Faith and Reason

By Richard John Neuhaus

Contrary to older theories predicting the unstoppable course of secularization, the world is becoming more religious and more religiously assertive. Western Europe may be the exception, even though that is much in dispute. Beyond dispute is the new prominence of religion and religiously-grounded morality in American public life. This is a surprise, and mainly an unpleasant surprise, to secularists who are committed to what I have called "the naked public square," meaning public life stripped of religious practice and conviction.

On the world stage, we are confronted by a newly assertive Islam and by radical political movements, aptly described as jihadist, advanced in the name of Islam. Samuel Huntington of Harvard has written of an ominous "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West (which most Muslims continue to view as Christendom). The alternative to a bloody and open-ended clash of civilizations, beyond the containment of jihadism by force, is interreligious understanding and the cultivation of the virtue of tolerance.

Since religion is not going to go away, religious tolerance must itself be grounded in religion. The great question is whether there are within Islam religious resources for legitimating peaceful coexistence with "the infidel." Or is it the case that Islam cannot move beyond the doctrine of a world divided between the "house of Islam" and the "house of war"? Needless to say, Christianity has had its own confusion about the uses of violence, as witness the attempt of the Crusades to retake territory that had fallen to Muslim conquest.

On the question of religion and violence, the most important speech that has been made by a world figure since 9/11 was delivered by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12 of this year. The use of violence in advancing religion is a violation of reason, the pope said, and to act against reason is to act against the nature of God. This understanding of the necessary connection between faith and reason, he said, is the product of centuries of philosophical and theological reflection resulting in a synthesis of Hellenic and biblical understandings of reality. His suggestion that Islam has not undergone a similar philosophical and theological development and is therefore prone to employ violence in the name of religion met with violent protest by thousands of Muslims.

That violent reaction, we must hope, is not the last word. In his later visit to Turkey, the pope--without backing off from the argument made at Regensburg--reached out to his Muslim interlocutors in a plea for interreligious and intercultural understanding. Religion and culture, he insists, are inseparable. The alternative to jihadism and a clash of civilizations is not the secularization of Islam and the creation of a naked public square in the Islamic world. The alternative, rather, is a religious commitment to a civil public square in which differences are engaged on the basis of reason and mutual respect.

Whether this can be achieved between Islam and the West is, one might well argue, the most important question of this century.