Is Religious Identity the Enemy of Global Harmony?

An American generation under 45 has glimpsed an interconnected world beyond race and tribe. They know its attainment will be elusive but, after a bleak season, they feel summoned by what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” And, speaking of experience, they know Lincoln came to the presidency with all of two years in Congress behind him, and a failed Senate campaign.

Those are the words of Roger Cohen in a NY Times Op-Ed piece today titled Tribalism Here and There. Cohen’s editorial, a sort of pro Obama piece that looks at the rise of tribalisms in the context of globalization, makes what I think are some very important points. Against those whose wide-eyed optimism links globalization with a safer, more connected world, Cohen notes:

Connection and fragmentation vie. The Internet opens worlds and minds, but also offers opinions to reinforce every prejudice. You’re never alone out there; some idiot will always back you. The online world doesn’t dissolve tribes. It gives them global reach.

What I found most interesting, however, was this remark:

The main forces in the world today are the modernizing, barrier-breaking sweep of globalization and the tribal reaction to it, which lies in the assertion of religious, national, linguistic, racial or ethnic identity against the unifying technological tide.

Only the worst sort of denial can fail to notice that tribalism, rooted in religious identity, has been the source of terrible intolerance and responsible for inflicting upon humanity scores of horrendous human atrocities. So familiar are we with religiously inspired violence that I see no need to parade before us the usual cast of examples.

However, I think it has become increasingly clear that evil and ugliness perpetrated against humanity is not the special inclination of those with religious identities. The killing fields, the Soviet pogrom, the rape of Nanking, the revolution in China and the world wars should all be sufficient to dispel the myth that somehow secularists are impervious to intolerance and evil. I think it was Anthony Appiah who once sagaciously noted that we human beings as such seem naturally impatient for harmony.

Though no doubt there are historical connections between religious identity and crimes against humanity, those connections are contingent, I would argue, and the solution to tribalism does not reside in ridding the world of religion or religious identity. Well, that's also what what I would argue. There have been and can be religious identities, i.e., communities with deep religious identity, without tribalism. Indeed if I had the time I would argue that the resources necessary for tolerance and a valuation of pluralism—e.g., an account of human beings as possessing inestimable and intrinsic worth, a recognition of human beings as thoroughly finite, frail and fallible, and an account of human beings as free—are actually to be found (perhaps surprisingly if you listen to the story told by the secularists) in theistic religions.

So, to Mr. Cohen I say this: while I agree that tribalism is no friend to universal harmony, ridding the world of religious identities would not a harmonious world make. And maybe, Mr. Cohen, just maybe, religion holds a key to the sort of universal harmony many of us—both secular and religious—long to see realized.