After September 11, 2021: The Next 20 Years

greetings greetings around the world my name is tom banshoff i'm director of the berkeley center for religion peace and world affairs here at georgetown and i'm delighted on behalf of our centre community to welcome you all uh to this online dialogue on the topic after september 11th the next 20 years 10 days ago now as many of you know we had an online forum here at the center an opportunity for many of our scholars to share their reflections their personal reflections about september 11th but also their thoughts about the significance of the anniversary what we've learned for the united states and for the world and for our work at the center at the intersection of religion peace and world affairs today we thought we'd do something a little bit different under the impact of the anniversary the moving commemorations um all of the input that we've read the outpouring of commentary in the global media we thought we'd take this opportunity to look forward to the next 20 years and engage in conversation with one another and with you all around the world about the challenges that lie ahead specifically we want to think a little bit about the themes that have been so central to the work of the center the role of religion in our communities local national and global and the intersection of religion peace and violence now before i turn it over to my colleague paul eli who will be organizing the conversation um i thought i'd share a few thoughts of my own you know it's uh a current dark global moment in so many ways we're still suffering through the pandemic we see the crisis of democracy the rise of autocracy around the world the long-term threat not so long-term it seems of climate change the victory of the taliban in afghanistan it's easy to be quite pessimistic at this global moment but i do see some cause for hope as we look forward especially as you think about the religious dimension of world affairs i think one of the remarkable long-term impacts of september 11th has been the mobilization of religious communities around global issues not just violence and issues of peace but broader global agendas such as health the environment and climate change migration i think for example of pope francis and his mobilization together with other religious leaders around covid 19 for example the migration issue and of course broader issues of climate change in the environment that have been so central to his papacy now we know of course that these uh religious efforts let's be realistic these religious efforts these uh efforts of interfaith initiatives to engage have not had such a tremendous impact in fact it's been quite marginal the voices are often not heard impact very circumscribed they often face tremendous opposition within religions themselves we'll come back to some of these themes i think in the conversation but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that overall there has been a tremendous mobilization unprecedented unprecedented mobilization of religious communities for the global common good since september 11th and how best to connect those efforts how to magnify them will i think be one of the main challenges of the next 20 years it's a challenge that the berkeley center through our research teaching and convening will continue to pursue uh in partnership with many others around the world including some of you on this call today so thanks so much for joining us for this dialogue i'd like now to turn things over to my colleague paul eli well-known author critic a senior fellow in the center who will be leading the conversation with four of our colleagues jose casanova jocelyn cesari drew christensen and catherine marshall so again welcome and with that over to you paul thank you very much tom and the thanks also to michael kessler the managing director of the berkeley center and to ruth copeland who helped organize this event i'm so glad to have the opportunity to be in conversation with four of our berkeley center colleagues at one time because this is a conversation that we've had interalia over meals in the hallways passing on the way to class intermittently for much of the last 20 years so this chance to consolidate our thought and point it forward to the next 20 years is something that i personally have looked forward to doing and that i'm going to learn a lot from i know that i think as i organized this event i was very aware of the way the 20th anniversary to me had the unfortunate effect of canonizing some simple ideas or ideas that aren't necessarily supported by reality about the attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon and what followed the one that came to mind for me most obviously was this idea of extraordinary unity that followed the attacks in the united states i remember that time as intellectually and culturally um fraught and full of division and hope that that doesn't get scanted as we look forward so then to read the four of your reflections on 11 written shortly before the anniversary was really refreshing because it was a reminder of the complexity of thought that the four of you and others at the center have brought to bear on this event and its consequences over 20 years in in rich and complex ways i got a great deal out of those reflections and those are found on the berkeley center website under the berkeley forum but i'll draw i wouldn't say substantially but those your reflections on that day are going to be the starting point for our discussion today but i'd like to start with uh jose casanova now jose you had written a book called public religions in the modern world and as you tell it in your reflection on 9 11 your central point in that book about the need to attend to the role of public religions in the modern world was suddenly current was taken up but in ways that um you say for the wrong reasons can you explain just how that