It’s the cultural war, and not the economic issues or the war in Iraq that has won George Bush a second term in the White House
SHE sums up religion in two straight words: practical compassion. Karen Armstrong has arrived, taking her 30 long and lonely years of search for God that sucked her into the heart and soul of the world’s three monotheistic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
For those of us who tend to wear religion on our sleeves and strut around as God’s chosen, cocksure we will go straight to heaven, Armstrong has news: “What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy.”
Breaking it down some more, the religious scholar says that if our understanding of the Divine makes us kinder ... and impels us to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, then we’re okay — “this is good theology” — as opposed to “if your notion of God makes you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it leads you to kill in God’s name, it is bad theology.”
Religion to her isn’t about a set of beliefs or believing things. “It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you” giving intimations of genuine “holiness and sacredness”, making you not a fundamentalist but a humanist. Go tell this to the 80 million white Evangelists, the born-again Christians, concentrated in America, who last week, ensured Bush’s victory in the presidential polls.
It wasn’t the economy, Stupid! Nor was it the Iraq war. Turned out, it was the cultural war! Social morals and family values drove hordes of religious right to go gung-ho for George W. Bush.
Playing the typical Monday morning quarterback — to borrow a football term where, as most major games are played on a Sunday, armchair commentators criticize and judge the game the day after — media talking heads sat on hindsight judgment over John Kerry’s surprising defeat, laying squarely the blame at the senator’s door for belonging to Massachusetts, the state that first recognized same-sex marriage. Kerry threatened to be too liberal for the likes of blue-collared working stiff, who preferred Bush’s religiosity, never mind if he shipped their jobs to India and China or bungled up Iraq slapping Americans with a $200 billion tab or gave $87 billion to the one per cent richest Americans as tax cuts. No single entity — news media or polling firm — predicted the head snapper to be the religious right who would swing Bush into the White House once more. Most misleading were the exit polls on E-Day that strongly suggested a clear Kerry victory. They did not factor in the fact that a band of 100,000 Americans, living in mid-west and the south were marching in unison to the polling booths to cast their mandate for Bush. Because they found Kerry pro-gay, pro-same sex marriage, pro-abortion, pro-stem cell research and hence unacceptable.
No one predicted morals to be the burning issue of the day.
Astounding is the American media’s amour for boilerplate issues, miserably failing to look beyond the obvious and ending often with egg on their face.
More indicting is the template mentality of the pollsters, Zogby and company, who are meant to have a finger on the nation’s pulse, but instead hop on the national bandwagon to make wrong predictions and end up eating crows.
So how will the Bible ballot pan out in the years ahead? More presciently, what can one expect from Christian bigots like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell — resurrected after 9/11 and now more entrenched than ever to drive the White House away from American Muslims? A religious clash could be lurking on the horizon.
“I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible ... to find room for ‘the other’ in our minds,” says Karen Armstrong, the lithe pixie like, sharp-tongued Londoner in her fifties, who is a frequent visitor to America and airs her learning on Islam.
Hear this woman and you will get a whiff of fresh air as you breeze through her compelling arguments on interfaith approach to life and religious harmony.
The maven’s leap of faith from being a nun, an atheist, a failed PhD scholar, an anorexic and a psychiatric case to a world-renowned religious author is a story not to be missed. It’s a must read.
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a horrible parody on the Holy Prophet, convinced Armstrong to shut out irreverent Rushdie with her own tome: Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. Her years of secluded scholarship on the life of our Prophet and diligent scan of the Holy Quran won Armstrong objective praise from the Muslim and the Christian world. The book, wrote The Economist was “respectful without being reverential, knowledgeable without being pedantic, and, above all, readable.”
Armstrong tells the story of Islam as it is when asked by Americans what to make of the Muslims after 9/11.
“It’s very important that people see what Islam is, and what it is not, and see these acts of violence, especially the September 11 acts of violence, as totally unrepresentative of the Islamic tradition, and so the more education that goes on, the better — education on all sides”.
But the Muslims, too, have got to change some of their bias, especially in textbooks to give their children a better, more balanced view of the Jews and the Christians, she asserts.
As a living testament to practical compassion that she hammers continually, Armstrong began her search by journeying to Jerusalem, to experience Judaism, Christianity and Islam firsthand found in daily practice, jettisoning the centuries-old prefabricated dogmas spun by theologians over the ages, designed to bring one into the presence of God. She witnessed for the first time the divisiveness and hostilities of the region, resulting in her writing A History of God, which explores what the three monotheistic faiths have in common.
“Stridently parochial certainty can be lethal,” she warns, making her “determined always to try to listen to the other side and at least understand where the enemy was coming from.”
But the iconoclast understands the fear all fundamentalists share: it is the “fear of annihilation, the fear that their way of life will not survive. And it’s a legitimate fear.”
Karen Armstrong ran away from the Convent when she was 29, disillusioned and disoriented because she had not found God. Her unswerving search finally ended with her most recent book, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, that sequels her journey of discovery of God penned in her first memoir as a nun.
The ‘magisterial and brilliant’ Armstrong has fallen in love with religion once again. She has found God. Her communion with Him occurs in the library, where she spends years researching her books, “I get my spirituality in study.”
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, says Armstrong, all insist that there’s no point in being religious or saying your prayers unless you are acting justly and honouring the sacred rights of your fellow human beings.
Hafiz, one of the best known Persian poets expressed similar sentiments when he wrote: “Preachers who display their piety in prayer and pulpit behave differently when they’re alone ... why do those who demand repentance do so little of it? It’s as if they don’t believe in the Day of Judgment with all this fraud and counterfeit they do in His name.”
Put plainly, if your belief in a “traditional God makes you come out imbued with a desire to feel with your fellow human beings, to make a place for them in your heart, to work to end suffering in the world, then it’s good”.
Nobody must have the last word on God, whether they’re conservative or liberals, Muslims, Jews or Evangelists. Right? By the way, if you live a life of practical compassion on earth, heaven can wait, says Armstrong, the ever provocative, original, and inclusive thinker on the role of religion in the modern world.
It’s the cultural war, and not the economic issues or the war in Iraq that has won George Bush a second term in the White House 
