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The National Interest
Religion, Reason and Conflict in the 21st Century
by Kenneth Minogue
. . . The Next Christendom is no doubt a more important book than these critical remarks suggest. It certainly creates an unfamiliar picture of the emerging world that will undoubtedly become part of the framework of our understanding. What I have been emphasizing, however, is that Third World religious conflicts that now look to be unavoidable are terrifying enough without gratuitously politicizing them. Neither Islam nor Christianity will do much to improve the world unless they operate as real religions, turning attention away from projects of transforming social systems toward an innerness focused on duty and goodness. Something like this was how medieval Christendom generated the moral stabilities out of which the modern world emerged. Politics today is notoriously impatient, while patience is one of the great religious virtues. Better that politics should be moderated by religious virtue than that religion should be contaminated by political toxins. . . .