RELIGIOUS WARS A Bloody zeal

By LANCE MORROW

The scenes are macabre. Religious images adorn vehicles and guns as Christian soldiers, some of them wearing crosses around their necks, storm Moslem strongholds. Moslem soldiers, in their turn, strip or mutilate the bodies of dead Christian soldiers, tie them to cars and drag them through the streets. In the vicious war in Lebanon, religion is a palpable presence--though allegiances are complex and contradictory; some Christians are backing the leftist Palestinians, while the Syrians, mainly Moslem, support the rightist Christian forces. Still, the air crackles with a certain primitive energy of zealots in a holy war.

Fighting and dying under religious flags go on with a violent persistence elsewhere around the world. Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster trade killings in a kind of perpetual motion of futility. Arabs and Israelis stand tensely at borders of territorial, cultural and religious dispute. In the Philippines, Moslem separatists are in rebellion against a Christian majority. Greek-Cypriot Orthodox Christians confront Turkish-Cypriot Moslems across a sullen truce line. Pakistan separated from India because Moslems feared the rule of a Hindu majority.

Why, at this point in the 20th century, the strange vitality of what seem to be religious wars? Westerners tend to regard them as something anachronistic--an offense against the heritage of the Enlightenment, spasms of violent superstition. If war is often enough inexplicable, religious conflict at least seems to carry war's inherent irrationality into an even uglier, throwback realm of absolutes, beyond the reach of compromise. Or perhaps it is simply that agnostic societies find it difficult to understand why anyone would think religion worth fighting about.

These conflicts are, of course, more complicated than religious fanaticism; they have a great deal to do with economic discrimination, battles for political power, questions of deeply laminated social difference. Nor do the wars involve religious doctrine--except in oblique, complex ways. A Belfast pub is not blown up to assert the Real Presence or the Virgin Birth. Many of the terrorists are atheists anyway. In such places as Ireland and Lebanon, religious leaders on all sides have prayed and pleaded for an end to the fighting. The I.R.A. is filled with the excommunicated, whose religious observances are limited to theatrical funerals for its martyrs. But the violence persists with a life of its own, like a hereditary disease. It is an anomaly of such conflicts that organized religion is powerless to stop them--as if a war involving religion were too important to be left to churchmen.

The wars arise in part from very secular fears about identity and survival. Two factors, sometimes contradictory, are at work: 1) deep, real, material interests lie just beneath the surface of most of today's ostensibly religious conflicts; 2) religion, not as a doctrinal crusade but as an identifying birthright, a heritage, is persistently present to complicate every issue, to enforce an "us-them" hostility. Religion, always a receptacle for ultimate aspirations, can enlist the best and worst in its congregations. In conflict, religion can be used--or perverted--to call up supernatural justifications for killing. In 1915 the Bishop of London asked his congregation to "kill Germans, to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill." The dark side of religious conviction can be a violent intractability, an avenging angel's note of retribution. As Martin Luther wrote, "He who will not hear God's word when it is spoken with kindness must listen to the headsman when he comes with his ax." Religion can provide a warmth of certitude and belonging. When its energy is turned outward, it may express itself in acts of mercy and even saintliness. But piety can also be lethal when directed against strangers and infidels. William James, writing 75 years ago, defined the problem: "Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct."

One writer, Miriam Reik, has claimed, "Were Ireland an African island and its natives black, no one would doubt that Ulster's troubles show the classical symptoms of a colonial struggle." That is true enough. Since the 17th century's Scottish and English Protestant settlers came to Ulster under the protection of the British Crown, the native Catholic minority has been relegated to permanently inferior status. Yet the conflict has a strong tribal aspect, with religion serving as the identifying element, even though groups such as the I.R.A. are now more likely to quote Marx than Jesus. Protestants like the demagogue Ian Paisley have kept the "religious threat" alive by constantly referring to the dangers of "popery" and "Romanism."

It is interesting and perhaps a bit mystifying that most of the religious struggles around the world involve Moslems. Some scholars believe such conflicts may be an expression of a resurgent Islam. Says Duke University Political Scientist Ralph Braibanti: "This may be the moment in history when money, diplomacy and strategy join together in providing a new context for the renaissance of Islamic identity and perhaps of Islam itself." Islam makes no distinction between the secular and the religious. The Moslem doctrine of jihad (holy war) has an immediate, literal significance. As the Vatican's guidelines on Islam observe, "Islam is a religion, yet it is also inextricably bound up with the notion of community, culture and civilization."

Moslem doctrine accounts for much of the intractability of the Middle Eastern situation. The Koran specifically sanctions religious war: "When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter of them." The Grand Sheik of Al Azhar in Cairo, a leading center of Islamic learning in the Middle East, has flatly said, "The struggle against Israel is jihad, and if all Moslems did their duty and took a weapon, there would be no problem." Moslem theology distinguishes between dar-al-Islam (the region already conquered for Allah) and dar-al-Harb (the region of Holy War, still to be conquered). Israel lies in dar-al-Islam and as such is seen as an alien presence in land already belonging to Moslems.

