God-on-Our-Side

God on our side!

Religious fervor is often added to a "cause,", identifying the struggle as a fight for God against the forces of Evil. Many leaders -- of many faiths -- have sought to link their cause with God's will.

From the battle cry of the medieval Catholic crusaders ("Deo Volunte" -- God wills it!) fighting to "rescue" the Holy Land, to the well known 19th century Protestant hymn ("Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus, Going on before.") to President Reagan's cold-war fight against the "godless communists" of the "Evil Empire," to the impromptu response after September 11th of President George W. Bush, who wanted to lead a "crusade" against terrorists.
Later, he retracted that word when he was told that it suggested, to Muslim ears, the Christian Crusaders invasion of Muslim lands. Yet, subsequently, President Bush continued to frame the issues in terms of polarities of Good and Evil.

In 2003, Lt. General Boykin, the undersecretary of Defense, was the man responsible for tracking down Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. While in Army uniform, he created a stir by speaking to religious groups, as an evangelical Christian declaring that the radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." To another group, he discussed his fighting against a Muslim warlord in Somalia: "I knew my God was a real God and his was an idol." Later, he said: "We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this."

In 2005, the Terri Schiavo case and the subsequent arguments about Senate filibusters and judical nominees, the Democrats were labeled as being "against people of faith." Although GOP Senator Bill Frist's speech identifying Democrats as being against people of faith was odious, it was not unprecedented. In 1884, the Democrats were attacked as being the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, an attack linking the Southern Democrats and the Northern "big city" Democrats (stereotyped as being drunken Irish Catholics, agents of the Pope).While the actual specifics (and political parties) have greatly changed, the same God-on-Our-Side tactic is common.

Biblical imagery and allusions about fighting (Armageddon, David and Goliath, Satan) abound in the Old Testament, and in the American "Bible Belt" mentality. Some critics ("Holy Terror") say religion is the problem, not the solution.

Bringing God into any cause is an effective way to stir things up ("energizing the base"), to bond groups, and to keep them together. Although any single issue -- a controversy over bible-reading in schools, or Ten Commandments signs on public property; or anything to do with sex (abortion, contraception, "gay marriage") may seem unrelated, religious groups can be continually bonded with these causes as being related to God and Family Values, then channeled later into voting for politicians who are "one of ours" or "on God's side." In one sense, there are no single-issues: causes, ideas, policies tend to cluster together, as movements -- of allies, friends, colleagues, cohorts, fellow travelers -- which share some positions, but emphasize one. They know they can gain strength from these allies, and usually share their mailing lists with each other.

Islam, also, fights a jihad, a holy war, with words and slogans ("Allah Akbar! God is great!) and images of young suicide bombers are viewed as martyrs in this holy war against "the Jews and Crusaders." In 1928, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the most influential of the radical groups, put it succinctly into a slogan: "God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Qur'an our constitution, jihad our way, and dying for God's cause our supreme objective."

It's harder to provide specifics and statistics here about current Islamic fundamentalist propaganda because so little is available in translation. (For example, see: Adam Parfrey, editor, Extreme Islam: Anti-Americanism of Muslim Fundamentalism). But it's apparent that some Muslims also see themselves as fighting with God on their Side, against the infidels of the "Great Satan," America.

Brian Michael Jenkins, of the Rand Corporation research program on terrorism, reflected (Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2005) on the motivation of the 9/11 hijackers:

"We have no X-ray for men's souls and can only guess why these men decided to accept this destructive mission. In their own minds, they were at war. Ferocious sermons and atrocity-filled jihadist videotapes told them that infidels threatened Muslims everywhere with annihilation. American troops were in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, Israeli tanks rolled over Palestinian homes, while Christian Serbs killed and raped Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. To do nothing was to accept humiliation and dishonor. The only alternative to physical and spiritual destruction was violence. God commanded it. One could be a victim or a warrior. This was propaganda but nonetheless powerful stuff that continues to propel thousands of young men to Al Qaeda's brand of jihad."

