Sunday, August 23, 1998

The Rev. David Smock

"Religion, Conflict and Peace"

The Rev. David Smock

August 23, 1998

The accumulating evidence, particularly from the suspect arrested in Pakistan, is that the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam was plotted as part of a private terrorist war against the U.S. motivated by an extremist form of Islam. It seems more and more likely that the mastermind and funder of these terrorist acts was Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden is an Islamic fundamentalist from a wealthy Saudi Arabian family who is using his millions to force the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East, to overthrow the Saudi government, and promote his Islamist agenda. Bin Laden for several years operated out of Sudan, whose government shares many of his Islamist ideas, but more recently he has been sheltered in Afghanistan where the Taliban regime is attempting to impose by force its own version of fundamentalist Islam on Afghanistan and probably ultimately to export it to other countries.

This is just one illustration of the interrelationship between religion and conflict. While most world religions advocate peace and love, all too often religion is a factor in fomenting conflict.

Muslims and Christians have long been in conflict in Lebanon; Jews and Muslims in Israel and the Middle East; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Christians and Muslims in Sudan; Roman Catholic Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Serb Orthodox Christians in the various parts of the former Yugoslavia, and most violently recently between Albanian Muslims and Orthodox Serbs in Kosovo. In Rwanda some Catholic priests supported and even participated in the genocide against Tutsis.

While religion and religious identity are factors in all of these conflict, it rarely reflects violent disagreements over religious beliefs, dogma or theology. In many places religious affiliation serves as a form of social identity, a surrogate for ethnic identity. In Sudan the conflict is as much over racial and language differences as it is over religion, since most Christians are Africans and speak African languages while most Muslims consider themselves Arabs and speak Arabic. In Lebanon, there are various brands of Islam and various Christian denominations, and often the differences among the Christians and among the Muslims are as great as the differences between Muslims and Christians. In the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, Christian Arabs are usually in solidarity with Muslim Arabs, so it is not simply a conflict between Muslims and Jews. In Northern Ireland, the conflict has more to do with disparities in levels of wealth and education and political power between Catholics and Protestants than it does about religious differences per se.

At the core of the conflict between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia is the collaboration of many Croats with the Nazis during World War II. I have just read a book manuscript that our Peace Institute financed written by a young Croatian scholar that points out that one of the most powerful causes of Serb hatred of Croats has been the collaboration of the Croatian Roman Catholic Cardinal, Cardinal Stepinac with the Nazis during World War II and the support that cardinal received from many of the Croatian Catholic clergy. In collaboration with the Nazis, many Croats engaged in widespread slaughter of thousands of Serbs. What is resented the most is the role of the Catholic cardinal in all this.

Much of this seems remote from us and from the UCC, but I can tell another story about how the UCC was indirectly involved in the civil war in Angola on the side of the CIA-supported UNITA rebels. The Congregational Church started sending missionaries to one region of Angola in the first half of this century. Many of the Ovumbundu people were educated at Congregational mission schools. Jonas Savimbi, the head of the UNITA rebels and many of his supporters were among those who were trained at these schools and became Congregationalists. Over the many years that the civil war continued and particularly during the period that UNITA was being supported by the CIA as well as by the apartheid regime in South Africa, the UCC was sending contributions to the Angolan Congregational Church in rebel-held territory without any assurance that the money was actually reaching the churches. There was the very real possibility that this money was going into the coffers of UNITA that Jonas Savimbi controlled. When I worked in the Office of the President of the UCC in the late 1980s, I tried to get these payments stopped. Some retired Congregational missionaries, retired from their years in Angola and supporters of Savimbi and UNITA, spread the word around the UCC that I was a troublemaker in order to undermine my efforts. The World Board of the UCC finally set up a review committee that decided that these payments should stop. But for several years the UCC was seen as a supporter, even a financial supporter, of the rebellion against the Angolan government.

The other side of the religion and conflict ledger are the many stories that can be told about religious peacemakers, reflecting the passage read from Matthew - Blessed are the peacemakers. Those who make peace are faithful disciples. I have worked closely over the last several years with a Catholic lay organization in Italy called St. Egidio. The Peace Institute has supported several of their peacemaking efforts. St. Egidio orchestrated the peace talks that brought a peace settlement to Mozambique. St. Egidio came closer than anyone else to bringing about agreement between the Algerian government and its Islamic fundamentalist opponents. And more recently, St. Egidio has been the only group that has managed to bring together Serbian president Milosevic and the Albanian leaders of Kosovo. I have also watched with admiration the work of the All Africa Conference of Churches promoting peace in Sudan and in the Congo. In 1973 the All Africa Conference of Churches in collaboration with the World Council of Churches mediated a peace agreement in Sudan that held for 10 years. Mennonite mediators have been effective in negotiating a peace accord between the Nicaraguan government and rebellious Indian groups. Archbishop Tutu and the Rev. Frank Chicane were key players in managing the peaceful transition in South Africa.

An explicitly religious dimension has been added to many discussions of peacemaking over the last year. That dimension is forgiveness. Our Peace Institute has supported three projects which are reflecting on how to promote political forgiveness in places of severe conflict like Northern Ireland, Lebanon, El Salvador, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia. Much of this conversation is stirred by a book on political forgiveness written recently by the former president of Union Theological Seminary, Don Shriver.

For most of you, this discussion of international peace and conflict probably sounds remote. It is very difficult to see how we can be engaged. But we are still obliged to ask ourselves, what can we do to be live up to our biblically mandated responsibility to be peacemakers. It is much easier to see how we can be peacemakers in our families and in this community. But we can also be engaged internationally. We can certainly contribute to humanitarian assistance to the victims of wars and to refugees, people like Kiiza. And we can do more. The impact of what we do may not be immediately clear, but it is still worth the engagement.

One important thing we can do is to avoid labeling other religious groups as enemies. Because some Islamic fundamentalists have engaged in terrorist acts, it is tempting to demonize Muslims and Islam generally. But the labeling of all Muslims as enemies is dangerous and wrongheaded. Most forms of Islam are benign and committed to peace; to label Muslims as enemies only precipitates more conflict.

And there are other things we can do. The UCC was deeply engaged in the movement for disinvestment from South Africa. Many of us believe that that helped move South Africa toward peace and justice, although to some extent that is an article of faith; we can't be sure we made a difference. Bill Briggs, who was pastor of a small UCC church in New Hampshire before he became conference minister in New York, run a private effort to bring peace to Cambodia for several years. Bill's detractors thought he was tilting at windmills, but he made a good faith effort to promote peace in Cambodia and he may have made a difference. The deep engagement of this congregation over several years with Bridges for Peace cast a pebble on the water that may have made a small difference in bringing peaceful transition to the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. A faithful group within the UCC has struggled over the past 10 years to promote dialogue and exchange between the U.S. and Cuba as a means of promoting peace between our two countries. It is impossible to tell whether the relationships they have established might help bring about the desired end in the years ahead.

However small and distant our contribution may be, we are called as faithful Christians to be peacemakers - peacemakers within our families, within our community, and even within the wider world. We may think that our small efforts won't make any difference, but as faithful Christians we are not asked to anticipate and predict the outcomes, but to be faithful on the journey.

As our passage from Isaiah states, "If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Amen

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