A long time ago--really, a long time ago: about 1959--two or three young women came to our door in Fremont, California, and tried to convince us that the Kingdom of God was coming down the road. They were Jehovah's Witnesses. In those dark, gray flannel days, I was a church member--in fact, a clergyman--but I was not ready to sign up for Armageddon.
A couple of weeks ago, two or three other women came to our door here in Tucson, and asked whether was interested in world peace; whether I deplored war. I assured them I was, and did, and they said, "Good!". Then they explained that the only way to achieve world peace was to give up our democratic ways and to welcome a king: Jesus, or God. It was not clear to me precisely who the new king would be, but they said the time had come to end our warring ways and to let God rule. That, they said, was the only way we would ever get peace. And (it was still true, as it always is) that the kingdom was coming soon. Good luck!
So far as I know, Jehovah's Witnesses are completely harmless. They seem to declare that they are ready for the battles of the end times, but nobody has ever accused them of stashing AK-47s, or homemade roadside bombs. Instead, they study the stories of the end times, as people a couple of thousand years ago imagined them, and trudge around the neighborhood telling us to get ready.
But all up and down the southern edge of the Mediterranean, other equally religious people--this time, of Islamic faith: religions take turns doing these things--are announcing a religious kingdom of their own, and demanding that people sign up. We keep trying to learn the names: Sunnis and Shia and Wahabists and many more. It is as complicated as trying to learn the differences between Catholics and Orthodox and Mennonites and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists, and Haugeaners and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans and Pentecostals and Shaker chairs.
What is happening in Syria and Iraq and Iran and Yemen and Gaza is not new. Christians also took turns killing each other for reasons of religious faith. Christians formed armies and marched to Jerusalem to free the Holy Land from people they believed were infidels; even once by sending children out front.
Yes, I deplore war. But not for a moment do I believe that either your religion or mine is going to establish peace. Nor do I believe that the only way out of human madness is to wait for a heavenly king to come and issue divine decrees. That has been a long wait.
Religion is just a shorthand way to define who the people are who live in Italy, or Germany or Iraq. The desert people who have oil beneath their feet have legitimate reasons to be angry at the people in France or England or the United States who want their oil, and who are willing to go to war for it. All one has to do is to look at a map of the Middle East, or Africa, and note how straight the lines are that define the political boundaries between nations, and it is evident that someone on the other side of the sea drew those lines. They correspond to very little on the ground. Europeans divided up those properties. We went to war in Iraq to insure our oil supply. Saddam Hussein was awful, but he did not have nuclear weapons. He had oil. Once, he had poison gas, and he used that on his own people, and Iran. But he still had oil. Lots of it.
The Islamic State represents a fundamentalistic strain of Islam, actually pretty much Saudi Arabian, and it should not surprise those of us who are not Islamic that such a mindset exists. It is both primitive, historically, and a carrier for current political and cultural and national anger and belief. But we know quite a bit about fundamentalism. We have our own religious and political and cultural fundamentalists. We have had our own such wars.
In a longer look at history, we are seeing a whole part of the world trying to establish itself as a legitimate and important culture, in a place where there is oil. It is their oil. They are angry, and they have reasons.
How we will manage to keep from butchering each other is not clear. Sometimes one does almost wish a really wise king would drop down from heaven and demand common sense. But kings are not particularly famous for common sense. They usually demanded absolute obedience, and went to war, instead. Such common sense as is available belongs to us. There might not be enough of it, but it is all we have.
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