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In God’s name A special report on religion and public life l November 3rd 2007 Republication, copying or redistribution by any means is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of The Economist The Economist November 3rd 2007 A special report on religion and public life 1 In God’s name Also in this section O come all ye faithful God is denitely not dead, but He now comes in many more varieties. Page 4 The power of private prayer A heretical thought about religion in Europe. Page 6 The new wars of religion An old menace has returned, but in very dierent forms. Page 8 Holy depressing Religious politics at its worst. Page 10 Bridging the divide The world’s most religious country is still battling with its demons. Page 11 Religion will play a big role in this century’s politics. John Micklethwait asks how we should deal with it Back to the Ottomans HE four-hour journey through the whose signs promising immediate re- Why Turkey matters so much to Islam. Page 12 Tbush from Kano to Jos in northern Ni- demption dominate the roadside. By the geria features many of the staples of Afri- time you reach Jos and see a poster pro- can life: checkpoints with greedy soldiers, claiming the ABC of nourishment, you Stop in the name huge potholes, scrawny children in foot- are surprised to discover it is for chocolate. Religion and modernity have a love-hate ball shirts drying rice on the road. But it is Recently Christians have been return- relationship. Page 15 also a journey along a front-line. ing to Kano, partly because sharia law Nigeria, evenly split between Chris- (which in any case applies only to Mus- The lesson from America tians and Muslims, is a country where peo- lims) has been introduced sympatheti- ple identify themselves by their religion cally. None of the bloodier sentences has The superpower has mastered the politics of rst and as Nigerians second (see chart 1, been carried out. Indeed, the election in religion at home, but not abroad. next page). Around 20,000 have been April was settled in a reassuringly secular Page 17 killed in God’s name since 1990, estimates waywith the local political barons swap- Shehu Sani, a local chronicler of religious ping cash and ballot papers in the bunga- violence. Kano, the centre of the Islamic low of the Prince Hotel. north, introduced sharia law seven years Yet it would not take much for things to Acknowledgments In addition to the people named in this report, the author ago. Many of the Christians who ed boil over again. The Muslim north resents would like to thank the following for their help: Mustafa ended up in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, the Christian south’s hogging of Nigeria’s Akyol, Ali Carkoglu, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Murl Manohar where the Christian south begins. The oil money. When earlier this year the shad- Joshi, Acharya Giriraj Kishore, Rajnath Singh, Arun Jait- ley, Shiv Shankar Menon, Karan Singh, Jairam Ramesh, road between the two towns is dotted owy Black Taliban struck a police station Salman Khurshid, M.J. Akbar, Father Cedric Prakash, Sir with competing churches and mosques. in Kano, around 20 militants were killed. Evelyn de Rothschild, Catherine Lee, Ahn Jaewoong, Yu This is one of many religious battle- In September Muslim youths set shops on Jaegun, You Seungmin, Lee Junghoon, Audu Grema, Sheik Umar Sunifagge, Mohammed Zubairu, Bala A. Muhammad, elds in this part of Africa. Evangelical re after rumours that a Christian teacher Elizabeth Dickinson, Peter Nanle, Randall Balmer, Paul Christians, backed by American collec- in the area had drawn a cartoon of the Pro- Kennedy, Charles Hill, Andrew Walsh, Michael Novak, Mi- tion-plate money, are surging northwards, phet Muhammad. And the missionaries chael Cromartie, Robert Royal, Efraim Halevy, Yedidia Stern, Nicholas Pelham, Erel Margalit, Aharon Barak, El- clashing with Islamic fundamentalists, are still pushing provocatively north. Sa- isheva Barak, Gidi Grinstein, Nuha Musleh, Aliza Olmert, backed by Saudi petrodollars, surging lihu Garba, a prominent Muslim convert to Meir Shalev, Diana Buttu, Noga Tarnopolsky, Iyad Bargh- southwards. And the Christian-Muslim Christianity (who has survived various outi, Salam Fayyad, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Shulamit Aloni, Da- vid Landau and Yoram Turbowicz. split is only one form of religious compe- assassination attempts), claims that the tition in northern Nigeria. Events in Iraq Evangelical Church of West Africa now A list of sources is at have set Sunnis, who make up most of Ni- has 157 churches in Kano statedouble the www.economist.com/specialreports geria’s Muslims, against the better-organ- number ve years ago. ised Shias; about 50 people have died in in- The journey from Kano to Jos may tra-Muslim violence, reckons Mr