Propulsion = Absolutism (Theological)
Let us next examine what it is that propels the aircraft called religion from point A to B. Simply stated it is religious faith grounded in belief, leading all too often to intolerance, sometimes fanatically so, of other belief systems. For readers wondering why this characteristic is listed second instead of first, the answer is that as important as it is, it pales in comparison to the ease with which ostensibly universal religions revert to their tribal/racial/ethnic pasts.
In today’s world, to think of religious intolerance is to think, first and foremost, of Islam. And it must be admitted there is good reason for doing so. For example, in a recent statement the well-known Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said, “Tell America, tell all the world, tell the Governing Council, that I have God by my side and they have the devil by theirs, and to my followers, I say, do not think we are not powerful. We can fight and defeat anyone! While it is possible to interpret Muqtada’s words as so much bluster, unfortunately the same cannot be said of the following report in the New York Times:
“The only reward for those who make war on Allah and on Muhammad, his messenger, and plunge into corruption, will be to be killed or crucified or have their hands and feet severed on alternate sides, or be expelled from the land,” the man says. With that, the two gunmen flanking the executioner shout “Allahu akbar!” God is Great, drop their Kalashnikovs and tumble Mr. Fawazi face down on the ground. The killer pulls his knife from behind a magazine belt on his chest, grabs Mr. Fawazi by the hair, severs his head, holds it up briefly to the camera, then places it between his rope-tied hands on his back.
The assertion that a barbarous act of this nature was done as a demonstration of God’s “Great[ness]” will no doubt strike many readers, as it does this author, as religious fanaticism at its worst. Especially if one is not a Muslim, it will be easy to point to acts of this nature as proof of Islam’s underlying, if not inherent, cruelty.
Yet the question must be asked, how do or should we react to the following story of religiously sanctioned barbarity, this time by the “Christian soldiers” of the United States? In 1906, at the time of the Filipino-American War, Major General Leonard Wood, governor of the Philippines, sent the following report to President Teddy Roosevelt on the occasion of a massacre of Filipino Muslim “insurgents” and their families:
“The enemy numbered six hundred—including women and children—and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.” In response, President Roosevelt sent a cable to the American troops praising their “brilliant feat of arms” and the excellent way they “upheld the honor of the American flag.”
Are we in the United States, especially those who are Christians, as appalled by this act of Christian depravity, that is “leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother,” as we are by the earlier Muslim beheading? If so, given that this atrocity happened more than a century ago, where or how do we commemorate (let alone atone for) the slaughter of Muslim innocents to match the multi-million dollar memorial being built at “Ground Zero” for the victims of 9/11? Is it only barbarity when Americans are the victims rather than the perpetrators? Furthermore, in the case of 9/11 there was no Arab government praising the terrorist perpetrators for upholding the “honor” of their flag.
It would, of course, be comforting to claim that the above incident was merely a one-off aberration by the “Christian soldiers of the United States.” Yet, when placed in the context of the following pro-war address on the floor of the Senate on January 9, 1900, it is difficult to believe that Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana would have opposed their actions:
Mr. President, this question is … elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No! He had made the U.S. the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this, the world would relapse into barbarism and night.
And of all our race, He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: “Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things.”
It should be noted that in the Philippines, U.S. soldiers killed upwards of 250,000 “savages and senile peoples” in the course of their alleged “divine mission.”
Needless to say, Senator Beveridge’s speech in 1900 was deeply rooted in the earlier doctrine of Manifest Destiny that spoke of God’s desire to give the entire American continent to “His chosen nation.” This doctrine had first been used to justify the slaughter of Native American “blood-thirsty savages” as part of God’s overarching plan. In fact, even prior to the creation of the United States it was claimed that God’s hand was at work in delivering this continent to the English invaders. John Archdale was the English (and Quaker) colonial governor of North Carolina who in 1707 wrote the following in Description of Carolina:
And courteous Readers, I shall give you some farther Eminent Remark hereupon, and especially in the first Settlement of Carolina, where the Hand of God was eminently seen in thinning the Indians, to make room for the English. … it at other times pleased Almighty God to send unusual Sicknesses amongst them, as the Smallpox, etc., to lessen their Numbers.
The belief that God actively intervened to kill the enemies of His chosen people was certainly part of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, but it was by no means a novel idea, for it had a long pedigree within European Christianity, most especially among the English Puritans who, like so many others before and after, had tribalized their faith into a uniquely English (and deadly) formulation.
