Faith’s Potential to enable Political Reunification

Faith is powerful. It can both divide and unite people as Albright discusses in the text. “Its impact depends entirely on what it inspires people to do”. Albright writes that there are people who are willing to die and kill for their faith. Extremists would do anything for something they believe in. Additionally, the article comes up with three stories to show the prospects of faith. It verifies that faith can encourage people when they’re feeling down. It teaches how to forgive or overcome hate as well. Still, there are some people who are misinterpreting faith such as the Muslim militias from the second story, and the organization LRA from the third story. However, faith is mighty enough to bring peace between people and nations. Faith-based diplomacy is widespread and it might even soon replace conventional diplomacy due to its advantages. As Albright writes in the text, “a faith-based mediator has means that a conventional diplomat lacks, including prayers, fasting, forgiveness, repentance and the inspiration of scripture”. Since they already understand the morals of the religions, it is undeniable that they will do a better job in reconciliations. In the text, Albright mentions that “Douglas Johnston, the book's coauthor, subsequently formed the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD), which has continued to study what it calls ''faith-based diplomacy" while also playing an important mediating role in Sudan and establishing useful relationships in Kashmir, Pakistan, and Iran. ” This quote provides that there are already successful negotiations with the assistance of faith-based diplomacy. Through the agency of faith-based mediators, there will be fewer religious wars and the world is going to be peaceful. Hence, faith plays an important role to enable political reunification. To enable political reunification, faith-based diplomats themselves need to have a deep understanding of the religions with the intention that they could find a common ground between the antagonists. For instance, most of the religious wars occur due to the fact that they want “their religion” to be number one. That is the common ground. Additionally, in order to reconcile the religious wars, the mediators ought to have high religious authority because people in a religious war would not listen to the words of the normal negotiator, who has no clue about their religion. If the mediator is a priest, a pastor, or a monk, on the other hand, they might listen to them, considering them as “religiously educated people”. To support that, in the first story from the Albright text, it says “ The pope helped the people of Poland overcome their fear”. The pope could help the people of Poland because he has high religious authority, they believe him and follow his lead. If they do not believe him, or if he does not have high religious authority, the pope could not have helped them however hard he tries. This example shows that faith has a strong potential between people. Because he negotiates with the Polish people, Pope John Paul II can also be considered as a faith-based mediator. Thus, we can see that faith-based diplomacy works perfectly fine in reconciliation with the help of qualified faith-based mediators, who have high religious authority. Furthermore, people need to understand that “however distant it may sometimes seem: we are all created in the image of God”. Once people realize that “we share a kinship with one another, everyone of influence in a given situation is not necessarily bad, and those who are bad aren’t all the time”, there is a great chance that they would forgive each other, realizing that we are all the children of God. Albright, too, mentions that “once they acknowledge their common humanity, it becomes harder to kill each other; then compromise becomes easier because they have admitted that they’re dealing with people like themselves, not some kind of Satan or subhuman species”. This quote points out significantly why people should not fight. Why would we fight and kill each other when we share a kinship with one another? There are people out there, who want to make their religion number one. As a result, some extremists coerce people with different religious beliefs to convert to the religion they, extremists, believe in. Everyone has his or her own opinions and we should be able to believe in whichever religion we want and no one else should decide it for us. President Jimmy Carter said, “ It is often simpler to deal with people of completely different faiths than those who share a religion but disagree about how it should be interpreted. ” This quote shows that even in one specific religion, some people are still fighting over how it should be interpreted. Nevertheless, if we all ignore our different beliefs, consider those as one, and use faith as our reunification tool, our world is going to be much more peaceful and enjoyable. The important reason why faith has the ability to enable political reunification is that religion itself controls people’s actions. Although there are many different religions, there is a common thing, that is, every religion teaches people to spread love, not hate. As Albright writes, “Religion at its best teaches forgiveness and reconciliation, not only when those acts are relatively easy but also when they are unbelievably difficult. ” For instance, in the second story from the text, a young Lebanese woman, Mary, forgives the Muslim militia who even tried to kill her. “I forgave him because my God forgave me. It's as simple as that. ” From this evidence, Mary can be considered as one of the people who are willing to die for their faith. However, even Mary, who was in such a risky situation, could forgive, people in religious wars should, too, forgive each other. In fact, if people are aware of that and view the world in an optimistic way, there, for sure, will be no or fewer religious wars in the future. To conclude, as Albright writes in the text, “faith-based diplomacy can be a useful tool of foreign policy”. Certainly, faith-based diplomacy can bring peace in religious cases than conventional diplomacy can. In order to enable political reunification, “faith-based diplomacy” is the main key. For the reasons I have stated above, it is unquestionable that faith plays an important role in policy and has a very strong potential to enable political reunification.