Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  I never did like John Paul II. Just after he took over, I did a four-continent tour of the Catholic Church for a radio series. At that point, it was an institution in a ferment of new ideas: liberation theology, feminist critiques of the traditional hierarchy, social activism of every sort. Karol Wojtyla shut all of that down, and left the Church a poorer place than he found it. But he did do one thing right.

  April 8, 2005

  WHAT JOHN PAUL II REALLY DID

  It was the biggest photo op in world history, and everybody who is anybody was there. Even the Protestant president of the United States and the Muslim clergyman who is president of the Islamic Republic of Iran felt obliged to show up for the Pope’s funeral. But the media circus is already moving on to the next global event, and we have one last opportunity to consider the life of Karol Wojtyla.

  Forget all the stuff about how he smothered all the new thinking and decentralization that were beginning to transform the Catholic Church when he was chosen pope in 1978. It’s true, but he was elected precisely to carry out that task. The conservatives in the Roman Curia who had been sidelined by Vatican II were determined to stop the rot (as they saw it), and they were well aware that Wojtyla was a man in their own mould when they pushed him forward as the dark-horse candidate to succeed John Paul I.

  He acted as they expected that he would, and it would be foolish to condemn him for it. He held those conservative beliefs long before he became pope, and he never hid them. But there was one thing he did that astonished and appalled the conservatives; and that one thing will continue to define Catholic Church policy centuries from now.

  Most of John Paul II’s policies are eminently reversible, if a subsequent generation of church leaders should decide that a different line on contraceptives or women priests is more in accord with divine teaching. That isn’t likely to happen any time soon, given the way that John Paul II has packed the College of Cardinals with like-minded individuals, but with enough time, many things become possible. What later generations are most unlikely to reverse is his acknowledgement that Judaism is a valid alternative path to God.

  We are not just talking “apology” here—although Christians certainly owed apologies to the Jews for two millennia of slander and persecution—nor even “reconciliation.” John Paul II went far beyond that, though few members of the general public realized it at the time: he recognized Judaism as a true religion.

  There is an old saying, beloved of Catholic theologians, that “error has no rights.” It drives the ecumenical crowd crazy, but it is perfectly logical: if you believe that your religion is true, then the others are false. John Paul II was perfectly affable and hospitable to various Protestant Christians who came to visit, but he truly believed that they were wrong, wrong, wrong—and he refused to enter into the equal relationships that they imagined possible between the various Christian sects.

  He was more open to the Orthodox Christian world, both because he came from Eastern Europe himself and because the quarrel between the Orthodox churches and the Church of Rome has always been about hierarchical and stylistic matters, not basic doctrinal issues. It was in his relations with non-Christian religions also in the lineage of Abraham, however, that John Paul II broke decisively with Christian and Catholic tradition.

  After fourteen hundred years of constant and intimate contact between the Muslim and Christian peoples around the Mediterranean, he was the first pope ever to enter a mosque. He doubtless continued to believe that Christianity was the one true successor to Judaism and that Islam was a post-Jewish, post-Christian heresy, but he was the first pope to argue that cordial relations between them were possible and desirable. And, in the case of the Jews, he went much further.

  It’s understandable that the new religion of Christianity, struggling to distance itself from its Jewish roots, should have insisted that the Christian revelation had invalidated and replaced the older faith. By implication, however, that meant that those Jews who refused to convert were in revolt against God—and from that mindset came the Christian image of Jews as “Christ killers,” and two millennia of savage Christian persecution culminating in the European Holocaust of 1942–45.

  Karol Wojtyla was a witness to that Holocaust, which may be why he did the extraordinary thing that he did. On his visit to Israel in 2000, he posted a prayer in a niche in Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall that said: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant.”

  By posting that prayer in the wall, he acknowledged that this uniquely Jewish method of communicating with the Almighty is valid; and by its contents, he accepted that the Jewish covenant with God is still in force. It was a thing done in a moment, but it ended two thousand years of Christian rejection of Judaism. The Catholic Church, while still advocating the conversion of everybody else, no longer seeks the conversion of the Jews, which is as close as it can get to acknowledging the equal validity of the Jewish faith.

  That was the Big Thing that John Paul II did, and it is more important and will last far longer than all the other things he did put together.

