During Archbishop TuTu's recent visit to Portland, some of us were asked to participate in panel discussions on several related topics. I was asked to be on a panel entitled "Religion as a Bridge to Reconciliation." The following is part of what I said in my introductory remarks:
The word religion comes from the prefix re, meaning back and the Latin ligare, which means "to bind" or "to bind back" or "to reconnect." One might say that the function of religion is to repair the illusion of our separation. Religion should play a natural, a logical role in reconciliation--to bind us together in common values of love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness.
Unfortunately, religion--and I can speak with real authority only of the Christian religion, which is my own--religion most often seems to do the opposite: it serves to separate and to divide. Christianity has such a bad reputation that the very use of the word in the common vernacular connotes "one who is rigid in belief," and people who are not religious are wary of those who are, for these unconverted individuals--those unwashed in the blood, so to speak--too often have been targets for conversion and have not been respected as the persons, theological and otherwise, that they are.
Of course, all religious people are not Fundamentalists by any means, but even so, when any group of people begin to say, "My way is the way, my path is the only path," the result is division and acrimony.
In fact, religion then becomes no different in this way from any other ideology, whethers an idealogy of communism or capitalism or racism or deconstructionist thinking. One who becomes an ideologist, or a true believer, begins to exist in a closed system. Whatever fits into this chosen system is labeled "true" and whatever does not is labeled "false." The curiosity, spontaneity, and growth of such an individual become limited.
Because each of us is troubled by a multitude of interior forces we do not and will not ever totally understand, it is our nature to look for a system which explains our angst and which makes us feel safe within the walls of that system. We do not see that system as arbitrary, as created by humans who are terrified of our own inevitable demise, and so we reify those structures--that is, we come to believe that there is a concrete reality there. Therefore, we cling to these beliefs as to life itself, and whatever threatens them must be challenged--or perhaps stemped out, eliminated.
Given this very human and very pervasive problem with religion, one can see why religion often fails to be a sturdy instrument of reconciliation. At the same time, we know that there have been instances when it has been. I'm thinking of enlightened leaders who have internalized the radical way of being that seems to be at the heart of all major religions--the radical way of love, compassion, peace. Violence and retribution have no part to play. I'm thinking, for example, for Martin Luther King, Jr., who taught non-violence in the Civil Rights movement; or Gandhi, who practiced satyagraha, or passive resistance, to free his people from British rule; or a more recent example, the Amish, who forgave the man who gunned down their children in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse a few years ago, because these gentle people could do no other: forgiveness is their way of being.
So if we mean by religion, a spiritual commitment to love and compassion and non-violence--if we mean by religion, a radical change of being in which the individual or community understands that we are all one and that love and forgiveness are central to their being, then yes, religion is the essence of reconciliation and a path to that difficult state.
But if we mean by religion--which we generally do--an institutionalized set of beliefs, then, no, just the opposite. For religion in that sense divides people into the righteous and the unrighteous, the saved and the unsaved, the good and the evil. And of course if we have made "the other" evil, then the righteous must have control over the evil ones. We righteous ones can then project all of our shadow side onto these evil ones, and then Christians can smile as we say things to gays and lesbians like, "I hate the sin, but love the sinner," or say to those of another faith tradition, "If you haven't accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you're going to hell." Not to mention the generations of wars between believers of various faiths throughout the world, throughout all time. Make the people of a different tribe or race or religion "other," and they are much easier to kill.
So is religion a path to reconciliation? Not until its practititioners mature as religious beings. Not until its institutions become more devoted to the heart-lessons of their prophets than to the divisive theology of their true believers.
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