c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ It’s human nature to believe the unknown future will just be a variation of the familiar past.

One result of such thinking is that military leaders prepare for the next war by focusing on their last battles, politicians re-play their last election campaigns, and clergy repeat their last sermons. Of course, all this is a mistake since the future is always significantly different from the past.

This is especially true in the constantly shifting relationship between religion and nationalism.

During this century, many political leaders, including evil ones like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, cynically used and abused religion to achieve their nationalistic goals.

Hitler, who was born a Catholic, sought to diminish the influence of Christianity in Nazi Germany by creating the”Deutsche Christen”church to replace traditional Catholicism and Lutheranism. And there are many photos from the 1930s and 1940s showing well-known German clergy performing the stiff-armed Nazi salute while garbed in ecclesiastical robes emblazoned with the swastika emblem.

And when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin, who was once an Orthodox Christian seminary student, abandoned his harsh attacks on religion, and linked the survival of his threatened communist empire to Mother Russia’s traditional church.

In more recent years, many self-styled Arab secular leaders, including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, have cunningly employed Islamic symbols and values to advance nationalist objectives.

But, as the saying goes, that was then and this is now, and the reverse of this pattern is currently taking place throughout the world. Increasingly, spiritual leaders are using the political system to impose their specific religious goals upon an entire society.

These religious leaders recognize that real power lies in dominating the political realm. Inspiring congregations of the faithful inside churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples may be necessary but it is not sufficient to control a nation.

In their drive for political power, today’s religious leaders claim all modern forms of political nationalism _ socialism, communism, Nazism, fascism, even democracy _ have failed. And that leaves only extreme religious ideologies which now must be given total power to run a nation.

And since it is the government and not religious institutions that controls a country’s treasury, natural resources, educational system, and the military, political power is the real target of religious extremists.

Sadly, they have already achieved some significant victories.

Twenty years after Ayatollah Khomeini gained power in Iran, the country still remains in the hands of Islamic hard-liners. Even a horrendous eight year war with neighboring Iraq has not broken the Islamic extremists’ dominance, nor have Iran’s continuing economic troubles weakened Islamic control. The ayatollahs have successfully hijacked an entire country for their religious goals.

If the Muslim extremists in Afghanistan succeed in consolidating their hold, the world will have yet another extremist Islamic state.

For the first 50 years of Indian independence, the dominant Congress Party espoused a relatively secular platform. Now, a Hindu nationalist party has gained power and one of its first actions was the testing of what some have called the”Hindu atomic bomb.”Not to be outdone, Pakistan exploded its own”Muslim”bomb.

Islamic extremists are actively seeking to topple the regimes in Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria.

Israel is undergoing its own version of this global phenomenon. Fervent religious leaders are struggling with secular Jews for control of the Jewish state. The battle grounds are familiar: school curricula, selection of judges and court jurisdiction, public behavior, cultural life including dance recitals, films, stage productions, and the media.

And finally, within the United States, the world’s largest multireligious and multiethnic nation, there are increasing calls by some Christian leaders to replace our constitutional system of government with something called”God’s law,”as they define it.

Unfortunately, the sexual misconduct of President Clinton and other political leaders provides our home grown religious extremists with added ammunition in their campaign to turn this country into a legally established”Christian America.” Clearly, the religious extremists’ quest for political power will dominate the first decades of the 21st century.

DEA END RUDIN