In his latest essay about religion’s impact on world affairs, Alan Wolfe ends on a constructive note in spite of the conventional sense that we are now and will be in a period of Cultural War, or “The war on Terror”:
The world will never be rid of fanaticism; globalization is just as capable of disseminating extreme ideas as it is of advancing moderation. But fanaticism should not be confused with religious intensity. One can pray passionately to God and lead an otherwise balanced life, just as one can be monomaniacal about things having nothing to do with the divine.
And religious leaders prone to fanaticism are likely to find that the price of using force to spread God’s word, or to try to monopolize it, will be a greatly diminished hold on the future. Moreover, the future may come sooner than we think. We have seen how rapidly religion has spread in the past, claiming adherents from competing faiths before the competition knew what hit them. Both secularism and secularly inspired ways of being religious are spreading just as rapidly—maybe even more so. Historians may one day look back on the next few decades, not as yet another era when religious conflicts enveloped countries and blew apart established societies, but as the era when secularization took over the world.
My first reaction is to say “Thank God that all those religious fanatics won’t be able to control public affairs forever”.
Quaint allusion to the God concept!
Mr. Wolfe is supposed to know a lot about nexus of religion and politics. So he must have enough intellectual authority to be listened to about this tendentious subject. Somehow this factoid doesn’t fill me with confidence in his hopeful predictions about the advance of liberal values vs. those of religious fanatics, who seem to stride across the headlines of our news today!
