Fr. Thomas Michel's Official Website

How we are seen by others

I would like to thank the organizers of the seminar “On Building a Culture of Peace” for taking the initiative of bringing us together to study this important topic, and I am grateful for the invitation to be one of the speakers.

A month ago, I was delivering a lecture at one of our national universities in Asia on the topic of “The Role of Religion in Preventing Regional Conflicts.”  Several days later I was talking informally with some people from the diplomatic corps of one of the “Great Powers” and happened to mention the topic of my lecture.  They were quite surprised and rather impressed and said, “That’s an interesting topic.  Usually we think of religion as being the cause of regional conflict and not a factor in preventing it.”

This brief remark, which is significant because it is quite typical of liberal political thought in today’s world, should give us food for reflection.  At this seminar on the Culture of Peace, we are all professed believers in one of the world’s great religions.  Our natural inclination is to look positively at religion - at least at our own religion - and we sincerely believe the words that we keep repeating and hearing during these days, that all our religions teach love, fellowship, peace, and harmony.  The problem, we say, is that people do not follow the teachings of their religion.  If they did, peace and harmony would reign in this world.

However, the spontaneous reaction of the diplomats is based on a different view of religion in relation to peace.  From their perspective, the reputation of religions and of believers is not good.  They regard religious commitment as an unsettling element in the regional political mix, an unpredictable, volatile factor of social life that can erupt unexpectedly and like typhoon winds rapidly cause havoc, destruction and plunder.  They see religion as a dangerous human phenomenon precisely because it is rarely responsive to logical reasoning, measured compromise, or words of restraint.

This is a sobering view to absorb during our deliberations on peace.  It is always painful to see ourselves as others see us. We must be aware that many conscientious people around the world would be immediately inclined to view a seminar such as ours with what has been called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”  They would spontaneously suspect that the participants like us, as representatives of various religions, are likely to spend our time engaged in an exercise in public relations, self promotion, empty platitudes, feigned acceptance of others, and generally “speaking much and doing little.”

Of course, we can note that our secular and liberal colleagues display more than a pinch of hypocrisy in their critical attitude toward religion and its role in persistent human suffering.  Their tut-tutting about the weaknesses of religion in regard to peace is often based on a highly selective reading of recent and current events.  It is the secular democracies, for example, that have brought us the international blockade of foodstuffs and medical supplies against the Iraqi people, perhaps the strongest claimant in today’s world to the title of “genocide,” to mention nearly 40 years of U.S. blockade against Cuba.  The destruction of Chechnya and the rape of Bosnia were carried out by secular, not religious, forces.  The ongoing conflicts in Sri Lanka, Rwanda and Burundi, and the civil war in Colombia cannot be said to be religiously based.  The 20th Century’s greatest calamities were brought on, not by religious groups, but by godless, secular ideologies such as nazism, fascism, and the communism of Mao and Stalin.

However, such an “ad hominem” argument can take us only so far.  If our moral values and commitment to peace as followers of the world’s religions can be defended only by saying that we are no worse than those who do not profess religious belief, then we are in a bad state indeed.  Religious faith, if it is to have any meaning for modern people, must make a contribution to human society that is not only positive but unique, one that could not be made except by those who worship the Divine.  The world must be a really better place because of religion.  Human society must be more humane, harmonious, and respectful of the dignity of all because of the active presence and contribution of committed believers.  Otherwise, we might as well pack our bags and return home, letting the secular critics be proved right.

Our share of the blame

I believe that all believers must accept a share of the blame for our religious groups’ failure to be a more effective force for peace in the world.  Part of the problem is that the rank-and-file adherents to our religion have not been taught that working for peace and harmony is a religious duty for all.  It should be an integral part of their religious commitment, yet I suspect that few of our people would see it in that light.  The failure to instill this conviction into the thinking of our faith communities falls squarely on the intellectual and religious elite, the kind of people who, like us, take part in this and similar seminars on peace.

