When Religion Gets Hijacked

Since the deterioration of Iraq has grabbed about all the attention to foreign affairs most Americans have time to give, little notice has been paid to the violence consuming Sri Lanka. A mob of Buddhists, inspired by the inflammatory rhetoric of Bodu Bala Sena, an ultra-right-wing Buddhist militia, marched through Muslim neighborhoods, setting ablaze dozens of homes. Three people were killed and 52 injured before authorities imposed a curfew to quell the violence.

Anyone who knows much of anything about Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, but little about the history of Sri Lanka, has to be flabbergasted. How could anybody derive a militant, nationalist agenda from the teachings of the man who eschewed all violence as the behavior of people imprisoned by their own unhealthy desires? It really does defy credulity. Yet there it is: Buddhism twisted into terrorism. We’ve grown sadly accustomed to this sort of thing happening among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. But Buddhists? Seriously?

Well, if you were a resident of, say, rural Mongolia and you had read the four gospels of the New Testament but knew nothing about Christianity, you would be just as perplexed when you learned of the persecutions, religious wars, and the Crusades that have marred the history of the church. How on earth did Jesus’ followers get from his example and teachings to a program of violence against those who do not call him Savior – and even against others who do call him Savior but practice their faith in a different way?

The same scenario applies to Muhammed and Islam. One of the most moving

moments in a college classroom for me was when a shy young Muslim woman from Palestine mustered the courage to say to her classmates, “These people who use bombs and guns are not Islam. Islam is beautiful. These terrorists use Islam for their own violent purposes.” She was not only grieved at how other people cast suspicious glances at her in her hijab. She was also heartbroken that extremists who brazenly claimed to represent Allah and his Prophet had so grotesquely disfigured the religion she loved.

A perennial problem in all religions is how their spiritual origins are so often hijacked by territorial or nationalistic interests (or even raw prejudice). Mohatmas Gandhi famously underscored this problem. He regularly quoted Jesus but spoke harshly of Christianity. When a Christian missionary asked why, he said, “I love your Christ. It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ.” For Gandhi, Christianity was most immediately represented by the British Empire, which had colonized his homeland of India and forced the Indian people into subservience to their “Christian” ideals of civilization. Early in his career, he had lived and worked in South Africa, where Dutch Christians had imposed Apartheid to assert their superiority over natives.

So then, should we just abolish religion from the human experience? Maybe the world would be better off without it. That’s what many skeptics have concluded. But here’s the problem with that proposal: religion is intrinsic to human culture. There is no example anywhere in the history of humankind of a culture completely devoid of religion. That’s because the spiritual impulses that prompt communities to contemplate and celebrate the sacred are impossible to stop. Plus, those impulses give rise to every culture’s highest ideals.

Abolishing religion would not bring an end to tribalism, nationalism, bigotry, and hatred. More likely, those darker tendencies of human society would gain momentum, undeterred by the memory of ancient wisdom that calls for peace and justice in all relationships. “Religion” is not the problem. It is nothing more than communal spirituality. When universal spiritual truths are perverted for provincial aims, it is the responsibility of those who still respond to sacred stirrings to expose this hypocrisy, confident that divine truth will ultimately undo human falsehood by its own power – not ours.

©2014 by J. Mark Lawson