happened and then i want to follow up with the question how it might be done differently in the next 20 years yes well thank you very much paul tom it's a pleasure to be here to have this conversation yes on the one hand it confirmed the thesis of public religions in the modern war namely that religion was becoming de-privatized that is going public but now was was public not anymore only at the nation-state level but at the global level this was the real impact of september 11. that somehow a group a non-governmental organization that was somehow in the name of religion was able to carry violence on a global basis and a global and a global level and of course this means that those secular institutions that had basically assumed that the religion is a relatively irrelevant private affair that was taken for granted suddenly rediscovered the power of the sacred the part of the sacred but now i say for the wrong reasons because it is the sacred able to precisely produce violence and now it was out of this fear and anxiety about religion then many of the responses basically took the shape and so i was very much happy obviously it confirmed my thesis and it probably opened a lot of venues for my career and i became involved in the formation of many centers at the berkeley center throughout the world but usually it was out of this anxiety and fear and i was trying to say well there is something else that religions can provide and it is basically something that transcends the view is the structures that we have and allow us to think beyond the present beyond the things we take for granted the great transformation of the great religions was the ability to develop fraternization beyond the kinship system that they could really bring bridges and encounters between peoples that were not simply taken as members of kinship structures now the kinship structure does not disappear but now it's able to bring trans-kinship structures of solidarity of encounter and my point is that in this age of globalization in which most of our challenges begin to be global both the global structure of governance of the capitalist system and the global structure of governments of the nation state he has very difficulties has difficulties addressing the common good precisely those global challenges in a way that really really uh could be helpful for the development of a more solidary more solidarious humanity and this is the moment which religions today and they have shown in the last 20 years that they have this ability to transcend the kinship state precisely the civilizational level is not only the the clash of civilizations precisely points to the ability of religion to transcend this class and so it is in the respect that i hope that in the last 20 years as we have to rethink our system of global governance to precisely address the global challenges that uh tam banchof has mention that religions could become a factor in the structuring of a global civil society that adds to the global governance that we have now in terms of the system of nation states and the global capitalist system so jose you you end by i'm suggesting some of the things that religion can do and is already doing but let's turn back to the way religion is apprehended from indifference or diminishing of religion that led you to write public religions in the modern world to sudden the fear of religion or anxiety about religion so what would if we had to characterize the apprehension of religion going forward either descriptively or prescriptively how how should we how should uh civil society apprehend religion for the next 20 years that well it should apprehend it's not the question of how civil society should apprehend religion but how religious groups individuals which are motivated by religion as are able to gain the courage to form uh structures of solidarity social movements uh non-governmental organizations that precisely transcend those uh national structures that we've seen is the near response to even the the global health pandemic was the reinforcement of national borders that that religious movements religious groups religious institutions show this ability it's we don't know whether it will possible but i hope because for me not only in terms of my own convictions but in terms of sociologically looking at global history religions have played throughout global history precisely this role so when you talk about the role that religions would play in the reshaping of global governance you mean just as for example the fact that say the catholic church is transnational and when pope francis speaks about the need for people to take the vaccine that that's a message that goes to many countries which have different national approaches to the issue well this is a very small example and indeed it was for me surprising to see that among the different groups in the us catholics appears the highest the highest group i mean you have different categories of of the the but the last statistics i saw 75 percent the highest groups uh uh which are for vaccines but this is not only about vaccines it's about immigration it's about refugees and it's about actually and and i hope that my fellow uh uh my my colleague katherine will raise this issues of gender which are the most uh uh if you wish contentious issues today in which religion is so uh uh implicated that this is a crucial issue that will only be resolved if there is also a transformation within religious institutions in a new direction so again i have i hope uh but i'm i am ambivalent about it in the sense that i'm not sure that this will happen thank you jose so catherine when um jose pointed that question in your direction let's back up a bit so in the years when jose was thinking as a social scientist about public religions in the modern world you had experience on the ground of the presence of religion to a greater degree than people in the developed world