Graham Fuller, in The Future of Political Islam, puts such religious associations in a wider context:

"All societies prefer to ennoble their conflicts through justification at the highest level of moral cause. Thus, few will go to war in the name of capturing territory, destroying a rival, exacting revenge, gaining geopolitical hegemony, or seizing economic assets. Instead, war is waged in the name of Christian values, the proletarian revolution, the master race, the war to end all wars, the free world, the forces of history, manifest destiny, or whatever." (p.145)

Moral superiority

Nothing so pleases one's own advocates, nor so infuriates the opposition, as the claim to moral superiority.

Because joining in a "cause" so favorably affects the self-image, advocates often feel very noble and self-righteous, not only about their "cause," but also about themselves.

Sometimes this is expressed very explicitly, as when we hear people using military-religious war metaphors: Onward Christian Soldiers, soldiers of the lord, defenders of the faith, fighters for freedom, and so on.

More frequently, the God-on-our-side attitude is an implicit, unspoken assumption. If we were specifically to claim such righteousness, such an explicit statement would often provoke skepticism and counter-claims by putting it so bluntly.

But our assumptions are seldom investigated or scrutinized; many of our feelings and beliefs are not subjected to rational "proofs." Nevertheless they are very powerful influences on our behavior because we act out certain roles and follow certain role models, consciously or unconsciously, to a greater or lesser degree.

When people intensify their own "good," they tend to see themselves as being competent, informed, superior to others in virtue or intelligence, "possessing the Truth," and acting with "good intentions."

Cultural Wars

This applies not only to our domestic quarrels -- the "culture war" going on within the United States -- about how Conservatives see themselves as the Righteous God-Fearing people struggling in combat with the loose morals and lax behavior of the Liberals. In the 2004 election campaign, the code-word used to imply one's own righteousness was "values."

But, in a world context, the Conservative Islamic fundamentalists of other countries see themselves as the Righteous God-Fearing people, struggling in combat against the loose morals and lax behavior of the Americans. For most people on earth, their view of the United States is taken primarily from violent Hollywood movies, sexy TV programs, and constant commercialism. For most people on earth, their traditional values, cultural and religious beliefs have encountered the various "bad influences" of "Modernism" and "Globalization" only during the very recent past generation, a real "culture shock" since global TV.

2008 parliamentary elections in Iran, for example, consolidated the power of the hard-line religious conservatives; previously, modernist candidates of their 2004 campaign were barred from running because they were declared by the religious leaders to be disloyal to the Khomeini revolution. Thus, in 2008, the new crop of conservatives, the younger candidates, called themselves "Principlists, a reference to their belief in the principles of Islam, which they say have been neglected.... "We believe that we must run the country based on a religious framework," said Mohammad Reza Katouzian, one of the candidates close to Mr. Ahmadinejad. "We must return to Islamic values, and they should become the basis for development of the country." (NYTimes 3/7/08)

Conservatives visualize the Golden Age to be in the past, progressives visualize the Golden Age to be in the future.

Righteous Anger

Sometimes people see their opponents (or even the dissidents within their own group) as intentionally evil. (The most common evils of critics within their own group are selfishness and disloyalty.)

More commonly, many people see their opponents as ignorant, misguided, unintentional dupes of a more powerful "hidden enemy."

Some people are probably more prone to be attracted to a "pep talk" than other people. Writers such as Eric Hofer, in The True Believer, have speculated as to the reasons why some people join "causes." Zealots and enthusiasts are not confined to any particular political ideology; the patterns presented here are likely to be used both for conservative and progressive "causes." But, perhaps the common tendency is the need for absolute certitude, for "being right," which contributes to a polarized kind of thinking, a "good guys/bad guys" mentality. One observable result is the pattern of descriptive language used not only to attack opponents, but also to proclaim one's own virtues, of "being right."

Variations and synonyms are common, but the advocate's attitude can be expressed in one basic sentence:

"We are informed and good; they are ignorant and evil."

Synonyms related to the advocate's attitude: "We are informed and good; they are ignorant and evil."

	Unintentional		Intentional

	uninformed		greedy
	unaware		profiteers
	ignorant		hirelings
	misled		mercenaries
	misguided		stooges
	naive		goons
	dupes of		scabs
	tools of		parasites
	pawns of		lackeys
	victims of		toadies
	irrational		finks
	crazy		traitors
	crackpot		disloyal
	screwball		diabolical
	lunatic		malicious
	hysterical		evil
	hard-core		Judas
	fanatics		Uncle Tom
	brainwashed		treasonous
	gulled		cohorts
	fooled		hatchet man

Test this.

