Faith and Politics: Mutual Use

In the spring of 2018, I wrote on a portal about the politicization of faith and the sacralization of politics. This topic is eternal – sometimes more or less актуализирован, and in our, Bosnian-Herzegovinian context, especially in the last quarter of a century, it has been dramatically актуализирован, because a war was waged in BiH which, in a very significant aspect, was also a religious war.

The tragedy is that religious elites and the highest religious institutions have not drawn appropriate lessons from that horrific war, which was both religious and aggressive (aggression from neighboring countries), but are still heading in the same direction today: equating the national and the religious, necessarily opposing other national and religious corpora. Because of this constant актуализация of the negative relationship between the religious and the political/national, I will refer to my own text, in the hope that I will not be blamed for it.

Religions and wars – it is a strong alliance, as old as humanity. The history of the human race is characterized by wars, and periods of peace are merely episodes in this constant human inability to finally learn humanity, or humanity as finality.

This constant relationship between religions and wars means that humanity has always lived in a kind of paradox because faith/belief is essentially incompatible with warfare – the aggressive kind, which should be distinguished from the necessarily defensive kind. In every faith, God is – essentially, and that means theologically unfalsified – unimaginable as a killer of other, different people/nations: He is not an instigator of devastation and crimes, but of mutual acquaintance.

However, despite this, religion and politics have always been in a kind of pact, or rather – the clergy and politicians (with exceptions precisely because they are exceptions!) generally enter into an alliance for the mutual realization of power and influence, even more than wealth, and in this alliance, both sides commit a great, fundamental violence.

Religious communities, or their highest institutions (i.e., the clergy, of course), consider themselves alone qualified to interpret faith in all aspects, and then – accordingly – define members of other faiths not only as different but as antagonists, as a constant potential threat; then others also position themselves that way because they are faced with suspicion, antagonism, threat, etc.

In our region, we have a specific, I would say even additionally negativized situation – that religions are equated with nations (majority), so religious institutions are considered qualified to "protect" and "affirm" their faith by "protecting" and "affirming" their nation. This is the first level of fundamental institutional falsification because every faith is, essentially, supranational, or international.

That is why we had situations during the dramatic breakup of Yugoslavia where some religious communities/clergy, with sacred-national authority, incited devastation and killing of others, and sent soldiers and plundering hordes on criminal exploits with their religious blessings, i.e., as supreme authorities.

In such conditions – when the nation and religion are equated and consequently the different is marked as an antagonist and potentially dangerous – politics enters that space of fateful and destructive falsification, considering itself qualified to "affirm" and "protect" its people and its faith, which in the historical and current circumstances here necessarily implies – unfortunately, reality proves this – antagonism towards others, up to the most dramatic conflicts.

This leads to a new phase of falsification which is dramatic, tragic precisely from the perspective of faith, and I will present this in the form of the next sketch.

Politics and faith are significantly different, or rather, they are incompatible in important, fundamental aspects. I will mention only a few, because this problem requires a whole study. Before that, I emphasize that in the regions of former Yugoslavia, religion and politics are in a very strong alliance, or more precisely – religious institutions and politicians. This warning must be kept in mind.
Religion belongs to the sphere of the universal and eternal, the Sublime; it "deals" with the highest and stable values.

Politics deals with – however pretentious it may be – the particular and temporary, almost instantaneous; it is unreliable because its highest interest is pragmatism and profiteering, for the realization of which it necessarily changes positions, orientations, preferences... Politics is the art of maneuvering; faith is adherence to permanently stable values and principles as treasures. Therefore, it would be a normal state of affairs for politics to orient itself in accordance with this stability, for faith to be a constant and reliable corrective for it, as it represents a stable and sublime spiritual, ethical code, or system.

In other words, it is clear that authentic, stable faith, or its institutions and clergy, must not allow itself to be used, to be the infrastructure of any political party or leader; a religious community/institution must be non-partisan.

That is how it should be, but it is not. In our reality, there has always been a strong alliance between the clergy and politicians, i.e., religion and politics, so that, in our circumstances, it is possible to speak of a monstrous inversion: of the (harmful) politicization of religion and, at the same time, of the (also harmful) sacralization of politics. Such a relationship yields devastating results, which I will use to punctuate this presentation.

It is almost impossible to hear priests in religious spaces, or in public generally, criticize, or – God forbid! – anathematize politicians who are known to flock to places of worship, while at the same time it is known that they are devoted to myth, corruption, nepotism – everything that faith condemns. Most priests do not do this because they lack the faith and consistency to offend those from whom they themselves derive power and various other benefits.

Politicians, for their part, by their "piety" and alleged protection of their people's faith, provide religious institutions themselves with a certain authority before the people, or at least before those parts of the people who consider themselves significant. This is a two-way exchange of energy that is inherently negative, because both sides abuse, sell their faith; they have turned it into a trade that is both miserable and blasphemous from the standpoint of religious principles. Namely, what kind of believer and what kind of prayer is any clergy that does not condemn the actions of politicians when they are in deep conflict with faith?!

This means that such clergy are in false authority, that they are hypocritical in relation to their own faith and God, or belief.

At the same time, politicians who exploit the faithlessness of the clergy and formally adhere to rituals, as a pose, even though in their political activities they engage in all sorts of things that conflict with faith – such are also hypocrites of the highest order. And both sides present themselves as leaders! Measured by human criteria – and God knows best! – both are blasphemous (of course, with exceptions, again) all the more so because they do it consciously and for relatively short-term interests. Religion must be above that. Religious institutions must be non-partisan. However, since this is about an alliance that is a kind of vicious disease, on both sides, the negative energy of this alliance is enormous.

In this way, one approaches the Gates of Hell from here.

Before the recently held elections in BiH, a message was sent from the highest instance of one religious community that was completely superfluous – at least superfluous and harmful to the religious community – stating that nations "should not choose representatives for each other".
However, after the elections were over, from another religious community – also from its highest instance – an absolutely shocking message was sent. Namely, referring to the election of Željko Komšić as a member of the BiH Presidency, the author of the message states: Hitler also came to power legally.

Such a comparison has a whole series of fatally wrong and harmful aspects and connotations. According to this, a member of one nation is identified exclusively by which religious community and which political party they belong to. Furthermore, citizens are essentially deprived of the right to CHOOSE WHO THEY WANT, and then something arises that does not exist anywhere else in the world but here: ELECTIONS ARE NOT ELECTIONS; they are false, defective; they are not free at all if they are so significantly restricted.

Finally, and this is the most terrible thing, with this second statement, Mr. Željko Komšić is compared to Hitler, which is inaccurate and horrific. It is horrific because the message – given its so high "authorial instance" – creates a context of further hatred, distrust, fear, prejudice; it is a call from the highest religious authority for adequate resistance to the alleged Hitler in BiH (a call for war and chaos!!), all with the aim of realizing the highest form of the alliance between politics and faith and for such an alliance to be a successful investment for future divisions.

The comparison between the election of Hitler and Željko Komšić has truly surpassed all previous uses of faith for the destructive goals of a failed policy. Eternity has been squandered for deviant immediacy.

The entire negativity of such a message in the given situation is simply inexpressible.

The statement I am discussing at the end of this presentation simply cries out for another type of "amortization" such as pointing to incorrect media transmission, etc.