Another part of the problem is that our scholars and religious leaders have become complacent on the subject of war and peace.  We don’t take concrete initiatives to ward off conflicts before they happen by addressing the root problems, to be busy at building and re-building peace all the time.  As a result, it is the angry, frustrated members of our community who fall into violence and conflict, and we resign ourselves to a belated role of trying to patch up communal relations once they have gotten violent and out of control.  It is shameful that, in many of our communities, it is the proponents of violence who take the initiative, while those who call for peace are seen to be comparatively weak, less committed, uncreative, and inactive in promoting the values of harmony and fellowship.  We are reactive at best, too little too late, wringing our hands.

Breast-beating and publicly confessing that we have failed does not rectify the situation.  The proponents of peace need to be as creative, proactive, and enthusiastic for our cause as are the proponents of hatred and prejudice for promoting their self-interests at any cost.  To this end, I would like to explore some of the ways in which religions and religious commitment can be factors in promoting peace and in preventing regional conflicts rather than elements leading to tension and destruction.

Educating for peace

The first area to work in is education for peace.  I believe that neither tolerance and respect for others, nor hatred and distrust of others, is an innate, natural characteristic of humans.  Both one and the other are taught and transmitted from one generation to the next.  A child will have no deep inner reason for either welcoming or rejecting another person unless he has learned to do so.  Similarly, children will have no basis on which to tolerate and esteem others unless those bases are taught to them.

Education for peace and tolerance should be part of the curriculum of our schools, whether they be state schools with mixed groups of children, or denominational or confessional schools with the majority of students from one or another religion.  Do our schools teach and show that respecting others is an integral part of our religious commitment?  Are students corrected when they make discriminatory, racist, chauvinist or intolerant remarks?  In some schools this is being done but I know many others where it is not.  Moreover, do we teach one thing in words, but convey another with unspoken attitudes, body language, and spontaneous reactions concerning certain groups in society or other national or ethnic groups?  Are teachers sufficiently trained in workshops and exposure-immersion programs to present a positive attitude towards groups that are different from our own?

At the same time we cannot expect schools to carry the whole load of educating for tolerance.  It often happens that schools already come too late to form positive attitudes toward others, for by the time children go to school the damage is already done, negative attitudes are already rooted in their outlook towards others.  If at home the pre-school child hears that Muslims are dirty, or that Hindus are treacherous, or that Christians are greedy, such a basic mind-set will already be fixed, a part of one’s basic attitude toward others before the child ever sets foot in school.  Thus, positive attitudes towards peace and harmony must begin with the attitudes of parents and older siblings, these having the deepest and most lasting effect compared with whatever is learned later in school.

Parents often feel reluctant to speak about religious questions to their children.  Fearing that they do not know enough about such matters, they prefer to leave such teaching to Qur’an classes or Sunday school, to the gurus or the bhikkus to explain.  Once in the question-answer period after a conference in Indonesia, a woman spoke up and said that she could not talk about religious matters to her children, because she was illiterate and unschooled and would be likely to get it wrong.  I said, “Teaching your children need not involve complex theological concepts.  Every mother can teach her children from their earliest years that God loves Muslims and Hindus and Christians and others, and so we must love people of other religious groups just like we love those of our own group.”

Here our churches, mosques, temples, cultural centers and the like can play a key role, by helping parents to take up their important duty of communicating attitudes of communal harmony and respect for others to their children.  How many times have you heard a sermon on Friday, Sunday or whenever you worship, that teaches that it is God’s will that people of various religions, languages, and ethnic groups should live in peace and harmony with one another?  Not very often, I suspect.  Have you ever heard that it is a serious sin not only to kill someone of another faith, or to burn their place of worship, but that it is wrong in the sight of God to speak falsely about people of another religion, to believe slanderous stories and rumors about others without any evidence or proof, to suspect others of evil intentions and deeds before they have manifested such, or to generalize and say that all members of such-and-such a religious group are lazy, untrustworthy, cheats, violent, or unable or unwilling to live with others?

How often have you heard in a sermon that parents must teach their children, not only by word but by their unspoken attitudes towards people of other faiths, that what God wants is for us to live in peace and unity and to overcome enmities by reconciliation?  Maybe those sermons you have not heard - or delivered - very often, and yet that is the kind of religious preaching that can make communities more open to accept and respect one another.  

