Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC

GODAuthor(s): KAREN ARMSTRONGSource: Foreign Policy, No. 175 (November/December 2009), pp. 54-56, 58, 60Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684940 .

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THINK

AGAIN

As casualties from the world's religious wars mount, God is getting a bad reputation. But the war against God has had its casualties as well. Here's why we

need a truce?and why secularism is almost as much of a threat to the world as fundamentalism.

BY KAREN ARMSTRONG

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3

"God Is Dead."

. When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882, he thought that in the modern, scientific world people would soon be unable to countenance the idea of religious faith. By the time The Economist did its famous "God Is Dead" cover in 1999, the question seemed moot, notwithstanding the rise of politicized religiosity?fundamentalism?in almost every major faith since the 1970s. An obscure ayatollah toppled the shah of Iran, religious Zionism surfaced in Israel, and in the United States, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority announced its dedicated opposition to "secular humanism." But it is only since Sept. 11, 2001, that God has proven

to be alive and well beyond all question?at least as far as the global public debate is concerned. With jihadists attack ing America, an increasingly radicalized Middle East, and a born-again Christian in the White House for eight years, you'll have a hard time finding anyone who disagrees. Even The Economists editor in chief recently co-authored a book called God Is Back. While many still question the relevance of God in our private lives, there's a different debate on the

global stage today: Is God a force for good in the world? So-called new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam

Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have denounced religious belief as not only retrograde but evil; they regard themselves as the vanguard of a campaign to expunge it from human consciousness. Religion, they claim, creates divisions, strife, and warfare; it imprisons women and brainwashes children; its doctrines are primitive, unscientific, and irrational, essen

tially the preserve of the unsophisticated and gullible. These writers are wrong?not only about religion, but

also about politics?because they are wrong about human nature. Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While

dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don't find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn't going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or

destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it's time we found a

way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous books on religion, including A History of God, Islam: A Short History, and, most recently. The Case for God.

"God and Politics Shouldn't Mix."

Not necessarily Theologically illiterate politicians have long given religion a bad name. An inadequate un

derstanding of God that reduces "him" to an idol in our own image who gives our likes and dislikes sacred sanction is the worst form of spiritual tyranny. Such arrogance has led to atrocities like the Crusades. The rise of secular ism in government was meant to check

this tendency, but secularism itself has created new demons now inflicting themselves on the world.

In the West, secularism has been a success, essential to the modern

economy and political system, but it was achieved gradually over the course of nearly 300 years, allowing new ideas of governance time to filter down to all levels of society. But in other parts of the world, secularization has occurred

far too rapidly and has been resented by large sectors of the population, who are still deeply attached to religion and find

Western institutions alien.

In the Middle East, overly aggressive secularization has sometimes backfired,

making the religious establishment more conservative, or even radical. In Egypt, for example, the remarkable reformer

Muhammad Ali (1769-1849) so brutally impoverished and marginalized the clergy that its members turned their backs on

change. When the shahs of Iran tortured and exiled mullahs who opposed their re

gime, some, such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, concluded that more extreme

responses on the part of Iran's future

religious rulers were necessary. Shiism had for centuries separated re

ligion from politics as a matter of sacred principle, and Khomeini's insistence that a cleric should become head of state was an extraordinary innovation. But moder ate religion can play a constructive role

in politics. Muhammad Abdu (1849 1905), grand mufti of Egypt, feared that the vast majority of Egyptians would not understand the country's nascent

democratic institutions unless they were

explicitly linked with traditional

November 2009 55

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Think Again: God

Islamic principles that emphasized the importance of "consultation"

(shura) and the duty of seeking "consensus"(ijma) before passing

legislation. In the same spirit, Hassan al

Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, began his movement by translating the social

message of the Koran into a modern

idiom, founding clinics, hospitals, trade unions, schools, and facto

ries that gave workers insurance,

holidays, and good working condi tions. In other words, he aimed to

bring the masses to modernity in an Islamic setting. The Brotherhood's resulting popularity was threaten

ing to Egypt's secular government, which could not provide these services. In 1949, Banna was assas

sinated, and some members of the

Brotherhood splintered into radical offshoots in reaction.

Of course, the manner in which religion is used in politics is more

important than whether it's used at

all. U.S. presidents such as John F.

Kennedy and Barack Obama have

invoked faith as a shared experi ence that binds the country togeth er?an approach that recognizes the communal power of spirituality without making any pretense to divine right. Still, this consensus is not satisfactory to American

Protestant fundamentalists, who

believe the United States should be a distinctively Christian nation.