What are some of the causes (gun control, abortion) with which you disagree?

How would you describe the advocates of those causes? What kind of people are they?
What motivates them? (Do you think they are more malicious? Or more misguided?)

Another test is to listen to "talk radio," for example, to "cause" advocates describe their opponents.

Many people in Left-wing movements view their opponents as "pawns" or "tools" of the rich (big business, capitalists, the Military-Industrial Complex, oil interests, Swiss bankers, Texas oil millionaires, cartels, corporations, conglomerates, organized religion, the Establishment, and so on.) Right-wingers see their opponents as pawns of, or dupes of, communism (creeping socialism, an international conspiracy, terrorists, radicals, and so on), or agents of the devil.

Right-wing causes tend to use the righteous God-on-our-side approach; the Left tends to be righteous secular humanists fighting for the People. (Vox populi, vox dei?)

George Lakoff, Moral Politics (p.59) on: SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

"A self-righteous person is someone who carefully keeps his own moral ledger books, who makes sure that, according to his own system of moral accounting, he is morally solvent and that, in his accounting system, his credits always outweigh his debits. A thoroughly self-righteous person knows neither shame nor gratitude, since he has no moral debts, again according to his own method of accounting.

There are three things that make him not righteous but self-righteous. The first is that he recognizes no moral values other than his own as valid. The second is that he keeps his own books. There is no external auditing. And the third is that he must communicate his moral standing to his interlocutors.

The self-righteous person's superfluity of moral credit is the basis of his discourse. He presupposes his own moral values and his own righteousness as a condition of conversation. The effect of this is that anyone talking to a selfrighteous person must either agree with his moral values and act equally self-righteous, or face being put in a morally inferior position in the discourse. This is what makes selfrighteous people particularly infuriating to talk to."

Martyrs | Palestine, 2005 "... a culture of martyrdom and its glorification"

David Remnick, "A Reporter at Large," The New Yorker (February 7, 2005) p. 67:

Walk around the neighborhoods of Gaza and it is hard to believe that Abbas can stifle terror either quickly or completely-not when a culture of martyrdom and its glorification has taken such root. The Martyrs' Cemetery, Martyr posters, Martyr cards, Martyr T-shirts, Martyr videotapes.

One day, I passed by the Maslam Martyr Pharmacy. This distortion of identity is a crisis as great as politics. In the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, a Harnas stronghold, I spoke to a group of teen-agers.

"Do you want to be a martyr?"I asked one.

"God willing," Muhammad Talmas, an eighteen-year-old student, said.

"And, if not that, what?"

"An engineer, maybe."

"Can you be both?"

"Well, look at Ismail Abu Shanab," he said. The boy knew martyrology the way American kids know ballplayers. "He did both. He was killed in a missile attack last year. I want to go to Heaven. The Prophet Muhammad used to say, 'I want to go to Heaven after long work and deeds.'Insballab."

"What do you think of Abu Mazen?

"The words of Abu Mazen conflict with the Palestinian national interest. There are thousands of martyrs and prisoners in Israeli jails. The Palestinians should receive a reward on their behalf -- all of Palestine."

"No coexistence? No two states?"

"No, no, no," he said. "Never."

The most prominent psychologist in Gaza, Eyad al-Sarraj, told me that if there was ever a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians the culture of martyrdom would dwindle drarnatically. "When Sadat came to Israel and laid down his sword, the Israeli psychology changed overnight," Sarraj said."We deserve the same thing." Until then, he said, the young men -- and even the young women -- of Gaza and the West Bank would seek martyrdom.

"Martyrs are at the level of prophets," Sarraj said. "They are untouchable. I can denounce suicide bombings, which I have many times, but not the martyrs themselves, because they are like saints. If you do that, you will discredit yourself completely. This is why when the stupid Bush said these are not martyrs, they are murderers -- as if the only martyrs are Christian. We, too, have our martyrs .... He sacrifices himself for the nation. If you want to be a part of this culture, you have to understand this. I don't believe in religion myself, but I cannot say that Muhammad was nothing but a magician or that martyrs are wrong. This disqualifies you from the culture."

PBS-TV Frontline: "Israel's Next War?"

