This is the second session of a 10-part series on “What’s the Heck’s Wrong with Religions These Days.” Today we’ll take a look at the question, “Is This Always the Way it’s Been?” My answer is yes and no. But first, let me review. To quote George W. Bush, he sees, “a third Great Awakening of religious devotion in the U.S.” which he believes coincides with our current war against terrorism, and which he calls “a confrontation between good and evil.” In his speech at ground zero 2 weeks ago, he spoke of the struggle in Iraq as “a war for civilization”.

There has, most certainly, been a revival of religion in recent years. Christianity and Islam, in particular, have undergone enormous growth spurts in membership and zeal during the past generation. There is also little doubt but that Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholic Christianity, Islam, and to a lesser extent, Judaism, have all taken hard turns to the right within the past twenty years, and that power struggles between conservatives and liberals within there own ranks have reflected that turn. We saw that each of the three monotheistic world religions has been involved in a two-front war. The home front of that war is a fight for the mind, heart and soul of the religion, itself. There has been an effort by each of those religions to consolidate its base around homogeneous fundamentals and to marginalize or repudiate Liberals and even Moderates within their own ranks. The other front of this religious warfare has been directed against other religions – both within underdeveloped countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Pacific Oceania, as well as between nations such as the U.S. and Iraq or Afghanistan. But the real enemy, beneath those enemies, is secularism, naturalism, modernism, or materialism. The underlying root of all this ideological and military warfare is nothing less than a fight for the future of world civilization.

I’d like to share 8 Snapshots of key moments in religious history to try to determine if the current dynamics at work in world religions have always played themselves out as they are now. These snapshots will be brief and to the point – trying to capture tectonic shifts in the religious landscape of their times. When I say tectonic, I’m referring to the effects of the movement of the subterranean continental plates, which under gird the Earth’s crust. Although those huge plates, floating on a vast sea of molten lava, are always moving, we don’t experience that powerful movement until the continental plates collide and grind against each other – causing earthquakes on the surface. Likewise the religious landscape of the peoples of the world has moved with glacial speed, until, suddenly there seem to have been points in time when abrupt changes and grinding collisions have taken place. I believe that we are currently living in the midst of just such a time of extremely widespread tectonic collisions within and between religions – one that is equivalent to others that have taken place earlier in history.

1. Abraham: In the 3rd millennium B.C. – specifically 2100 B.C. – within the context of one of the earliest “cradle lands of civilization” – Mesopotamia -- the Sumerian civilization was well established. Like all known civilizations, the Sumerians shared a prevailing religious environment. It was polytheistic, not primitive nature religion, but belief in numerous supernatural gods and goddesses, who presided over various aspects of life in this world. For example, one of the most widely revered was the Sumerian goddess Lillith – the spiritual being who was thought to have the power of death. Now at least one of the members of that civilization – Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans – had a spiritual awakening in which he was encountered by a god, who claimed to be the only God – the Creator of the Universe. Abram believed that and left not only his homeland, but also the polytheism, which shaped the culture of that civilization. Monotheism was born, but its birth was devoid of trauma, conflict or violence, except perhaps within Abram and his family. And that’s because Abram left those for whom it might have presented a conflict – his peers -- and largely kept his faith within his family.
2. Moses: It was almost 600 years later, in another “Cradle Land of Civilization”. Egypt -- at about 1500 B.C. -- was also polytheistic, like Sumerian religion it was also focused on death, but with a highly developed view of afterlife. And, like Sumeria, the prevailing religious atmosphere of Egypt under girded its Egyptian civilization. Like Abram, Moses had a spiritual awakening. He encountered the god, who claimed to be the only God – the Creator of the universe and the one his ancestors knew. Unlike Abram, though, Moses’ monotheistic faith gave rise to conflict – with Egyptians and Hebrews alike – mainly because the faith had public impact, which required a response. Monotheism conflicted with polytheism. The religion of Moses was in your face. It was in Pharaoh’s face – Exodus. It was in the Hebrews’ face – Covenant of the 10 Commandments. There was resistance, conflict and violence. Egyptians died, and with all do respect to Cecil B. DeMille, it wasn’t an earthquake that killed those Hebrews who worshipped the golden calf in the wilderness. It was ethnic cleansing. The Levites were armed and slaughtered those within the fold who wouldn’t adhere to monotheism and the code of conduct.
3. Joshua: similarly resistance, conflict, and violence characterized the immigration of the Hebrew people into Canaan. Upon entering Palestine the Jewish people embarked upon several years of genocidal conquest. The rationale given was clearly religious in nature – that the God whom they believed and followed – the one and only God wanted the Hebrew people to kill all the people of the land – men, women and children for two reasons. The Hebrews were God’s way of punishing those evil people, and there evil couldn’t rub off on the Hebrews if they were obliterated. In this sense the religion of Joshua was in your space. The people of God were in the same geographical location as the polytheists of Palestine.
4. Babylonian Captivity: Just about 1,000 years later, back in that Mesopotamian Cradle Land of Civilization and nestled between the powerful 400-year ascendancy of the Assyrian Empire and the equally powerful and more widespread ascendancy of the Persian Empire, there existed the nearly 100-year ascent of the Babylonian Empire. Frustrated by Israel and Judah’s resistances and collaborations with the other superpower of the time, Egypt, the peoples of Israel and then Judah were taken into exile or captivity for the better part of 70 years during the 6th century B.C. During that period the Jewish people lived in Babylon as a slave class. Zoroastrianism was the prevailing religion there at that time. The basis of its theology was that there were two gods above all others – two cosmic spiritual forces – one good and the other evil. They were in perpetual battle, explaining why people sometimes experience good and evil at other times. The final outcome was unknown, but there would be an apocalyptic battle in the end. Two things happened in Judaism during that time. One was the emergence of a Jewish sect called the Pharisees, who took on the role of safeguarding the integrity of the Jewish religion – in matters of doctrine as well as religious and moral practice. They were the watchdogs of the faith and were devoted to keeping the Jewish religion pure. The other was a certain amount of syncretism – religious osmosis – whereby the concepts of Satan and apocalypticism seeped into Jewish religion from the influences of Zoroastrianism in the wider culture. The attraction of these was clear. It helped to answer the question of how a bad thing like their exile could possibly have happened to God’s people, if God was the only God and the Jews were God’s chosen people. Since they lacked the power to enforce their religion on the Babylonians, the Jewish people focused their energies on enforcing their religion within their own community and were subtly influenced by the wider culture nonetheless.
5. Jesus: Approximately 500 years after the Jewish Exile, Jesus came onto the scene of human history. The focus of his brief, 3-year public ministry was to communicate four essential spiritual truths:
   • God’s unreserved love for all people
   • God’s unlimited willingness and capacity to forgive people’s sins and failures, and to give all people new beginnings
   • God’s unrestricted desire to enter into a mutually loving personal relationship with all people
   • God’s continuous presence, availability and involvement in the lives of those who turn to Him
   • The absolute importance of faith – of trust in God – as the basis of human spirituality
   • The centrality of love – love for God and love for others – as God’s way of living
   • The ultimate hope of eternal life with God after physical life ends
   Then Jesus died and was resurrected to demonstrate all this and effect it in people’s lives.

