I have been told repeatedly by large foundations that even though they fund peacebuilding and security initiatives, they will not fund anything to do with religion. For these folks, religion is a taboo subject, no matter what its relationship to peace and security. Each time I hear this, a faint echo from my past arises.
It was the early 80s, and the AIDS epidemic had just erupted. I was serving as diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Church in San Francisco, and I wanted to do something. But when I sought funding for a healthy response to the pandemic, I was often told that since Gay sex was involved, no support would be forthcoming. Gay sex was a taboo subject in those days.
It all started for me when I visited a hospital where a young man on our staff was dying of a disease that didn't yet have a name. But he had a name: Wes Hallock. In the hallways it was whispered that he was suffering from "Gay pneumonia." Soon afterwards I called for a conference, the first in the world, to explore ways the Church could respond in a care-giving manner to the new disease. That catapulted me onto the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which in turn forced my attention to the role of Gay sex in AIDS.
In some of the churches and in the world in general, the first reactions to AIDS were: "This is God's wrath on homosexuals;" and "AIDS is a gay man's disease." But when people had to get morally serious and move beyond taboo thinking, other questions surfaced. "Do heterosexuals get AIDS?" "Do more heterosexuals die of AIDS than homosexuals?" "Since AIDS is a disease of bodily fluids, what help would condoms be?" "What kind of clinical trials are needed in order to know more and find solutions regarding gay sex and AIDS?"
And something else changed even while these questions were beginning to be asked: Hearts broke. You cannot witness the prolonged suffering of a beloved friend or family member, watch them die and not have expanded compassion. So many people were drawn into the agony. I'd go to parishes where 20, 30, 40, 50 people had died of AIDS, average age of 36. We would never be the same. What started out as a taboo ended up creating a radical new social order. A much more promising and healthy one.
Now to religion and terrorism. Popular clichés go something like this: "Religions have been fighting each other for thousands of years; that will never change," and "Religions have so many core values in common, but inevitably they can not get along." I probably went along with that thinking until I got involved with the 50th anniversary celebration of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1995. At that time, it dawned on me that just as nations can identify common interests and work together to prevent war, people of differing faiths could develop a common vocation in preventing interreligious conflict.
If they could just find each other and get organized for the sake of building healthier communities, an urgently needed power source could be unleashed. One that was independent of governments, independent of religions. That’s what we’ve built URI around, but funding for that work has been an uphill battle.
"Religion" is a modern taboo word. In the popular, secular mind, religion can connote exploitation, alliance with corruption, superstition, accumulation of power at all costs, anti-common sense, anti-science and even sexual exploitation. So if we add the existing clichés about religion to this popular perception, it is no wonder the word carries such a negative meaning among those who have not experienced first-hand the beneficial contributions of believing.
All of this plays out in mind-numbing logic when it comes to funding. Large foundations that deal in peace and security can look at Muslims fighting Coptic Christians in Egypt, Sunnis fighting Shias in Karachi and throughout the Middle East, Christians fighting Muslims in Sudan and Nigeria, etc., and they don't see that religion is a relevant and vital factor in peace and security. Or if they see it, they can't imagine that the situation could ever be improved. They will not support clinical trials to change the relationship between religion and terrorism.
But we have to. People of different religions need to learn to live together if life on this planet is going to have a future. Do we invest in a better day or get swallowed up by our inherited biases?
Even though the religion taboo currently dominates thinking in some power circles and popular mind-sets, I continue to look for and work for a change. I have seen it happen before with my own eyes, as the upending of the Gay sex taboo led to a more compassionate and humane world. My present hope is that we will not always be resigned to the role of religion in terror and violence, but will get morally serious and create cultures of peace among faiths to counter terrorism and make life continue to be possible.
