c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) Some recent events prove again that nothing is ever really settled in history, especially when it comes to religion.

In case you haven’t noticed, religious extremism is on the rise throughout the world. If you believe we are safely living in an age of “enlightened modernity,” think again.

In the last few years Islamic extremists have cut the throats of or beheaded hostages in Pakistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Among the victims were three Americans _ Daniel Pearl, Nicholas Berg and Paul Johnson. The killers carried out their lethal acts while praising God, but that’s no surprise. Murderers acting in the name of religion always invoke God as they slaughter the innocent.

Johnson’s killers in Riyadh, the capital of our oil-rich “ally” Saudi Arabia, responded to desperate appeals from the hapless victim’s family to spare their loved one with these unnerving words: “Do these people want to see this infidel carry on the killing of the children and the raping of the women in Baghdad and Kabul?”

To make certain we understood precisely why Johnson was beheaded, his Muslim executioners declared: “A lot of voices were very loud, expressing their anger for taking a Christian … as a hostage and killing him … while poor Muslims … are in prison and are being tortured by the hands of the cross-believers.”

Pearl and Berg were killed because they were Jews. Johnson was a Christian, a “cross-believer.” All three were “infidels.”

The Vatican recently published a 786-page essay collection on “The Inquisition.” Like the word “infidel,” “inquisition” sets off a chain reaction of horrific images. For nearly 700 years, beginning in the 13th century, Catholic authorities in Europe conducted trials for “heresy” (another Hall of Shame word). Those caught up in the Inquisition were often labeled “infidels,” and included Jews, Protestants, Muslims, presumed witches and scientists. Remember Galileo?

Physical and psychological coercion was employed to extract confessions, and Inquisition officials also decreed death sentences that sometimes meant being burned alive at the stake.

Pope John Paul II has publicly apologized for the Inquisition, stating that “violence” cannot be employed “in the service of truth.” So far so good.

But Catholic historian Agostino Borromeo summed up the findings of a 1998 three-day academic conference on the Inquisition. Borromeo reassured the world that physical abuse and executions “were not as frequent as has been believed for a long time.” Indeed, “fewer heretics were tortured and fewer witches were burned at the stake during the Inquisition than is generally believed.”

He comforted us with his assertion that while 125,000 Inquisition trials were conducted in Spain, only 2,250 people, about 1.8 percent of those charged, were actually executed. Even if we accept Borromeo’s figures, we do not know the fate of the other 98.2 percent.

Martin E. Mary of the University of Chicago, America’s foremost historian of religion, places the Vatican’s Inquisition numbers game in the “ecumenical absurdist” category.

At its recent convention, the Texas Republican Party approved a platform plank that called the United States “a Christian nation.” The Lone Star GOP also denounced the “myth of the separation of church and state.”

While 82 percent of Americans call themselves “Christian,” that percentage is continually shrinking. America with its nearly 300 million citizens is increasingly multireligious, multiethnic and multiracial. Every religion known to the human family is represented in the United States.

But advocates of a “Christian nation” often have something more than population figures in mind. What they really want is an America that is officially “Christian.” Their demand is nothing new.

The issue was debated in the late 18th century when Patrick Henry failed in his attempt to make the Anglican Church the established faith in Virginia. Henry’s bitter opponent was Thomas Jefferson. James Madison, George Mason and the Baptist pastor John Leyland joined Jefferson in the critical battle to separate church and state. They knew the dangers when religion and state are officially linked, and they wanted the new United States free of such entanglements.

“Christian nation” advocates tried to pass a U.S. constitutional amendment in the 1860s and 1870s, but that effort failed. However, the issue remains alive more than 200 years after the Henry-Jefferson battle.

If the wretched European history of “Christian nations” is a guide, the legal status of 18 percent of our fellow citizens _ Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucinists, New Agers, agnostics and atheists _ would be bleak. They would, at best, be members of a tolerated minority, perpetual outsiders. And ultimately, religious extremists in a Christian America would smear them with an always-handy term _ dare I say it? “Infidels.”

DEA/PH END RUDIN