perhaps recognized through your work with the world bank and in your scholarship uh did is that accurate and if so then did that apprehension or perception of the role of religion uh markedly change after 9 11 the way the perception of jose's work suddenly changed the events of 9 11 were a sharp divide in the way that people thought about the role of religion in many aspects of global affairs and that includes the field of development which is really what my career has been uh focused on um the it is over the last 20 years that the question that's always before me is what's religion got to do with any specific problem uh and does it matter and if so how does it matter and what does that translate into into practice so one of the topics that i have seen over my professional career uh tremendous change is an understanding the importance of the roles of uh gender relations of relations specifically between men and women and there has been clearly a a revolution intellectually as well as socially uh in understanding women's roles that i think was indeed accentuated by the negative focus on religion during the during the crisis following 9 11. the perception came to be that one of the major reasons why women's equality was so difficult was because of religious teachings religious practices in many parts of the world in many ways though it's it is more complicated than that um as we've discussed on different occasions and i think jose uh jocelyn uh tom are well aware of the of the deep complexity but maybe i can just take three issues that are of central importance uh for development thinkers where they see often tepid uh if not even negative roles of the religious communities with much to sweeping much to sweeping a brush the first one is the girls education with so much research demonstrating that some of the most fundamental social economic political changes come with uh girls going to school and that's why there's so much focus on that in afghanistan right now but it's been a major revolution and religious leaders have often been willing to go along with it but perhaps without much enthusiasm second one is domestic violence and the realization that this is not an issue of someone else it's a central issue common to all cultures and societies but where it's been tremendously difficult to get religious actors to take that on as a central issue for reasons that sometimes are hard to understand that it's seen as interfering with the family in some way and then the third issue is child marriage where there are 12 million girls a year who are married below the age of 18 with many diverse negative consequences and once again because religious leaders actually perform marriages in so many settings one would have expected that the research and the evidence the powerful evidence on that would have pointed to activism enthusiastic advocacy for doing away with child marriage and we have seen some support in places but not what i would have expected so i think what that points to is one of our perennial comments about the roles of religion and public affairs which is that it's complicated it's diverse it's often ambivalent it moves quite slowly you have points of prophetic voice and of leadership but you also have this tepid response sometimes and even hesitation as as far as it's complicated amen to that i think all of us at the center one of the things that we have in common is this sense that these things are quite complicated and that it's really necessary to push back against oversimplification and the way simplified ideas get into circulation and and move very fast certainly that was my experience of what happened after the world trade center was destroyed suddenly the awareness of the extent to which religion permeates uh societies globally the variety of religious expression the outside role of religion and things like education and in something like domestic violence in the way that you suggest that goes far beyond a kind of goddess dead campus thesis from the 60s and makes you realize that um even if you think god is dead on campus uh god is alive for tens of millions of people in many countries uh and it goes right down into their lives do you think that um over 20 years did you just on almost on a simple journalistic level did you see the uh presence of religion growing more intense uh or less intense or just kind of um carrying along the way it had been over the 20 years since since 2001 from the area in which you work i think we're talking both about perceptions and about practice um in terms of perception uh it's very clear that there's a much much more interest in the roles of religion that unfortunately as jose was uh suggesting focused on its role in inciting violence and divisions um more than on the hoped for uh prophetic voice of um that you were referring to of common common interest and common concern uh we've also though seen really um almost an explosion of interest institutional academic uh personal of of many leaders and when you when i say that my focus is on what's religion got to do with energy supply with climate with girls education etc the answer is often that's very interesting that's something i had not really thought about it was because what we had dealt with before was i would say a willful blindness um an absence of religious materials even in libraries uh that it was simply not on the curriculum even of a university like georgetown in its international development programs and conflict resolution so i think that that barrier is behind us but we're still groping for meaningful ways of what we call strategic religious engagement that really looks both at the diversity of religious contributions and their dynamism as well as simply taking them out from the shadows thank you i'm going to circle back to you with a question of what that kind of religious engagement would look like say in 2041 another 20 years from now