IN THE Name of God : The dark side of Religion

Two places, the World Trade Center and Waco, are now twinned in the headlines and in the minds of the public. It is accident alone that connects the name of a Texas city with terror in the name of God. And nothing in their doings led the workers in the New York center of commerce to attract terrorists in the name of another God. Events turn both those close at hand and citizens at a distance into victims--victims of blind and blinding zeal.

The World Trade Center and Waco, then, become code names for bizarre connections between bloodshed and belief, murder and religion. A stunned nation looks on, its people more wary than before of zealotry, less sure of the groundwork of their world.

Great questions get associated with the twinnings of these terrorisms. The fact that the one gets covered as a “conspiracy” and the other as a “cult” helps make comparisons and contrasts by observers possible, but no angle on either offers reasons for comfort.

One widespread American notion certainly gets challenged by events. People typically say, “It doesn’t make any difference what you believe, as long as you believe.” People in the United States are trained to have faith in faith, to show respect for the act of believing. One often hears a kind of regard for deep commitment in times of shallowness: “I may not agree with them, but, by God, at least they’ve got some conviction.”

After Waco and the World Trade Center, some may well question whether belief is all that healthful for the republic, whether faith is always a good thing and whether lightly held religious claims may not be better than those that inspire zealotry. Stunning events elicit questionings of things most of us hold dear.

How can religious belief and murderous action come to be tied together at all? A message of peace is at the heart of Christianity, off which the Branch Davidians in their fortress compound in Texas are weird extensions; and of Islam, which gets accused of inspiring the grotesque expressions of the New York bombers. The world’s religions offer the promise of healing and wholeness; their messengers talk about reconciling people with God and each other. But faith systems may have an underside that produces a kind of spiritual underworld, one that has become all too visible.

People who fiercely follow a charismatic leader draw on the same resources that religions use to heal, but turn them into the power to kill. In both cases, the followers claim to have seen God, or had a vision of the holy; they have been in contact with the sacred. The healers experience a world that transcends the ordinary, and bring their new awareness into a world of brokenness to mend it. The killers announce that the sacred exists to make them aware that a transcendent God licenses and even orders them to do battle against the forces of anti-God. There is no way to assure that all appeals to the sacred will lead to peace and health instead of war and hatred.

The Waco and World Trade Center horrors at the very least teach a lesson: “It does make a difference what you believe.” The limits of casual tolerance are reached when citizens see children as pawns in the one case, or innocent people in the work place as victims in the other. These horrors bring close to rural and urban America alike a reality that shadows most of the world daily.

By now we are used to reading headlines from Northern Ireland that speak of Protestant and Catholic “armies,” of how “Jewish radicals on the West Bank attack,” or “Muslim fundamentalists (in the Middle East, North Africa and the subcontinent of Asia) assault,” or how “Hindu militants attack a mosque.” Our domestic versions of zealotry have been milder, though our own civilization gets tested ever more frequently. The murder of a doctor outside a clinic in Florida on Wednesday--explained if not justified by some as the prevention of a dozen murders of unborn babies that day--may portend difficulties to come if the crusading spirit becomes widespread. For now, the New Christian Right has concentrated on winning caucuses and taking over political units within the rules of the game. Their members may be troubling in the eyes of their enemies, but they are ordinarily not threats to life and limb.

But now there seems no place to hide. This winter, America joined the world of religiously inspired violence. “What to do?” we ask, in a world where there is much faith in doing. A rational sounding but often cynical few urge the end of religion. But its disappearance would do little.

Most of the century’s personal and social terrors have been executed without reference to God or the sacred. In any case, religion will not disappear. If anything, here and abroad, the spiritual realm offers too much consolation to too many, and is growing as a force in personal and public life in a world that was supposed to have been, or been turning, secular.

What to do? Study religion? Studying does help us understand some things, and discriminate in others. For example, one of the most urgent lessons for non-Muslims to learn is not to go Muslim-bashing, falsely associating fanatics with mainstream Islam. Or, for that matter, expecting Adventists or Christians, in general, to recognize themselves in any part of the heretical offshoot of Adventist apocalypticism in the bunkers in Texas. But studying will not make terrorists go away.

The next tempting counsel is: Make law serve to prevent such acts. Forbid religious extremist movements to exist. Force people to conform to the standards of tolerance in a republic. Such counsel seems logical and humane. But it is on this front that a nation under psychological siege and tempted to overreact has to be most cautious. Our Founding Fathers considered religious freedom to be “The First Liberty,” the best assurer of all the others. Limit it and you begin to limit them all.

The founders offered counsel when there was a normal eruption of religious aggression. James Madison said that, if a conflagration broke out through the acts of one faction in a republic, we could and should count on the others to counter it. But that does not help at the moment: All the groups together in the “Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches” could not contain the leaders of the attacks in Waco or on the World Trade Center.

So the temptation to rely on law remains. Three years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court shocked most religious leaders with its ruling in Employment Division vs. Smith. It held that an Oregon statute forbidding the use of the peyote drug in Native American religious ceremonies did not violate the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion. The government therewith began the dangerous activity of spelling out what is licit and illicit in religion. Religious leaders, from fundamentalist to liberal, rose up in reaction: What will happen to the First Amendment? Which religion will be next? In any case, what would court-based threats to the free exercise of religion have done to prevent the current madnesses?

There are times when almost everyone backs the courts as they intrude, in the most extreme circumstances, on religious expression. The law has stepped in to take an innocent, unconsulted child from parental care for a moment to assure its life through a blood transfusion, though such an act violated the parents’ religion. But an instinct in the citizenry has asked that such acts be rare. It may sound cruel, after the events of this winter, to say that it is better for Americans to risk a Jonestown--the mass suicide in the name of religion--or a Waco, to have the expensive trauma of the World Trade Center bombing, than to overinvolve the government in defining religion or to have citizens enforce orthodoxies.

Surveillance of those who would murder and bomb has its place. Preventing bloodshed, especially when that bloodshed is in the name of God, is a praiseworthy, indeed, urgent activity. But at a time when the veneer of our civilization seems to be cracking and when faith in the civility of faith is tested, the worst thing that could happen would be to clump together all the religious, the healers and the killers, the reconcilers and the haters, as if they were the same thing. Or to ask the government to get into the business of telling anyone what to believe and how to please everyone else by the ways of expressing their belief. Such notions are dangers as threatening as the possibilities of future murders and bombings in the name of God.