The Mighty & the Almighty: Negotiating a Faith-Filled World

By PLS

Today as ever, “religious devotion is both a powerfully positive force and an intermittently destructive one,” according to former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It’s been the basis for stunning advances in human rights. It has also bred intolerance and violence. Firmly rejecting the clash–of-civilizations cliché, Albright explores the constant of American religiosity in the context of a troubled US-Islam interface in her just released book The Mighty & the Almighty: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs.

Effective diplomacy looks for common ground. But where to start? And how to find shared values or interests without back-slapping at such an ethereal level of generalization (Albright’s “mush” and “cotton candy”) that real world problems remain untouched?

Albright chooses “respect for the rights and well-being of each individual [as] the place where religious faith and a commitment to political liberty have their closest connection,” and she finds texts to show that respect for the individual is not just a Western value out of sync with a global norm holding that groups are primary sources of value:

Hinduism demands that “no man do to another that which would e repugnant to himself.” the Torah instructs us, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as myself.” Zoroaster observed, “What I hold good for myself, I should for all.” Confucius said, “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do unto others.” Buddha taught us to consider others as ourselves. The Stoics of ancient Greece argued that all men are “equal persons in the great court of liberty.” The Christian gospel demands, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” The Quran warns that a true believe must love for his brother what he loves for himself. Finally, the world’s first known legal code [that of Hammurabi of Babylon, now Iraq] had as its announced purpose “to cause justice to prevail and to ensure that the strong do not oppress the weak.”

This is not airy-fairy stuff—and in the course of negotiating on the basis of these principles both Americans and Islamists would have to modify their behavior, Albright claims. If Muslims follow their own precepts, they will not recruit volunteers to set off suicide bombs in civilian market places. If American of any faith follow theirs, they will not so carelessly kill innocent civilians in the course of pursuing otherwise valid military objectives.

Religious pride, arrogance and know-it-all-ness are not only compromise-killers that make negotiation futile, they are illogical, according to Albright. Even if a believer is certain that his/her religion is true, no mere mortal can wholly know the Truth as his/her God can. “If God has a plan,” she says, “it will be carried out. That is heaven’s jurisdiction, not ours,” which frees mere mortals to find commonalities on the mundane level of making life better for as many people as possible and of dealing with widely shared fears, too. For instance, “the same forces of globalization and change that raise fears in conservative Muslim societies are also generating anxiety in the West. The same concern that God’s role as a source of law and a guide for living will be lost is felt by the devout in Kansas as much as in Karachi, in the average orthodox kibbutz as much as in Riyadh.” Everywhere there is tension between those who embrace both social and technological aspects of modernity and those who prefer the cell phones without the feminist revolution. Once it’s clear that such fears are widely shared, even valid, there may be room for discussion about mitigation—or whatever.

In short, as Albright sees it, the problem isn’t to get religion out of public life and international affairs, because “religion is a large part of what motivates people and shapes their views of justice and right behavior. It must be taken into account.” The question is how to do so wisely.

“If diplomacy is the art of persuading others to act as we would wish, effective foreign policy requires that we comprehend why others act as they do,” says Albright. “Fortunately the constitutional requirement that separates state from church in the United States does not also insist that the state be ignorant of the church, mosque, synagogue, pagoda and temple....Religious motivations do not disappear simply because they are not mentioned; more often they lie dormant only to rise up again at the least convenient moment.”

In Iran, for example. Even after all these years American policy makers have not figured out how to deal with the Ayatollahs. In fact, they don’t want to understand them. They just want them out. As if a secular Iranian government would destroy the nuclear facilities it inherited. As if Shi’ism would be irrelevant to the values of that secular government.