Our Religious War

By Crispin Sartwell

The President and his advisors have denied that "the war on terror" is a religious war, trying to distance themselves from the preaching of General and Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence William "Jerry" Boykin. Boykin who had appeared in church in dress uniform, portraying the "war on terror" as a battle of Christians against Satan. He has said "my God is bigger" than Allah, and claimed that George W. Bush "was appointed by God."

Whatever the official position, however, we are indeed engaged in a religious war. The United States is ruled by evangelical Christians, among them George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. Israel is controlled by conservative Jews, with ultra-orthodox parties often holding the balance of power between the major parties. "Hezbollah" means "party of God." Iran is ruled by Shia mullahs with nuclear ambitions. Al Qaeda has its origin in the Muslim religious movement known as Wahabbi, to which the royal family of Saudi Arabia has been connected for a century. The conflict between India (which is governed by Hindu nationalists) and Islamic Pakistan, nurtures terrorism and always threatens to go nuclear. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were the original sponsors of the Taliban theocracy in which al Qaeda was sheltered. Russia's intractable problem in Chechnya - the source of its own terrorism - pits Russian Orthodoxy (which Vladimir Putin describes as the unifying feature of Russian culture) against Islamists.

All the fronts and all of the aspects of the "war on terror" are defined by their religious dimensions. The word "crusade" emerged naturally from the President's lips at the beginning of the whole thing.

Historians have had some trouble catching up with this situation. Karl Marx, in a basic claim that was absorbed by Marxists and capitalists alike, held the engine of history to be exclusively economic, and religion to be a mere mask for economic relations. When, around 1885, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that "God is dead," he meant that the world was lurching into complete secularization in which religion was quickly becoming irrelevant to history. And as capitalism squared off against communism through much of the century, these claims seemed roughly correct.

But surely we are now in a golden era of religious faith, a golden era of theocracy, and a golden era of religious war. Not since the use of Christianity to subdue the Americas, Africa, and Australia have so many people been slaughtered in the name of God. During the colonial period, religious rhetoric concealed political domination and economic exploitation. Today, political and economic rhetoric conceal religious struggle.

The truth is that the various dimensions of power - political, military, religious, and economic - are bound together inextricably in every concrete situation in which power circulates. All of them move around and through us like an atmosphere we breathe. Americans rejected communism as much as anything for its godlessness, and probably no national elective office has ever been held by a professed atheist, or, for that matter, by a non-Christian. Our work ethic is protestant. Our laws are codifications of "the Judeo-Christian tradition." Our nation is blessed, a beacon of light in a benighted world.

It may be that the motivations for the invasion of Iraq were fundamentally economic, or fundamentally military. But they were as well religious, if nothing else because in our culture as in others, military, economic, and religious power are basically held in the same hands and move in the same direction.

Moslem terrorists consider Christians and Jews to be infidels. Fair enough, because Boykin and his sponsors consider Moslems infidels as well. Get far enough into a religious system, particularly the Abrahamic monotheisms - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and you become profoundly alien to those of the other faiths, and they to you: unensouled and so not fully human, despised by God, worthy only to be conquered and converted or else annihilated.

The notion that the war on terror is not religious is itself an ideology that seeks legitimacy for war on other grounds. But the people on all sides who are waging it are fundamentally driven by differences of faith. "Crusade" is precisely the right word, down to the struggle over the Holy Land. The problem that Bush and company have with Boykin isn't that what he said misrepresented the administration's beliefs, but that it stated those beliefs frankly.

Crispin Sartwell's book "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives" will be published in November. Contact him at c.sartwell@verizon.net.