When we look at political hot spots around the globe, there is almost always a religious component in the conflict- a clash between sects that illustrates the immense power of belief, and the endemic risk that belief imposes on our quality of living.

The dynamic of belief serves as a framework in which we couch our life’s experiences. It gives them context and meaning. But, since the accuracy of our perceptions are often mistaken for truth even though they may often be erroneous, we must learn to step outside the confines of mere belief if we are to become free of conflicts. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetuate them.

Witness the conflicts in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Iran and Iraq, Africa, Greek and Turkish Cyprus- and countless others where beliefs about the meaning of ethnicity and religious preference draw lines in the sand, ignoring the possibility that anyone with two feet, no matter their faith or race, can cross that arbitrary line without having to relinquish their religion or culture.

The problem is that pain is often a greater reinforcer of experience than joy. There’s a saying that if someone does something nice to you, you might tell ten people, but of someone does something bad to you, you’ll tell the whole world. Sadly, there’s some truth to this. The fact that pain imprints so deeply on us is well know to both politicians and religious leaders, who have used fear- of taxes, poverty, foreign or domestic “enemies” – or of eternal damnation- as an highly effective tool of manipulation of others for their personal agendas. They inevitably do so, moreover, in the name of truth.

And pain has a long memory- all those hotspots I mentioned have been fighting for centuries, or even millennia- dating back usually to some major moment of cultural trauma or conquest, whose p.t.s.d. has bee passed down from generation to generation, with such regularity that the experiential reasons for the belief have long since been forgotten. The hatred and fear of those who differ from one’s chosen group, in time become virturally genetic, and generally unexamined.

Just as in the psychology of the individual traumatic memories can be healed with the proper kind of self examination and emotional support, so too, can cultural wounds be healed. Even though we may still have a long way to go in America, we have made huge strides to heal the centuries of slavery, misogyny, and homophobia. Northern Ireland has made huge progress in healing the Protestant-Catholic rift; the Balkans have made progress in healing the scars that date back to the division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western, the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the Conquest by the Ottoman Turks; and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dating ultimately back to the birth of Islam, show some signs of softening, as Israel herself experiences a growing influx of non-Jewish immigrants, and younger Israelis who are “linked in” with the wider world, eschew the hard-line orthodoxy that has held sway for decades.

As a child of the Civil Rights Movement era, I know from my own experience that giving a name and face to the “other” increasingly broke down my perception of “difference” and the invisible lines that separate segments of society, so that apparent differences of color, nationality, or religion were no longer defining of the person- including of myself. That was enormously liberating.

This  reality has persuaded me more and more over the years that in the final analysis, experience trumps belief- or at least modifies it. Belief, in fact, is the underlying root that eventually morphs (and if we’re not careful, ossifies) into belief. And that is crucial for us to realize, understand and remember. For if belief denies experience, holding onto mere belief- because our parents, teachers, political or religious leaders told us to, requires denying our experience, and when we do that, an essential part of us is stifled. If allowed to be repressed for too long, it grows toxic and eventually resurfaces in the very violence and conflict our belief systems simultaneous decry and promote.

I have no doubt that when Jesus proclaimed “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”… he was not talking about belief, but about an experience that unites us all.

The cultural clash in the religious world today seems to be increasingly drawn as a battle between so called conservative and liberal theologies. In fact, given the current blend of politics and religion, the distinction between theology and ideology has become quite blurry. Ideologues, no matter what position they hold,  by nature have a very hard time accepting any view but their own, and all the more so when their ideology is sanctified as divinely inspired.

Webster’s Dictionary defines conservatism, among other things, as:                                                                                     a : tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : traditional          b : marked by moderation or caution <a conservativeestimate>

Likewise, it defines liberal as:                                                                                                    1 b archaic : of or befitting a man of free birth                                                                        2 a : marked by generosity : openhanded <a liberal giver>b : given or provided in a generous and openhanded way <aliberal meal>c : ample, full                                                5: broad-minded; especially : not bound by authoritarianism,orthodoxy, or traditional forms

The tension between these two principles, by rights, should be complimentary rather than oppositional. The question we must collectively ask is: What is it about our relgious beliefs or spiritual practices that most merits conservation, and about what should we be most liberal to secure both our individual and common good?

Today President Barack Obama endorsed same sex marriage. His reasoning was mature, compassionate, honest, and principled. He spoke as a man who, though sharing the dominant culture’s traditional view that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman, evolved in his understanding on the basis of the human dimension of the issue. He was able to let go of his own paradigm enough to allow differing data in, and that data- i.e. the experience of friends and colleagues in committed healthy same sex relationships, and the openness of his own daughters to their friends who are being raised by same sex couples- persuaded him that he needed to alter his own position.

The ideologues of the religious right will fulminate, and probably attempt to use the president’s comments to decry his leadership and paint him as some sort of Godless, deluded Socialist, or something. With the smug assurance of being privy to God’s thoughts, they will quote the Bible to insist that “God says” that homosexuality is “an abomination”, an unforgivable sin (conveniently and selectively avoiding the fact that the Bible also says that eating pork or shellfish is equally “an abomination”). The extreme right, who tends to be both anti-intellectual and anti-scientific, also insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that homosexuality is simply “a choice” inspired by evil and temptation, not a inborn propensity, (and that AIDS is God’s punishment for the sin of homosexuality- even though there are more heterosexual victims of AIDS than homosexual ones). And all this heated rhetoric is couched in religiousity with an spiritual arrogance and superiority that simply uses Biblical passages taken out of context to justify a particular political and social  bias. All of this misses the point, both factually and spiritually.

