God's presence in an open society

Extract

On September 14th a central memorial ceremony was held in the New York Yankee Stadium: a multireligious, patriotic liturgy at whose centre stood the American star-spangled banner. This religious dramatisation of the Stars and Stripes in those days of terror proves that September 11th was at least a matter of religion: a matter of a violence of religious origin, whose trail of blood runs from Manhattan via Kandahar to places which are not yet known. Once religion comes into play, there is a need to criticise its potential malignancy, so that people are able to get out of the vicious cycle of religious violence. One year after September 11th these theological theses would like to contribute to the project of shedding light upon this ‘depraved part’ of all religions by emphasising eight basic differences which constitute religion and cause its characteristic dangers. Therefore current terms are to be used against their everyday usage in a strictly formal sense as instruments for analyzing sacred and profane phenomenons of religion.

In their everyday life, people experience the power of the Holy as something extraordinary, that magically attracts them and repels them at the same time—but never lets them go. It is precisely this inescapable difference which constitutes religion, at the centre of which, according to Rudolf Otto’s classic definition, there is the mysterious experience of a ‘mysterium fascinosum, tremendum et augustum’. September 11th revealed this constitutive ambivalence of the Holy, because it unveiled the double face of religion: the face of mighty violence, embodied by the pilots of death, and the face of powerless hope, embodied by the New York firemen.