Learning from sharing life

But talking about others is not enough.  Peace and harmony are ultimately built on the ways that we live together.  Here in Asia there are many opportunities to share life together, and the fact of living together in mixed neighborhoods accounts for much of the tolerance that is found in Asian societies.  It is true that a Christian might live down the street from the local mosque, buy bread at the grocery run by Hindus, get vegetables and fruits in the market from the Muslim vendor, and send his children to school together with the children of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and others as well.

However, we know that much of this daily interaction can be very superficial and not hold up against the strains of confessional tensions and political agenda.  Friends in Bombay, for example, have told me how surprised they were at the extent of communal violence and destruction that took place in a city that had always prided itself on being cosmopolitan and pluralist.  One hears the same expressions of shock and surprise from people in Lebanon, Bosnia, and Indonesia, regions where people also prided themselves on the good way they had traditionally lived together, but where in a short time factors beyond everyone’s control led to violence and destructive - even hateful - behavior which is condemned by all the religions which they professed.

Several years ago, I conducted a seminar on Christian-Muslim relations in Bangalore in India, a city with a 75% Hindu majority, 20% Muslim minority, and a very small minority of Christians. The seminar participants were all Christian, and we began the seminar with a questionnaire asking what ideas, perceptions, and prejudices they had about Muslims, what they thought about Muslims in general, and what they had heard from others.  They listed a great many things, most of which were negative.  Finally, the last question was factual, “Have you ever eaten a meal in the home of a Muslim?”  Not a single participant out of about thirty answered positively.  No one of them had ever shared a meal in the home of a Muslim family.

This shows the superficial basis of their earlier answers.  They saw only from the outside.  People were repeating information received second-hand from others, not knowledge that gained from personal experience.  They had no personal contacts, deep friendships, real sharing of life by which they could check and control the flood of information, some solid, but much of it consisting of half-truths, generalizing clichés, mischief-making rumors and tall tales, irresponsible journalism and sensationalist reporting, and the self-serving accusations of politicians.

How do we encourage people to form and maintain friendships across confessional and inter-religious lines?  Where can people encounter one another as fellow humans, to come into direct experience of other believers as good, conscientious people who share many of the same moral values, societal goals, and spiritual aspirations as we have?  I know of some initiatives undertaken in various parts of Asia to accomplish this.  Recently, on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia I took part in an exchange of visits, in which Christians spent four days living in Muslim homes in Muslim villages and Muslims did the same in Christian villages.  The project had prevention as its goal, to build up a large enough group of Christians and Muslims who knew each other personally, who had lived with each other even for a short period, who had shared meals together, in the hope that the violence which was breaking out in neighboring islands might thus be avoided in their region.

Coexistence not enough

Was this program successful?  It is, I believe, impossible to measure success in such matters.  All one can say is that there has been no violence - yet - in the region where this and similar projects of coming to know one another better have been carried out.  One cannot say for certain, however, that violence would have broken out had there not been such peacemaking efforts, nor can we say that no communal violence will ever touch that region in the future.  We work in hope without any guarantee of success.

I remember wondering, during the Lebanese civil war, whether in the Christian village in which I was living while studying Arabic or in the neighboring Muslim village where I visited often and had many friends, if such active initiatives in peacemaking had been systematically promoted and carried out by the church and mosque communities, whether history might have taken a different turn.  I should add, sadly, that both villages were totally destroyed in 1979 and the inhabitants of both shared a common fate - that of homeless refugees.

I cannot place the blame on one or the other side - I found the two groups of people equally loveable, conscientious, sincere, and well-intentioned, but the passive coexistence that marked relations between the two groups did not provide a bond that was strong and deep enough to withstand the forces of local and international politics and the polarizing activities of the warmongers, rumormongers and arms purveyors on both sides.

