Fear of the God-Fearing

It was one of those ideas only an outsider could come up with, and the short six-month tenure of John Danforth as the American ambassador to the United Nations has certainly been that of an outsider.The ordained Episcopalian priest from Missouri, like so many Americans from the heartland, believes in religion as a possible force for good in the world and he thought the U.N. could use a good exchange of religious ideas. Recently, however, Mr. Danforth gave up, telling Colum Lynch of the Washington Post, “I think it’s really not an idea whose time has come.”“Religion is more the problem than the answer in today’s world,” he said. “Trying to bridge the religious divide is something that is very important in managing conflict, so I’ve had this notion that there should be some sort of facility for mediating religious disputes.”The utter contempt by which the idea was met was a lesson about the great divide between most Americans, (as the November election showed), and the world, including the State Department, where sources tell me Mr. Danforth was gently told to forget about it.At the U.N., it was all but laughed at. Here, the General Assembly managed to pass a 3-page resolution in January 2001 declaring a “year of dialogue among civilizations” without once mentioning the word religion.That idea had been hatched in Iran, a nation ruled by fierce theologians who allow for very little internal religious dialogue. Despite the verbose resolution, one Israeli reporter, despite belonging to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, was barred by his Iranian host from asking questions at a breakfast event kicking off the year of dialogue.Upon arriving at the U.N., Mr. Danforth toyed with his idea, bouncing it off the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But here even representatives of the Organization of Islamic Conference and the Vatican were not very receptive.“This does not belong,” the observer of the Holy See at the U.N., Archbishop Celestino Migliore, told me recently. “It’s not based in the Charter.” His objection was mostly premised on church state separations, but it might have been influenced by his experience in European ruling circles, where the church’s past sins loom large when religion is spoken of.“To a lot of Europeans, still steeped in memories of the Catholic Church’s intellectual repression, religion is an irrational force,” the Canadian liberal Muslim writer Irshad Manji recently observed in the New York Times. In North America, intolerance of Muslims, where it exists, derives from a rational fear of terrorism, she wrote, while Europeans fear Muslim symbols and the religion itself.At the U.N., the Unification Church has tried to establish a body made of religious leaders, only to be laughed at. Not just because it came from the Moonies, the president of the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Public Policy, Joseph Grieboski, told me, but because diplomats shun “soft” exchanges on religion, favoring to deal with hard interests instead.Mr. Grieboski’s institution is designed to give religion a voice in the policy-making process. “To keep religion out of the question,” he said, “is to ignore what nearly 80% of the global population considers one of the most important factors of identity and of life.”Europe, he argued, has spread its “militant anti-religiosity” around the world, with France leading the charge by banning Muslim head scarves, and Germany fearing scientologists. But, as any Falun Gong believer in China could attest, fear of religion is not confined to Europe. Religion was a source of many wars through the ages, as Europeans and Middle Easterners well remember. But America’s major global battles were against Communists and Nazis who vehemently opposed religion.As we all light another candle this week or continue the countdown to Christmas, let me say I am not God-fearing. At times I even fear the wrath of those who are. When religious beliefs result in the mutilation of women’s bodies, as they do in certain parts of the Middle East and Africa, I think they should be fought.That said, Mr. Danforth’s idea was one of those rare moments at the U.N. when something new and fresh graces a very stale and formulaic landscape. As Mr. Grieboski noted, it was a very American idea meeting an environment in which “you’ve committed blasphemy by mentioning the word religion.”Mr. Avni covers the United Nations for the Sun. He can be reached at bavni@nysun.com.

Fear of the God-Fearing

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