Religious Conflicts Threaten Stability

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

When quarrels between nations become violent there is a tendency for them to become framed in terms of religion when there is a religious difference between the sides.

Peter Berger, the Boston University sociologist of religion, has termed this the “de-secularization” and “sacralisation” of conflict; such wars become infused with religious imagery by both parties. 

Wars between peoples that may begin over economic and historical grievances often come to be understood from a religious perspective as their societies are “brought under the domination of religious institutions and symbols.” 

Embedded in each nation’s culture, its myths and memories resurface and return to the public sphere. After all, some essence of religious faith exists across different societies, even if latent.

Religion is important because any threat to one’s beliefs is a threat to one’s very being. And since each religion has its fanatic fundamentalists, demagogy, rhetorical intolerance, and demonization of the “other” and “unbeliever” will typically prevail. 

Fundamentalists of any religion tend to take a Manichean view of the world – they see it as a struggle between good and evil, which makes it difficult to justify compromise. 

Such conflicts are hard to resolve by pragmatic and distributive means and become tenacious and brutal.

So, as Berger warned in his 1999 book The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion in World Politics, those who “neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril.”

Today most violent conflicts contain religious elements linked up with ethno-national, inter-state, economic, territorial, cultural, and other issues.

In a world where many governments and international organizations are suffering from a legitimacy deficit, a growing impact of religious discourses on international politics seems inevitable.

“Because religion has come to occupy a more prominent role in international affairs since about the mid-1970s, gradually overtaking ideology in some regions, we logically see its different facets more vividly,” notes Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, head of the International History Department at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, Switzerland. 

He cites the end of the Cold War, the 1979 revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its related rise of transnational Islamism, 9/11 and its international imprint, and “the big regional conflict of our times, the increasingly existential opposition between Sunnis and Shiites.” 

And there is the seemingly never-ending deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians over such religious symbols as the sacred sites in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In Asia in recent years Buddhist monks have attacked churches, mosques and Hindu temples in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, with many thousands dead. In China, the Muslim Uyghurs are under increased pressure by the Han state.

Non-state actors have in various countries seized the opportunity to undermine the legitimacy and control of central governments and to promote their extreme ideologies – Hezbollah in Lebanon is a prime example. 

Conflicts that have a religious dimension are becoming more common in sub-Saharan Africa. Failed states and corrupt polities gave rise to religiously-based movements such as al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Is religion on the verge of becoming the common denominator in world politics? If so, it is all the more important to understand it correctly. 

This has been difficult for many intellectuals in western, “post-religious” countries such as Canada. They are prisoners of a liberal mind-set that understands little about the “real world” of deep religious and ethno-nationalist conflict.