Today's American "culture wars" tend to be at base and at heart religion wars. If the image of war is a bit too strong, let religious conflict do. There have been few dead bodies as a result of the current controversies, yet the time has come for efforts to address situations in which words have become the instruments of incivility.
When people of religious faith enter public debate, they draw on their deepest beliefs—and sometimes express themselves with a passion and vehemence that can quickly turn conversation into argument, and argument into rhetorical meltdown. In 1994, believers made their presence felt on all sides in a stunning encounter in Cairo where, at the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Population and Development, people of conviction shocked each other and a watching world as they clashed over some of the most volatile topics of the day: family planning and the nature of the family; the rights of women; gender and sexuality; and abortion and birth control.
It is hardly possible to take up such subjects in any forum without risking dissension. In a setting where profoundly convinced believers speak up, as in Cairo, what can easily occur is intense conflict and communication breakdown, resulting in deep frustration and a legacy of continuing misunderstanding and combat.
Ironic, isn't it: most major religions advertise themselves sincerely as agents of reconciliation, advocates of love and shalom. Yet many institutions, professions, and communities do what they can to keep religious voices away from the table, precisely in order to promote the very reconciliation that was supposed to have come with expressions of faith.
Persistent questions
Yet people who ground their commitments in faith have the resources to promote understanding and good will, resources that can be found in their religious texts, traditions, and experiences. Religion can enable believers to combine reasoned advocacy with concern for the voices and convictions of those with whom they disagree. The questions remain: How can believers consistently advance understanding and make progress in dealing with profound issues of the sort that surfaced at Cairo? Should religions and religious people be represented at local, national, or international forums where there are certain to be controversial issues of public import? If, as they all claim, their faith traditions include resources that make it possible for them to speak and act out of conviction while hearing and conversing with those outside their traditions, how do we bring these resources forward? Can there be what we might call "rules of the game" for serious public conversation involving people of faith?
"Religion is a private affair" has come to be a slogan, almost a shibboleth, of many citizens. They believe that if only matters of faith or viewpoints based on it could be sequestered in the sanctuary or tucked into cubbyholes and closets, all would be well. Let America be a privately religious, publicly secular society, and the situation would improve.
It won't. If for decades some citizens have gone about creating the impression that democracies might make basic decisions without reference to spiritual and religious expressions, they were not reading the signs of those times well. In the civil rights cause, the movements for women's rights and human rights in general, debates over population and development, war and peace, the record shows that religious forces played overt and often constructive roles.
If this record is forgotten, or if a new generation has not learned it, then this must be said: around the world the forces of faith, be they mild or fanatic, benign or murderous, are on the front lines in most conflicts, and the prospects for seeing religion pushed back into the private zone are rather slim. At the turn of the millennium, more people in the world and more citizens of this nation find it valuable, necessary, and even urgent to act upon the premises of faith.
Why? First, while many people in a society that is called secular and pluralistic are able to develop and express their ethical and political views without reference to any kind of transcendent order, many more ground their moral choices and social views in profound views of reality that include God, the sacred and the like. They could not refrain from doing so even if they were asked.
Second, from time immemorial, many kinds of human groupings have derived from religious bases and displayed religious intentions. Sometimes these groups include nations, at other times parties, causes, caucuses, or coalitions. The rich diversity of American culture has led many of these to find ways to cooperate and creatively coexist. But the people who make them up are not always able simply to "park their religion at the door" when they enter the public arena.
More voices, not fewer
If some participants in public debate suppress their most profound convictions for the sake of peace and quiet, they will simply yield the platform or the floor to the more strident voices that will in such cases be addressing a kind of void.
The entry of more voices, rather than fewer, into the public conversation helps assure that the community will be aware of the diversity and, quite possibly, enriched by it.
This is a decisive moment, as the calendar turns from the end of the second millennium C.E. to the beginning of the third. This momentous if admittedly arbitrary transition symbolizes the roiling changes engulfing so many religions and cultures today. Around the globe, people of faith are dealing with urgent questions about the environment, war and peace, justice, community, economics, and precisely the kinds of issues the Cairo Conference took up. Religionists do so at a time when instruments of destruction—whether wielded by terrorists, tribal warriors or nation-states—are more available and more threatening than ever before. Such tools of violence loom in the background of the earnest efforts to use words to address grave issues, and those tools are too often put to work when such efforts break down.
Civility helps avoid such breakdown in the first place. It is an attempt to find ways to ensure that civil discourse will, in fact, be civil. In this age of media sound bites and talking heads who shout more often than they talk, far too frequently the public square devolves into a verbal battleground from which only losers emerge, bloodied but unable to see that there is another, more helpful and more edifying way to communicate. Civility suggests a way of embodying that new mode of communication, and although these ideas are inspired by and drawn from the sometimes ancient roots of a wide variety of major religious traditions, together they constitute a new form of civil discourse.
That term, "civil discourse," includes all modes of public communication, from a politician's televised speech to a letter to the editor, from a United Nations conference to a demonstration featuring non-violent protest. Civility is not a lack of passion; discourse is not only a string of words. Providing the foundation stone of the new public conversation, civility is appropriate to all modes of communication, both constructive and critical. Most important, civil discourse is geared toward action, toward working together to achieve a common good, and toward achieving real-world goals.