but something that you said reminded me of a distinction that is set out very clearly in jocelyn's reflection jocelyn cesari about the anniversary published on the berkeley forum jocelyn you distinguished between the role of religious teaching and the role of religious belonging and suggested that uh insufficient awareness of um the way these things are related is one of the things that led to a lot of misperceptions about religion after 9 11. is that have i characterized your point accurately and if so can you um can you expand on it a bit yes thank you paul the piece i wrote was really to show a discrepancy in the sand that the scholarship in the last 20 years has made a deliberate effort to debunk the clash of civilization and you have now data that shows that there is no real clashes between civilization that the most intense conflicts happen within civilizations and and the scholars of politics would now look at religion nobody would say that it doesn't matter but there are few issues that remain the first one is that i think the clash is still very much alive empirically among people because it is very easy to mobilize to make sense of the environment in which we live you know when you are attacked uh in the west in the name of islam people indeed read it as a clash of civilization noting also that the actors themselves read it this way i always say this anecdote but uh huntington at the end of his life was pretty much taken aback when he learned that al-qaeda was a big fan of his book the leaders of al-qaeda were a big fan of his book so you know that it goes both ways so it's very much alive despite the fact that as scholars and as data show it's not really validated so the gap has to be addressed at some point but beyond that even if we don't believe in the clash of civilization and we think it's wrong there are still a few flaws that we all share the first one is really to look at islam to understand the role of religion in international politics and i think it does have a lots of biases with it um including like the fact that maybe islam is the only religion that has a sense internationally if we don't do more comparison and that's what the berkeley center is a unique place in this sense if we don't look across as a religious tradition it remains a big issue uh the second is indeed the fact that we are interested in religion when it comes to conflicts while um we also know that religions are part of different kinds of social action civil actions that in some areas even the religious communities we replace the states that are not able to provide welfare for example we always see hezbollah as a jihadi terrorist group hezbollah has legitimacy because it provides in the south of lebanon services that the lebanese state cannot provide and it does even serve the christians in the area so nobody see that you see that that's a kind of multiple facets of religion that we do not take into account the fact also and then we have tons of data showing that that the most observant practitioners of their tradition are the less violent or the more eager to criticize violence and that's the gap here even in the u.s if you look at who is ready to act violently about religion are not the one was the most pious in their own tradition so there is something in there that we have also to look into more um in more detail and and the third point is indeed that the beliefs the doctrine and not the first triggers of a political action is a violent or not and that what is at stake is identification to communities and that's something that the western scholarship doesn't address because we have all been educated in the fact that religion is an individual feature while most of the significant roles of religion politically have to do with the sense of community and um and i think this is something we are missing here in the way we look at a religion in other words the religion is not a collective of religious individuals it's something else it is about the building of not only an identity but a way to live together and and that's the most important way to look at religion today or for the next 20 years so and i'm sure i'm simplifying to a certain degree huntington's idea came out of the class of civilizations in 92 93 just when scholars were showing its limitations it was then enshrined in the popular and political imagination so then you scholars have had to push back against an idea that was already superseded in your own work so at this point um it is a is a different idea of coalescing to take the place of the cost of civilizations uh is do we have um a macro idea of religion in society that um can can displace that one for the next 20 years or are we working with lots of different theories that you scholars have to fit together it's an interesting question i think we are as lots people we are the stories we tell and even in our scholarship we have deep down ingrained the idea that the secular narrative is the only one that can provide meaning for the collective and we're going to have to revisit that because it most of the engagement and i think the pandemic was a moment of that religions were important to people not because they were catering to their spiritual of faith you know the enduring use of the term of faith that we return to the person to the intimacy of the belief this is one aspect the second aspect is i am part of a community that makes sense and the nation has provided this meaning for everybody including religious people it is about time to revisit the secular narrative to make room for people who also have a sense of community that is not only based on the nation and and here there is a lot of work to do on the public space um and the fact that not only the religious voices should be heard but the role of religion in building this sense of social contract uh without leaning or or going to intolerance or excommunication you know there are