On the other side of the conflict are the Jewish extremists who see themselves as the only "authentic Jews" doing "God's will" and ready to "fulfill their religious destiny" by becoming martyrs, or killing others, a "redemption through war." One of their goals is to destroy the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim mosque in Jerusalem, thus triggering a catastrophic war, an Armageddon, an idea also shared by some fundamentalist Christians who believe this is the necessary prelude to the Second Coming.

In fiction, this is dramatized by Robert Stone's Damascus Gate (1999); in reality, this is the focus of the April, 2005 PBS program, "Israel's Next War?" available online (full text, references, links).

"The phenomena that we're talking about are not on the fringe," says Yitzhak Dar, head of the Jewish section of the Israeli security service. "The glue that holds them together is ideology. It's a very, very dangerous ideology….When they try to put it into action, through the murder of the prime minister[Itzak Rabin], through the murder of the Arabs, through the massacre at the Hebron Mosque, it's the beginning of the end of a system that can defend itself."

Among the extremists, there is a feeling of persecution by the Israeli government."I think the government is mainly afraid of us because we represent an alternative," says Noam Federman, a prominent Kahanist [Meyer Kahane, their leader, was assassinated, "martyred"] who trained some of the school bomb plotters on how to withstand interrogation from Israeli police. "We basically explain the Arab problem as Rabbi Kahane saw it. We say this should be a Jewish country and I think that's what threatens them."

Mike Guzofsky, a transplanted New Yorker and leading Kahanist, is convinced that the very people who are now painted as extremists will one day be viewed as heroes. "I think the day will come when the secret service and the government will look for Jews who are willing to risk their lives and go into Arab villages and kick them out, kill them… and we have thousands of civilians with the military know-how to instigate a mega-attack against Arabs."

How the GOP Became God's Own Party
By Kevin Phillips | Washington Post | April 2, 2006

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's domestic and foreign policy, driven by religion's new political prowess and its role in projecting military power in the Mideast.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits -- oil and biblical expectations -- require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary -- fascinating but appalling -- is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been linked to a politics that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions.

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests -- a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics. On the most important front, I am beginning to think that the Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the Southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.

I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," which I finished in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, for which I became the chief political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, the volume was identified by Newsweek as the "political bible of the Nixon Era."

In that book I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe the oil, military, aerospace and retirement country stretching from Florida to California, but debate concentrated on the argument -- since fulfilled and then some -- that the South was on its way into the national Republican Party. Four decades later, this framework has produced the alliance of oil, fundamentalism and debt.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any region of the United States had the potential to produce a high-powered, crusading fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential to nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it was the Sun Belt, which helped draw them into commercial and political proximity and collaboration. Wall Street, of course, has long been part of the GOP coalition. But members of the Downtown Association and the Links Club were never enthusiastic about "Joe Sixpack" and middle America, to say nothing of preachers such as Oral Roberts or the Tupelo, Miss., Assemblies of God. The new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

While studying economic geography and history in Britain, I had been intrigued by the Eurasian "heartland" theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a prominent geographer of the early 20th century. Control of that heartland, Mackinder argued, would determine control of the world. In North America, I thought, the coming together of a heartland -- across fading Civil War lines -- would determine control of Washington.

This was the prelude to today's "red states." The American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. airstrikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilments could also boomerang economically. The United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies -- the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is depressing to someone who spent many years researching, watching and cheering those grass roots.

Four decades ago, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy a major infusion of conservative northern Catholics and southern Protestants. This troubled me not at all. I agreed with the predominating Republican argument at the time that "secular" liberals, by badly misjudging the depth and importance of religion in the United States, had given conservatives a powerful and legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United States has deepened. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership.

Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured.

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United States is a unique and chosen nation, they say; what did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He apparently was not added a further debilitating note to the late stages of each national decline.

Over the last 25 years, I have warned frequently of these political, economic and historical (but not religious) precedents. The concentration of wealth that developed in the United States in the bull market of 1982 to 2000 was also typical of the zeniths of previous world economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of Edwardian England. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial distortion. The United States of the early 21st century is well into this debt-driven climax, with some analysts arguing -- all too plausibly -- that an unsustainable credit bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in 2000.

Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch. Politics in the United States -- and especially the evolution of the governing Republican coalition -- deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence of these forces in America today.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Kevin Phillips, is the author of American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century"

Other Recent Books on this topic:

Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness
Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
Claes Ryan, America the Virtuous

"I'm Right, You're Wrong, Go To Hell"
Religions and the meeting of civilization
by Bernard Lewis | The Atlantic Monthly | May 2003

For a long time now it has been our practice in the modern Western world to define ourselves primarily by nationality, and to see other identities and allegiances—religious, political, and the like—as subdivisions of the larger and more important whole. The events of September 11 and after have made us aware of another perception—of a religion subdivided into nations rather than a nation subdivided into religions—and this has induced some of us to think of ourselves and of our relations with others in ways that had become unfamiliar. The confrontation with a force that defines itself as Islam has given a new relevance—indeed, urgency—to the theme of the "clash of civilizations."

At one time the general assumption of mankind was that "civilization" meant us, and the rest were uncivilized. This, as far as we know, was the view of the great civilizations of the past—in China, India, Greece, Rome, Persia, and the ancient Middle East. Not until a comparatively late stage did the idea emerge that there are different civilizations, that these civilizations meet and interact, and—even more interesting—that a civilization has a life-span: it is born, grows, matures, declines, and dies. One can perhaps trace that latter idea to the medieval Arab historian-philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who spoke in precisely those terms, though what he discussed was not civilizations but states—or, rather, regimes. The concept wasn't really adapted to civilizations until the twentieth century.From the archives:

The first writer to make the connection was the German historian Oswald Spengler. Perhaps influenced by the horrors of World War I and the defeat of imperial Germany, he looked around him and saw civilization in decline. He built a philosophy on this perception, captured in the phrase "the decline of the West"—Der Untergang des Abendlandes. His two volumes under this title were published in 1918 and 1922. In these he discussed how different civilizations meet, interact, rise and decline, and fall. His approach was elaborated by Arnold Toynbee, who proceeded with a sort of wish list of civilizations—and, of course, also a hit list. Most recently Samuel Huntington, of Harvard University, has argued that the clash of civilizations, more than of countries or governments, is now the basic force of international relations. I think most of us would agree, and some of us have indeed said, that the clash of civilizations is an important aspect of modern international relations, though probably not many of us would go so far as to imply, as some have done, that civilizations have foreign policies and form alliances.

There have been a number of different civilizations in human history, and several are extant, though not all in the same condition. Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, dealt with the relative condition of civilizations in some of the speeches in which he urged the people of the newly established Turkish Republic to modernize. He put the issue with military directness and simplicity. People, he said, talked of this civilization and that civilization, and of interaction and influence between civilizations; but only one civilization was alive and well and advancing, and that was what he called modernity, the civilization "of our time." All the others were dying or dead, he said, and Turkey's choice was to join this civilization or be part of a dying world. The one civilization was, of course, the West.

Only two civilizations have been defined by religion. Others have had religions but are identified primarily by region and ethnicity. Buddhism has been a major religious force, and was the first to try to bring a universal message to all mankind. There is some evidence of Buddhist activities in the ancient Middle East, and the possibility has been suggested of Buddhist influence on Judaism and, therefore, on the rise of Christianity. But Buddhism has not expanded significantly for many centuries, and the countries where it flourishes—in South, Southeast, and East Asia—are defined, like their neighbors, by culture more than by creed. These other civilizations, with the brief and problematic exception of communism, have lacked the ideological capacity—and for the most part even the desire—for indefinite expansion.

Christianity and Islam are the two religions that define civilizations, and they have much in common, along with some differences. In English and in most of the other languages of the Christian world we have two words, "Christianity" and "Christendom." Christianity is a religion, a system of belief and worship with certain ecclesiastical institutions. Christendom is a civilization that incorporates elements that are non-Christian or even anti-Christian. Hitler and the Nazis, it may be recalled, are products of Christendom, but hardly of Christianity. When we talk of Islam, we use the same word for both the religion and the civilization, which can lead to misunderstanding. The late Marshall Hodgson, a distinguished historian of Islam at the University of Chicago, was, I think, the first to draw attention to this problem, and he invented the word "Islamdom." Unfortunately, "Islamdom" is awkward to pronounce and just didn't catch on, so the confusion remains. (In Turkish there is no confusion, because "Islam" means the civilization, and "Islamiyet" refers specifically to the religion.)