   The cultural context of Jesus’ efforts was Palestinian Judaism. Dominated as the Jews were by a hostile, polytheistic Roman Empire, the religious context was naturally all the more rigid than it had been at other times – to ward off the influences of other religions. The Jewish leaders were vigilant watchdogs of what they saw as the pure religion that had been passed down to them. The affect of that restrictive Fundamentalist culture was control over all moral and religious behavior, and a view of God, which was remote. Since Jesus’ teachings and ministry was explicitly directed to the Jewish people, as His popularity among common folk increased so did the religious leadership’s scrutiny of everything He said or did, and so likewise did the conflict between the religious leadership and Jesus. It started as a theological conflict, became ideological, then political and ultimately, of course led to violence – the religious establishment had Him executed. That’s because Jesus’ ministry was in the face of the prevailing religion, in it’s space and threatened to take its place in the minds of some of the people. Jesus never resorted to violence in that conflict.

6. Roman Persecutions: Within the following generation Jesus’ followers found them selves involved in a two-front war. On the one side was the Jewish establishment, which tried to suppress this new faith that they firmly believed to be heretical. That suppression took the form of ideological conflict and debate, political power plays by the established religious authorities, and limited physical violence. That home front conflict lasted for almost 40 years until the Diaspora, when Rome forcibly spread Palestinian Jews throughout the Empire. But there were also conflicts between the fledgling Christian community scattered throughout the Roman Empire and the prevailing polytheistic Roman culture – one that lasted, off and on, for 300 years or so. Taking after Jesus, the Christians never employed violence, but spread their faith personally. It was the Roman authorities, who sought to suppress the spread of Christianity with ideological condemnation, political power and, physical violence. What inspired Rome’s persecution of Christianity was its exclusive monotheism coupled with its evangelism, which threatened to spread a religion that competed with the state for people’s single-hearted allegiance. Things changed once Christianity became a favored religion within the Empire, though. That’s when Christianity began a 300-year war on the home front over orthodoxy and heresy – what everyone must believe in order to be Xn.
7. Crusades: The conflicts within the Christian religion over matters of theological homogeneity extended from the 200’s through the 600’s A.D. and were particularly bitter in the Eastern Church. That left the Eastern Empire severely disunited in Church and State. Religion seems clearly to have been inextricably connected with culture and culture with political will in a civilization. So it was that by the 6th century A.D. Eastern Christian civilization split. Therefore, during the first third of the 7th century, when the prophet Mohammed spearheaded a crusade to spread Islam there was little organized resistance against it. His lieutenants carried on his vision after his death so that between his death in 632 and the Battle of Tours in 732 Islam had conquered the entire Middle East, Eastern Europe, North Africa and had spread throughout Spain and into France. Islam spread by ideological assertion, political power plays and military aggression. Its spread was reversed by religious, political and military force – beginning with Charles Martel’s defeat of the Moors at the Battle of Tours. For more than 300 years an uneasy peace ensued from something of a stalemate between what had solidified into Western Christian Civilization and Eastern Islamic Civilization.