Representative of such Puritan leaders was Oliver Cromwell, who in 1641 had been sent by Parliament to restore order in Catholic Ireland. Cromwell proceeded to the port town of Drogheda and ordered his troops to storm its garrison where they massacred four thousand of its inhabitants, including about a thousand women, children and friars in the cathedral of St. Peter.
In taking these actions Cromwell was firmly convinced that he was doing the Lord’s work, for the Puritans believed that it was they who were the “elect,” chosen by God as his people. In fact, they were certain the British people as a whole were uniquely favored by God as demonstrated by the miraculous victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 and by England’s rapid growth as a maritime nation.
“It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors,” Cromwell reported after Drogheda. “This hath been a marvelous great mercy. I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.” The “great thing” that should be done was “done, not by power or might, but by the Spirit of God.”
Yet, in one sense it would be wrong to be too harsh in assessing this aspect of Cromwell’s (and the Puritans’) theology, for they had a mighty teacher in the form of one of the fathers of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. Luther addressed issues of war and peace in his 1523 work Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed as follows:
If your opponent is your equal, your inferior, or of a foreign government, you should first offer him justice and peace, as Moses taught the children of Israel. If he is unwilling, then use your best strategy and defend yourself by force against force. … And in such a war it is a Christian act and an act of love confidently to kill, rob, and pillage the enemy, and do everything that can injure him until one has conquered him according to the methods of war. … Such happenings must be considered as sent of God, that He may now and then cleanse the land and drive out the knaves.
It is significant that Luther mentioned Moses as a source of inspiration for his teaching on allegedly Christian warfare, for it was of course Moses who led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and repeatedly lead successful battles on the way to the Promised Land. The only problem was that when the Israelites finally reached that land, they encountered, then as now, other peoples already living there. For God, however, this was no impediment. According to Deuteronomy 20:10-18, God instructed his chosen people as follows:
But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall _annihilate the_—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their Gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.
Note that the other must be totally destroyed to the last man, woman and child in order that they may not teach his chosen people “to do all the abhorrent things they do for their Gods.” If the Bible is to be believed, it is God himself who is the author of religious intolerance, not to mention what we today identify as “genocide.”
Further, given this scriptural basis in the Hebrew Bible, it is hardly surprising to see the following contemporary comments made by Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the Shas political party:
During a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday, the influential Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef exclaimed: “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, _and annihilate them._” He added: “It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.”
Again, should readers think that the Abrahamic faiths are being unfairly singled out here, it could be demonstrated that all of the world’s major religions, or at least their leading adherents, have embraced variations of the absolutist, intolerant, and deadly positions noted above. Given limitations of space, the preceding examples will have to serve to demonstrate that like tribal/racial/ethnic religion, the propulsion mechanism of the aircraft called religion still functions if not exactly ‘smoothly’ then at least ‘forcefully’ not to mention ‘deadly.’
Fuselage = Security (Psychological)
What is it that offers protection to the passengers on the aircraft called religion as they hurtle through the air? It is, of course, the aircraft’s fuselage, hermetically sealed, pressurized and, at least in first class seats, quite comfortable. Its chief characteristics are:
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Rituals and religious practices in their many forms provide a sense of belonging and give purpose and meaning to adherents’ lives. They feel a sense of connection to both the past and the future, as well as to their fellow believers.
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While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, adherents are also aware that outside their “security blanket” lies a cold and dangerous world.
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This leads to a deep desire to conform to the norms of the group and its leaders within one’s fuselage/faith, for to do otherwise is to risk the danger of expulsion as an unbeliever or heretic.
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The outside environment is regarded as dangerous, not least of all because it is inhabited by those who don’t share one’s religious beliefs and practices, making them disruptive at best and potentially dangerous.
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Thus, when another ‘aircraft’ with strange markings and strange faces at the windows draws too near to one’s cozy world, it is hard to avoid a sense of anxiety, even fear, a ready pretext for violence.
Many readers will recall the varying degrees of discomfort they experienced the first time they visited a denomination (let alone a faith) significantly different from their own. Questions arise such as, When and how long should I stand or sit? Or, Must I kneel to pray? Or, Protestants in a Catholic church might ask, Does my faith allow me to make a sign in the shape of a cross as I enter the Church?
