In 1999 Glenn Hoddle, then England manager, suggested that disabled people were the victims of bad karma, punished for their conduct in an earlier life. In 2004 Robert Kilroy-Silk, then presenter of a daytime TV show, described Arabs as “suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors”. Both Hoddle and Kilroy were eventually sacked, their defenders hailing them as free speech martyrs, cut down for daring to speak their mind.
The pope won’t suffer Hoddle and Kilroy’s fate — the only authority who can sack Benedict wears a hood and carries a scythe — but he is already being elevated, as they were, into a symbol of freedom under assault. It’s as much a mistake now as it was then, a product of a repeated confusion over the nature of free speech.
To be clear, we all have the right to free speech. Still, we know instinctively that certain roles or positions of responsibility limit that right. The position we hold alters the meaning of our words.
Of course Pope Benedict has the right to quote whomever he chooses, but there is now a significance to his words that did not apply when he was a humble scholar. This is what makes the pope’s defenders so disingenuous when they insist that he was merely engaged in a “scholarly consideration of the relationship between reason and faith”. He is not a lecturer at divinity school. He is the head of a global institution with more than a billion followers. So he has to think carefully about the sources he cites. When he digs out a 700-year-old sentence that could not be more damning of Islam — “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached” — he has to know there will be consequences. If he did not fully agree with the statement by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologos, he should have put some distance between himself and it. But read the lecture and the only hint of papal disavowal is a description of Manuel’s “startling brusqueness”. Which means the pope was either inept, failing to disown Manuel’s sentiment effectively, or that he in fact agreed with it and wanted to say so. Again, that is his right — but he should have known, given who he is, that it would have the most calamitous results.
That’s not because Muslims are somehow, as their accusers have written, uniquely touchy. It is rather because of two dramatic shifts in our world.
First, religion is becoming more political. It is possible to have an academic discussion about the competing claims of different religions, but it has to be done with great care. Yet the pope wades in almost casually. Note how his weekend apology to Muslims quoted St. Paul to describe the crucifixion as a “scandal for the Jews”. Almost in passing, he touched a landmine, buried deep in the European soil. (In so doing, he performed one useful service, reminding us that the Crusaders of the past had not one infidel enemy, but two: Muslims and Jews.)
The pope seems unaware that, for hundreds of millions of people, religious affiliation is not a matter of intellectual adherence to a set of abstract principles, but a question of identity. Theology plays a lesser part than history, culture, folklore, tradition and kinship. In this respect, religious groups begin to look more like ethnic ones. Which means that a slur on a religion is experienced much like a racist insult. Plenty of secularists and atheists struggle to understand this — wondering why they cannot slam, say, Catholicism the way they might attack, say, socialism — but the pope, of all people, should have no such trouble. He should realize that when he declares Christianity a superior religion, as he did some years ago, that is heard by many as a statement that Christians are superior people.
Second, politics is becoming more religious. For many years people in Arab and Muslim lands have resented Western meddling in their affairs: Toppling governments, propping up dictators, invading countries. They have cheered on different movements to fight this intrusion, whether socialism in the 1950s or Arab nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Each effort has been thwarted, usually with Western connivance. Today the lead movements of opposition are Islamist and, in their most extreme versions, seek to cast the battle of East and West not as a political clash about imperialism but as a holy war.
What makes me shudder about the pope’s Regensburg lecture is that he appears to join Osama Bin Laden in this effort to cast the current conflict as a clash of civilizations. If the most senior figure in Christendom effectively takes Bin Laden’s bait and says that, yes, this is a war of religions, ours against yours, how can this end? Such a war cannot be quieted by the usual means of diplomacy or compromise. There can be no happy medium in matters of core belief: Muslims cannot meet Christians halfway on their belief that God spoke to Muhammad, just as Christians cannot compromise on Jesus’ status as the son of God.
Most religious leaders have long recognized that, and agreed to tiptoe politely around each other, offering a warm, soapy bath of rhetoric about “shared values” and “interfaith dialogue”. Of course they have known that, if pushed, they would be obliged to say their own faiths are better than the others, but they have avoided doing so. Now this pope has broken that compact — and who knows what havoc he has unleashed.