But the struggles involving Moslems are more complicated than that intransigent doctrine. Arab leaders like Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Syria's Hafez Assad are not encouraging the rhetoric of holy war. Arabs are not theologically blinded to the larger secular issues of international power. In Lebanon, for example, a tangled social history has preceded what might seem at first glance an essentially religious struggle. The roots lay in the creation by the French in 1920 of a greater Lebanon from the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Lebanon combined a predominantly Maronite Christian area, which had had a semiautonomous status in the past, with Moslem regions. The country's Moslems have tended to identify with the Arab Orient, while the Maronite Christians looked to the West. The Christians' special relation with the French and the rest of the West gave them enormous advantages. Lebanon was slow in developing a state system of education, but the Maronites became the best-educated community in the Arab world because of the large number of French Catholic mission schools in their area. Through such advantages, many of them created a thriving entrepreneurial class and gained control over the economic life of Lebanon, the commercial and financial center of the Middle East. The country became a pattern of haves and have-nots--with the line drawn between the religious communities. But again, as in Ireland, the religious identifications have served as a deeply embittering factor. Observes Ralph Potter, professor of ethics at Harvard Divinity School: "We pick out that factor which puts most things into immediate order for us. Where religion satisfactorily encompasses the whole logic, it becomes the prime identifier. At the same time, that shorthand also traps people into a primarily religious identity."

Other conflicts involve longstanding secular grievances. They are perhaps primarily not religious so much as they are exertions for recognition and even survival. Yet the element of religion gives all these wars an odd phosphorescence. What is important is usually not a deep spiritual faith but rather an intense loyalty to the religious community. The phenomenon has something to do with a clinging to identity, especially in such enclaves as Northern Ireland and Lebanon, whose national identities are fractured and cannot in themselves command patriotic followings. One of Egypt's leading intellectuals, Political Scientist Magdi Wahba, sees signs everywhere of "a disintegration of the national fabric and a religious revival taking its place."

In many ways, monotheism led ultimately to a new assertion of man's worth. It rose as a unifying force above countless tribal deities and, therefore, tribal conflicts. But, facing outward, it also encouraged exclusivity and intolerance--the line between the believer and the infidel, the chosen and the unchosen. Christianity and Islam have had the historical habit of descending with a sword on strangers. The world's other great monotheistic faith, Judaism, has traditionally been more defensive.

Is the religious element in war an atavism, or has it been taken up, in its essentials, by the various sides in the world's more modern ideological struggles? Viet Nam was in one sense a kind of religious war--a battle for souls, for "hearts and minds." (Soldiers in Viet Nam collected enemy ears, just as Huguenots wore strings of priests' ears.) Perhaps a quality of holy war was involved, but there were crucial differences. The Americans who fought in Viet Nam did so chiefly out of a residual social discipline, not a religious or tribal loyalty, and that discipline eventually all but broke down, hastening the end of the American involvement. Besides, ideological conflict is susceptible to detente, and there is something in the nature of religious war that is deeply intolerant of accommodation. The combination of Communism and nationalism is, of course, a powerful force for ideological upheaval, providing saints and messiahs--Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Castro--and an accompanying mythology and faith. There, too, the overriding faith validates any behavior on behalf of the visionary goal--which in the Marxist case must be achieved in this world, not the next. Some Communist leaders now, how ever, especially those in Western Europe, have begun insisting that it is time for an end to celebrations of Red mythology.

Roger Shinn, Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at New York City's Union Theological Seminary, believes that "religious wars tend to be extra furious. When people fight over territory for economic advantage, they reach the point where the battle isn't worth the cost and so compromise. When the cause is religious, compromise and conciliation seem to be evil." Possibly the transcendent nature of both religion and war encourages an especially lethal kind of fanaticism. As Shinn says, "War is one of the few occasions when people are asked to give of themselves in a cause that is greater than self. People are asked to forget self -- and human nature rises and falls to the occasion."

In any case, men who have fought in the name of religion and journalists who have observed them detect an eerie difference from more conventional warfare -- a note of retribution and atonement, a zealotry that exists outside time and immediate circumstances, an implacability that is directed from within. The fury of fighting in Lebanon suggests as much. That, of course, is a definition of faith -- but saintliness has its dark, bloody side.

Religion is not only certainty, but a confused striving for truth; not only the imposition of dogma, but the open, undiscriminating act of mercy. And certainly secular societies have not managed to avoid war or cruelty. Yet the paradox of religion-at-war remains shocking.

There are some satisfactory reasons for going to war. Self-defense -- and even survival -- are the most compelling. But religion, with its ancient, emotional connotations, shows up in these wars like a tribal ghost of Hamlet's father, urging revenge. Religion, especially when it blends with the secular religion of nationalism, fetches back to timeless grievances and can find in them that nasty, righteous "Gott mil Uns" that wants no truck with the enterprise of peace -- which in this world is always temporal and temporary.

Lance Morrow

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