 | Madeleine Albright |
While religious beliefs tempered by a secular morality are a binding and positive force of humanity, religious convictions that are taken too literally and held too fervently tend to be corrosive and divisive, said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during a March 30 talk on campus.
Most destructive of all, she contended, is the specious claim of any nation or leader to an exclusive franchise on God's grace.
In a talk at the Divinity School titled "American Foreign Policy and God," Albright drew on her knowledge of world history and her eight-year tenure as chief of the State Department to discuss the marriage -- for better or worse -- between religious beliefs in the United States and the nation's role in the world.
Applying strict interpretations of Scripture to real-life situations can be wholly inappropriate and dangerous as well, Albright said. Suppose, she told the audience in Marquand Chapel, President Bush had responded to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with the Biblical injunction: "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right check, turn to him the other also."
Albright presented religion in the United States as a paradox central to who and what Americans are, how they perceive themselves as a culture and how they are generally perceived in other countries. Although separation of church and state is a fundamental principle of the American system, she noted, religion permeates America's civic and secular institutions.
"Today, God is on our currency, in our patriotic songs, appealed to every day in Congress and incorporated -- controversially but I expect permanently -- in the pledge of allegiance," Albright said.
Religious rhetoric is also the instrument of choice for political and military leaders to manipulate public opinion and to sanction public policy, she suggested.
Albright cited examples from George Washington's rallying cry to patriots in the American Revolution, through the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and President William McKinley's justification for taking possession of the Philippines, to Vice-President Dick Cheney's most recent Christmas card -- which read, she quoted: "If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable than an empire can rise without His aid?"
"[W]hen a politician starts preaching I tend to react the same way as when a preacher starts talking politics," Albright quipped, noting that Machiavelli advised his prince that "to succeed in public life, the most important quality he must learn to fake was religious belief."
The former secretary of state pointed out that religion is often falsely used as a justification for the most egregious acts. She recalled that Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic once commented to her that his policy of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans was motivated by a desire to uphold his country's role as "the protector of 'Christian Europe' from Muslims."
She in turn told Milosevic that she hoped to help "Christian Europe" and NATO save the world from him.
On the other hand, Albright contended, religious belief has provided the very foundation of civilization.
It was faith in God that launched Abraham on his "bold journey into the unknown," Albright said. Without that journey "humankind was resigned to a life without progress, tied to the unceasing cycles of nature," she added.
If religion has been used divisively throughout history, it has also served to unite humanity at various grand epochs, she said -- noting that Christianity was a globalizing influence, spreading from the Middle East through Greece and Rome, to North Africa and Europe, and finally to every corner of the map. From the 7th century, Islam too had a great role to play in the transmission of cultures throughout the known civilized world, she told the audience.
"The borderless nature of religious faith often makes it easier for leaders to talk to one another; easier for nations to agree on common values; and easier for people from vastly different backgrounds to reach a consensus about moral standards," she said.
Several of the great leaders of modern history have been propelled by their faith, she noted, listing Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr. among them.
Albright pointed to a fundamental premise that religion shares with democracy: "respect for the value and dignity of every human being." It is this basic respect for human life, common to most cultures, that Albright sees as most threatened by the terrorist scourge that announced itself on Sept. 11, 2001.
"We must be relentless in making the case that terrorism is fully, fundamentally and always wrong, just as genocide, apartheid and slavery are wrong," she said in reply to critics who seek to justify terrorism on religious, moral or political grounds.
Speaking specifically about al-Qaeda, she said the terrorists are "no more representative of Islam than the Ku Klux Klan is of Christianity." Nor are their acts in any way politically motivated, she claimed, because "al-Qaeda has no coherent political agenda."
She sees the religious language of the Bush administration as undermining its avowed purpose of defeating terrorism. Allying religion with U.S. policy "could play right into the hands of al-Qaeda," she warned. By presenting U.S. opposition to Osama bin Laden and terrorist organizations as a religious war, the administration runs the risk of alienating Muslims all over the world, she maintained.
However critical she might be of the Bush administration's approach to the war on terrorism, Albright said, she is much more concerned about deeper ramifications of American foreign policy and the message Americans proclaim to the world that "God is on our side."
"We can only admit, if we are honest, that we fall far short of what God has asked and of what our own consciences instruct," Albright said, calling for a fuller measure of national introspection.
"We may be ensnared by the temptations to use power to dominate, not simply to help; to value American lives more highly than the lives of others; to squander wealth and consume the world's resources rather than share and be good stewards of the gifts given to us; to stare avidly at frivolous entertainments while averting our eyes from suffering; and to boast over and over again how good we are ...," Albright posited. Yet, she added, "Nations are neither baptized nor promised salvation."
Finally, Albright called for the United States as a nation to adopt foreign policies that reflect the basic tenet of all religions -- "simply that every human being counts."
-- By Dorie Baker
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