And here we return to the great failing of religious leaders and the educational and social movers of our respective communities.  That is complacency.  Relations between religious communities can never be taken for granted.  They cannot be ignored until tensions arise and hostilities break out, for at that point all that remains for us is to enter upon reactive activity.  It is then too late to achieve much in a constructive way, and the only thing possible is to try to limit the damage and to care for the victims.
My dream

I share with you a dream that I have had for many years now, one that I am still hopeful that it can become a reality.  My dream concerns a Christian-Muslim project.  I dream of “Muslim-Christian Friendship Schools” in regions of conflict between the two communities.  I am dreaming of schools run jointly by Christians and Muslims that would offer not only quality education but also be a living sign to all that the two communities desire to live and work together for the common good of all.  The visible cooperation would teach not only the students, but also their parents, neighbors, the people of the locality, and of the whole country, that these two groups need not be enemies, in fact, are not intended by God to be enemies, but rather partners.

I first began to dream about such schools after the war in Bosnia.  Until the communist government was established in Yugoslavia after World War II, my religious congregation - I am a Jesuit - had a big school in Sarajevo.  Croatian Catholics, Serbian Orthodox, Bosnian Muslims, and even local Jews studied together there.  The school was nationalized, but at the end of the civil war in Bosnia, we were invited to reopen the school.  Certainly, in any war-torn area, one of the key elements in reconstruction is education of high quality.  I was opposed to our simply reopening the school as the same unilateral project it had been 50 years before.  With all that had gone on during the civil war and after all that they had suffered from Christian militiasl, Bosnian Muslims would have naturally felt suspicious about our motives and full of resentful wartime memories, and hence reluctant to send their children to the school.

But what if a joint project, a “Muslim-Christian Friendship School” were to be erected upon the ashes of Sarajevo?  What if the teachers and administrators were committed not only to offering good education to students, but to training a new generation of Christians and Muslims committed to rebuilding the country together?  What if the school were to become a “social laboratory” where students of various nationalities and religions could learn the difficult task of mutual respect and esteem, thus enabling people to move beyond the chains and burdens of the past to build a new future together?  Is this not a project worth devoting one’s life to?

I came to realize that it is not only Sarajevo that could profit from a Muslim-Christian Friendship School.  We can equally envision the contribution that such schools could make in Pristina, Kosovo, in Grozny, Chechnya, in Zamboanga in the southern Philippines, in Ambon in eastern Indonesia.  I would even like to see, as a symbolic act, the opening of such schools amid the very ruins of burned-out mosques and churches - like Coventry Cathedral was rebuilt literally amidst the bombed-out ruins of the previous church - simply to prove to all people that the forces of peace, of tolerance, of generous religious commitment are stronger than those of war and intolerance, that it is not the proponents of violence and intolerance who have the last word, but those who are committed to harmony within the human family before God who cares for all.

My dream of Muslim-Christian Friendship Schools is not meant to be a panacea or to answer all problems or respond to all needs.  It is an example, one example of many that could be mentioned, one that I believe can be applied wherever we are speaking about religious groups in situations of tension.  But it is religious believers undertaking such creative initiatives and concrete contributions that can finally and properly answer the skeptics and critics of religion.  All of us here are convinced that human life is better when we live in daily contact with our Creator, when we seek to live according to religious values and principles, when we recognize the transcendent dimension to human existence in this world.  This is the unique benefaction that we offer to modern secular society which, without the input that can only come from religious faith, is in constant danger of becoming an economic jungle, a race for power, an aimless drift towards continually new pleasures and material rewards.

But this contribution, a contribution that the world needs, is today not visible.  People cannot see that religious faith offers a necessary corrective to secular values and way of life.  And people can not see this because religious communities - and I speak of all our communities - are too often guilty of a complacent abdication of our role, of allowing our religions to become instrumentalized by power groups, manipulated by political interests, tranquilized by the rich and selfish, and controlled by the negative initiatives of angry and hate-filled members.  In this situation, building a culture of peace means letting the peace-loving, humanity-loving, tolerant, respectful forces of our own communities of faith regain the initiative in playing the specific role in human societies that God has always intended them to play.

Thomas Michel, S.J., Dhaka, 03.11.00