there are two ways of looking at religions and you can find example in both open or closed so what we are seeing most of the time and that the secular narrative is that religions are closed there are people in each of this tradition that are trying to open when are we going to make room for that i'm not even talking about the politician who are not even there but even in the way that we scholars look at religions that's that would be my response to you looking at the open um mindset of religious actors including the religious leaders but not only we are talking about women what happened in the pandemic is that the visibility of women in also building this sense of community or young people you know that would be attractive to a lot of the young people that we see now as the nouns you know but they are they are in need of building this community as well they and they want to be part of that thank you what i hear you saying and i hear some points of contact between your work and jose's and that religion is not easily assimilable to the secular narrative it offers an alternative structure to the structures to the social imaginaries that dominate so many people's lives and to actual worldly structures such as those of global governance but then um certain ideas of religion um are enshrined within those structures in ways that makes it difficult for us to understand things uh drew has addressed this both in his reflection for the anniversary and in an article he uh recently wrote for last year drew you you suggest that scholars and institutions aren't sufficiently able to grasp a certain distinction that you put forward is very important in afghanistan and elsewhere the distinction between urban societies and rural and tribal societies has that um 20 years on from 9 11 uh has the what what is that what is the state of that idea that you consider uh central to our understanding of things if i characterize it right yeah i think you have to characterize it right um i mean the first point i'd make is that it's an historic pattern it's not just a recent development excuse me if my laryngitis gets the better off in here but um uh you know in the early centuries of christianity uh christianity in north africa was affected by uh uh by divisions between the provincials on the uh and and then the the berbers uh on one side and the metropolitan romans in north africa on the other uh and uh uh in in church history uh it's it's it's i think pretty well understood that that many of the early heresies for social social protests by people living on the margins of uh of of that kind of world uh and that you can see that pattern again and again in the middle ages uh it's also affected islam i mean the uh uh the convo vencia that could be romanticized in andalus uh was was an effective [Music] place where christians and muslims and jews could live together but then they will overcome again and again by successive waves of of berbers from north africa with a more radical religion than the previous wave and so gradually before the the uh uh the spanish monarchy brought them down the uh uh they had been greatly weakened by this this their tax from their from the muslim brothers so i i i think we shouldn't be surprised that this pattern reoccurs in our in in our own time um uh i i think that that it still exists um i think there's evidence now that that just a hints of evidence that the us may be getting in this case the government is getting a different perception of this and that that the cia got the release of uh baradar from um from jail in pakistan and then uh has been in dialogue with him as the number two in kabul uh that there there's a sense that well you can actually deal with these people uh to some extent um uh i still think the fundamental problem exists and that is that that uh you have tribal war cultures on the margins of of metropolitan societies that that uh really you know when when they feel threatened in one way or another uh will will be will be a uh will threaten with violence and we need to need to deal with that i don't think that that reaction has to be uh uh uh military um i think uh doug johnston from the institute for international uh religion and international diplomacy uh really worked very effectively for a number of years before the surge in in afghanistan with the teachers from the matrasas and and work with us uh with as many as uh 4 500 madrasa teachers uh to to to create some kind of understanding uh of the west and and of of uh of uh non-muslim society so i think it can be done but i i think we have to face the reality when there is this level of of um distance between these these tribal societies and our own that to some extent the reaction has to be policing as well and i think it's wrong to think of of um of the us as the world's policemen this has to be international policing and and there the us can do things uh in terms of logistics and reconnaissance and things but uh i think uh otherwise it should be uh it should be international with the lead for local people so hearing you um set it out the way you just did i was led to wonder whether framing things the way you frame them actually would serve to um reduce the uh attention to religion or the responsibility that religion is seen as bearing in global conflict so should we understand the attack on the world trade center as the not the attack of islamic extremists but as the attack of some tribesmen against a particularly potent symbol of urban life and should we see the triumph of the taliban in afghanistan not as the triumph as a theocratic body but as the triumph of the rule over uh uh over the urban and thus minimize pay less attention to religion and not have religion be so overdetermined in our understanding of these conflicts i think they think there is the third category that that akbar allah gives which is tribal islam i mean they're combined you can't you can't sort it