War, peace and religion

The Western secularists’ protest – that all the trouble in the world is caused by religion – seems to be confirmed by every headline. Nearly 10 million people in Syria are sorely in need of help because of a bloody conflict that is, in essence, between uncompromising Sunni and Shia versions of Islam.

The same clash of fanaticisms is a threat to peace in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. Conflicts between Islamic extremists and Christians in northern Nigeria are taking a dreadful toll on innocent life. Other parts of central Africa, including South Sudan and the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), are also in turmoil, with religion a key element in various tribal conflicts. This phenomenon has been growing in the past decade and shows no sign of easing off.

It is in the nature of a certain sort of religious believer, though not of all believers per se, to want the law and culture of a nation to reflect the religious beliefs of a majority of its inhabitants. This would have been true of Britain in the nineteenth century, and it was a strong component in the conflict in Northern Ireland that has still not been laid completely to rest. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the architect of the Northern Ireland peace process, Tony Blair, has appealed to world governments to start taking religious conflicts more seriously, indeed to see religious extremism as the primary threat to world peace.

But his message is not just that “religion” is a problem to be solved: it can also provide solutions. Indeed it must, as there is little else in sight. The idea that there is some kind of blanket sophisticated secularism that can be thrown over the world’s most intractable religious conflicts, instantly smothering them, is absurd. Even if religious conflict in its various ­manifestations is to be found in most of the world’s trouble spots, that observation offers no help in dealing with them.
The other side of the coin was on display in London this week when Archbishop Dieudonné Nzapalainga from the Central African Republic was joined by imam Omar Kobine Layama, president of the CAR Islamic Community, in appealing for international intervention to defeat an incursion by Islamic jihadists which had already displaced nearly a million people and cost many lives.

Whatever might have been the case in the distant past, it is not in the fundamental nature of either mainstream Christianity or Islam nowadays to want to prevail by force, and the leaderships of virtually all faiths pay more than lip service to the principle of toleration.

It is a lesson it took Europe a long time to learn, and the deal was not finally sealed until 1965 when the Second Vatican Council issued its Declaration on Religious Liberty. The Muslim world is having to catch up fast, but already many millions of Muslims – for instance the crowds demonstrating against the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo – look enviously at the West’s model of civic peace and want it for themselves. They do not necessarily want less religion: they want the best it has to offer.