The ‘Priest’ and the ‘Prophet’ - the Church and conflict disruptive friendships

Many early liberal development professionals and scholars saw religion and religious people as an obstacle to progress, touting that religion’s influence would wane as countries and cultures modernised. This result, like many other assumptions of liberal development, has not materialised. [1]

One of the results of this early assumption (and perhaps hope) has been that expertise in local and regional religious histories, practices and beliefs have not been well integrated into modern development planning and practice. When planning has included religion as a factor in design, it has tended to focus on organisational aspects of religion whilst overlooking the significance of how religious ideas inspire institutions and human practices which are shaping communal life. [2] This leaves a lot of room for much conjecture over the influence of religion on peace (and conflict).

Peacebuilding and peace research are not value-free, and often-times they are motivated by a normative agenda, “Peace has been invented and reinvented throughout history to reflect the worldview of its sponsors.” [3] Religious actors in the field of peace are not immune to the evolution of these normative agendas. Rees contended that religion has three modes: secular religion (religion that is subordinate to the priorities and structures of the state, market, and political ideologies), sacral religion (in contrast, where religion promotes primacy of spiritual and ‘otherworldly’ actors and interests and encourages detachment from the material world), and integrated religion (which brings a balance between sacral and secular interests and dynamics). [4] According to Rees, integrated religion offers the most potential for development (and building peace) within public and plural contexts.

Appleby drew from Rees’ typology to analyse how religious institutions, groups and actors tend to fall into one of two groups in their expression of integrated religion. The first group tends toward adopting more bureaucratic liberal structures in their development and peace work, downplaying their religious identities and histories to align more closely with the goals of secular relief and state aid. The other group tends to be more aligned with critical development ideals and prioritises religiously inspired social movements of resistance to the destructive aspects of the Modern capitalist development agenda (including liberal peace) and celebrates theologies of liberation as they align with critical development ideals [5].

These contributions from Appleby, Omer argued, are essential towards understanding engagement in religiously inspired just peace by religious actors and institutions. She wrote:

Religion as a tool in program implementation is not prophetic religion. It does not disrupt anything, is bureaucratized and NGO-ized, and carries little to no resemblance to the prophetic figure and her prophetic actions—moving power, disrupting it, rewriting national and religious scripts. In this postsecular turn, it is not a Martin Luther King Jr. or other exemplary figures who are cultivated. Instead, polished leaders, bureaucrats, religioncrats, and other professionalized religious actors take centre stage and actively circulate from one big conference to another in fancy hotels around the world, declaring commitments to stop poverty, reduce child rape and marriage, and many other ills. This is priestly, not prophetic. [6]

From the perspectives of Appleby and Omer, the ‘Priestly’ voice of peace has emerged out of a dualism that the realist philosophy creates, and continues today to perpetuate its assumptions and structures without adequately reforming them when they reproduce structural inequities and violence. The ‘Prophetic’ voice of religion, on the other hand, demonstrates the possibility of religion to challenge the hegemony of the positivist realism when it produces inequity and violence. These dynamics also appear to transcend differences in religions with ‘Prophetic’ functions of hegemony subversion being cited in literature from proponents of Protestant & Catholic Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Pope Francis in the 2016 conference on “Nonviolence and Just Peace” cited Christian–Muslim women’s peace movement in Liberia, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan as effective examples of this function and the role that ethical virtues in religion contribute to Just Peace. [7]

However, while this way of categorising behaviours of religious actors may aid us in situating some of the dynamics of religiously inspired actions of subversion and resistance to the negative effects of the processes of Modernity (as well as violence evolving from other social and cultural factors), Mac Ginty cautions us to avoid assuming stark binaries especially at the everyday of either dynamics of subversion of the hegemony or oppression of the hegemony:

“Alongside ‘routine actions whose repetition brings stability, order and submission to institutional authorities’ [8] , there can be space for alternatives and resistance but also space for in-between situations and flux.” [9]

Seek Peace attends to this intersection in our work: moving beyond the trend of development practice to only show interest in religious organisational structures in relation to (liberal) peace programme delivery, and also beyond the highly publicised examples of religious actors defying the injustices of our cultures and systems in highly public ‘Prophetic’ acts that are often idealised/glorified…

We focus on better understanding and promoting how religious ideas inspire human practices and actions shaping communal life and relationships in the everyday. The actions we are interested in are case studies of what Mac Ginty calls ‘remarkable friendships’ that contradict the dominant narrative in their own societies in which the ‘other’ is demonised [10], and initiate forms of ‘conflict disruption’ through challenging normative narratives of the other, normative actions towards the other, and to challenge dominant mentalities of conflict.

To us, this is part of the 'Prophetic' voice of the local Church, inspiring everyday actions for people in their normal lives and relationships to turn away from the dominant narratives that exist in all our societies that tell us to demonise (and dehumanise) the 'other', by turning them into our enemy, and pursue instead a just peace flowing from Jesus' Kingdom ethics. 

Read next a story from our own experiences of a ‘remarkable friendship’ that inspires us in our work and caused an effective disruption in conflict in middle-belt Nigeria.

Endnotes:

[1] Omer, Little, and Appleby, The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, 186, 190.

[2] Ibid, see also ter Haar, Religion and Development.

[3] Söderström and Olivius, Pluralism, Temporality and Affect., Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace., see also Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order.

[4] Rees, Religion in International Politics and Development.

[5] Appleby et al, Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding, 187.

[6] Omer, Prophets versus Religiocrats, 3.

[7] Francis, Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace.

[8] Capasso, ‘Sketches’, 221.

[9] Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace: How so-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict, 30.