   During the mid-11th Century A.D. forces of the Christian West had been successful in defeating Muslim strongholds and pushing Islam out of southern Italy and Spain. Those military victories coupled with a Christian religious revival during the severe famines and economic depressions of the 11th century and the desire to send discontented masses of males off to war elsewhere during those hard times in order to protect European political stability inspired the first of 200 years of Christian military crusades against Muslims at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean. They were religiously inspired, politically and economically motivated waves of military aggression launched by the Christian West against Islamic Civilization.

8. Reformation: After the crusades ended in 1291, a miserable failure by all accounts, except for the prosperity it brought to Italian city-states, there was relative religious peace for almost 300 years. Then came the Reformation. The Reformation was primarily a theological and religious reform movement within the Christian Church in the West. It also had direct impact on the hierarchy of power within the Church, and was quickly harnessed as a force to be used by regional political leaders. At first the conflicts were ideological ones, but soon employed tactics of power politics and eventually resulted in armed conflicts – assassinations, massacres, and battles. Wars raged between organized Catholic and Protestant forces within nations and across Europe for the better part 125 years. At the end of that period, exhausted by the conflicts, Europe settled into relative religious calm with little change to the religious map since.

• There is a difference between organized religion and personal Faith or spirituality – Abraham or Jesus versus Crusades and Reformation wars.
• There have always been times of religious strum und drang, when conflict is ascendant. Those times have been inspired by fear of change. Changes come anyway, and have been followed by periods of stalemate. Hegel = thesis + antithesis = synthesis.
• Jesus never advocated using violence for anything – not even verbal aggression. He left it all up to the individual to decide his or her faith.
• Jesus never came to start a religion, and He certainly didn’t come to establish or to be used by a culture, nation or civilization.
• Many conflicts throughout history have involved religions, and have either been based upon or used the raw power of religious shifts.
• As many religious conflicts have been on the home front as have been directed at an external enemy.
• When religious people have no power they do not use force – Abraham, Jews in Babylon, Jesus, early Christians.
• When religious people have power they tend to become embroiled in conflicts and to use force to suppress the potential threats – Moses, Joshua, Jewish leadership vs. Jesus, Roman Empire, Heresy Trials, Crusades, Reformation/Counter Reformation wars.
• Religion is the foundation of civilization; but civilizations shape their religions; and politics uses both to promote its own agendas.
• Fundamentalist religion is a reaction to perceived threats.
• It feeds on negative energy and expresses itself by control & conflict.
• Religiously inspired conflicts last a very long time – until there is a stalemate and exhaustion.
• Religiously inspired conflicts have rarely changed anything. Joshua’s genocide of Canaanites never prevented Jewish idolatry. Pharisaic control of personal religion during the Exile never prevented Zoroastrianism from creeping into Judaism. The religious authorities execution of Jesus never suppressed his influence. Rome’s suppression of Christianity never stopped its spread. The Crusades never gained anything from Islamic civilization. And the wars of the Reformation-Counter Reformation never stopped the inroads of Protestantism or Catholicism in a country.
• No religion, culture, civilization or state embodies God, but they have all always believed that they did, and have incorporated holy war language to justify violence and atrocities.

Without wanting to get ahead of myself, it does seem to me that the methodology of current religious conflicts is destined to failure as it has in the past. Zealous Fundamentalist religionists of every religion tend to be insatiable. By that I mean that their Fundamentalist zeal is fueled by dissatisfaction – by the next struggle, whether it’s an internal struggle of individual personal religion or dissatisfaction with others and the problems with culture or the threat of aliens. That sort of religion seems to feed on negative energy, and that will continue to fuel conflicts and inspire statements – whether the pope’s or Pat Robertson’s or W’s – which increasing numbers of people will become disenchanted by. Exhaustion and skepticism will eventually ensue. That’s the reason so many Europeans feel disaffected by religion after hundreds of years of warfare in religion’s name. And it’s one of the reasons that I find myself so concerned by the hot religions of our time – because they will eventually backfire and negatively affect people toward faith and spirituality 20 in the next generation or so.