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.

So what’s changed? What threats or perceived threats have generated enough stress and fear to trigger the kinds of widespread reactions that we’ve been seeing during the past 10 years or so?

Actually quite a bit of it has to do with context. Whatever else we humans might like to our consciousness with – our own personal daily agendas, relationships, work, finances, recreation, education and life interests – there are global matters of overriding importance, which few of us can deny.

1. The human population of the world has exploded during the past 100 years almost quadrupling during that period.
2. The demand for the basic resources that support human life – including space for living – has caused enormous stress.
3. Resource distribution inequities are being challenged.
4. Industrialization has increased in the Middle East and Asia.
5. The impact of all this is rapidly being felt in various aspects of the global environment.
6. The impact of economic globalization is rapidly being felt in various parts of the world.
7. There is a sense, among many, that global disaster is looming.
8. Simultaneously peoples are exposed to cultures different from their own more than ever in history.
9. People are turning to what is both the foundation of civilization and the only hope beyond human ability to solve the problems that face us – religion in ways that are unparalleled in intensity.
10. Islam and Christianity are the only religions that propagate their faith, and enormous growth has taken place in both religions – especially in underdeveloped parts of the world -- Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America.

It only stands to reason that with the aforementioned intense causes of anxiety and stress coupled with the roles religions serve that zeal and conflict would increase. On face value it would appear that religion is to blame for the conflicts in the world today. But that would be a superficial understanding of current events. There are deeper roots to the current conflicts. Like no time ever in history, multiple civilizations exist in the contemporary world, which constantly rub up against each other -- causing friction on virtually every level of human interaction. About 10 years ago Samuel Huntington wrote a book. He called it The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. Huntington is one of those people, who've been acknowledged both by liberals and conservatives alike as an undisputed expert in contemporary international relations, and he has the credentials to show for it. {He is the Weatherhead professor at Harvard University, the Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He served as director of security planning for the National Security Council. He founded and is coeditor of Foreign Policy journal. He has also served multiple terms as president of the American Political Science Association, and is the author of scores of books and scholarly articles in the field of Political Science. The book that we'll be considering has been acclaimed by the likes of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and the New York Times. Kissinger calls Professor Huntington "one of the West's most eminent political scientists."}

The Clash of Civilizations, may just be the most important work on the subject of global relations in our generation. It's helped me like no other work in my efforts to understand what's going on in the world today and how to approach being the Church in the contemporary global environment.

Huntington begins by stating that everything has changed since the end of the Cold War, and that what the world is presently experiencing has never occurred in the history of the world. The population of the world is so dense that people of divergent cultures are incapable of compartmentalizing themselves as they did in past history. Again, for the first time in history revolutions in communications, transportation and technology make it impossible for people in different cultures to isolate them selves from each other. Except for East Asia, Communism has evaporated and, with it, so has the artificial political issue of peoples' identification of them selves as pro-Communist or anti-Communist. While, initially, that may seem to have heralded a new age of harmonic global collaboration, everyone was unprepared for the new, even more conflicted, dynamics that it has actually created.

You see humans crave identity and ultimate meaning. Humans derive identity and meaning from their affiliations. According to Huntington "Cultural identity is most meaningful to most people. People are discovering new but often old identities and marching under new but often old flags which lead to wars with new but often old enemies." He writes, "For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world's major civilizations."

Huntington's basic thesis is that "Culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilizational identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in this post-Cold War world."

1. For the first time in modern history global politics is not bipolar, but multi-polar and multi-civilizational.
2. The balance of power among civilizations has shifted: the West has declined in relative influence. Asian civilizations are expanding in their economic, political, and military strength. Islam is exploding with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors. Non-western civilizations are generally rejecting Western values and reaffirming the value of their own cultures. We've lost the international culture war -- and I would add even more precipitously during the past 5 years.
3. A civilization-based world order is emerging. Societies that share cultural affinities cooperate with each other. Attempts to shift societies from one civilization to another (nation-building) are unsuccessful. Countries group themselves around the lead of one Core State in their civilization, unless, I would add, a core state abandons the rest of the states that group themselves around it, as America has done during the past 5 years.
4. The West's universalist presumptions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations -- particularly Islamic and Sinic Civilizations.
5. The future survival of the West -- beyond the next few generations -- depends upon Western nations reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique -- not universal, but unique -- uniting to renew and preserve Western Civilization against challenges from non-western civilizations. To avoid a global war of civilizations world leaders must accept and cooperate to maintain the multi-civilization character of global politics. I would add that in a very short-sighted way the U.S. has recently done more to harm that cooperation than ever done in the past.