I vividly recall meeting a childhood Catholic friend after a lapse of more than twenty years. He recounted with amusement how concerned his Catholic parents had been when I occasionally invited him over for supper on a Friday night. His mother was suspicious that since my family typically ate meat on Fridays, it was a Protestant plot to lure their son away from Catholicism! If suspicions of this kind can exist between believers in different denominations of the same faith, it is not difficult to understand why far stronger suspicions exist between believers of different faiths. For example, the Taliban in Afghanistan viewed the two giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan as un-Islamic, graven images deserving of destruction, something they accomplished in March 2001. For them, the other, albeit in the form of a statue, could not be tolerated.
The reader will also recall that in Deuteronomy 20:10-18, God instructed his chosen people that, upon entering the Promised Land, they “must not let anything that breathes remain alive.” However, when it was a question of how Israelites should treat one another, Deuteronomy 15:7-10 had this to say:
If a fellow Israelite from one of your villages in the land that the Lord your God is giving you should be poor, you must not harden your heart or be insensitive to his impoverished condition. Instead, you must be sure to open your hand to him and generously lend him whatever he needs.
Be careful lest you entertain the wicked thought that the seventh year, the year of cancellation of debts, has almost arrived, and your attitude be wrong toward your impoverished fellow Israelite and you do not lend him anything; he will cry out to the Lord against you and you will be regarded as having sinned. You must by all means lend to him and not be upset by doing it, for because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you attempt.
The tribal mentality of the Israelites of that era is crystal clear. While the other must be completely destroyed, one’s fellow tribal members must be treated with compassion and understanding. The question must be asked, has anything changed in the intervening two thousand plus years?
One person who would likely reply in the negative is Josh Rushing, a former Marine Corps media liaison officer in Iraq who went on to become a correspondent for Al Jazeera International and author of Mission Al Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World. Rushing recounts how he first began to have doubts about his role as a Marine Corps media spokesperson upon seeing graphic video on Al Jazeera of both dead American and Iraqi soldiers. His initial reaction was one of anger directed toward Al Jazeera for having shown dead American soldiers but little or no anger regarding similar footage of dead Iraqi soldiers.
When Rush asked himself why he had reacted as he had, a process of self-discovery was initiated that led him to recognize that his initial revulsion stemmed from his gut-level identification with his fellow U.S. soldiers. Only later was he able to view the Iraqi war dead with the same degree of concern, leading to resignation of his officer’s commission and, subsequently, to work at what many U.S. military and civilian leaders still regard as a media outlet for the promotion of anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism. In short, over a period of months and years, Rush came to recognize the humanity he shared in common with the other, and his life changed dramatically as a result.
A related incident took place in the 2000 TV film Nuremburg, which dealt with the trials of suspected Nazi war criminals in Nuremburg in 1945-46. The film focused both on the trials themselves as well as the true story of Jewish-American Gustave Gilbert, a U.S. Army psychologist assigned to monitor the mental condition of the defendants. Seizing this opportunity, Gilbert set out on a personal quest to understand how it had been possible for Nazi leaders to undertake the genocidal acts associated with the Holocaust.
After interviewing Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and other leading Nazis over a period of months, Gilbert had a “eureka moment,” following which he confided to the chief American prosecutor: “I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it—a lack of empathy … a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.“
This insight is the key to understanding the psychological relationship between one religion and another, or even tension between different branches of the same faith. The key question becomes whether adherents of any faith can move beyond lip service to such universal doctrines as “we are all God’s children” or “all sentient beings have the Buddha nature” to the point where adherents genuinely place the same value on the other as they do on themselves, their loved ones and their fellow citizens.
While many would like to think they already embrace this attitude, how many are prepared to travel, for example, to Iraq or Afghanistan to serve as human shields or otherwise aid those innocent civilians and their families who day after day are killed by all sides, including so-called collateral damage from American military actions?
According to John 15:13, Jesus said: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But the perennial question for those seated in the comfortable, pressurized cabin of the aircraft called religion is this—just who are our “friends”?
Seating = Hierarchy (Sociological)
As everyone who flies knows full well, not all passengers are treated equally, neither in seat allocation, legroom, food, or even in-flight entertainment. So what are the criteria for deciding which passengers get what on the aircraft called religion?
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Not surprisingly, high-ranking clergy, the successors of tribal shamans, pilot the aircraft called religion. As such, they are the leaders the laity looks to for guidance and in whose hands the spiritual safety of the faithful lies.
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At the same time, only a few clergy ever get to actually pilot the aircraft and most are relegated to either first or business class seats. It is while occupying these seats of privilege that they address the needs of their flocks, most of whom will always remain in economy class.
