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DR. FRANK KAUFMANN
Executive Director, Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace
PLENARY SESSION V
“Prospects for Peace in the 21st
Century”
Thank you very much. I have entitled my talk, “Religion and Government Since 1608: Recommendations for Media Reform.” My remarks proceed on the assumption that noting certain broad and sweeping trends in history since the 17 th century can bring us to a point of reform in the relationship between media and religion for the sake of more effective coverage of current issues.
The Thirty Years War, which lasted from 1608 until the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, was one of the most far reaching and destructive wars in recent history. Some estimates claim that Europe lost at least a third of its population in this ruinous war. It tends to be thought of as a religious war, although religion in fact was just a part of the equation. This massive conflict reluctantly limped to its exhausted end with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, the essence of which became codified, or popularly known, through the Latin phrase cuius regio eius religio, meaning roughly that each leader will determine the religion that will be practiced under his sovereignty.
All subsequent political and social development had inherited from this was an effective distrust of religion and religious belief. Subsequently the view prevailed that religions and religious believers cannot be trusted or left to their own devices.
This anti-religiosity was justified by the behavior of religions and religious figures during the Thirty Years War. All subsequent reflection on how to build government and order society was attended by the demons of the Thirty Years War, which declared that religion cannot be active as a co-participant in designing theories of how human beings are properly and peacefully organized in government and society.
Much of the most elegant derision of religion is found in the ideological and philosophical forces of the French Philosophs and Encyclopaedists. Such folk as Voltaire, Diderot, and others giftedly established the view of religion as a primitive, if necessary, part of human life (for the great unwashed). Religion was the dull hammer of superstition that marked one as being intellectually inferior and unsophisticated. Finally (it came to be held in the universities and coffee shops), we can organize ourselves in ways that never again will give way to the primitive violence manifested by Catholics and Protestants who destroyed “the civilized world” in the name of God.
I would like to argue that journalism has suffered similarly from this bias of the modern period.
This view that religious belief is a threat to peace and reasonable social life has never gone away. As political thought evolved, issues of sovereignty, national government, international relations, and so forth were always attended by the derogation of religion as the enemy of peaceful and orderly human organization.
Eventually social, political, and economic organization developed beyond the nation-state, resulting in the broadest collectivity in human history, namely blocs. The latter half of the 20th century was characterized by this basis for understanding international relations.
I argue that antipathy to religion in the professional intelligentsia, including in journalism, resulted in incomplete and incompetent analysis during that historical period and, more important, left the community of analysts and policymakers flatfooted in the wake of the 1989 fall of Russian expansionist and imperialist communism.
Analysis occurred solely in political, economic, and military paradigms, and tended to understand the Cold War as vying between socialist, statistic economic and social organizations on the one hand and free-market, democratic societies on the other.
I hold, however, that a deeper and more fundamental distinction pertaining to the foundations of these two systems tended to be overlooked, namely the radical and polar differences on religion. The “Western” view, most fully manifested in the United States, is the “freedom of religion” position; namely “all religion” or “any religion” (if it is really religion) is OK. Every (genuine) religion is perfectly fine. Come worship here. The “communist bloc” was basically the opposite. All religion is not OK. No religion is welcome here. So the division of blocs was not only a clash of ideologies and economic systems and theories, but (perhaps more important) positions on religion underlay the two poles of the primary conflict of the last century. All religion is fine versus no religion is fine. (The current “world war” also revolves centrally around freedom of religion issues as well.)
This oversight had one particularly devastating result, which lay dormant during the Cold War and has become a contemporary world of horror in its aftermath.
If political science had not turned against the religious question in the modern period, it would easily have recognized during the Cold War period not two but three so-called blocs. A crude overlay extending the religious distinctions I just identified between East and West then adds: Communist: No religion is OK. Free world: All religion is OK, Islamist: Only one religion is OK.
I contend that the sooner the journalistic community acquires as a habit of mind an operative analytical framework that embraces the complexity of the freedom of religion issue, the better it will serve the pursuit of truth, viable analysis, and the enlightenment of its readership.
I believe the European split with U.S. leadership is not only an oil and economic split but also is influenced heavily by the European lean toward Islamist-style theocracies insofar as state churches manipulate a religiously totalitarian environment. Recently, Secretary of State Powell issued a letter of concern to nations like Germany and France for their legislation violating the human rights of its citizens who adhere to minority religions.
The second the communist overlay of its conquered satellites dissolved, the world erupted into ancient rivalries. I call this the “No World Order.” The please-no-religion intelligentsia insisted on analyzing these matters as “ethnic,” such as the morass in former Yugoslavia, and it was not until agents killed thousands of innocent civilians in the name of Allah that religion was permitted into public discourse.
The past is the past. No one needs to lecture anyone. Nevertheless, our current crisis affords the world community, including its very nerve system, the journalistic community, to shed the biases of the post-Enlightenment period and recover perhaps the most central element of political and social analysis, namely the role of religion in world affairs.
I would like to devote the remainder of my time to offer constructive recommendations for how the journalistic community can catch up and recover indispensable aspects of relevance and constructive contribution to an informed readership.
Among other things, accounting for the role of religion in the war on terrorism requires an understanding of theology, history, and what one may call ecclesiology or doctrine of clerical authority.
Expertise in these matters lies with scholars of religion and with religious leaders themselves. The assumption that one can conduct international affairs absent constant consultation with religious scholars and religious leaders themselves should be unthinkable.