In looking at the history of civilization we talk, for example, of "Islamic art," meaning art produced in Muslim countries, not just religious art, whereas the term "Christian art" refers to religious or votive art, churches and pious sculpture and painting. We talk about "Islamic science," by which we mean physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, and the rest under the aegis of Muslim civilization. If we say "Christian science," we mean something totally different and unrelated.

Does one talk about "Jewish science"? I don't think so. One may talk about Jewish scientists, but that's not the same thing. But then, of course, Judaism is not a civilization—it's a religion and a culture. Most of Jewish history since the Diaspora has taken place within either Christendom or Islam. There were Jews in India, there were Jews in China, but those communities didn't flourish. Their role was minimal, both in the history of the Jews and in the history of India and China. The term "Judeo-Christian" is a new name for an old reality, though in earlier times it would have been equally resented on both sides of the hyphen. One could use an equivalent term, "Judeo-Islamic," to designate another cultural symbiosis that flourished in the more recent past and ended with the dawn of modernity.

To what extent is a religiously defined civilization compatible with pluralism—tolerance of others within the same civilization but of different religions? This crucial question points to a major distinction between two types of religion. For some religions, just as "civilization" means us, and the rest are barbarians, so "religion" means ours, and the rest are infidels. Other religions, such as Judaism and most of the religions of Asia, concede that human beings may use different religions to speak to God, as they use different languages to speak to one another. God understands them all. I know in my heart that the English language is the finest instrument the human race has ever devised to express its thoughts and feelings, but I recognize in my mind that others may feel exactly the same way about their languages, and I have no problem with that. These two approaches to religion may conveniently be denoted by the terms their critics use to condemn them—"triumphalism" and "relativism." In one of his sermons the fifteenth-century Franciscan Saint John of Capistrano, immortalized on the map of California, denounced the Jews for trying to spread a "deceitful" notion among Christians: "The Jews say that everyone can be saved in his own faith, which is impossible." For once a charge of his against the Jews was justified. The Talmud does indeed say that the righteous of all faiths have a place in paradise. Polytheists and atheists are excluded, but monotheists of any persuasion who observe the basic moral laws are eligible. The relativist view was condemned and rejected by both Christians and Muslims, who shared the conviction that there was only one true faith, theirs, which it was their duty to bring to all humankind. The triumphalist view is increasingly under attack in Christendom, and is disavowed by significant numbers of Christian clerics. There is little sign as yet of a parallel development in Islam.

Tolerance is, of course, an extremely intolerant idea, because it means "I am the boss: I will allow you some, though not all, of the rights I enjoy as long as you behave yourself according to standards that I shall determine." That, I think, is a fair definition of religious tolerance as it is normally understood and applied. In a letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, that George Washington wrote in 1790, he remarked, perhaps in an allusion to the famous "Patent of Tolerance" promulgated by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II a few years previously, "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights." At a meeting of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Vienna some years ago the Cardinal Archbishop Franz Koenig spoke of tolerance, and I couldn't resist quoting Washington to him. He replied, "You are right. I shall no more speak of tolerance; I shall speak of mutual respect." There are still too few who share the attitude expressed in this truly magnificent response.

For those taking the relativist approach to religion (in effect, "I have my god, you have your god, and others have theirs"), there may be specific political or economic reasons for objecting to someone else's beliefs, but in principle there is no theological problem. For those taking the triumphalist approach (classically summed up in the formula "I'm right, you're wrong, go to hell"), tolerance is a problem. Because the triumphalist's is the only true and complete religion, all other religions are at best incomplete and more probably false and evil; and since he is the privileged recipient of God's final message to humankind, it is surely his duty to bring it to others rather than keep it selfishly for himself.

Now, if one believes that, what does one do about it? And how does one relate to people of another religion? If we look at this question historically, one thing emerges very clearly: whether the other religion is previous or subsequent to one's own is extremely important. From a Christian point of view, for example, Judaism is previous and Islam is subsequent. From a Muslim point of view, both Judaism and Christianity are previous. From a Jewish point of view, both Christianity and Islam are subsequent—but since Judaism is not triumphalist, this is not a problem.

