c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) If we ever doubted the wisdom of keeping religion out of politics, ongoing protests over Danish cartoons deemed offensive to Islam should be our wake-up call.

This is the face of religious extremism.

When religion is on the line, no side understands any other side. Angry Muslims cannot imagine a culture in which everything is routinely offered up in caricature, from kings and presidents to popes and preachers, and cartoon images of Jesus run the gamut from reverent to ribald. In return, Westerners struggle to comprehend a culture whose capacity for faith-based protest is so easily sparked.

When religion is on the line, compromise and moderation vanish. How does any faith that considers its tenets ultimate and God-given find room for other points of view? If our cause is just, then all competing causes can only be absurd, loathsome, dangerous, to be condemned and, when restraints are off, destroyed.

When religion is on the line, goodness and mercy are banished. No matter that both the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus counseled kindness and peace. When religious battle is joined, goodness gives way to brutality, and mercy is considered weak.

If truth is the first casualty of war, grace is the first casualty of religious extremism. Grace cares for the other, grace allows room for newness, grace blurs boundaries, grace counts no cost, not even the cost to pride and certainty. Religious extremism rages in exactly the opposite manner, putting pride, certainty, self and tradition above all else.

The tragedy is that, just as unbridled warfare slaughters lives on all sides, so does religious extremism eviscerate religion. The best of each faith is lost. In the drive to victory, what the Scriptures and heroes actually said is put aside. Religion degenerates into battles over property, right-opinion, power and pride _ all matters that Jesus, and I suspect Muhammad, considered snares, not godly aims. When rifles and stones are being handed out, children are seen as warriors, not treasures to be brought to God.

No society can stand the loss of its moderate center. For that is the ground where nuance and perspective bear fruit in wisdom, and thoughtfulness and common sense matter more than zeal. When religion sets out to seize power, its first target is the moderate center. The with-us or against-us language of religious zealotry vanquishes the language of reason, and soon Both-And yields to Either-Or, and Maybe yields to Never. Freedom of expression is deemed an open door to blasphemy, and tolerance is deemed unnecessary. At that point, words fail, and when words fail, nothing is left but raw emotion, the tinder that demagogues and manipulators fan easily to flame.

This isn’t a problem unique to Islam. Our Founding Fathers knew well the danger of letting religion do more than inspire trust and promote justice. If religion actually held power, the savage wars of European history would transfer here, and the rampaging mobs of radical Islam would be matched by those of radical Christianity.

Any faith invites devotion. When that faith is applied to doing good and serving the least of these, then devotion can move mountains. It can even free slaves and encourage sacrifice. But when religious devotion is harnessed to right-opinion and institutional supremacy, it can become demonic.

In the end, religious extremism takes everyone prisoner, even its adherents. Any mob creates a vacuum of power, and into that vacuum come the manipulators. They push religious buttons, stir passions, orchestrate violence, and either bring repression upon themselves or open the door to repression of others, and soon the righteous find their own freedom lost, too.

MO/PH END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Tom Ehrich, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.