---

Holy wars are just as
potent in Christianity

It's such an exalted feeling to believe that God is on your side in battle. It makes it easier to cloak hatred and thirst for supremacy with a mantle of righteousness. Murder and violence seem honorable, the stuff of heroes and ballads and myths.

Millions of Americans who grew up with those songs and legends probably missed the news story last week, buried in the back pages and skipped by television news, in which a sorry remnant of righteousness announced that its great jihad is over.

The terrorists said they're quitting the conflict that began as a religious war and was also always about nationalism. They promised to empty their arsenals and work through legitimate political channels to build up the country and dedicate themselves to a peacemaking process.

Jihad is an Arab word but this wasn't their holy war. The concept is embraced by Islamic fanatics, but it wasn't theirs. It wasn't in Iran nor Kosovo, northern Sudan or the southern Philippines.

Our introduction to jihad in the 20th century was the Protestant vs. Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland. It was the leadership of the unofficial Irish Republican Army who announced last week that its volunteer soldiers were ordered to dump their weapons and put their energy into supporting a peace initiative that has been wobbling along for a decade.

More than 3,000 people were killed by the nameless, faceless Catholic guerrillas and paramilitary Protestant groups since the IRA revived a 400-year-old struggle in the 1960s. The recent chapter might have started with laudable motives, to protect co-religionists whose civil rights were violated by bullies operating behind a shield of religion. But Christian soldiers became the bullies and thugs, and hundreds of innocent people were killed or hurt by their guns and bombs.

It's different from the 21st-century jihad, to be sure. Most Americans know as little about Christian conflict shaping the history and politics of Europe as they do about Islam in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Our view of religious fanaticism has a very limited time line.

When bombs ripped through the London transportation system last month, a few commentators referred to IRA bombings in London in the 1970s and '80s.

Muslims in Britain and around the world, including the Muslim Association of Hawaii, felt moved to denounce the killers. The legitimate religious organizations of Islam have done the same thing time after time since Sept. 11, 2001, each time a suicide bomber does his ungodly deed.

Who ever heard such a statement being issued by the Knights of Columbus or the Holy Name Society when Anglican children were mowed down in Belfast? Did anyone hear a condemnation from Episcopal or Catholic pulpits, or a resolution from the national voting body of any Protestant denomination? Did anyone say Christians abhor this un-Christian war?

On July 28 a group of leading North American Muslim scholars issued a religious edict condemning all acts of terrorism and religious extremism as being fundamentally un-Islamic. They did it from the pulpit of the Washington, D.C., Press Club. The ruling, or "fatwa," endorsed by 130 Muslim organizations in the United States and Canada, said: "Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives. Targeting civilians' life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram -- or forbidden -- and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not 'martyrs.'"

I don't remember any such fatwa from the Catholic-Protestant jihad days. I do remember hero stories repeated by children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants and "patriotic" fight songs in parties and pubs, where Americans contributed money to the secret army to keep the terrorism going back in the old country.

Maybe that's the conceit of being in the majority; there are so many varieties of Christian that there is no collective conscience. The landscape is so loaded with Christians that a condemnation from one corner would be refuted, attacked, interpreted and spun by Christians from the other perspectives.

Ah, it sounds familiar. The jihad of the moral high ground continues on the battlefields of Senate confirmation hearings and Supreme Court rulings, family-planning clinics and marriage ceremonies. Please let the weapons of righteousness continue to be tongues and pens and not swords.