On 1 February 1901, the eve of Queen Victoria’s funeral, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave his views of the international situation in a private conversation recorded by Bishop William Boyd Carpenter. He believed that the fear of war between ‘individual European nations’ was ‘damned nonsense’. Rather he perceived a global racial and religious confrontation in which ‘The Roman Catholic Church was now making and would continue to make desperate efforts to … undermine the ascendancy of the Protestant Powers.’ In response he believed Britain and Germany should ‘pull together’, a bitter irony in view of the subsequent course of early twentieth-century history. A century later, the Kaiser’s perceptions of the role of religion in international affairs have found, mutatis mutandis, a strong echo in Samuel Huntington’s influential concept of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Christianity and Islam, a view that has gained considerable currency in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001 and the ongoing ‘war on terror’. The twenty-first century, Huntington believes, ‘is beginning as an age of religion’.
It remains to be seen whether Huntington’s prognosis for the twenty-first century will prove to be any more accurate than the Kaiser’s for the twentieth century. Meanwhile the central premise for the proposed programme is that it is essential to set such current preoccupations with the role of religion in international and internal security in a long historical and comparative perspective. Once this has been done, contemporary problems can be viewed in better proportion, and a significant contribution made to their more effective resolution.
Since 9/11 substantial academic and journalistic attention has understandably been devoted to exploring the historic roots of contemporary militant radical Islam, but less attention has been given to the Christian side of the equation. In particular little or no account has been taken of the remarkable extent to which contemporary perceptions of Islam resemble widespread perceptions of Roman Catholicism in earlier generations. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kaiser’s view that the Roman Catholic Church was a major threat to international security was not held in isolation but reflected a widespread strand in public opinion in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and Protestant continental Europe. While it is arguable that by 1901 this viewpoint owed much more to subjective prejudice than to objective reality, it demonstrated the enduring persistence of states of mind stimulated by the historic confrontations of Protestant and Catholic powers, from the Armada of 1588 to the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763. Moreover in numerous parts of the English speaking-world there were entrenched traditions of sectarian confrontation in Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast, Boston, New York and Sydney.
The general trend during the twentieth century was for these conflicts to become more attenuated but they have by no means disappeared. Religious labels remained important in Northern Ireland and even following the end of military conflict and the movement towards political settlement symbolized by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the segregation and division of ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ communities persists. The situation there continues to merit close study both in order to understand how positive developments can be emulated elsewhere, and in order to minimize the dangers of a future fresh deterioration in the security situation in the province.
In the United States, where Barack Obama's election has demonstrated that colour is no longer a bar to the presidency, John F. Kennedy, whose election in 1960 stirred substantial Protestant concern, has in the face of significant continuing anti-Catholic sentiment remained the only Roman Catholic to gain the White House.
A programme investigating Protestant-Catholic conflict in historic perspective is thus highly timely, both because it will shed light on a cluster of enduring directly related issues of security concern, and because of its potential to be a valuable comparator for understanding of other forms of religiously labelled conflict, above all that between Christianity and Islam.