Culpability for this problem lies not only with political and diplomatic leadership but also with the religions themselves. Not enough religious leaders and religious scholars have endeavored to grasp the mission of the media, and many create of themselves people who are hopeless even for the labors of a sympathetic journalist. The mission to bring the vital religious questions into the atmosphere of popular discourse is a two-way street. I would argue that journalists need to recognize, and disabuse themselves of, post-Enlightenment biases and prejudices about religion, and religionists need to enter the public arena in a more sophisticated and accessible way.
Very briefly, for the long-term war on terrorism one must have a clear and complete knowledge of the full range of potential doctrinal interpretation on the issues of violence, the use of violence, conditions of war, issues of self-defense, and so forth. Further, one must similarly know the full range of interpretation for texts and authority pertaining to the rights of and postures toward non-believers. For example, since September 11 everyone has heard of the term jihad, but virtually no non-Muslim is aware of qatl, which means to fight against oppression for justice (Q2: 216-218). This latter term to my mind is endlessly more dangerous in its range of interpretation.
The theology of land is also central if one desires a sound and long-term approach to the problem of terrorism. Second, one must know deeply and clearly religious and interreligious history. Narrowly, as pertains to the war on terrorism, it is important to know the history of what might be called religious conquest, and conversion and expansion. As cultures and empires rise and fall, they leave behind them a record of what might be called theological declaration: that the ruler is, or is loved by, [the true] God and that [the true] God is glorified in the highest place of honor. This habit of conquerors and leaders has created for the modern world half a dozen or more physical sites that invoke fanatical reaction. These include the sacred sites in the Holy Land, most especially the Dome of the Rock, and now the Church of the Annunciation; the site of the Ayodhya Mosque in Gujarat; and to a lesser but not insignificant extent, sites in Constantinople, most specifically the Haga Sophia and Blue Mosque.
Additionally, one must know the history of religiously defined political and military activity (the Crusades for example) through the prism of what each tradition erects as its theology of history. Namely, to what degree does what happens in history reflect the hand of God. Finally, one must know deeply what I have termed ecclesiology or the structures of clerical and interpretive authority in religions. For example, why is Osama bin Laden able to have a following? Could bin Laden, for example, have defined his activity as a Catholic cause? Why or why not? How is religious authority established in Islam, for example?
The problem is the issue of what constitutes clerical authority in Islam. If we don’t understand that there is no pope that says one thing is right and one is wrong, but rather it is a matter of fatwas and juridical discourse, we have artificial expectations about how the religion should respond to its contemporary crisis. Such things as ecclesiology or clerical authority, doctrines, religious injunctions vis-à-vis violence, self-defense, the status of non-believers, and so forth are vital to understand if we are to compile and construct a viable analysis and inform our readers as responsible journalists.
When Arnaud de Borchgrave began speaking, one of my colleagues in the audience leaned over to me and said, “Frank, there’s a man who at the age of 16 understood the importance of a good Rolodex.” Anyway, how many of us have a good Rolodex for sound religious information, analysis, or interpretation? Few. Often I hear journalists or diplomats say, “Yes, we’d like to include religion, but religion is so complex. There’s no one Christian view. There’s no one Muslim view.” Is there one French view? Is there one theory of the free-market economy? People are perfectly willing to engage the complexities of any major dimension of human striving. Similarly, journalists sooner or later should take upon themselves the responsibility to be willing to grasp, or engage, the complexity of religion.
For example, we are teetering on the brink of a war with Iraq. Does anyone know the difference between the Anglican position on war and the Lutheran position on war? Do you know someone who speaks on behalf of Lutherans in America? These things all exist. Have you ever heard of the Center for Religion and Society? They exist. They are available. The Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge just recently conducted a conference entitled “Just War: The Judeo-Christian and Islamic Perspectives.”
We are on the brink of war. There is another major opinion roundup in Christianity Today: “Is Attacking Iraq Moral?” That is a decent question. How many people reading the New York Post or the Washington Post have laid out before them a simplification [of the issues], some kind of reportage that speaks to a newspaper reader and can basically summarize them. How many people can give the four elements of the just war theory, the entire military foundation of war as a moral phenomenon in the West. We can name the seven Mets who got caught with marijuana, but we can’t name the four elements of what constitutes a just war theory when we might be on the brink of one of the most fundamental turning points in American foreign policy as we stand here.
So in summary, I would merely like to say that the post-Enlightenment period was soured, and understandably so, by coming on the heels of the Thirty Years War. That created a habit of mind and an undercurrent of intellectual atmosphere that did not permit the religious question to be part of the analytical framework. This has resulted in our current situation, in which finally a world war is essentially religious by definition.
We all probably could have done better to welcome and embrace religion as an element of responsible, not religious, journalism. When I read the mistakes of people writing on religion, if that person did that one time in economics, made so gross an error on the market pages of the Wall Street Journal, they would never write again for anybody. And yet in religion one freely just kind of guesses, pulls rabbits out of a hat, does their best. So I would urge people in religion who are divinity students also to think about journalism as a career, as a religious vocation, and also journalists who are responsible for guiding their readership to be able to think clearly and forming secular public opinion to do a little good homework, so that we can start to communicate the nuances, the complexities, and the central role that religion plays in much that we do.
Thank you very much.
