I read a comment yesterday from someone genuinely horrified that the American Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has tattoos with Christian motifs - including the Jerusalem cross and Bible verses.
The horror was that it must be a sign he was a religious nutcase - and hadn't he just said the world is in a religious conflict!?
🤓
I don't quite know where this person has been for the last few thousand years.
Because in the real world, the underlying religious conflict has never stopped.
It has changed form. It has shifted intensity. It has at times been dampened by trade, diplomacy and balance of power.
But it has never disappeared.
And this isn't something Hegseth invented - or an expression of a position that deviates particularly from normal, if we measure this in a longer perspective than the last 50 years in Northern Europe.
If you step even slightly back from the political noise of the present and look at the history of civilisations, it actually becomes difficult to find periods where the great civilisations were not also bound together by religious narratives.
The Christian civilisation in Europe.
The Islamic civilisation from Spain to Indonesia.
The Hindu civilisation in India.
The Confucian-Buddhist civilisation in East Asia.
The Jewish religious tradition, which for millennia has been an axis in history.
None of this is just "private faith".
These are world-stories.
Stories about what the human being is.
What truth is.
What law is.
What justice is.
And where history is moving.
Embedded in the Human who lives inside them.
When such stories meet, tensions almost inevitably arise.
The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington tried in the 1990s to articulate precisely this in his thesis about the clash of civilisations - that future conflicts would to a lesser degree be ideological, as during the Cold War, and to a greater degree civilisational.
And in many cases also religious.
But in Western Europe many believed something else. There are still many who do - or try to convince themselves they do.
Because as a small anomaly in world history, we believed here that religion was something history had slowly left behind.
That modernity, technology and economic development would dissolve the old metaphysical conflicts.
That notion was almost symbolically formulated by Francis Fukuyama in the idea of "The End of History".
That the liberal, secular order was in reality history's endpoint.
Hard to understand today, that one could convince oneself that the Human had suddenly permanently transcended itself and its nature… but they believed it. And they made toasts about it and celebrated.
The rest of the world, however, continued their narratives unperturbed - and in some places growing in strength.
And exactly as expected and easily predictable, history did not stop.
It just drew breath for a moment.
And then came back.
Because outside the Western bubble, large parts of the world still think in holy texts, historical mission and civilisation's calling.
And in some cases also in eschatology - that is, the notion of history's ultimate goal.
In the Islamic world, the idea of a global religious mission is not a conspiracy theory, but part of the tradition's historical self-understanding through more than 1400 years.
That doesn't mean all Muslims think that way.
But it means that religious worldviews are still deeply embedded in many civilisations' understanding of themselves - and of the world. And that leaders act according to these inner images and narratives, to align with their own faith, identity and deepest meaning.
And when such worldviews meet other civilisations' narratives, friction arises (almost inevitably).
Not necessarily constant war.
But a deep tension beneath the surface.
I actually first heard this thought about 30 years ago.
I was on holiday in the border area between France and Italy. My family had rented a house by the water from an older Italian couple, and one evening my father and I sat on the rocks together with the man and watched the sun go down over the sea.
We talked about Europe. About the world. About the future.
And he said, quite calmly and without drama, that he was certain that within 20-30 years Europe would again stand in the midst of religious conflicts.
Both internally in Europe - and globally.
I can still remember what I thought.
That the man must be raving mad. That he must have read some church book upside down and lost connection to reality - or had drunk too much.
Europe was rational now.
Secular.
Enlightened.
We only wanted what was good, which I even thought I knew what was… 😅🤷🏼♂️
Religion was something history had left behind.
That's what I believed then.
Today I'm not quite so certain.
In fact, I see it directly reversed.
Perhaps the most precise description of our time is actually this -
The world is split over its deepest story and meaning.
And when civilisations no longer share the same answer to
what truth is, what God is, what the Human is, and where history is moving - then the old conflicts return.
Not necessarily in the same form.
But with the same weight.
...
I'm not writing this to defend Pete Hegseth.
But to point to something far more banal - and far more historical.
That he is neither wrong.
Nor stands outside the position the human being has most often occupied throughout all of written history -
As believer.
As meaning-seeker.
And as a being who again and again expresses this faith in its understanding of the world.
❤️🔥🪽
… and we haven't even brought China or India into this yet.
That will have to be another day.