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In this situation, the clergy (pilots and non-pilots alike) have a vested interest in maintaining their privileged positions in the aircraft.
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Unsurprisingly, clergy can easily become attached to their power and prestige, fully aware that challenging the status quo can threaten their position. Thus, in practice they often (though admittedly not always) act as a socially conservative force.
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In times of crisis, especially at the beginning and in the midst of war, the clergy enjoy, at least momentarily, enhanced status since it is they who validate the justness and morality of the conflict as well as valorize the deaths of combatants on the battlefield and comfort their bereaved at home.
Perhaps no American better understood the danger posed by privileged clergy to the state than Thomas Jefferson. In 1814 he wrote the following to Horatio G. Spafford: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
While Jefferson was no doubt referring to the long history of a generally mutually supportive, if not corrupting, relationship between Christian clergy and European monarchs and royalty, he was clearly prescient if we examine the relationship in the modern era between both Protestant and Catholic Church leaders and one of the greatest despots of all time, Adolf Hitler.
On the one hand it is true that there were men like Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, albeit relatively late in the day, did actively oppose Hitler’s demonic savagery. Yet he was only one of a handful of Lutheran clergyman who acted similarly. This is made clear in the following words of Martin Niemöller who, though he would later oppose Hitler, honestly admitted the role of Church leaders like himself in bringing Hitler to power in the first place:
Hitler promised us [in 1931] financial support, control of the schools, and real collaboration on the part of the State if he should attain power. He promised to restore all the churches’ rights, which we could not hope to attain under the Weimar Republic. We were all very favorably impressed with his talk and with his apparent modesty, and I know that from that day on … Hitler had the full support of the Protestant Church in Germany.
And what of Catholic Church leaders? Were they any different? The answer to this question can be found in the Church’s relationship with the world’s first fascist, Benito Mussolini, for in 1929 the Catholic Church signed a pact with his government known as the Lateran Agreements. In celebrating this event, the Catholic press wrote: “Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy.” The Vatican itself organized a large tribute to Mussolini, describing him as the “Man whom Providence has sent us.”
Given this background, it is not surprising that the Vatican would move to establish a similar relationship with the Nazi regime even though, early on, there had been tension between them. This agreement, known as the Concordat, was signed on July 8, 1933, in Rome and represented an official guarantee to the church in the form of an international treaty that the church would gain everything it had long fought for, that is freedom for Catholic organizations, maintenance of denominational schools, and preservation of the general influence of the Church on the education of German youth.
And what did Hitler’s Reich get in return? According to a report written by OSS Director William Donovan at the time of the postwar Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, reciprocation consisted of “a pledge of loyalty by the clergy to the Reich government and in a promise that Catholic religious instruction would emphasize the patriotic duties of the Christian citizen and insist on a loyal attitude toward the Fatherland.”
There will, no doubt, be those who will defend both Italian and German Church leaders with the claim that in order to preserve the faith they had no choice but to cooperate if not collaborate with the all-powerful, all-pervasive fascist regimes of their respective countries. Yet, did such cooperation require that, upon the celebration of the birth of the “Prince of Peace” in December 1942, the Catholic Church’s Office of Military Affairs provide the following “model sermon” for its approximately 10,000 military chaplains in Hitler’s military?
God gave the German people a noble mission in this war—reordering Europe. This reconstruction should be done in the name of Christ. Bolshevism means a Europe without God, and without and against Christ. The front of young nations led by Germany wants a Europe with God, with Christ. … So we celebrate the birth of Christ very purposely. Christianity is after all not just a workshop for the highest spiritual culture but also a construction site for national greatness and power. Further, Pope Pius XII himself issued the following statement on July 30, 1941: “Hitler’s war is a noble enterprise in the defense of European culture.”
As much as we should acknowledge and celebrate the handful of Protestant and Catholic clergy who actively opposed Hitler’s reign, the anecdotal evidence suggests (even though not proving it definitively), that there were many more Church leaders who, as Thomas Jefferson noted, were indeed “in alliance with the despot,” while “abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
Of course, it can cogently be argued that self-love/self-preservation is a truly universal human trait—and of course it is. Further, this self-love can apply to the organization of which one is a part, not simply one’s person. However, a major difference is that most ordinary folks don’t attempt to present themselves and the religious organizations of which they are a part as exemplars of moral rectitude, let alone possessors of “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” In viewing the hierarchical seating arrangement on the aircraft called religion, one cannot help but recall the passage in Luke 4:23 in which Jesus states: “Physician, heal thyself.”