The question that must be asked of those who claim to be religious or people of faith is, “If you could reduce the message of scripture to a single word, or its teachings to a single precept, what would they be?” Historically most would come up with some variant on “Love” or “The Golden Rule-Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Jesus himself summarizes the essence of Torah to two “commandments”: Love God with  all your heart. mind and being, and love your neighbor as yourself. What then, does this imply in regards to  either overt or covert homophobia?

If, as scripture claims, we are all God’s children, sprung from a single source, and are created in the image and likeness of God, then the next question to ask is, “How can one love God and hate one’s neighbor- who is created in God’s image?” The reality is, if we hate any one of the triad of God/neighbor/self, we cannot truly love either of the other two, for they are all intrinsically intertwined.

Sincere religious conservatives will counter, “I don’t hate the homosexual, I hate the homosexual act”. That sounds good enough- after all, people can legitimately disagree without having to hate those with whom they differ, and one does not have to like homosexual actions to like a homosexual person. But  twisted faces of hate, the shouts and placards of condemnation of the “sin” of homosexuality, and the hysterical allegations that homosexuality is threatening the institution of marriage or corrupting the very fabric of society, break forth regularly in the evening news and belie the claim. Moreover, however plausible the attempt to disavow their homophobic hatred, this begs the issue of whether hatred itself isn’t in fact antithetical to love- where the one exists the other cannot.

The distinction between who we are essentially (the imago dei) and what we do or how we are is, spiritually and experientially, an important one. But let us not deceive ourselves. Belief- whether religious or political- is not purely rational. In fact, ideological rigidity of any kind eventually causes the ideologue to confront situtations in which belief and experience are at odds with each other. The ideolgue denies their experience and holds to the ideology- a square peg in the round hole choice fraught with frustrations and disappointment. The wise learn from experience and recognize that belief is an organic, evolving thing that changes and grows over time. That is the path toward wisdom.

Swami Vivekananda, the eloquent disciple of the great Hindu saint from Calcutta, Sri Ramakrishna, was credited in the 1890′s with bringing Eastern wisdom to the West. From his work was born the Parliament of the World’s Religions- which has met every four years in a different city around the world  since  it first was convened in Chicago in 1898. Vivekananda was famously quoted as saying, apropos religious ideologues, “Religion is a very good place to start, but a very bad place to end up”.

Religion is a vehicle to a more expansive understanding, not a rigid pursuit of agreement. If true religion opens us to a more universal comprehension, then perhaps President Obama’s courageous ackowledgement of his own evolving understanding should be seen as a model of faith, not of the faithlessness the right so fears.

In our increasingly polarized political environment, the political right and the political left often square off over the issue of religion. The Christian right proclaims to all who will listen that they stand for the true values of the Christian faith- equating them increasingly as a litmus test for patriotism.

The religious left- (somewhat of an oxymoron, since to the secular world, religion itself is generally seen as an inherently conservative, if not reactionary movement) – insists that their populist promotion of social justice and care for the marginalized members of society constitutes “true faith”. With comparable rigidity, they tend to cast conservative Christianity- and particularly the varieties prone to Biblical literalism- as an aberration of the truth of Jesus. The intellectual tendencies of the the left also tend to paint the biblical literalist as engaged in an anti-intellectual interpretive approach that is intrinsically self-contradictory, requiring an abdication of all critical thinking. The response of the Right is to see the Left as tailoring faith to convenience, morally too weak to handle the rigors of dealing with the Absolute that true faith requires.

Ironically, similar polarities exist with Islam, Judaism, and even Hinduism, despite the millennial wisdom enshrined in them all. Instead of trying to decide who is “right”, it would be more helpful to the pacification of religious conflict and its political offshoots to take a deeper look at the deep seated appeal of fundamentalism.

To be sure, there is a strong anti-intellectual strain in some brands of religious conservatism. There are those who hold to a rigid interpretation as emotionally comforting, Scripture taken as a rule book, or case study of simple truths, sooner or later is likely to bring the faithful to an emotional abyss when the reality of experience and the interpretation of scripture seem diametrically opposed. But to dismiss the sincerity and integrity of those who devotedly try to live up to the requirements of their understanding of faith would be to discount the entire communion of saints throughout history who have led exemplary spiritual lives in the face of enormous opposition and challenge.

In order to understand the pull of fundamentalism, we need to look beyond the clichés of “people looking for simple answers to complex questions”. We need to take a fresh look at what it is that is truly “fundamental” to any faith. By doing so, we may well be surprised to discover that less separates the religious conservative from the spiritual radical.

The yearning to transcend suffering and achieve lasting peace is arguably innate to our species. Historically it has been demonstrated that, despite our increasingly sophisticated weapons and methods for killing each other, as a species, we have been becoming less violent. This suggests that the underlying message of the world’s scriptures is, in fact, expressive of something fundamental to the human race. Though we may disagree as to the most effective means to pursuit that transcendent and peaceful goal, we should recognize it as a tie that should unite us rather than divide us.