Ah, Easter

"We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another. Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome."

Those words were spoken by pope Benedict yesterday, moments after he baptized a lifelong Muslim, the prominent writer Magdi Allam, converting him to Catholicism.

Religion brings people together? Sure, but only if they worship the correct God, of course. If Mr. Allam had remained a Muslim, the pope would hardly have turned him into a symbol of international brotherhood. It seems that the fraternal affection Benedict feels for his convert is conditional upon the man's willingness to join the pontiff's club. The statement that religion bestows peace and reconciliation on humankind is a mawkish falsification, as anyone who reads the paper knows.

The opposite is true. Nothing, probably, is a greater source of blatant tribalism (and unchecked hostility toward most forms of otherness) than religion.

I don't doubt that faith helps millions of people find inner peace, and hey, more power to them. I should also stress that because Catholicism, unlike Islam, hasn't spawned armies of mass-murdering thugs for a few centuries now, I'm happy when Muslims switch from their own rabble-rousing brand of medieval superstition to the less incendiary kind promoted by the Vatican.

But the fact is that religion — with its seemingly infinite number of doctrines and strands and variations-within-variations, most of them hotly contested — is just another word for division. No amount of pious papal bromides and soppy white lies can conceal just what a toxic effect organized faith has on human relations.

One other thing: I can't be the only one who sees the high-profile Vatican conversion of a Muslim on a holy day like Easter as the opposite of an attempt to smooth over religious differences. Rather, Magdi Allam's rebirth as a Catholic, along with the pomp-and-circumstance performance put on by the pope and his clergy, comes across as an act of triumphalism bordering on Schadenfreude, a finger poked into the collective eye socket of the world's Muslims.

A worthier eye socket for repeated poking has yet to be found, of course, and I'm fine with the jabbing. I just wish the Vatican would man up and admit that Magdi Allam's televised conversion is what it seems — not a gesture of eucumenical peace, but a fratboyish provocation not so very different from Princeton jocks stealing Harvard's mascot.

Comments

[Martin Owens]

There is something to be said for a Pope who
got Wehrmacht infantry training before he went to the seminary... knows how to hit the target
when he's got a mind.

[NeoWayland]

Religion is division only if you claim exclusivity.

Believe me, if a religion doesn't claim to be the "one and only path" to the Divine, then the differences don't matter all that much. Ask your average Buddhist.