out that easily i think but but um i would say that if you look at 911 uh all but one of the hijackers was from one yemeni tribe and uh so there were tribal connections there that were very important that we we haven't we haven't paid attention to we've we've tended to to make it look as as religious and not looked enough at the social under underpinning of of that particular event i guess then the question for you and i get for anybody as we open things to discussion is right now the um lingua franca of daily journalism is to refer to the divisions in the united states as tribal and that it's not uh principled white evangelical christians versus principled secularists in the cities but there's um a white tribe fighting to hold its territory and a different tribe that uh sees the city as territory i mean is that kind of facile journalism speak or does that somehow legitimately derive from the uh idea that that you're putting forward here i i i i think there's an analogy um um i i i don't i wouldn't say that that it holds firmly but i think there is somewhat of that same kind of tension between the coastal cities and the hinterlands and the culture of the hindu lands and the major metropolis i think that that does exist um jocelyn i would like to to bring a caveat here about the use of tribal because we know that the radical form of islam were actually shaped by the urban educated muslim elite so i wouldn't i mean the leadership is not tribal that's the opposite actually what we have seen in iraq when the us was there is that the tribes agreed the sunni tribes agreed to work with the general petraeus at the time against these young people who are coming in there and trying to mobilize them for violence so i would be careful about using the tribal thing because the narrative the leadership is not tribal baghdadi was not a tribal member i mean so political islam in its radical form is the urban phenomenon it's a modern fellow we have to address that and this modernization that happened in islam didn't lead to what we know in the west as modernization but it doesn't mean that it didn't happen the same thing in the us i would refrain from using what we are seeing today in terms of religiously based political claim as a tribal claim this is the voices of people who have gone through failed modernization or the the outcome of modernization has been failed but that's not tribal at the opposite i mean it's it's about the individualization that goes wrong if i may say so so um that's my my claim here my caveat on uh in afghanistan the warlord joined the global jihad there are reasons for that that are beyond the the discussion we are having now uh yeah i think if you look if you look at the the struggles along the uh the 10th parallel from asia through through africa that that these are very much uh fostered when i forced the folks being trended resourced i suppose from from tribal groups in in those regions now it is also the case that they're often fighting against fail uh failed elites who they see as betraying them i mean boko haram is the classic example of that uh you know western education is forbidden is a reaction not just to western education but the corruption of the west uh or the elites uh who will have western education and so i i i think that that we have to we have to see we have to deal with with the place where the where the soldiers come from i think when you mention the tenth parallel uh drew i'm reminded of my work on the book i worked with eliza griswold on a book by that title and one of the themes of the book was that different communities were put in conflict partly by resource scarcity driven by climate change so when we're looking forward from to the next 20 years there's one area in which the past is not a reliable precedent at all and it's um uh climate change there i think we can agree as members of the center that the response of uh religion to climate change is gonna be a you know vital part of the next 20 years um does any of you and i'll start with jose if you're willing uh have a distinct idea of what form that might take uh because it's something that we really need to know and that the past doesn't offer a precedent in the way that it does in other areas i mean linking it to the other conversation rather than tribal or rural urban i would use center periphery and it is peripheries that maybe within nation states i mean the peripheries within the united states those are not necessarily rural urban distinctions although they may be the hinterland so the center periphery is very important and of course we know and this is an argument which pope francis has made precisely the need to have solidarity with the peripheries the preferential option for the poor is a way of praising this issue how do we at the global level create structures in which he precisely realized that the greatest threat from climate science comes to the peripheries peripheries geographic peripheries social peripheries gender peripheries so it is precisely the most marginal the poor which are going to suffer most from these climate change and ultimately out of if you wish global self-interest we will need to transcend our national interest our class interests to precisely create these structures of solidarity and this is historically has been proven that this is the greatest uh power of religion to transcend structures already existing and create new bounds of solidarity and so in this respect i don't know how it's going to happen but if it will happen it will happen in this form creating bands of solidarity between centers and peripheries so i hear almost a biblical accent in what you're saying that if we that the let's say the christian response to climate change is one we're all connected the human family is one uh we have um obligations to one another that transcend nation and so forth and two we have a special obligation to pay attention to