  Doctrinal disputes, within or even among the three great Abrahamic religions, are of limited interest to those who do not share their particular beliefs, but the political relations among these three great religions matter a lot. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute poisons the relationship between Jews and Muslims everywhere. The Christian-Muslim relationship has been fraught from the very beginning, when half of the then-Christian world was conquered by Muslim armies in little more than a century. Unlike the localized, and to some extent encysted, quarrel between the Israelis and their neighbours, moreover, the Muslim-Christian relationship implicates more than half of the world’s people.

  June 23, 2006

  UPDATE ON THE FAMILY QUARREL

  The past year has been one of the worst in recent history for relations between Muslims and “the West” (as the part of the world formerly called “Christendom” is now known). According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2006, an opinion survey conducted in thirteen mainly Christian or Muslim countries by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., the majorities who saw relations between the West and Islam as “generally bad” ranged from 53 percent in Russia and Indonesia to highs of 70 percent in Germany and 84 percent in Turkey.

  There were purely local causes for some of the extreme reactions, like resentment among Turks at being seen as problem candidates for European Union membership simply because they are Muslims. The violent uproar in January over Danish newspaper cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad doubtless influenced the answers of many respondents, both Muslim and Western, in a poll conducted only months later. But military confrontations that killed a lot of people were the core problem: Western armies fought local insurgents in two occupied Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan; suicide bomb attacks by young British Muslims killed fifty-two people in London; and the nightmare images of 9/11 were never far from the surface in the United States. Furthermore, the Arab-Israeli fight over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea had entered its seventieth bloody year.

  Seventy years, give or take a few, depending on whether you date that long conflict from the great Palestinian revolt against Jewish immigration in 1936 or from some other clash of that period. Without that open sore, however, the deep resentment of Muslims at having been conquered by European empires—as they all were, apart from the Turks—would probably have mostly died down by now. It is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has kept it alive for generations of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.

  The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq was a ghastly mistake that confirmed existing suspicions in the Muslim world: its declared motives were so transparently false that Muslims everywhere were driven to look
for ulterior, undeclared motives—like a Western crusade against Islam. On the other hand, Muslims have remained in denial about how their own internal conflicts have spilled over into anti-Western terrorism. Majorities in most of the Muslim countries polled still refuse to believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks in the United States, taking refuge in fantasies about Zionist or CIA plots.

  Descend from high politics to cultural stereotypes, and it starts to look like a classic family quarrel. A majority of Muslims see Westerners as violent and immoral, while the view from the reverse perspective is that Muslims are violent and fanatical. Majorities in every Western country polled see Muslims as disrespectful of women, and majorities in every Muslim country polled (except Turkey) see Westerners as disrespectful of women. But then, it is a family quarrel.

  Just the same, you cannot really have a “clash of civilizations” between Muslims and “Westerners” (Christians and Jews, by belief or at least by cultural descent) because they are members of the same civilization—the twin descendants of the old classical civilization of the Near East and the Mediterranean world. That world was divided almost fourteen centuries ago between competing but clearly related religions—the Christians of seventh-century Syria and Egypt who were the first to face Muslim armies surging out of Arabia saw Islam as a new Christian heresy—but it remains a single civilization whose fundamental cultural values are largely shared.

  The surviving half of the former Christian world subsequently spread its faith and its genes across the Americas and Australia, while Islam conquered much of southern Asia (and the two religions divided Africa between them). Together, they account today for more than half of the world’s population, so the old family quarrel affects a lot of people.

  Muslim-Western disputes are so emotional precisely because they are between family members: neither of the estranged twin cultures brings the same amount of reproach and resentment to its occasional disputes with peoples who belong to entirely different traditions. But the fact that they do share so much history and so many values—they are all, as Muslims put it, “peoples of the Book”—means that the possibility of reconciliation is also ever present.

  The most interesting statistics in the Pew survey are those about Muslim minorities living in the West, who were interviewed as a separate group for the first time this year. Muslims elsewhere may see Westerners as disrespectful of women, but Muslims who actually live among Westerners say the opposite—by a 73 percent majority in Germany, a 77 per cent majority in France, an 82 percent majority in Spain. Even in Britain, despite the police harassment that has alienated so many Muslims since last July’s bombs in London, a narrow majority agrees.

  The same phenomenon is evident across a broad range of issues—and the huge non-Muslim majorities in Britain, France and the United States also have largely positive views of the Muslims in their midst, despite all the old history and all the recent clashes and controversies. To know them may not be to love them, exactly, but it does seem to breed tolerance, and maybe even solidarity.

  What a respectful non-believer, I can hear a few of you murmur. He must be a deeply spiritual person despite his inability actually to believe.

