Church and Society: The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988-2007

26. Christ Among the Religions: November 7, 2001

26 Christ Among the Religions November ,  T he relations between the various religions of the world have often been hostile, and in many places they remain so today. When we pick up the daily newspaper, we can hardly avoid reading about conflicts between Jews and Muslims, between Muslims and Hindus, between Hindus and Sikhs, or between Sunnis and Shiites. All of these faiths have at one time or another clashed with Christianity, which, for its part, has contributed more than its share to interreligious tension and warfare. Christians have persecuted Jews and have fought holy wars against Muslims. Within Christianity there have been internecine wars, especially between Protestants and Catholics, but sometimes also with Eastern Orthodox. Struggles of this kind continue to rage in Northern Ireland, for example, although it would be unfair to describe the Catholic Church as a belligerent in that conflict since its authorities have disapproved of violence on either side. The present armed intervention in Afghanistan is sometimes described as a religious war. This interpretation is on the whole false, but it contains a grain of truth. From the American standpoint, there is nothing we are less interested in than a war against Islam. Our own nation is hospitable to Muslims, who constitute nearly three million of its inhabitants. They enjoy full freedom of worship throughout North America and Western Europe. A new crusade would gain no support from any major power in the West and would certainly not receive the blessing of Christian religious authorities. Our quarrel with Osama bin Laden has to do only with his politics of violence, which may not be in accord with the tenets of authentic Islam. 360 Christ Among the Religions 兩 361 From the Arab side, religion is part of the picture, but Muslim extremists such as bin Laden seem to be working for ends that are cultural, political, ethnic, and economic rather than exclusively religious. They resent the power of the United States and its allies, which they perceive as arrogant and brutal. Even more fundamentally, they are repelled by what they perceive as the culture of the West. Their quarrel is not primarily with Christianity as a religion but much more with what they regard as the loss of religion in the West: its excessive individualism, its licentious practice of freedom, its materialism, its pleasure-loving consumerism. They see this hedonistic culture as a threat since it exercises a strong seductive power over many young people in the traditionally Islamic societies of Asia, Africa, and other continents. If this analysis is correct, globalization might be seen as an underlying cause of the conflict in Afghanistan. Modern means of travel and communication bring together cultures that have developed in relative autonomy in different regions of the earth. The encounter produces a kind of culture shock, especially in nations that have not gone through the gradual process of industrialization and modernization that occurred two centuries ago in the West. Christians of North America and Western Europe have by now grown accustomed to rubbing shoulders with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and members of practically every other religion that can be named. Where immigration is taking place on a large scale, and modern means of communication are generally available, no religion is any longer in a position to claim exclusive domination of a region and shelter its faithful from contact with other faiths. Like it or not, most of us are destined to live in a religiously mixed society that includes people of many faiths and of no faith at all. For this reason we have to discuss the ways in which different religions can relate to each other. I should like in this lecture to propose a typology consisting of four possible models: coercion, convergence, pluralism, and tolerance. Coercion The first model, coercion, predominated throughout the greater part of human history. In most periods of history, political authorities have 362 兩 Church and Society wanted to enforce unity of religion within their respective jurisdictions and to compel the populations of subject peoples to adopt the religion of the conqueror. The Roman Empire for a while accepted religious pluralism , but the emperors soon began to insist that divine honors be paid to themselves. They consequently came to persecute religions such as Christianity , which refused such worship. When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion, the emperors began to enforce Christian orthodoxy and persecute all...