The first point I want to make is about the very nature of religious language. To believe in an absolute religious truth is to believe that the object of my belief is not vulnerable to the contingencies of human history: Gods mind and character cannot be changed by what happens here in the world. And the logic of this is that an apparent defeat in the world for my belief cannot be the end of the story; God does not fail because I fail to persuade others or because my community fails to win some kind of power. Now if I believe for a moment that my failure or our failure is a failure or defeat for God, then my temptation will be to seek for any means possible to avoid such an outcome; and that way lies terrorism and religious war and persecution. The idea that any action, however extreme or disruptive or even murderous, is justified if it averts failure or defeat for my belief is not really consistent with the conviction that my failure is not Gods. Indeed, it reveals a fundamental lack of conviction in the eternity and sufficiency of the object of faith. In plain English, religious violence suggests religious insecurity. When different communities have the same sort of conviction of the absolute truth of their perspective, there is certainly an intellectual and spiritual challenge to be met; but the logic of belief ought to make it plain that there is no defence for the sort of violent contest in which any means, however inhuman, can be justified by appeal to divine sanction. The divine cannot need protection by human violence. It is a point uniquely captured in the words of Jesus before the Roman governor: My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight (Jn 19.36).
So the rather paradoxical conclusion appears that the more religious people are utterly serious about the truth of their convictions, the less they will sanction all-out violence; they will have a trust that what truly is will remain, whatever the vicissitudes of society and history. And they will be aware that compelling religious allegiance by violence is tantamount to replacing divine power with human; hence the Quranic insistence that there can be no compulsion in matters of religious faith. It is crucial to faith in a really existing and absolute transcendent agency that it should be understood to be what it is independently of any lesser power: the most disturbing form of secularisation is when this is forgotten or misunderstood. And the difficult fact is that it has been so forgotten or misunderstood in so many contexts over the millennia. It has regularly been confused with cultural or national integrity, with structures of social control, with class and regional identities, with empire; and it has been imposed in the interest of all these and other forms of power. Despite Jesus words in Johns gospel, Christianity has been promoted and defended at the point of the sword and legally supported by extreme sanctions; despite the Quranic axiom, Islam has been supported in the same way, with extreme penalties for abandoning it and civil disabilities for those outside the faith. There is no religious tradition whose history is exempt from such temptation and such failure.
