«(...)The return of religion is bringing two big sets of problems. The first is the return of wars of religion. Did you ever think you would hear the phrase "wars of religion" again? It's something that we associate with the 17th century. The mid-17th century saw a determined attempt to drive religion out of politics. You basically saw, with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the establishment of the modern state system on the principle that the prince could determine the religious worship of the people who lived in his territory: cuius regio, eius religio.
That was the beginning of the great secularization of foreign policy, which went on throughout the 19th century, which was dominated by the balance of power.
Throughout the 20th century, you saw the resurgence of various ideologies in foreign affairs, but they were political ideologies, not religious ideologies. Even a decade ago, nobody really took the return of religion very seriously. In Henry Kissinger's great masterpiece, Diplomacy, a 900-page-long book, the word "religion" does not appear at all in the index. Somebody did a study of the four most important American foreign policy journals between 1980 and 1999. There were a dozen articles about religion in that entire period.
There's a wonderful quote from Madeleine Albright when she was talking with a bunch of Clintonistas in the late 1990s about the Northern Ireland peace process. One of the Clintonistas says, "Can you believe that we are talking about a religious conflict at the end of the 20th century?"
Well, we are now at the beginning of the 21st century, and you can certainly believe that we are talking about religious conflict. The world is very much out of its Westphalian box.
Look at West Africa and Nigeria. You can see a potential conflict, a conflict between fundamentalist Islam and evangelical Christianity. Right along the 10th parallel, there are numerous potential wars or, indeed, real wars of religion going on. Many of the world's older and more intractable conflicts, such as the Palestine-Israeli conflict, are now getting an ever-harder religious edge. Whatever they were in the past, they are becoming real wars of religion.
As John was saying, by the mid-21st century, China could become the world's biggest Muslim country, as well as the world's biggest Christian country, which creates a huge potential for religious conflict and wars.
The problem, of course, with religion is that once it gets involved with politics, it makes things more difficult to deal with, partly because it solidifies loyalties, partly because it inflames passions. You can compromise over land eventually, but when it's a battle between truth versus truth, compromise is much, much more difficult. So wars of religion are coming back, and they are very, very difficult to deal with.
The second problem, of course, is the spread of American-style culture wars. Europeans have always looked at America and seen these culture wars as signs of, quite frankly, American derangement.
But these culture wars are now spreading to Europe and, indeed, to much of the rest of the world. Politics increasingly, in Europe and elsewhere, is being driven by questions of value, questions of identity, questions of the meaning of life. It's not just that old technocratic debate about who gets what and how we run an established welfare state.(...)». Está tudo aqui: God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
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