Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Chinese Police Clash With Tibet Protesters - New York Times, March 14, 2008

BEIJING — Violent protests erupted Friday in a busy market area of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, as Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans clashed with Chinese security forces. Witnesses say the protesters burned shops, cars, military vehicles and at least one tourist bus.

Cars were overturned cars and shops burning in Barkhor Square in front of the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, Tibet, on Friday.

Tibetans throwing stones at army vehicles as a car burns on a street in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, after violent protests broke out on Friday.

The chaotic scene marked the most violent demonstrations since protests by Buddhist monks began in Lhasa on Monday, the anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The protests have been the largest in Tibet since the late 1980s, when Chinese security forces repeatedly used lethal force to restore order in the region.

The developments prompted the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, to issue a statement, saying he was concerned about the situation and appealing to the Chinese leadership to “stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people”.

By Friday night, Chinese authorities had placed much of the central part of the city under a curfew, including neighborhoods around different Buddhist monasteries, according to two Lhasa residents reached by telephone. Military police were blocking roads in some ethnic Tibetan neighborhoods, several Lhasa residents said.

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults 28% have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today 16.1% is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%.

FTMP_NDH_conclusion.pdf (application/pdf Object), TMPR, 2008

Across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a cross-section of Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic clerics - and occasionally their religious organisations - gave material support to radical right and fascist movements. While comparative research on this phenomenon is in its infancy, a few claims made be made, however tenuously, bearing directly upon the case of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941].

In the new Yugoslav state, like elsewhere in interwar Europe, political Catholicism and its lay institutions (most notably Catholic Action) were of recent vintage. These movements came to prominence in no small measure as a proactive response to many of the same perceived decadences of modern life that fascism, likewise, arose to combat in the
wake of World War One: Marxism and materialism, liberalism and individualism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism. This amorphous movement may thus be regarded as fellow-travellers of fascism, with an important article of faith separating their paths: the Christian God (in an extensively elaborated and ‘revised’ understanding) came first for clerics intervening in politics where, for fascists, the nation became a partially-revealed, ersatz god.

Jeremy Bransten, Religion and Tolerance, RFE/RL, October 26, 2004

Many of the countries in which the Orthodox Church has a significant following were devastated by communism and by the interethnic conflicts that followed its collapse. Some say the church is uniquely poised to help these societies rebuild, but others question whether Orthodoxy itself — and its historical ties to nationalism — may be part of the problem. In this first of a two-part series on the Orthodox Church, RFE/RL examines this unique link between church and state.
Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Aleksii II accuses the Vatican of “stealing souls” on its territory.

A leading bishop in Russia denounces the import of Western human rights values as an “alien concept.”

In Serbia, the Orthodox clergy rallies behind ultranationalist politicians. A senior churchman rails against the West’s “devilish lust for power.” Another calls for the creation of a “Greater Serbia.”

Are these isolated examples of the abuse of faith, or is there a natural — and sometimes toxic — link between Orthodoxy and nationalism?

Putin’s Reunited Russian Church - TIME, May 17, 2007

Nationalism, based on the Orthodox faith, has been emerging as the Putin regime’s major ideological resource. Thursday’s rite sealed the four-year long effort by Putin, beginning in September 2003, to have the Moscow Patriarchate take over its rival American-based cousin and launch a new globalized Church as his state’s main ideological arm and a vital foreign policy instrument. In February press conference, Putin equated Russia’s “traditional confessions” to its nuclear shield, both, he said, being “components that strengthen Russian statehood and create necessary preconditions for internal and external security of the country.” Professor Sergei Filatov, a top authority on Russian religious affairs notes that “traditional confessions” is the state’s shorthand for the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Church’s assertiveness and presence is growing — with little separation from the State. The Moscow City Court and the Prosecutor General’s Office maintain Orthodox chapels on their premises. Only the Orthodox clergy are entitled to give ecclesiastic guidance to the military. Some provinces have included Russian Orthodox Culture classes in school curricula with students doing church chores. When Orthodox fundamentalists vandalized an art exhibition at the Moscow Andrei Sakharov Center as “an insult to the main religion of our country,” the Moscow Court found the Center managers guilty of insulting the faith, and fined them $3,500 each. The ROC had an opera, based on a famous fairy tale by the poet Alexander Pushkin, censored to the point of cutting out the priest, who is the tale’s main protagonist. “Of course, we have a separation of State and Church,” Putin said during a visit to a Russian Orthodox monastery in January 2004. “But in the people’s soul they’re together.”