what's happening on the periphery where in this case the effects of climate change are going to be felt first and most keenly is that right yes but the public health the public health issue of the pandemic has made this even most clearly we only attend to the health needs of the centers we are not going to solve the pandemic because the periphery is going to constantly recreate the pandemics so it's a question of uh create in our global structure we are more and more so interlinked so intertwined that the ability to create uh to if you wish to uh extract ourselves from the peripheries problematic on the other hand and i think this is also the prophetic voice of uh pope francis in the old marxist creative capitalism capitalism was bad because it exploited the workers the problem of today's capitalism is not that it exploits the workers it is that it is indifferent it leaves half of the population of the world out of the system they are not needed and so they are the discarded and so we have to create structures so that these discarded people uh which the capitalist system will not in any way uh uh assault national structures will only for the discarded within its own boundaries uh in the structure of nations and capitalism the welfare system was the way of uh com compensating for the inequalities created by the system we need to create structures at the global level that compensate for the inequalities which the system of capitalism reproduce constantly and for the a different treatment that the geopolitical nation system nas system of states creates so we can only deal with these inequities with with these inequalities if we deal with them at a global level so when you say that capitalism is indifferent to half the population my mind goes to catherine and her work because historically that half of the population to which capitalism was indifferent was women can you envision what role might public religion play catherine in in the amelioration of that uh indifference over the next 20 years to make uh this half the population um not peripheral i was uh happy to hear jose bring the discussion to the question of inequality um which is um the the global commitment theoretically is to leave no one behind the watch words are inclusion accepting diversity but with inclusion and opportunities and clearly the issues of women have much to do with that because they affect everyone uh in other words they're not exactly a peripheral group they're fundamental to every family so i think this it's an interesting challenge where deeply ingrained habits that start when a child is born and the expectations of what a girl versus a boy will have and will do is is deeply ingrained in people's lives but you have in contrast the quite remarkable research and evidence and passionate advocacy that really speaks to empowerment and to equality and there are some religious traditions that have actually led that transformation which may be to my mind the greatest transformation in social history uh the changes in the relationships between men and women uh which is something that is still very much underway there are some religious traditions that have been on the forefront and there are some that are distinctly uncomfortable with this changing role and the both the social practical issues of who's going to cook my meal and who's going to raise my children but it is also obviously fundamental issues of power and the issues that you see echoed at the family level are echoed all the way to the global governance structures uh whether it's about the inequalities that come with climate change the inequalities that the covid crisis has so starkly revealed uh in lives including including the roles of women and of men thank you and the way you put it the the extent of the change when you when you put it so passionately i'm i'm a believer i'm convinced that this is this is the fundamental change and i hope that it is the case a pretty specific question for jocelyn now from marjory manosum balzer the question is about the de-radicalization efforts within islam how are they going and how can we understand better than we have to this point the bitter extremism of so many young people in islam wow that's more than one question in a nutshell the de-radicalization didn't go very well for the reason that i mentioned previously meaning they took um a group of clerics and they asked them to go through some textual analysis with young people who were part of you know a al-qaeda group or other kind of jihadi group but again that's the one on one and textual basis that doesn't address the fact that the radical message appeals because of its collective meaning so it doesn't it's people are not getting to it even if they think they do and that's why we're not we have to be careful and not taking at face value the sort of epiphany that some of these jihadi reports when they say you know i found meaning there what they found is a group and the group became something in which they could fit so when you take this when you do not sorry take this into account not the radicalization can work and and i think that's part of the meaning and it's also part of the reason why it doesn't it has not gone very far i think the term itself has been discredited and and the engagement of young people in the west toward this radical message is exactly the reason i'm also pointing out here if i can simplify a lot it's just that it gives collective meaning and the less people know about their religion the more they are attracted to this global narrative that is based on something very narrow and poor when you look at the islamic tradition it is about victimization and retaliation and and this can work a lot for people who live in context where islam is seen as uncivic uh especially in europe but that's not the whole tradition but when you do not know about it it does appeal and that's why i've seen lots of the foot