But it is a problem for Christians and Muslims—or perhaps I should say for traditional Christians and Muslims. From their perspective, a previous religion may be regarded as incomplete, as superseded, but it is not necessarily false if it comes in the proper sequence of revelation. So from a Muslim point of view, Judaism and Christianity were both true religions at the time of their revelation, but they were superseded by the final and complete revelation of Islam; although they are out-of-date—last year's model, so to speak—they are not inherently false. Therefore Muslim law, sharia, not only permits but requires that a certain degree of tolerance be accorded them.

It is, of course, a little more complicated: Jews and Christians are accused of falsifying their originally authentic scriptures and religions. Thus, from a Muslim point of view, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus Christ are distortions. The point is made in several Koranic verses: "There is no God but God alone, He has no companion," and "He is God, one, eternal. He does not beget, He is not begotten, and He has no peer." These and similar verses appear frequently on early Islamic coins and in inscriptions, and are clearly polemical in intent. They are inscribed, notably, in the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem—a challenge to Christianity in its birthplace. Jews are accused of eliminating scriptural passages foretelling the advent of Muhammad. Anything subsequent to Muhammad, "the Seal of the Prophets," is, from the Muslim perspective, necessarily false. This explains the harsh treatment of post-Islamic religions, such as the Bahai faith and the Ahmadiya movement, in Islamic lands.

Muslims did not claim a special relationship to either of the predecessor religions, and if Jews and Christians chose not to accept Muhammad, that was their loss. Muslims were prepared to tolerate them in accordance with sharia, which lays down both the extent and the limits of the latitude to be granted those who follow a recognized religion: they must be monotheists and they must have a revealed scripture, which in practice often limited tolerance to Jews and Christians. The Koran names a third qualified group, the Sabians; there is some uncertainty as to who they were, and at times this uncertainty provided a convenient way of extending the tolerance of the Muslim state to Zoroastrians or other groups when it was thought expedient. On principle, no tolerance was extended to polytheists or idolaters, and this sometimes raised acute problems in Asian and African lands conquered by the Muslims.

Tolerance was a much more difficult question for Christians. For them, Judaism is a precursor of their religion, and Christianity is the fulfillment of the divine promises made to the Jews. The Jewish rejection of that fulfillment is therefore seen as impugning some of the central tenets of the Christian faith. Tolerance between different branches of Christianity would eventually become an even bigger problem. Of course, the outsider is more easily tolerated than the dissident insider. Heretics are a much greater danger than unbelievers. The English philosopher John Locke's famous A Letter Concerning Toleration, written toward the end of the seventeenth century, is a plea for religious tolerance, still a fairly new idea at that time. Locke wrote, "Neither pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth, because of his religion." Someone is of course missing from that list: the Catholic. The difference is clear. For Locke and his contemporaries, the pagan, the Muslim, the Jew, were no threat to the Church of England; the Catholic was. The Catholic was trying to subvert Protestantism, to make England Catholic, and, as Protestant polemicists at the time put it, to make England subject to a foreign potentate—namely, the Pope in Rome.

Muslims were in general more tolerant of diversity within their own community, and even cited an early tradition to the effect that such diversity is a divine blessing. The concept of heresy—in the Christian sense of incorrect belief recognized and condemned as such by properly constituted religious authority—was unknown to classical Islam. Deviation and diversity, with rare exceptions, were persecuted only when they offered a serious threat to the existing order. The very notion of an authority empowered to rule on questions of belief was alien to traditional Islamic thought and practice. It has become less alien.

The consequence of the similarity between Christianity and Islam in background and approach is the long conflict between the two civilizations they defined. When two religions met in the Mediterranean area, each claiming to be the recipient of God's final revelation, conflict was inevitable. The conflict, in fact, was almost continuous: the first Arab-Islamic invasions took Islam by conquest to the then Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, and, for a while, to Southern Europe; the Tatars took it into Russia and Eastern Europe; and the Turks took it into the Balkans. To each advance came a Christian rejoinder: the Reconquista in Spain, the Crusades in the Levant, the throwing off of what the Russians call the Tatar yoke in the history of their country, and, finally, the great European counterattack into the lands of Islam, which is usually called imperialism.

