One of the bitterest complaints against both sides in the Iraq war is that religion has been a prime cause. When President Bush proclaimed that the war on terror represented a clash of civilizations, he implicitly meant Christianity versus Islam, a view reinforced by his further claim that he was guided by God in his decision-making. No one supposes that a universal God spoke to him. It was specifically a Christian God. Even Judeo-Christian would be a stretch. The Bush administration came into office hard on the heels of a massive push by President Clinton to bring about a Mideast peace accord, an effort that was dropped immediately as the incoming president more or less cut Israel loose. In the past six years there have been no serious attempts at peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, even as both sides declared that the U.S. must participate as a good-faith broker.
One can't help but sniff out an ulterior religious motive. Bush's brand of fundamentalism is rife with myths about a final conflict between Christ and the Anti-Christ, an apocalyptic scenario that many right-wing Christians want to hasten rather than prevent. Before anyone points the finger at the regressive beliefs of Muslims, consider that millions of Americans have bought into the myth that a final conflict in the Mideast has been biblically prophesied to usher in Judgment Day.
It would be a simple equation if one could say that militarists want God on their side while the peace movement doesn't. Nothing is that simple, because all societies, East and West, are entangled in history, and history has been tied to God from the beginning. When official atheism has been tried, as in the Soviet revolution and the seventy years that followed, the crimes committed against humanity have rivaled, if not surpassed, those committed in the name of religion. A wrenching divorce between God and society can't be judged as either desirable or undesirable. And yet unless God is off our side -- and off the side of the jihadists -- peace is impossible in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.
Among Muslims there is a tiny sliver of society that has become Westernized enough to adopt laissez-faire attitudes toward religion, but the sector of true believers is vast -- vast enough to cause the Saudi royal family, for instance, to subsidize fundamentalism in order to retain power. In the U.S., the number of people who don't take their identity from religion is much, much larger, but even here politicians have been backed into a corner and must pay lip service to religiosity or risk the wrath of the Republican smear machine. The irony, of course, is that the mind of God cannot be known, and to say that God is on anyone's side is self-contradictory. Being omnipresent, God is on all sides. Invoking God in the name of war is theologically indefensible, no matter that it's done every day.
Getting God off our side seems the most desirable among bad choices. In the name of globalism, the best friend of progress at this point is enlightened secularism. Spirituality will have to evolve beyond sects and beyond the primitive us-versus-them thinking engendered by organized religion. As long as one religion believes that it's going to win out over all others because God wants it to, the Iraq war will be a template for enduring conflict, casting its baleful shadow long into the future.
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