  Well, no, actually. The sociology and the political behaviour of religions is interesting to me. Even the various competing theologies have a certain weird fascination: how can people believe that stuff? Especially, how can they believe it just because they were born into families and communities that believe it, when they know that other people, just as intelligent and well educated, believe equally weird but entirely contradictory things because they were born into different families and communities? Isn’t anybody paying attention here?

  If I had a magic wand to wave, I would expunge all religion tomorrow: not just the institutions, but the whole body of superstition and fear of the unknown that underpins religion. I do not have such a wand, so I will only call your attention to the following article. Suspicions confirmed.

  March 17, 2007

  RELIGION AND GOOD BEHAVIOUR

  They published an opinion poll in Britain recently in which 82 percent of the people surveyed said that they thought religion does more harm than good. My first reaction, I must admit, was to think: that’s what they would say, isn’t it? It’s not just that suicide bombers give religion a bad name. In “post-Christian Britain,” only 33 percent of the population identify themselves as “religious persons,” and if you stripped out recent immigrants—especially Polish Catholics, West Indian Protestants, Pakistani Muslims, Indian Hindus—then the number would be even lower.

  So that’s what the British would say, isn’t it? In the United States, where over 85 percent of people describe themselves as religious believers, the answer would surely be very different, as it would be in Iran or Mexico. But then I remembered an article that was published a couple of years ago in the Journal of Religion & Society entitled (sorry about this) “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look,” in which Gregory Paul set out to test the assertion that religion makes people behave better.

  If that is true, then the United States should be heaven on Earth, whereas Britain would be overrun with crime, sexual misbehaviour and the like. Paul examined the data from eighteen developed countries, and found just the opposite: “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, venereal disease, teen pregnancy, and abortion,” while “none of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction.”

  How interesting. Now, to be fair, only one of the eighteen countries examined (Japan) was not Christian or “post-Christian,” so this might just show that high levels of Christian belief correlate with a variety of social ills. There’s really no way of testing that, since, apart from the countries of East Asia, there are no non-Christian countries where the level of religious belief has yet fallen below 60 percent.

  There’s not even any way of knowing if other religions will eventually experience the same decline in belief as the people who used to believe in them get richer, more urban and better educated. Even in what used to be Christendom, the United States didn’t follow that path, after all. But the question is not whether religion will continue to flourish. It is whether religion makes people behave better, and the data say no.

  Even within the U.S., Paul reported, “the strongly theistic, antievolution South and Midwest” have “markedly worse homicide, mortality, sexually transmitted disease, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the North-East, where societal conditions, secularization and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.” As the most religious country of the eighteen surveyed, the U.S. also comes in with the highest rates for teenage pregnancy and for gonorrhea and syphilis. (A sidebar: boys who participate in sexual abstinence programs are more likely to get their partners pregnant, presumably because they are in denial about what they are doing.)

  What are we to make of this? I never thought that religion really made people behave any better, but apart from the occasional pogrom or religious war, it hadn’t occurred to me that it would actually make them behave worse. But there may be a clue in the fact that the more religious a country is, the fewer resources it puts into social spending, perhaps on the assumption that God will provide.

  There is a very strong linkage between how secular a country is and how much it spends on social welfare and income redistribution. There is an equally strong correlation between high levels of social spending and a good score in Paul’s survey—which makes sense, as all the ills he measured, from homicide to high infant mortality to teen pregnancy, are far more likely to affect the poor than the rich.

  It’s not that religious people choose to do bad things more often—indeed, they are probably more likely to get involved in charitable activities. Maybe it’s just that when they talk about transforming p
eople’s lives, they don’t think in terms of big state-run systems—and if you don’t, lots of people fall through the cracks. Whereas the Godless, all alone under the empty sky, decide that they must band together and help one another through large amounts of social spending because Nobody Else is going to do it for them.

  Or maybe there is some other reason entirely. But the numbers don’t lie: the more religious a country is, the worse people behave in their private lives. Thank God they didn’t do a survey on the correlation between strong religious belief and war.

  Amen to that.

  5.

  ISRAEL-PALESTINE I

  I’m beginning this section in the middle, so to speak, because 2007 was the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War, and that was the event that changed everything for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. If you want to understand what’s really going on in the region, you always have to start in 1967.

  May 31, 2007

  THE WAR OF SIX DAYS AND FORTY YEARS

  On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In six days, it annihilated the Arab air forces, defeated the Arab army and conquered the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. It seemed like a decisive victory at the time, but forty years later the outcome is still in doubt.