During this long period of conflict, of jihad and crusade, of conquest and reconquest, Christianity and Islam nevertheless maintained a level of communication, because the two are basically the same kind of religion. They could argue. They could hold disputations and debates. Even their screams of rage were mutually intelligible. When Christians and Muslims said to each other, "You are an infidel and you will burn in hell," each understood exactly what the other meant, because they both meant the same thing. (Their heavens are differently appointed, but their hells are much the same.) Such assertions and accusations would have conveyed little or no meaning to a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a Confucian.

Christians and Muslims looked at each other and studied each other in strikingly different ways. This is owing in part, at least, to their different circumstances. Christian Europeans from the start had to learn foreign languages in order to read their scriptures and their classics and to communicate with one another. From the seventh century onward they had a further motive to look outward—their holy places, in the land where their faith was born, were under Muslim rule, and could be visited only with Muslim permission. Muslims had no comparable problems. Their holy places were in Arabia, under Arab rule; their scriptures were in Arabic, which across their civilization was the language also of literature, of science and scholarship, of government and commerce, and, increasingly, of everyday communication, as the conquered countries in Southwest Asia and North Africa were Arabized and forgot their ancient languages and scripts. In later times other Islamic languages emerged, notably Persian and Turkish; but in the early, formative centuries Arabic reigned alone.

This difference in the experiences and the needs of the two civilizations is reflected in their attitudes toward each other. From the earliest recorded times people in Europe tried to learn the languages of the Islamic world, starting with Arabic, the language of the most advanced civilization of the day. Later some, mostly for practical reasons, learned Persian and more especially Turkish, which in Ottoman times supplanted Arabic as the language of government and diplomacy. From the sixteenth century on there were chairs of Arabic at French and Dutch universities. Cambridge University had its first chair of Arabic in 1632, Oxford in 1636. Europeans no longer needed Arabic to gain access to the higher sciences. Now they learned it out of intellectual curiosity—the desire to know something about another civilization and its ways. By the eighteenth century Europe boasted a considerable body of scholarly literature regarding the Islamic world—editions of texts and translations of historical and literary and theological works, as well as histories of literature and religion and even general histories of Islamic countries, with descriptions of their people and their ways. Grammars and dictionaries of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish were available to European scholars from the sixteenth century onward. It is surely significant that far more attention was given to Arabic, the classical and scriptural language of Islam, than to Persian and Turkish, the languages of the current rulers of the world. In the course of the nineteenth century European and later also American scholars set to work to disinter, decipher, and interpret the buried and forgotten languages and writings of antiquity, and thus to recover an ancient and glorious chapter in history. These activities were greeted with incomprehension and then with suspicion by those who did not share and there-fore could not understand this kind of curiosity.

The Islamic world, with no comparable incentives, displayed a total lack of interest in Christian civilization. An initially understandable, even justifiable, contempt for the barbarians beyond the frontier continued long after that characterization ceased to be accurate, and even into a time when it became preposterously inaccurate.

It has sometimes been argued that the European interest in Arabic and other Eastern languages was an adjunct—or, given the time lag, a precursor—of imperialism. If that is so, we must acquit the Arabs and the Turks of any such predatory intent. The Arabs spent 800 years in Spain without showing much interest in Spanish or Latin. The Ottomans ruled much of southeastern Europe for half a millennium, but for most of that time they never bothered to learn Greek or any Balkan or European language—which might have been useful. When they needed interpreters, they used converts and others from these various countries. There was no Occidentalism until the expanding West forced itself on the attention of the rest of the world. We may find similar attitudes in present-day America.

Today we in the West are engaged in what we see as a war against terrorism, and what the terrorists present as a war against unbelief. Some on both sides see this struggle as one between civilizations or, as others would put it, between religions. If they are right, and there is much to support their view, then the clash between these two religiously defined civilizations results not only from their differences but also from their resemblances—and in these there may even be some hope for better future understanding.

Copyright 2003 | The Atlantic Monthly

Good intentions: Noah Feldman's Divided by God (2005), points out the two polarized positions in America today, both sides righteous with good intentions: the "values evangelicals" who see themselves defending the importance of religious values in society, and the "legal secularists" who see themselves defending the importance of keeping church and state separate.

Secular nationalism is not exempt from becoming a "religion" in intensifying allegiance to a cause.