How Do We Get Along?

Growing up in Cold War Germany, organized religion came in two flavors. There were Catholics. And there were Lutherans.

Period.

Sure, there were generational differences within each denomination: Both our old-school Pastor Nikolitsch of the Lutheran parish my parents belonged to and the ancient Silesian Jesuits teaching at my high school were figures of authority, stern and unbending like the Red Brick Gothic churches of the Mark Brandenburg. The younger generation of clerics, however, wore Earth Shoes, played guitar, insisted on jeans and white T-shirts in church-sponsored theater groups (“to symbolize that it could happen today”) and overall were indistinguishable from social studies teachers, eco-politicos or any other representatives of leftist pop and social culture in the secular seventies.

America’s plethora of religions and denominations is thus almost incomprehensible to a Continental European. When I get letters from European readers blaming everything that’s wrong with the world on America’s “religious right,” I feel compelled to ask whom exactly they mean: the Methodists, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Presbyterians, German or English Lutherans, Baptists, Southern Baptists, Catholics, Calvinists, Evangelicals, Armenian, Russian or Greek Orthodox, Reform Jews, Orthodox Jews, Amish, Herrenhuthers, Sunnis, Shiites, Boumis, Mennonites, Masons… or maybe the Indian Boy Scout who introduced our troop to the Hindu religion during the last campout as part of his “public speaking” requirement?

Because I pass all of them on my way into the office.

Given the variety of faiths in the States, one question inevitably arises: How do they all get along without cutting each others’ throats? Because, let’s be honest, ecumenical services and interfaith worship are inventions of modernity. If you take your religious convictions as seriously as you’re commanded to, everyone else’s beliefs must needs be filed under “deplorable superstitions,” heresy, or even blasphemy. Could it be simply the righteous consciousness of “the Force being with you” that allows people to nod at their infidel neighbor’s aberrations with a smiling show of tolerance?

If so, what can one say about the brouhaha over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed? It’s a Muslim’s good right to consider the depiction of the prophet as blasphemous or idolatrous. It’s his good right to decide to take his business elsewhere as a consequence and buy his yoghurt from the Yemenis instead of the Danes. But it’s also a Danish or other newspaper’s good right to publish whatever they darn well please - just as it is perfectly acceptable that a Dane eats Danish ham, drinks Faxe beer from cans the size of paint buckets, dances with his mother at his own wedding, and puts down the “Satanic Verses” after trying to make sense of the first two pages.

(A book, by the way, whose author was condemned to death for writing it, whose Italian translator was severely wounded during an assassination attempt, and whose Japanese translator was stabbed to death. I don’t know about you, but my Western sensitivities are still, shall we say, “outraged” at that!)

It is most interesting that especially left-leaning and liberal newspapers have thus far found very little reason to take a stand against what amounts to a proto-totalitarian interference with free speech rights.

The German-Israeli journalist Henryk Broder asks:

“How would the [ultra-left wing German newspaper] Taz react if Christian fundamentalists were calling for a boycott of England [because of Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’]? Something has changed in the consciousness of the public since September 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks from Ankara to Madrid, after the Al Jazeera images of beheaded hostages. ‘Punish one, educate a hundred,’ Mao once said. Threaten one, cow a million, that could read today.”

One feels inclined to agree with Jihad Momani, editor-in-chief of the Jordanian weekly independent newspaper Al-Shihan, who wrote: “What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?”

J. Christoph Amberger