soldiers of this jihadi group coming from the west are converts to islam and they didn't convert in the traditional way learning with the shirt they converted through this radical narrative and we know that when people have been educated and have more traditional resources to mobilize they are less vulnerable to to this understanding or i would say even shaping of what islam is that should be thank you the um next question i want to point towards drew stephen meyer observes well isn't one person's periphery another center and i guess what i've wanted to ask you anyway drew is whether the um center and periphery thrust of france's pontificate which uh jose spelled out a few minutes ago has that had um are you seeing practical effects of that outlook for peace building especially in contrast to benedict the 16th that's a very that's a very good question um uh i i'd say that that francis has been very consistent in focusing on that that kind of program um but uh it's very hard i think the conversion on the part of of the uh of the more established parts of the church uh much harder to bring a law on that that kind of agenda uh and uh i think that his his um uh his goal of uh cinodality which would be the topic of the next synod which will go for two sessions uh is really intended to get the bishops of the world to know one another as they did to some extent in vatican ii but to understand that they have a common responsibility uh that will overcome some of these distances and the fact that he's appointed so many bishops from the periphery and many fewer from traditional uh major seas in in the atlantic region it seems to me uh suggests he wants to continue that program but it's really hard i mean you can see from the church in the united states uh this agenda is not taking hold among many of the bishops some of the leading cardinals yes but but others are very resistant to it so um i i don't see it as is moving along so well and i i understand said i work with some people who are involved in in um uh talking to people interested in in uh isis and uh they they had discovered that that uh isis stopped talking to uh uh inquirers as soon as they knew they knew something about islam they just dropped them you know so uh but they would talk with with a kind of dis uh disenchanted young people uh confused young people uh all day long because they would they were their target group these these kind of people who didn't fit in and that was their target group but as as of the periphery in the church i think that's going to take a lot of building um i i don't think we're there yet i i'm very happy to see that francis is persistent on his agenda i know just from my um late person's sense of things that it can be argued that the openings of the second vatican council for a different way of relating among religions have only borne fruit 50 and 60 years later and these things take time but if anyone has a distinct vision of what what religion's contribution is going to look like 20 years from now i would love to know it uh if catherine say on the issue of women is there a concrete project or approach or initiative that you can imagine where you could say 20 years on see that this really did happen it's an interesting question because i think many people in the development world economists sociologists anthropologists historians have been quite powerfully convinced by some of the evidence um that's coming out of both research and experience and i think in in many ways the religious communities are also amenable to that kind of of evidence and persuasion uh i think what's what's been complicated is the disruption that it means to traditional understandings uh and power relationships let's be very clear this is not about love and harmony and um the way things have to be but it it has to do with with power and comfort uh and influence so you know we talk about strategic engagement which in in some ways uh you know we don't want to be unstrategic which sort of means stupid um and um maybe scattered unsystematic but i think what we are looking for is and we have faith in the intelligence um and the multifaceted approaches that are part of the human condition so that yes i do have faith um that the religious communities um sometimes slowly and reluctantly uh but sometimes even with blinding uh moments of insight are moving forward on what to me i agree is such a fundamental issue uh that benefits people in so many ways i mean one of my favorite examples is that a child's head size is related to the level of education of the mother um because intelligence education is so much related to understandings of nutrition and and health so there are so many other examples but i think that it is fundamental but it is also a profound change in the way people relate from the time they wake up until the time they go to sleep we're over time and so i'm going to let that be the last word the fact that you have hope that religious institutions um have a significant contribution to make for the next 20 years and let's hope that if we're doing an anniversary event down the road it's not marking a terrorist attack but a significant positive achievement in which religion played a role uh thank you so much catherine marshall jose casanova jocelyn cesari father drew christensen thanks again to tom benchoff the director of the center and thanks to all of you who have joined this event um it's been a real privilege to lead the conversation with and for all of you thank you very much and have a great day you

Channel: Berkley Center

Views: 72

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Berkley Center, Religion, Peace, World Affairs, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, Drew Christiansen, Jocelyne Cesari, José Casanova, Thomas Banchoff, Katherine Marshall, Paul Elie

Id: iRROTZEnbA0

Length: 61min 13sec (3673 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021