Archbishop Christodoulos

Archbishop ChristodoulosArchbishop Christodoulos obituary - Times Online, January 29, 2008

Popular Greek Orthodox priest who used the media to energise his Church and relished attacking its secular enemies

Christodoulos presided over one of the more tumultuous decades of the Orthodox Church of Greece. Elected at 59, he was the youngest archbishop to lead the church. Often outspoken and always at ease with television and the internet, he did much to reinvigorate that unwieldy and somewhat conservative institution.

One of his much publicised achievements was to ease relations between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, in the process eliciting from Pope John Paul II an apology for presumed sins committed by Rome against the Greeks in the crusades.

A formidable priest, Christodoulos spared no efforts to combat what he perceived to be Greek Orthodoxy’s foes. Secularism, Roman Catholicism, the Turks, the Americans, the Jews, the leftwing intelligentsia, even non-Greek Orthodox - all at times came under the lash of his emotional oratory. Once elected to lead the Greek church, in 1998, he tried to use his power to revive the old tradition of ethnarch, or spiritual-cum-political leader, a model which had administered the Christian populations of the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire, and whose most effective recent exemplar had been Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus.

Le patriarche de l’Église orthodoxe roumaine, Daniel. Crédits photo : ASSOCIATED PRESS

Les projets pharaoniques de l’Église orthodoxe à Bucarest, Le Figaro, February 1, 2008

Le projet de construction d’une gigantesque cathédrale, financée pour moitié par l’État, suscite la polémique.

C’est un projet pharaonique, digne de la mégalomanie de Nicolae Ceausescu. Une cathédrale susceptible d’accueillir 6 000 fidèles, complétée par une bibliothèque, un hôtel pour les pèlerins et la résidence du chef de l’Église orthodoxe roumaine. Budget présumé : environ un milliard d’euros.

Lancé à la fin des années 1990, ce «nouveau Vatican» a soulevé une polémique qui n’a cessé de s’amplifier. Non parce qu’il transgresse les règles intimistes de l’architecture orthodoxe, mais parce qu’il devrait être financé en grande partie par l’État roumain qui a déjà offert le terrain : onze hectares au cœur de Bucarest, juste derrière le palais cyclopéen de Ceausescu, devenu aujourd’hui le siège du Parlement.

Soutenu par une partie de l’intelligentsia, Remus Cernea, le jeune président de l’Association pour la liberté de conscience, multiplie les démarches juridiques pour bloquer la réalisation de ce vaste complexe en dénonçant une «collusion inacceptable entre la classe politique et l’Église». Traité tantôt de «satanique» tantôt de «communiste», Cernea commente laconiquement qu’il doute «vivre dans un pays membre de l’Union européenne».

La future cathédrale «du salut de la nation» est le dernier avatar du retour en force d’une Église orthodoxe qui n’hésite pas à s’ingérer dans la vie publique en affichant des convictions nationalistes exacerbées. Dix-neuf ans après la chute du communisme, les icônes ont pris massivement la place des portraits de l’ex-Conducator dans les écoles. Diverses pressions administratives y ont rendu l’éducation religieuse implicitement obligatoire.

Archbishop Christodoulos paid a historic visit to the Vatican in 2006

Greeks flock to mourn church head, BBC, January 31, 2008

Thousands of mourners have lined the streets of Athens for the funeral of Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Greek Orthodox Church.

The archbishop died on Monday, aged 69, after suffering from cancer.

The funeral, with full state honours, comes after four days of official mourning across the country.

Thousands of people have already paid their last respects to the Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, whose body lay in state at Athens’ cathedral.

The spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, led the funeral service at Athens’ main cathedral.

It was also attended by other senior Orthodox officials, Greek President Karolos Papoulias and Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis. A delegation from the Vatican was also present.

Outside the cathedral, thousands of mourners waited as the funeral cortege wound its way to Athens’ cemetery.

The archbishop’s open coffin was carried on a gun carriage, accompanied by priests, government officials and a large military guard of honour.

“I cried when he died and I am crying today, mourning the loss of our spiritual father,” Spyridon Georgantis was quoted as saying by Reuters.

“He safeguarded our faith and our Greekness,” he said.

Schools, courts and public services were closed on Thursday.

Archbishop Christodoulos was a colourful and controversial figure, says the BBC’s Malcolm Brabant in Greece.

Archbishop Christodoulos paid a historic visit to the Vatican in 2006

He defended the Church’s pre-eminent role in the state and upheld Hellenism - the national character and culture of Greece, our correspondent says.

But critics said that under Archbishop Christodoulos, Greece remained a country which discriminated against those who were not Orthodox, including Catholics and worshippers of other branches of Christianity.

Elected as church leader in 1998, Archbishop Christodoulos was known as a fierce and outspoken defender of Greece and the role of the Orthodox Church within it, our correspondent says.

The archbishop once said that when ancient Greeks were creating the lights of civilisation, Europeans were living in trees.

