Religion and Peacebuilding

1. A Moment of Opportunity?: The Promise of Religious Peacebuilding in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Conflict

During our lifetime, religion has been anything but invisible. Predictions that it would become privatized, removed from the sphere of politics, economic development, warfare, and education, have proven false. In the 1960s, millions of Catholics joined their fellow U.S. citizens gawking in disbelief at the sight of priests and nuns marching with the civil rights movement in the streets of Selma and Chicago. Buddhist monks immolated themselves in protest of the war in Southeast Asia, while yeshiva-trained Jewish messianists brazenly moved their families into the Palestinian-populated territories occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War. During the 1970s and 1980s, religion manifested itself repeatedly in the public realm, often to the surprise, delight, or consternation of onlookers. The Shi‘ite-led revolution in Iran was the most prominent example of the resurgence of political Islam; Sunni-based movements also swept across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Sudan and Afghanistan joined the ranks of Islamist-governed nations, while powerful Islamist parties fomented revolution or threatened political stability in Algeria, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, and Indonesia. In the United States a majority-claiming minority of Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists laid the groundwork for the emergence of “the 1 1 A Moment of Opportunity? The Promise of Religious Peacebuilding in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Conflict DAVID LITTLE AND SCOTT APPLEBY Christian Right,” a coterie of congregation-based sociopolitical movements , public action committees, think tanks, and lobbyists led by preachers who pledged to take back Congress and the Supreme Court from the secular humanists. The Indian subcontinent during these decades saw the rise of Sikh extremism, Hindu nationalism, and Muslim communalism. Sinhala Buddhists fought Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka, Israeli Jews squared off against Palestinian Muslims in the Holy Land, Catholic nationalists attacked and were attacked by Protestant unionists in Belfast. These and countless other expressions of “public religion” tended to put religion in bad odor among many educators, students, journalists, policy makers, and public officials. Others, however, looked beyond the headlines to appreciate the multiple constructive dimensions of religion in its publicness; some of these observers even recognized that the genius of religiously inspired social welfare and peacemaking activism is rooted in the same zeal for holiness powering the holy wars and religiopolitical crusades. Indeed, one of our central themes in what follows is “the ambivalence of the sacred”—the ability of religion to promote what might be called militancy on behalf of the other, as well as militancy aimed against the other. Religion promotes both intolerance and hatred, that is, as well as tolerance of the strongest type—the willingness to live with, explore, and honor difference. Whether upholding universal human rights or denying them to “heretics” or “infidels,” religious actors, of course, always believe that they are doing God’s will and thus serving the common good of humanity, properly understood. It is, however , the obligation of scholars and educators to discriminate between the zeal that compels true believers to violate the rights of others, and the zeal that compels them to defend those rights at any cost. Recognition that religion also promotes the latter kind of activism has led in recent years to some striking reversals for religion’s public image. In August 1996, President Clinton signed into law a bill overhauling the U.S. welfare system that contained a provision allowing states to contract with houses of worship “without impairing the religious character of such organizations.” This “charitable choice” provision permits tax funds to be directed to religious organizations on the condition that the funds not be used to subsidize acts of worship or evangelizing. In 2001, newly elected president George W. Bush sought to expand this program by channeling funds to faith-based organizations that were permitted to use religious identity as a criterion for employment by the organization.1 Internationally, the celebration of the millennium provided opportunities for religious leaders to present their credentials as proponents of 2 David Little and Scott Appleby nonviolent social change and reconciliation. One of the world’s largest, truly “global” religious bodies, the Roman Catholic Church, celebrated a biblical “year of jubilee” by asking forgiveness for a host of “sins”— evils occasioned not by individual Catholics but, as Pope John Paul II confessed, by the body called “the Catholic Church.” Theological terms—repentance, forgiveness, contrition, and reconciliation—found their way into international headlines when the pope carried this message to the Holy...