During most of what might be called the history of organized civilization contact between different civilizations was intermittent or non-existent. With the beginning of the modern era -- around about 1500 AD -- global politics assumed two dimensions -- the West and the rest of the civilizations of the world. For 400 years or more the nation states of the West constituted a multi-polar international system within Western civilization -- often jockeying with each other over which of them would take the position of dominance within the West. Simultaneously, Western nations -- for economic reasons and in pursuit of national ascendancy within the West -- expanded, conquered, colonized and decisively influenced every other civilization. During the Cold War global politics became bi-polar in a different way, and the world was divided into 3 parts -- a bloc of Communist nations (led by the Soviet Union), opposed by a bloc of anti-Communist, mostly wealthy nations (led by the U. S.), and other so-called Third World nations. Much of the conflict of the Cold War between the Communist and anti-Communist blocs was played out in the Third World -- composed of often poor countries that lacked political stability or economic strength, recently decolonized and claiming non-alignment. The Communist world collapsed in Eastern Europe during the 1980s, and that bi-polar Cold war system became history. In the aftermath the most important distinctions between peoples have become no longer political, ideological or economic, but cultural. Peoples and nations are asking and answering the most basic question humans can face: "Who are we?" The answers are taking the form of the traditional way humans have always answered it -- by reference to what means most to them. Humans define them selves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. Humans identify them selves with cultural groups -- tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, cultures, and at the broadest level with civilizations. Politics have become the way in which people define their identity. And that is partly shaped by who or what we're against. The most important groupings in the world today are not the previous two ideological blocs of the Cold War, but the 7 or 8 major civilizations of the world.

1. Western: Comprised of North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
2. Latin American: Comprised of the nations of Mexico, Central America and South America -- people who mostly speak Spanish and have had affiliations with Roman Catholicism.
3. Africa: mainly comprised of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.
4. Islamic: comprised of the peoples of Northern Africa, Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, Western Asia, Indonesia and other parts of Pacific Oceanea -- forged together by a common commitment to the religion of Islam and the Koran and consisting of over 1 billion people.
5. Sinic: Comprised of cultures with their roots in Confucianism, including China, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Singapore and consisting of over 1 billion people.
6. Hindu: Comprised of the peoples of India, Ceylon, Bangladesh, and other regions of the subcontinent of Asia and consisting of over 1 billion people.
7. Orthodox: Comprised of the peoples of Eastern Europe, including Russia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, and other former member states of the Soviet Union and those peoples who historically identified themselves with Byzantine Christianity.
8. Buddhist: Comprised of peoples from Tibet, Mongolia, and parts of Southeast Asia.
9. Japanese: While some combine the Japanese with Sinic civilization or with the Western economic bloc. The Japanese core sense of identity is its own and it remains to be seen which larger civilization it will join and how.

Of these major civilizations five are the most engaged in play for world ascendancy at present -- Western, Sinic, Islamic, Orthodox and Hindu civilizations. Due to the recent history of the West, and I would add, current U. S. policies, there is less likelihood of the West unifying around America as it did during the Cold War or of other civilizations unifying with the West for the foreseeable future. There is, however, a real possibility of Hindu, Japanese, and possibly Buddhist civilizations drawing closer to Sinic Civilization, with China taking the position of core state over against the West, especially if the U. S. continues its current international course and China softens its Communist ideological rigidity. If that happens more than half the world's population could gather effectively over against the West -- while the West focuses upon Islam and its nations bicker among themselves over ascendancy. In other words, while the West is busy fighting over who's the captain of the ship as it chases the red herring of radical Islam, Sinic civilization is the whale that may scuttle the ship altogether -- gaining world ascendancy -- rejecting the most dearly held values of the West -- namely, individualism and pluralism.

But I'm getting ahead of myself and of Professor Huntington. These civilizations are the subject of Huntington's book. He defines civilization as a cultural entity -- the overall life of a people writ large. Civilization is a collection of cultural characteristics and phenomena. Civilizations are comprehensive, which means that none of their constituent parts -- nations or peoples -- can be understood without reference to the encompassing civilization. Civilization is the broadest cultural entity, thus the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of being part of the same species. It is defined, but not limited to, such objective elements as history, religion, language, customs and institutions. It is the largest level us vs. the largest level them there is among humans. Civilizations are very long lived. Nations and empires rise and fall, but civilizations precede and continue on after their demise. They evolve and adapt and are the most enduring of human associations. Virtually all of the major civilizations in the world today have existed for at least 1,000 years. Civilizations must not be confused with political entities. They transcend nation states.

