I do not know if this personal coming together can be repeated by others on a larger scale, but there is a basis for hope when we consider how some other seemingly irreconcilable religious conflicts have been overcome or at least ameliorated.
“ Faith Invaders” may be found at New Statesman.com
Contributing editor Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press).
"Saudi Arabia and the United States are surprisingly similar in their mixture of religion, politics and interference in other countries’ affairs."
Total B.S. I'll stop right there
The West is doing just that, and it's gotten the West into a religious war with those in the Middle East. The more the West tries to avoid religion the more embroiled in religion it becomes.
Muslims will come together just as soon as you all become Muslim. Does anyone remember who started this war?
That evening my friend took me to a store-front church near her home. Though she was raised Anglican, this was now her regular church. It was crowded. People had driven from all over the Brighton area to attend. The preacher was old-fashioned, a bit fiery, but intelligent and articulate with a strong message.
The traditional Church of England is a hollow shell, and the intellectual elite are simply pagan, but below the surface there are believing Christians in England who take their faith very seriously.
Whoever wrote this is full of something that smells a lot like defecation.
The error is packed off in that little "or". The state is incapable of judging between true and false religion. The state is not an arbiter of truth. When the state pretends it is an arbiter of truth, it pollutes questions of truth with questions of power and expediency. This is of no service to truth.
But the state can distinguish between the malevolent and the benign. The state is an arbiter of outward justice in conduct. It does not bear a sword in vain. It judges by conduct, not by truth.
Some relativists want to pretend there is no standard of truth, and they are wrong. They try to confuse the inability of the state to decide questions of truth, with an inability of anyone to decide them, or an inability of the state to decide anything, or both. These are well known and thoroughly exploded errors of reasoning.
Almost every doctrine believed by human beings is utterly wrong. Men are sunk deep in ignorance and in error. To require truth of them is to require what they cannot give, and is a recipe for condemning mankind wholesale. The condemner is almost certainly in the same situation, just more arrogant about his own particular errors. Among those he would denounce for their errors, many of whom are indeed in error, the truth is also likely to be found.
Tolerance is not the notion that there are no truths, or no truths in such matters, or that they cannot be known, or that they are not known at present, or that they are not known widely enough. Tolerance is a recognition of the right to be wrong, a recognition founded on awareness that error is the natural state of man and man is free to live in error, and that freedom depends on much less than the truth being required of men.
What is required of men is that they do unto others as they would have others do unto them, that they live according to law and respect the authorities over them, that they do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with whatever light they are given. Where men do not do those things, the state can and should require it of them. But truth beyond that is outside of its competence, and largely outside the competence even of its wisest subjects in the most enlightened ages of the world.
Banish that "or" to the pit; it is a rack on which mankind would be broken. Benign lives we can require of men, truth we cannot.
Reminds me of visiting my mother here in the USA. I go with her to her beautiful National Historic Landmark church of a very mainstream Protestant denomination that is well known for supporting liberal causes & diluting Christian theology. It is pure drudgery to sit in the almost empty church with an uninspired pastor (except when he gets fired up to talk about buying "fair trade" coffee in the church basement after the service). Our regular church is Bible-based, independent, crowded, and still growing.
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