"God Breeds Violence and Intolerance/7

No, humans do. For Hitchens in God Is Not Great, religion is inherently "violent... intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry"; even so-called

moderates are guilty by association. Yet it is not God or religion but violence itself?inherent in human nature?that breeds violence. As a species, we survived

by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive pas sages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like them to treat you. Despite manifest failings over the centuries, this has remained

the orthodox position. In claiming that God is the source of all human cruelty, Hitchens and Dawkins

ignore some of the darker facets of modern secular society, which has been spectacularly violent because our technology has enabled us to kill people on an

unprecedented scale. Not surprisingly, religion has absorbed this belligerence, as became hideously clear with the September 11 atrocities.

But "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as politi cal ones. This happened in Europe during the 17th century, and it has happened today in the Middle East, where the Palestinian national movement has evolved from a leftist-secular to an increasingly Islamically articulated nationalism. Even

the actions of so-called jihadists have been inspired by politics, not God. In a

study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, American scholar Robert Pape concluded that 95 percent were motivated by a clear strategic objective: to force

modern democracies to withdraw from territory the assailants regard as their

national homeland.

This aggression does not represent the faith of the majority, however. In recent

Gallup polling conducted in 35 Muslim countries, only 7 percent of those ques tioned thought that the September 11 attacks were justified. Their reasons were

entirely political. Fundamentalism is not conservative. Rather, it is highly innovative?even

heretical?because it always develops in response to a perceived crisis. In their

anxiety, some fundamentalists distort the tradition they are trying to defend. The Pakistani ideologue Abu Ala Maududi (1903-1979) was the first major Muslim thinker to make jihad, signifying "holy war" instead of the traditional meaning of "struggle" or "striving" for self-betterment, a central Islamic duty. Both he and the influential Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) were

fully aware that this was extremely controversial but believed it was justified by Western imperialism and the secularizing policies of rulers such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

All fundamentalism?whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim?is rooted in a

profound fear of annihilation. Qutb developed his ideology in the concentration camps where Nasser interred thousands of the Muslim Brothers. History shows

that when these groups are attacked, militarily or verbally, they almost invari

ably become more extreme.

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Think Again: God ]=

"God Is for the Poor and Ignorant." . The new atheists insist vehe

mently that religion is puerile and irrational, belonging, as Hitchens ar

gues, to "the infancy of our society." This reflects the broader disappoint ment among Western intellectuals that

humanity, confronted with appar

ently unlimited choice and prosperity, should still rely on what Karl Marx called the "opiate" of the masses.

But God refuses to be outgrown, even in the United States, the richest country in the world and the most reli gious country in the developed world. None of the major religions is averse to business; each developed initially in a nascent market economy. The Bible

and the Koran may have prohibited usury, but over the centuries Jews,

Christians, and Muslims all found ways of getting around this restriction and produced thriving economies. It is one of the great ironies of religious his tory that Christianity, whose founder taught that it was impossible to serve both God and mammon, should have produced the cultural environment

that, as Max Weber suggested in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was integral to

modern capitalism. Still, the current financial crisis

shows that the religious critique of excessive greed is far from irrelevant.

Although not opposed to business, the major faith traditions have tried to counterbalance some of the abuses of

capitalism. Eastern religions, such as

Buddhism, by means of yoga and other disciplines, try to moderate the ag gressive acquisitiveness of the human

psyche. The three monotheistic faiths have inveighed against the injustice of unevenly distributed wealth?a

critique that speaks directly to the gap between rich and poor in our society.

To recover from the ill effects of the last year, we may need exactly that conquest of egotism that has always been essential in the quest for the transcendence we call "God."

Religion is not simply a matter of sub scribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a

more humane humanity.

"God Is Bad for Women."

It is unfortunately true that none of the major world religions has been good for women. Even when a tradition began positively for women (as in Christianity and Islam), within a few generations men dragged it back to the old patriarchy. But this is changing. Women in all faiths are challenging their men on the grounds of the egalitarianism that is one of the best characteristics of all these religious traditions. One of the hallmarks of modernity has been the emancipation of wom

en. But that has meant that in their rebellion against the modern ethos, fundamentalists tend to overemphasize traditional gender roles. Unfortu

nately, frontal assaults on this patriarchal trend have often proven coun

terproductive. Whenever "modernizing" governments have tried to ban the veil, for example, women have rushed in ever greater numbers to put it on. In 1935, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi commanded his soldiers to shoot hundreds of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of Iran's holiest shrines. Such actions have turned veiling, which was not a universal practice before the modern period, into a symbol of Islamic integrity. Some Muslims today claim that it is not essential to look Western in order to be modern and that while Western fashion often displays wealth and privilege, Islamic dress emphasizes the egalitarianism of the Koran.