Of the identifiable civilizations that have existed throughout history -- including the ones already named -- there have been only seven that no longer exist: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cretan, Classical, Byzantine, Middle American, and Andean -- though traces of them exist within the modern civilizations into which they evolved. There are traces of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilization in Islamic Civilization. Cretan or Minoan and Classical / Roman civilization evolved into Western civilization. Byzantine civilization evolved into Orthodox civilization. Traces of Middle American and Andean exist in certain expressions of Latin American civilization. And then, too, of course, there are isolated traces of extinct civilizations found in remote tribes. The point is that civilization refers to a very widespread, enduring and comprehensive general cultural tradition from which constituent peoples derive their identities as humans. They do not change by exposure to other civilizations, nor even by violent domination over centuries, though they do become extinct either by genocide or pandemic.

As we all know from grade school the basic Eastern Hemisphere civilizations -- the seminal Neolithic cultures, if you prefer -- emerged from the so-called cradle lands of civilization along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Indus and Yellow Rivers. These evolved, during the past 5,000 years, into most of the civilizations that exist in the modern world. It wasn't until the 8th or 9th century AD that Western civilization emerged as a distinct entity from its Roman and Classical roots, which evolved, in turn, from the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cretan and Minoan civilizations that existed 3 - 4 millennia earlier. There was very limited contact among civilizations prior to 1500 AD. It usually took centuries for ideas and technology to move from one civilization to another, simply because transportation and communication media were limited.

With the Renaissance, improved technology in Western armaments and transportation enabled the Western powers to invade other civilizations by oceangoing fleets. The Western powers won dominance over other civilizations not by the superiority of Western ideas, values or religion (to which relatively few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners have forgotten this fact, but non-westerners never do. In the course of Western expansion, North American, Andean, and Mesoamerican civilizations were eliminated by genocide and pandemic. Hindu and Islamic civilizations, along with Africa, were subjugated, and China was subordinated to Western influence. Only Russian, that is, Orthodox, and Japanese civilizations withstood the onslaught and maintained their autonomy.

For 400 years intercivilizational relations consisted of the subordination of other societies to Western civilization. The first phase of that subordination of other civilizations to the West was the conquest phase. The second was the colonization phase from which Western nation states economically prospered. The third phase was the emergence of the Western defined system of international relations. The fourth phase was the period of decolonization, in large part forced by the exhaustion of the Western nations in the wake of WW II and the rise of the Cold War.

In the 20th century relations among civilizations have moved from uni-directional Western dominance of all other civilizations to one of intense, sustained, and multidirectional interaction among all civilizations. Consequently the present international system has expanded beyond the West and has become multicivilizational. This is, of course, one reason that the U.S. has had such an increasingly challenging time accepting the autonomy of the United Nations and wants to walk away from its authority. The problem is that without something like the UN the political world of the 21st century can easily become a geo-political free-for-all -- with each and every nation acting unilaterally -- quite beyond the capacity of one nation to control.

Global politics has moved Western civilization from the Western dominated world of the 1920s to the "Free world" of the 1960's to the West of the 1990's. The problem is that many Westerners imagine that the people of the other civilizations of the world simply want to become what we are -- especially Americans. This is completely untrue and it's important for us to understand that. There is another myth extant in the West, particularly shared among Americans, and that is that the world is coming together into one diversely expressed universal civilization. There is not a shared desire for the same form of government in every civilization. Democracy is not a shared aspiration outside the West. Capitalism is not a shared economic desire in every civilization outside the West. Language has not become more common, but more diverse. Religious affiliations have not become a source of commonality, but of greater conflict. The only religion that has grown appreciably in terms of the percentage of the world's population is Islam -- growing from 12% to 20% of the world's population in the past 100 years. Otherwise, folk and tribal religions have shrunk from 30% of the world's population to 4%. And non-religious or Atheist affiliation has grown from less than 1/2 % to 20% of the world's population. Western Christianity has remained steady, but shifted its base from the West to Latin America and Africa during the past 100 years. During that time the world's proselytizing religions -- Islam and Christianity -- have remained in their traditional relationship of competition and conflict.

After the Cold War ended, Western political and economic analysts assumed that modern Western Culture would naturally become the universal culture of the world, simply because they thought that it was more highly evolved than other civilizations. There was a rude awakening though. Improved global trade and communications have failed to produce mutual understanding, harmony and homogeneity. Indeed the fact is that trade and communications have simply increased mutual exposure, and with that, increased distrust, competition and enmity. People increasingly define their identities by what they are not. In an increasingly globalized world, far from recognizing similarities, people are emphasizing their differences. Consequently, indigenization has increased. People have been returning to their own traditional sacred spaces in reaction to their perception of the world as a single place. Modernization has triggered civilizational backlash. And so societal and ethnic self-consciousness has proliferated -- characterized by global religious revival in virtually every continent and nation.

