Marching in the freezing cold with my children at the peace demonstration last Saturday, it was clear that many people see this conflict as being only about oil and imperialism. It would be naive to discount these motivations for war, but an increasingly secular West is inclined to overlook other equally potent factors.
Political journalist David Brooks redresses the balance in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly, in an article titled "Kicking the secularist habit". Until September 11th, 2001, he had accepted that as the world became richer and better educated, it would inevitably become less religious, that science would replace dogma and reason would replace unthinking obedience - the classic Richard Dawkins perspective.
However, Brooks now asserts: "Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of the future." Along with an unprecedented explosion of scientific knowledge, the world is becoming more religious, not less. Furthermore, the fastestgrowing religions are those which make no concessions to modernity, while those which make strenuous efforts to be up-to-date and relevant are withering.
Brooks' arguments inspired me to look again at Peter Berger's writings, because he was one of the most important proponents of the idea of the inevitable triumph of secularism. He recanted with style and wit when it became clear to him that he had been wrong. The "Aha!" moment came on receiving the first huge volume of a massive research project on fundamentalism. Berger fell to musing on why millions of dollars should be spent on investigating fundamentalism, which "when all is said and done, usually refers to any kind of passionate religious movement". It could be because progressive people deem fundamentalism to be anti-progressive, therefore it behoves them to know the enemy.
More interestingly, it was, at least according to the elite who funded the research, a difficult-to-understand phenomenon. Yet, as Berger points out, throughout history and in the contemporary world, it is not so-called fundamentalists who are rare. It is people who think otherwise. Berger suggests mischievously that it might have advanced the sum of human knowledge more if a research project costing millions of dollars had been conducted into why so-called progressives do not believe in God.
Brooks agrees that what really needs explanation are the pockets of people who "do not feel the constant presence of God in their lives, who do not fill their days with rituals and prayers and garments which bring them into contact with the divine, and who do not believe that God's will should shape their public lives".
Brooks hits out at what he terms "secular fundamentalists", who even now make little attempt to understand one of the most important forces shaping our world. "A great Niagara of religious fervour is cascading down around them while they stand obtuse and dry in the little cave of their own parochialism - and many of them are journalists and policy analysts, who are paid to keep up with these things."
Not that he is an uncritical cheerleader for religious fervour. One of the steps of his proposed six-step recovery programme is a recognition by the recovering secularist that he or she has been too easy on religion. This is no longer an option, Brooks says. We have to separate right from wrong, and if Wahhabism is a vicious sect which perverts Islam, we must say so, and not just downplay the significance of the influence in favour of less embarrassing economic and material perspectives.
He suggests it does not make any sense to try to explain away religious beliefs and actions in terms of thwarted economic impulses. "Human beings long for righteous rule, for a just world or a world which reflects God's will - in many cases at least as strongly as they long for money and success."
Brooks concentrates on current world events, but his point could also be applied to Irish affairs. For example, those who characterise the actions of religious orders regarding the Residential Institutions Redress Board as simply attempts to hold on to power and money, fail to provide a full picture. By summarily rejecting as irrelevant or even deceptive the self-understanding of those who chose religious life, the picture of what happened in the past and is happening now is distorted beyond recognition. It does no justice to the understanding of some survivors, either, many of whom still retain deep religious faith.
Not that appeal to religious motivation provides a convenient escape clause. In fact, Brooks suggested way of looking at the world might well result in harsher judgments of religious people. It is not enough to claim to do God's work, because that is a claim made in very different ways by George Bush, Osama bin Laden and even Saddam Hussein. Moral criteria must be applied which judge whether that claim promotes evil or not.
The last section of the article is perhaps the most interesting, as he analyses what he terms competing eschatologies. (Eschatology in theological terms is concerned with death and destiny, but Brooks uses it in a narrower sense of preferred outcome to history.)
"Saddam Hussein sees history as ending with a united Arab nation globally dominant and with himself revered as the creator of a just world order. Osama bin Laden sees history as ending with the global imposition of sharia (Islamic law). Many Europeans see history as ending with the establishment of secular global institutions under which nationalism and religious passions will be quieted and nation-states will give way to international law and multilateral co-operation. Many Americans see history as ending in the triumph of freedom and constitutionalism, with religion not abandoned or suppressed but enriching democratic life."
This last sentence contains, I believe, a penetrating insight little understood on this side of the Atlantic. George Bush is a deeply religious man, who sees America and the American way as an agent of God's providence. Ultimately, Saddam's mystical nationalism and Bush's conflation of US foreign policy and the will of God may both be scary, although I am not suggesting moral equivalence between them. However, without a profound and non-dismissive knowledge of these world views, one cannot understand what is happening in the world today.
As Brooks puts it, we do not yet have, and sorely need, a model of analysis which attempts to merge the spiritual and material.