Time Essay: RELIGIOUS WARS A Bloody zeal

The scenes are macabre. Religious images adorn vehicles and guns as Christian soldiers, some of them wearing crosses around their necks, storm Moslem strongholds. Moslem soldiers, in their turn, strip or mutilate the bodies of dead Christian soldiers, tie them to cars and drag them through the streets. In the vicious war in Lebanon, religion is a palpable presence—though allegiances are complex and contradictory; some Christians are backing the leftist Palestinians, while the Syrians, mainly Moslem, support the rightist Christian forces. Still, the air crackles with a certain primitive energy of zealots in a holy war.

Fighting and dying under religious flags go on with a violent persistence elsewhere around the world. Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster trade killings in a kind of perpetual motion of futility. Arabs and Israelis stand tensely at borders of territorial, cultural and religious dispute. In the Philippines, Moslem separatists are in rebellion against a Christian majority. Greek-Cypriot Orthodox Christians confront Turkish-Cypriot Moslems across a sullen truce line. Pakistan separated from India because Moslems feared the rule of a Hindu majority.

Why, at this point in the 20th century, the strange vitality of what seem to be religious wars? Westerners tend to regard them as something anachronistic—an offense against the heritage of the Enlightenment, spasms of violent superstition. If war is often enough inexplicable, religious conflict at least seems to carry war's inherent irrationality into an even uglier, throwback realm of absolutes, beyond the reach of compromise. Or perhaps it is simply that agnostic societies find it difficult to understand why anyone would think religion worth fighting about.

These conflicts are, of course, more complicated than religious fanaticism; they have a great deal to do with economic discrimination, battles for political power, questions of deeply laminated social difference. Nor do the wars involve religious doctrine—except in oblique, complex ways. A Belfast pub is not blown up to assert the Real Presence or the Virgin Birth. Many of the terrorists are atheists anyway. In such places as Ireland and Lebanon, religious leaders on all sides have prayed and pleaded for an end to the fighting. The I.R.A. is filled with the excommunicated, whose religious observances are limited to theatrical funerals for its martyrs. But the violence persists with a life of its own, like a hereditary disease. It is an anomaly of such conflicts that organized religion is powerless to stop them—as if a war involving religion were too important to be left to churchmen.