In short, the pendulum has swung. Western civilization is well known. The modernization of technology and trade, which the West developed, has been accepted. But the rest of what Western Civilization has to offer has been bitterly rejected -- not out of envy as people in the West like to think, but because others regard Western civilization as inferior and morally bankrupt.

1. Western Christianity: The coexistence of Catholicism and Protestantism within a shared Christian Faith, according to Huntington, is the single-most important characteristic of Western Civilization. Christian Faith undergirds the rest of Western Civilization.
2. Classical Legacy: As a 3rd generation civilization, Western civilization inherited a great deal from previous civilizations -- including Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman Law, and the Latin language.
3. European Languages: He claims that language is second only to religion in differentiating people in one culture from another. The West differs from most other civilizations in the multiplicity of languages spoken in one civilization.
4. Separation of Spiritual and Temporal Authority: Throughout Western history, first, the Church and then many churches existed apart from the state and vice versa. That dualism of spiritual and temporal authority -- embodied in the separation of Church and State -- has contributed immeasurably to the development of freedom in the West.
5. Rule of Law: Inherited from the Romans, the tradition of the rule of law laid the foundation for constitutionalism and the guarding of human rights -- against the exercise of arbitrary power.
6. Social Pluralism: Historically Western societies have been highly pluralistic -- composed of divers and autonomous groups. Beginning in the 6th and 7th centuries included monasteries, clergy orders, and guilds, which proliferated to include many different associations. Most Western societies included relatively strong and autonomous aristocracy, a substantial peasant class, and a small, but significant class of merchants and traders. That limited the absolutism that emerged in other civilizations.
7. Representative Bodies: Social pluralism gave rise to parliaments, unions and other institutions, which represented the interests of their respective constituencies. That gave rise to modern democracy. And no other civilization has any comparable heritage of representative bodies stretching back more than 1,000 years -- even as far back as ancient Athens and the Roman Senate.
8. Individualism: Many of the aforementioned contributed to the emergence of a sense of individualism and a tradition of individual rights -- unique among existing civilizations. Individualism developed in 14th century Europe and prevailed by the 17th century. It was not an American phenomenon, but Western. In all other civilizations it is collectivism, not individualism, which is core to personal identity and society. No civilization wants to trade its core consciousness for a different one.

Christian Faith, Classical legacy, European languages, Separation of Church and State, Rule of Law, Social Pluralism, Representative Bodies, and Individualism -- these 7 -- are the basic components of Western Civilization. Westerners do well to take pride in them, other do not. The people of other civilizations value their own unique heritage and want nothing to do with becoming westernized. Consequently, sensing their resistance and the loss of ground relative to past Western ascendancy people in the West -- and especially in America -- are currently embroiled in an anxiety driven culture war, motivated by the desire to stem the tide of decline. Liberals, following Western tradition, press to ensure heterogeneity of faiths, diversity of languages, the separation of Church and State, the rule of law (ACLU), safeguard social pluralism (including sexuality), promote representative bodies (including labor unions), and uphold individualism (including the right to choose abortion). In the process, the extent to which they go for the sake of diversity -- in an increasingly diversely cultured world -- waters down the very traditions of Western Civilization they wish to promote -- including the integrity of traditional Christian Faith. Likewise, Conservatives, desperately trying to preserve those same elements of Western Civilization, press to ensure the homogeneity of traditional Christian Faith, the use of one national language, the bonding of Faith and government to strengthen traditional Western behavioral values, limit the rule of law with respect to economics so as to keep Western Economies ascendant, limit social pluralism for the sake of preserving Western cultural uniqueness, restrict certain representative bodies (such as unions) to strengthen the economic viability, and curtail individualism (especially when it comes to sex) in order to keep us altogether on the same path. In the process, the extent to which they go for the sake of preservation changes the roots of the very civilization they want so desperately to preserve. I believe that this is the catch 22 of our current situation -- epitomized, I suppose -- in the Patriot Act, which would restrict our historic freedoms to preserve the safety of our freedom. The problem is that both approaches jeopardize our civilization in the very process of trying to preserve it by the extremes to which they tend to go --demonizing the each other, while in the process fulfilling each other's worst fears -- resulting in the potential demise of what we've know to be Western civilization.

What are followers of Jesus Christ suppose to do about it, though? What we have been doing is following -- and in many cases leading -- the ideological extremes and becoming increasingly disaffected from each other in the process. This has clearly been underscored by the reactions to the recent decisions by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. But, I wonder, if that were the way Jesus would have us behave -- siding with one civilization and trying to preserve it. Or would He have us be above all civilizations, yet involved for the good in each?