This is our 6th session in this series on What the Heck’s Wrong with Religions These Days.

Last time we met we focused on the large front war that’s taking place in the world at this time, which religious conflicts are, in a sense, only a barometer for. That global conflict is only about 20 years old – emerging in full force only with the end of the global cold war between Communist and anti-Communist powers. The present conflict is far more basic – far more radical – since it has to do with the roots of how people define themselves. It’s a struggle between civilizations – at the core of which are the religions embedded within those civilizations. And it’s a struggle for the integrity of each civilization as well as for global supremacy in the upcoming millennium.

There are 9 civilizations in the world today, according to Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations:

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 tribalism and Roman Catholicism.
3. African: 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 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 only 4 have what it takes to be engaged in play for world ascendancy at present -- Western, Sinic, Islamic, and Hindu civilizations. Due to the recent history of the West and 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, including Latin American Civilization. There is, however, the 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 Western civilization -- while the West focuses upon fighting radical Islam and its nations bicker among themselves. 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 supremacy -- rejecting the most dearly held values of the West -- individualism and pluralism. But pluralism is currently in jeopardy in the U.S. already.

I proposed that fundamentalist religion is one of the main reasons the U.S. is looking the wrong way at this critical time in history. The rise and political influence of fundamentalist Christianity is focused on three central issues: moral purity in the culture, doctrinal purity in the religion, and that, which galvanizes both – preparation for the apocalypse. I proposed that the culture wars within the U.S. and the war with Fundamentalist Islam are both the result, at least in part, of obsession as a nation with the Fundamentalist Christian agenda. That agenda involves the effort to support Israel over against its neighbors no matter what, in order to be on God’s side as well as the use of power politics to reshape American culture and Western civilization in more explicitly biblical and Christian ways. Therein lies a crisis for Western civilization and American culture in particular.

You see Western Civilization for the past few hundred years has been composed of basic characteristics. The central characteristics of the West, which distinguish it from other civilizations, naturally, antedate the modernization of the West. Professor Huntington identifies 8 basic characteristics of Western civilization.

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 under girds 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 diverse 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.

These 8 core values have constituted Western Civilization. But at least 3 of them, or 4, are products Humanism as much as Christianity, namely classical legacy, separation of church and state, and social pluralism, together with individualism. The willingness of the Christian Right to limit these in America threatens a 250-year old compromise between Humanism and Christianity in the West.

You see almost 600 years ago the West emerged from the Middle Ages, and a period of discovery and innovation ensued. Though the Crusades never permanently accomplished their aims, they did expose those who returned from them to the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome, and also engendered a greater appreciation for this life instead of the life hereafter, which had inspired so many to go to war in the first place. The soil was ready for something new to emerge from Medieval Christendom. Two movements burst forth, almost simultaneously, though they were quite different in many respects. About 500 years ago the renaissance was born, and 50 years later, for some of the same reasons, the Reformation began.

The Renaissance essentially involved an entirely new outlook on the world. It emphasized the present life – here and now. It began with Man as the center of the universe rather than God. It emphasized the importance of empirical investigation rather than doctrinal faith. It stressed beauty and satisfaction with this life rather than future heaven and hell. It explored the glories past and the present rather than salvation out of this world in the future. That gave rise to an explosion in the arts and sciences, and laid the groundwork for democracy – from the works of the Greek philosophers.

It was at that time that Gutenberg invented the printing press. And that, as much as anything else, gave rise to the popularity of both Humanism and the Reformation. By 1500 over 30,000 volumes had been disseminated throughout Europe. That made classical languages and literature available to the emerging middle class and also made the Bible available to individuals – eventually even in their own languages. And that, more than anything else, gave rise to the spread of the dual revolutions of thought that Humanism and the Reformation represented. The Reformation did for Christian religion what the Renaissance did for art, science, economics and government. The Reformation emphasized the importance of individual understanding of God’s revelation. It stressed the absolute importance of God’s grace. It exposed the corruptions or, at least, the distortions that had come into Christianity. It focused on faith and reason over against the dogma of Church tradition and the authority of the Church hierarchy. And it centered itself, once again, on the person and accomplishments of Jesus Christ as the sole basis of salvation. Ultimately it gave critical weight to the individual person of faith, relying upon the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to illuminate Holy Scripture as the sole medium of God’s Word for instruction in what is needful for eternal salvation.

Due to the obsession that Reformers and Counter-reformers had with fighting each other, the Humanism of the Renaissance benefited in three ways. Since Protestants and Catholics were busily fighting each other, the implicit heresies of the Humanists of the Renaissance failed to register on their doctrinal radar screens, and they were left alone to flourish. Second, those, who became disenchanted with Christianity on either side because of the home front Christian wars throughout Europe, drifted into Humanism. Third, left to itself Humanism was able to begin to develop concepts of government, which separated Church from State. Although contemporary Fundamentalist leaders often confer upon the Founding Fathers a shared literalistic biblical Christian faith as the basis of modern democracy, that seems to me to be revisionist. They were all theists of a mostly Deist sort, who apparently knew from history better than modern Fundamentalists that wedding religious doctrine closely with government has always had repressive consequences. You see, except for the scriptural truth that all people have been created in God’s image and therefore have inherent and equal dignity and rights before their Creator, there is no warrant in scripture that would lend itself to democracy. On the contrary, that’s one of the reasons that Martin Luther felt able to sanction the destruction of the pre-democratic movement called the “Peasants Revolt.” One of their precepts was the abolition of serfdom in Europe, and Luther believed that that would lead to a loss of control, order, and that chaos would ensue.

The Humanism of the Renaissance and the biblical Christianity of the Reformation were always strange bedfellows, and yet, these two are at the very core of Western Civilization. When one seeks to rid itself of the other, the inherent genius of their creative tension, which balances modern Western Civilization, will be undermined. It has been the vitality of Western Civilization, if not its aggression and technology, which have accounted for its ascendancy during the past 500 years. 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 relations between civilizations consisted of the subordination of other societies to Western civilization. The first phase of that subordination of other civilizations to the West was conquest. The second was the colonization, 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 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 one-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 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 basic identity and 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. Christian Faith, Classical legacy, European languages, Separation of Church and State, Rule of Law, Social Pluralism, Representative Bodies, and Individualism -- these 8 -- are the basic components of Western Civilization. Westerners do well to take pride in them, others 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 our 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 Xn. Faith.

Likewise, Conservatives, desperately trying to preserve those same elements of Western Civilization, press to ensure the integrity 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 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?

The next complicating factor in the current struggle between religions, especially Christianity and Islam, which is also rather new, but also ancient is anticipation of the Apocalypse. Apocalypse is the term, which refers to the end of human history on this planet. It is the biblical belief God will wrap all things up one day, and that as that day draws nearer the struggle between Good and Evil will increase – played out on planet Earth.

While Christianity is, Islam is not an apocalyptic religion. However it does have a strong view of afterlife. And in that sense, stretching the idea a bit, each Muslim has a sense of his own apocalypse – the end of his own life on Earth, after which his state will forever be determined by the faithfulness of his life in this world. The certainty of one’s ultimate destiny, according to some Muslims’ thinking, can be assured by dying for Allah and his prophet, Mohammed, in a holy war. In that sense, with the rise of Muslims’ consciousness of other religions and ways of life a war exists to preserve and extend Islam, and one’s role in that war will effect ultimate destiny. I’m calling that an apocalyptic influence.