Religion and Global Affairs: Religious "Militants for Peace"

Symposia like this one are welcome signs that a growing chorus of leaders are recognizing that it is high time to examine “the other side” of religion in international affairs. The burden of this essay is to argue that “the other side” is not “the lighter side,” as in “the well-intentioned but ineffective do-gooder” side: religious militants dedicated to conflict mediation, the nonviolent promotion of human rights, and other elements of long-term peacebuilding have proven themselves to be no less resilient, no less “zealous” than their violent counterparts. They are, however, less organized, less funded, less publicized, and less well understood.

Violent, exclusivist, anti-pluralist “true believers” need no introduction. In recent years, extremist violence in Northern Ireland, France, the Balkans, Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka has been cloaked, in whole or in part, in religious garb. Secular militants who fear little else, fear religious extremism as a particularly ruthless and unpredictable de-stabilizing force. Religion’s unique ability to sustain cycles of violence beyond the point of rational calculation and enlightened self-interest was not lost on PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for example. During the final fury of the intifada, as the death toll among both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs mounted from massacres, suicide bombings, and other acts of religious violence, bitter enemies chose to attempt reconciliation in the face of the unrelenting threat posed by religious extremism, the one anarchic political force neither side seemed able to contain.

Meanwhile, new technologically enhanced acts of religious terrorism have achieved a prominence and political salience disproportionate to the actual number of perpetrators or their sympathizers. Today a tiny minority of violent religious actors might command the attention of an entire nation, as was the case in the United States following the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City by Muslim extremists.

Religious Peacebuilding

The dreadful record of religiously inspired violence and intolerance notwithstanding, history paints a more complicated picture of religious agency. Religious radicals of the Christian Reformation were prominent among the early modern proponents of religious liberty and freedom of speech; Baptists, the original advocates of religious autonomy, were champions of church-state separation. Hindu and Christian religious leaders, including martyrs for peace Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., were influential pioneers of nonviolence as both a spiritual practice and a political strategy. Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and Buddhism have also produced champions of nonviolent religious militancy.

The contemporary inheritors of this legacy of religious peacemaking include Christian ethicists who refine just war and pacifist traditions in light of contemporary military and political circumstances as well as Muslim jurists and theologians who defend the integrity and priority of Islamic law while demonstrating its adaptability in the building of just and stable Muslim societies. Meanwhile, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Christian scholars and religious leaders plumb and “translate” their respective traditions of wisdom and cultural values in the effort to establish cross-cultural norms of religious human rights. Finally, transnational religious communities, such as the lay Roman Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio, engage in conflict transformation through the provision of good offices, mediation, and social services in nations gripped by civil or regional wars, while local religious leaders work for genuine reconciliation among aggrieved parties.

Related to these efforts and operating on a global level are a host of religious nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), some hailing from the early years of the United Nations and working under its auspices, others active as independent agents of peace and development. Such organizations and agencies as the Mennonite Central Committee, the World Conference on Religion and Peace, Malaysia’s JUST World Trust, the Society of Engaged Buddhists, and Catholic Relief Services foster ecumenical cooperation in communities riven by ethnic and religious violence, conduct workshops and courses in religious resources for conflict transformation, and facilitate communication and dialogue between communities historically divided over competing ethnic and/or religious claims. Other NGOs such as the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, led by Rabbi Arthur Schneier, depend on the international...