He said Greeks lived in paradise compared to other Europeans because they had a strong faith, built churches, followed traditions and resisted globalisation.

Archbishop Christodoulos opposed Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union, describing the Turks as barbarians.

Palestinian Christians praying at mass in Gaza on Sunday. (AP)

AP, Gaza’s Christians keep low Christmas profile after activist slain, Haaretz, December 23, 2007

Gaza’s tiny Christian community is keeping a low profile during Christmas this year, traumatized by the killing of a prominent activist after Hamas’ takeover of the coastal territory.

Few Christmas trees are on display, churches are holding austere services and hundreds of Christians hope to travel to the West Bank to celebrate the holiday in Bethlehem. Many say they don’t plan on returning to Gaza.

“We have a very sad Christmas,” said Essam Farah, acting pastor of Gaza’s Baptist Church, which has canceled its annual children’s party because of the grim atmosphere.

About 3,000 Christians live in Gaza, an overwhelmingly conservative Muslim society of 1.5 million people. The two religions have generally had cordial relations over the years.

That relationship has been shaken since Hamas seized control of Gaza last June and especially following the recent death of 32-year-old Rami Ayyad.

Ayyad, a member of the Baptist Church, managed Gaza’s only Christian bookstore and was involved in many charitable activities. He was found shot in the head, his body thrown on a Gaza street in early October, 10 hours after he was kidnapped from the store.

He regularly received death threats from people angry about his perceived missionary work, a rarity among Gaza’s Christians, and the store was firebombed six months before the kidnapping.

No group claimed responsibility for the killing, and no one has openly accused Hamas of persecution. But Christians fear that the Hamas takeover, along with the lack of progress in finding Ayyad’s killers, has emboldened Islamic extremists.

Munson: Krauthammer is a neoconservative whose views on foreign policy are myopic–to put it mildly. But this column demonstrates that neoconservatives can be quite sensible when not discussing foreign policy.

Charles Krauthammer, An Overdose of Public Piety, washingtonpost.com, December 14, 2007

Mike Huckabee explains his surge in the polls thus: “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?” — and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

Steve Almond, A Very Osama Hanukkah | Jewcy.com, December 4, 2007

Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah. As it turns out, the traditional Hanukkah spiel about the oil-that-was-only-supposed-to-last-for-one-day-but-lo-and-behold-it-lasted-for-eight-wowza is mostly Talmudic PR. Contrary to popular myth, the holiday arose from the exact struggle Bin Laden is waging today: an armed rebellion against an imperial power, driven by religious fanaticism and suicidal self-assertion….Judah himself eventually dies, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon carry on the insurgency. Their methods could hardly seem more familiar:

They watched and suddenly saw a noisy crowd with baggage; the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet the bride’s party with tambourines and musicians and much equipment. The Jews rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded and after the survivors fled toward the mountain, all their spoils were taken. Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of music into lamentation.

Again, from where I’m sitting this sounds a lot like, well, terrorism….

As an assimilated and not-very-observant Jew, I grew up hearing almost exclusively about the miracle of the oil.

The only thing I knew about the Maccabees was that they were heroic defenders of the faith who had something to do with the Jewish Olympics. The modern holiday has been recast as a cheery Festival of Lights, a counterpart to the bright tinsel of Christmas. It’s the same impulse that leads Christians to repackage Easter as a vista of bunnies and candy eggs, rather than the commemoration of a brutal public murder.

But this kind of soft-pedaling distorts our history and distracts us from the true meaning of our holidays. Hanukkah really is about a violent insurgency. It’s about the lengths to which the oppressed will go to defend their beliefs. But it’s also about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side.

George F. Will - None of The Below - washingtonpost.com, December 2, 2007

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee’s candidacy rests on serial non sequiturs: I am a Christian, therefore I am a conservative, therefore whatever I have done or propose to do with “compassionate,” meaning enlarged, government is conservatism. And by the way, anything I denote as a “moral” issue is beyond debate other than by the uncaring forces of greed. His is a moralist’s version of the intellectual vanity once ascribed to Oxford’s Benjamin Jowett:

My name is Jowett

Of Balliol College;

If I don’t know it,

It is not knowledge.

Many Iowans think it would be wise to nominate a candidate who, when the Republicans were asked during a debate to raise their hands if they do not believe in evolution, raised his. But, then, Huckabee believes America can be energy-independent in 10 years, so he has peculiar views about more than paleontology.

Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism: He wants Washington to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public, show more solicitude for Americans of modest means and impose more protectionism, thereby raising the cost of living for Americans of modest means.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And — 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note — America must have a Christian president.

