In The Name of God

By LANCE MORROW

THOSE WHO GLORIFY THE IDEA OF THE WORLD turning into a global village may not know much about the behavior of people in villages. Sometimes, as Cervantes understood, "there is more harm in a village than is dreamt of."

In any case, the global village -- proliferating now into a planetary city, with a few luxurious districts, and many terrible slums, and some neighborhoods that are savage and very dangerous -- has no police force. The people of Bosnia know this. What the global community does have is many churches. Sometimes it is the faithful of the churches, and the mosques, who need policing most of all.

If you scratch any aggressive tribalism, or nationalism, you usually find beneath its surface a religious core, some older binding energy of belief or superstition, previous to civic consciousness, previous almost to thought. Here is the paradox of God-love as a life-force, the deepest well of compassion, that is capable of transforming itself into a death-force, with the peculiar annihilating energies of belief. Faith, the sweetest refuge and consolation, may harden, by perverse miracle, into a sword -- or anyway into a club or a torch or an assault rifle. Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute. The mystery is now on view among the Hindus and Muslims of India, among the Islamic fundamentalists of Egypt or Algeria, and among Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats.

Religion is sometimes a fortress for the beleaguered tribe in the new world disorder. Every cult is a kind of nation. The citadels bristle with intolerant clarities of doctrine -- and with high-caliber weapons. Outside Waco, Texas, a cult called the Branch Davidians, apocalyptic and armed to the teeth, played out a siege drama that owed something to Jim Jones' last hours, when he and more than 900 members of his People's Temple cult died in Guyana, and to some older religious Americana, like Elmer Gantry, darkened with touches of the Road Warrior. The tragedy in Texas was self-contained, and seemed a familiar story of what happens when a group sealed away in paranoia succumbs to the influence of a sort of preacherly hypnotist.

Waco represented a micro-fanaticism. The week's other case suggested larger issues, a macro-drama. It may have involved religion in more political form. The arrest of a 25-year-old Muslim named Mohammed Salameh raised the specter that the bombing of Manhattan's World Trade Center was perhaps a terrorist act of intense cultural symbolism, framed in religious context. And it brought serious terrorism across the American threshold for the first time.

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union deconstructed and freedom swept across the old communist bloc, American foreign policy analyst Francis Fukuyama offered a much discussed thesis about what he called "the end of history," wherein, with communism gone, the world's civilization would settle upon a kind of sun-splashed plateau of democratic pluralism and free- market rationalism. One of the worst dangers in the post-Fukuyama world might be boredom, a fitful cultural unease.

But obviously, "the end of history" has a dark, chaotic side. The collapse of the binary cold war configuration has produced an unstable, free-form arrangement of forces and impulses loose in the world, often traveling forward or backward at high historical speed. The world moves along a double track, tending toward one extreme or the other -- toward economic internationalism and electronic interpenetrations, for example, and at the same time toward monomaniacal nationalisms. Toward intelligent tolerance on the one hand and toward irrational religious tribalisms on the other. The trouble is that the dark side tends to gain when fear and uncertainty are rising. That is, in fact, the entire working dynamic of terrorism.

When Muslims, millions of them living in deepening poverty, contemplate the materialist West, they experience a mixture of repugnance and envy that often resolves itself into militant fundamentalist anger. On the other hand, the West and some of what comes with it (AIDS, drugs, pornography, the destruction of family and community, for example) are in many ways as dangerous and repulsive as a fundamentalist Muslim may believe.

The world is becoming both more religious and more secular simultaneously. In the U.S., for example, respect for religion in areas of popular culture like music, books and television is as low as it has ever been (see Madonna, or Gore Vidal's elaborately blasphemous novel called LIVE from Golgotha). At the same time, both religious observance and the press of religious issues (questions of uncertainty, faith, anguish) are rising. Church leaders repeatedly condemn violence done in the name of religious tribalism -- as Orthodox churchmen speak against "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and as some Muslim leaders criticize the bombing of the World Trade Center. But the zealots press on, shattering the silence, blasting the foundations.