Sani. On seem a trip back in time. In fact, religious An audio interview with the author is at the Christian side, Catholics are in a more front-lines criss-cross the globe. www.economist.com/audio peaceful battle with Protestant evangelists, Most obviously, Americans and Brit-1 2 A special report on religion and public life The Economist November 3rd 2007 2 ons would not be dying in Iraq and Af- an eternal subject has become fashion- ghanistan had 19 young Muslims not at- Faith conquers all 1 able. Father Richard John Neuhaus points tacked the United States in the name of Nigerians’ views by religion, % of total out that when he founded his Centre for Allah. The West’s previous great military Muslims Christians Religion and Society in 1984, there were interventions were to protect Muslims in only four centres of religion and public life % saying their religion, nationality or their Bosnia and Kosovo from Orthodox Serbs continent is most important to them in America; now, he thinks, there are more and Catholic Croatians. America’s next than 200. Religious people are getting war could be against the Islamic Republic 0 20406080100 more vocal in all sorts of elds, including of Iran. Other conicts have acquired a Religion business. Religion is also cropping up in new religious edge. In the poisonous war economics. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish his- over Palestine, ever more people are claim- Nationality torian, re-examined Max Weber’s theory ing God on their side (with some of the of the Protestant work ethic to explain most zealous sorts living miles away from Continent why Europeans work less than Americans. the conict). In Myanmar (Burma) Bud- dhist monks nearly brought down an evil Opinion of the US The garden of Eden regime, but in Sri Lanka they have pro- 0 20 40 60 80 100 Philip Jenkins, one of America’s best longed a bloody conict with Muslims. If scholars of religion, claims that when his- Favourable India has an election, a bridge to Sri Lanka torians look back at this century, they will supposedly built by the god Ram (and a Unfavourable probably see religion as the prime ani- team of monkeys) may matter as much as mating and destructive force in human af- a nuclear deal with America. US fight against terrorism fairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty Formerly communist countries are also 0 20 40 60 80 100 and obligation, concepts of nationhood getting hooked again on the opium of the In favour and, of course, conicts and wars. If the people. Russia’s secret police, the KGB, rst seven years are anything to go by, Mr hounded religion: its successor, the FSB, Oppose Jenkins may well turn out to be right. has its own Orthodox church opposite its Sympathise more with Israel or Palestinians What has changed? The main protago- headquarters. In the Polish parliament the 0 20 40 60 80 100 nists are oddly unhelpful in providing ex- speaker crosses himself before taking his planations. Believers usually produce Israel seat. Some of China’s technocrats think some version of you can’t repress the that Confucianism, which Mao con- Palestinians truth for ever. Sociologists point out that demned as feudal, is useful social glue in Sources: “Spirit and Power: A 10-country survey of Pentecostals” outside western Europe most people have their fast-changing country. But they bru- Pew Global Attitudes project poll, Pew Forum on Religion always been religious. Peter Berger, the tally repressed a Buddhist sect, the Falun and Public Life, October 2006 dean of the subject, chides journalists for Gong, and they are worried that Christian investigating the religious rule, not the sec- churchgoers may already outnumber thought since the Enlightenment that mo- ular exception: Rather than studying Communist Party members. dernitythat heady combination of sci- American evangelicals and Islamic mul- In Western politics, too, religion has ence, learning and democracywould kill lahs, you should look at Swedes and New forced itself back into the public square. religion. Plainly, this has not happened. England college professors. The American president begins each day Numbers about religious observance are Yet even if underlying piety has not on his knees and each cabinet meeting notoriously untrustworthy, but most of changed that much, religion’s role in pub- with a prayer. The easiest way to tell a Re- them seem to indicate that any drift to- lic life plainly has. Only ten years ago, most publican from a Democrat is to ask how of- wards secularism has been halted, and academics and politicians would have dis- ten he or she goes to church. And although some show religion to be on the increase. missed Mr Jenkins’s claim about religion European liberals sneer about American The proportion of people attached to the being central to politics as weird.
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