Another pious populist who was annoyed by Darwin — William Jennings Bryan — argued that William Howard Taft, his opponent in the 1908 presidential election, was unfit to be president because he was a Unitarian, a persuasion sometimes defined as the belief that there is at most one God. The electorate chose to run the risk of entrusting the presidency to someone skeptical about the doctrine of the Trinity.

If Huckabee succeeds in derailing Romney’s campaign by raising a religious test for presidential eligibility, that will be clarifying: In one particular, America was more enlightened a century ago.

People For the American Way - Texas: “Patriot Pastors” for Perry, 2006

Texas is home to a pioneer of pulpit-based politics, Rick Scarborough, the former minister of First Baptist Church in Pearland and a long-time ally of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Scarborough’s efforts to “mobilize” pastors in politics go back at least as far as 1996, when he ran an ultraconservative-insurgency campaign for president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. (He lost.) In his book that year, Enough Is Enough, Scarborough described his success in creating a local political machine around his church, strongly urging his congregants to run for office at all levels: “At this writing, three members of our church serve on the city council. . . Four of our members serve on the school board. The city manager is a member of our church. The police chief is a member of our church. The assistant district attorney of Brazoria County is a member of our church. . .”[27]…

By 2004, Scarborough created his own network of “Patriot Pastors” to lead evangelicals to the polls for the 2004 election, and expanded it to at least 5,000 by the time Texas voters ratified a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2005. “One of my goals in life is to give the Republican Party courage,” he told The Washington Post during the debate over the “nuclear option” to push through Bush’s extremist judicial nominees.[29] At the same time, Scarborough’s Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration worked in Washington to push Bush’s judicial nominees, organizing a conference timed around the death of Terri Schiavo at which DeLay urged the impeachment of judges, and other speakers suggested execution.[30]

Most Americans, including Senator John McCain, believe that that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” Jon Meacham does a good job of demonstrating the inaccuracy of this notion. But when he writes that the “founding principle of the nation” was that “all men are created equal,” he fails to mention the obvious fact that men like Washington and Jefferson, who eloquently defended the separation of religion and state, did not really believe that “all men are created equal.” This famous phrase appears in the Declaration of Independence, the original draft of which Jefferson wrote in June of 1776. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other members of the Continental Congress made some changes to Jefferson’s draft before it was finally approved on July 4. In the list of the offenses of the British king listed in this text, we find the sentence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Jefferson and his colleagues had no trouble understanding the grievances of the European colonists vis-à-vis the British, but they were incapable of understanding the grievances of the “Indian Savages” who were defending themselves against foreign colonists who were taking their land. When he was president, Jefferson wrote Secretary of War Henry Dearborn on August 28, 1807 that “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Missisipi [sic].” In a later letter to John Adams, dated June 11, 1812, Jefferson wrote that despite the progress of some “Indian Nations,” many “will relapse into barbarism & misery, lose numbers by war & want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains.” As for Jefferson’s slaves, he obviously did not see them as equal to white men. He also obviously did not view women as the equals of men. (Women did not gain the right to vote until the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920.) So when Jefferson and his peers declared that “all men are created equal,” they meant that all white males are created equal. Like most people, they shared most of the biases that prevailed in the society in which they were immersed. There were some things they simply could not see.

Meacham, A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation - New York Times, October 7, 2007

The only acknowledgment of religion in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated “in the year of our Lord 1787.” Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith….

Thomas Jefferson said that his bill for religious liberty in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination.” When George Washington was inaugurated in New York in April 1789, Gershom Seixas, the hazan of Shearith Israel, was listed among the city’s clergymen (there were 14 in New York at the time) - a sign of acceptance and respect. The next year, Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., saying, “happily the government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. … Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a “Christian party in politics.” Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed “Christian amendment” to the Constitution to declare the nation’s fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan.

The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation - that all men are created equal - in the divine.

Palestinian Christian activist stabbed to death in Gaza, AP, Haaretz, October 7, 2007

A Palestinian Christian activist who had received repeated death threats was found stabbed to death in a street in Gaza City early Sunday.

Rami Khader Ayyad, 32, was director of the Teacher’s Bookshop, Gaza’s only Christian bookstore, which is run by the Bible Society of Gaza Baptist church.

Health Ministry officials confirmed his death.

Ayyad had been missing since Saturday evening. Over the years he had received repeated death threats from unidentified people displeased with his missionary work.

The Interior Ministry run by Gaza’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers condemned the killing and said it launched an investigation.

“This grave crime will not pass without punishment,” the ministry said in a statement.

About 3,200 Christians live in Gaza, most of them Greek Orthodox. Relations with Gaza’s Muslims are generally good, and have not deteriorated since Hamas wrested control of the strip in mid-June.

But there have been occasional acts of violence, and in April, a bomb severely damaged the Palestinian Bible Society building in Gaza, which has been operating since 1999.