Islam and Christianity: Religious War Coming?

Sébastien Mamerot, Siege of Antioch

Medieval Miniature Painting, 1490

(Image from Wikipedia)

Religion and politics are difficult to disentangle, whether among Christians (who make a crucial distinction) or among Muslims (who make no significant distinction), a point that I'm reflecting on these days due to a couple of my courses (on British and American culture at Kyung Hee University and on Islamism at Yonsei University).

Hence my dark thoughts for today.

In an interview by Mark Galli for Christianity Today, "Our Geopolitical Moment" (March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3), the political scientist Walter Russell Mead -- who is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy on the Council on Foreign Relations and currently a visiting professor of political studies at Bard College -- argues that evangelicals play a crucial role in American foreign affairs.

Mead observes that our current "global system of politics, power, investment and trade, and culture and ideology . . . was first dimly sketched out by the Dutch, taken over by the English and then by the Americans." American evangelicals have come to prominence in a world where America largely holds sway, which tends to make Americans happy but which greatly dismays a force formerly powerful in the world. Mead characterizes two visions of the past 300 years of world history:

We Americans look at the last 300 years of history, and we basically see a world that's getting better and better. The rule of freedom expands. The economy develops. We have risen to become the world's greatest power. The American people are extraordinarily comfortable, affluent, and secure. It's easy for us to make the argument that God's purpose is being fulfilled through history and through the rise of American power. And to some degree, it probably is.

But suppose you are a sincere and pious Muslim. What you see in 1700 marks the beginning of the rise of England and America, the beginning of the great decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Ultimately it will be divided into little pieces. The English are beginning to challenge the great Islamic empire of India. The Persians are beginning to lose their greatness. Over the next 300 years, it just gets uglier and uglier. The Muslims are driven out of Europe and in many cases, ethnically cleansed or persecuted. The English stopped the expansion of Islam in Nigeria. The Spanish colonials stopped the expansion of Islam into the Philippines. What you see is a history that's gone wrong, a very different attitude about the modern era and the values that have shaped it.

This is a point similar to one that Bernard Lewis made in his Atlantic Monthly article, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990) in his book What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Harper 2003), and I'm assuming that Mead has learned from Lewis on this point.

Mead goes beyond Lewis, however, in drawing upon Harvard professor Joseph Nye's arguments about "soft power," and he notes that the worldwide spread of evangelical Christianity, particularly of the Pentecostalist variety, tends to enhance America's image among those who convert:

In terms of creating American soft power, this is extraordinary. If you travel around a lot of the developing world, what you see is the extraordinary progress of Christian missions and evangelization. Christianity in general leads people in many cases to have very positive feelings about the United States and American foreign policy. Polls taken, say, among Pentecostals in Nigeria, showed great support for America's war on terror at a time when, in a lot of the world, that policy was profoundly unpopular. Polling evidence shows that in places like Kenya, Nigeria, and other African countries where Christianity has become a very vibrant presence, people are optimistic about their future; they actually are glad to see American values playing a larger role in their countries.

In The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins -- the Distinguished Professor of History and Religious studies at Pennsylvania State University -- has noted that the enormous growth of Christianity throughout Asia and Africa through conversion and population increase is outpacing even the growth of Islam, often in the same areas.

Given Samuel Huntington's arguments in his clash of civilizations theory -- see his article "The Clash of Civilizations?" (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) and his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster 1996) -- namely, that the fault lines between civilizations are, fundamentally, the lines of conflict between great religions, then I ask the question posed in the heading to this blog entry.

Is a war of religion coming?