In general, any direct Western intervention in gender matters has back

fired; it would be better to support indigenous Muslim movements that are agitating for greater opportunities for improved women's rights in educa

tion, the workplace, and politics.

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Think Again: God

"God Is the Enemy of Science."

He doesn't have to be. Science has become an enemy to fun

damentalist Christians who campaign against the teaching of evolution in public schools and stem-cell research because they seem to conflict with bibli cal teaching.

But their reading of scripture is un

precedentedly literal. Before the modern period, few understood the first chapter of Genesis as an exact account of the

origins of life; until the 17th century, theologians insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, it must be inter

preted allegorically. The conflict with science is symp

tomatic of a reductive idea of God in the modern West. Ironically, it was the empirical emphasis of modern science that encouraged many to regard God and religious language as fact rather than symbol, thus forcing religion into an overly rational, dogmatic, and alien literalism.

Popular fundamentalism repre sents a widespread rebellion against

modernity, and for Christian fun damentalists, evolution epitomizes

everything that is wrong with the modern world. It is regarded less as a

scientific theory than a symbol of evil. But this anti-science bias is far less common in Judaism and Islam, where fundamentalist movements have been

sparked more by political issues, such as the state of Israel, than doctrinal or scientific ones.

"God Is Incompatible with Democracy." Samuel Huntington foresaw a "clash of civilizations" between the free

world and Islam, which, he maintained, was inherently averse to democracy. But at the beginning of the 20th century, nearly all leading Muslim intellectuals were in love with the West and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. What has alienated many Muslims from the democratic ideal is not their religion but Western governments' support of autocratic rulers, such as the

Iranian shahs, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, who have denied people basic human and democratic rights.

The 2007 Gallup poll shows that support for democratic freedoms and women's rights is widespread in the Muslim world, and many governments are respond ing?albeit haltingly?to pressures for more political participation. There is, how ever, resistance to a wholesale adoption of the Western secular model. Many want

to see God reflected more clearly in public life, just as a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God should be the source of legislation. Nor is sharia law the rigid system that many Westerners deplore. Muslim reform

ers, such as Sheikh Ali Gomaa and Tariq Ramadan, argue that it must be reviewed in the light of changing social circumstances. A fatwa is not universally binding like a papal edict; rather, it simply expresses the opinion of the mufti who issues it. Mus lims can choose which fatwas they adopt and thus participate in a flexible free mar ket of religious thought, just as Americans can choose which church they attend.

Religion may not be the cause of the world's political problems, but we still need to understand it if we are to solve them. "Whoever took religion seriously!" exclaimed an exasperated U.S. government official after the Iranian Revolution.

Had policymakers bothered to research contemporary Shiism, the United States could have avoided serious blunders during that crisis. Religion should be studied with the same academic impartiality and accuracy as the economy, politics, and social customs of a region, so that we learn how religion interacts with political tension, what is counterproductive, and how to avoid giving unnecessary offense.

And study it we'd better, for God is back. And if "he" is perceived in an idola trous, literal-minded way, we can only expect more dogmatism, rigidity, and

religiously articulated violence in the decades ahead. G?

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Karen Armstrong has spent the past 25

years writing about the centrality of religion to the human experience. Before her most recent

book, The Case for God (New York: Knopf, 2009), she wrote The Bible: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), an account of the not entirely orthodox way that the Bible came into being.

Over the last few years, the so-called New Atheists have become increasingly vocal about the dangerous shortcomings of religion in such books as Sam Harris' The End of Faith: Reli

gion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mif

flin, 2006), and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007).

Recently, some books have sought out a middle ground between atheism and

fundamentalism. These include Robert

Wright's The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), which

incorporates evolutionary psychology to

explain shifts in belief over time, and Econo

mist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's God is Back (New York: Pen

guin, 2009), examining the curiously vital

relationship between modernity and religion.

Religion scholar John Esposito and polling expert Dalia Mogahed argue in Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007), a book based on more than 50,000 interviews in

Muslim countries, that Westerners have been

getting Islam wrong for decades.

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