Aug. 17, 2007, 6:03PM
CNN's Amanpour looks at God's Warriors
3-night report features militant Jews, Muslims and Christians

By JOANNE WEINTRAUB
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

They've been called radicals, militants or zealots. Christiane Amanpour calls them "God's warriors."

The CNN reporter's three-part series on the subject, scheduled to air next week on the cable news channel, looks at Jews, Christians and Muslims who have aggressively brought their religious faith into the political arena.

These fervent believers change social policies, shape the course of national elections and influence global affairs. A small minority use terror to achieve their ends.

Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent and one of the most recognizable faces in broadcast news, spent eight months working on the special, which will be shown in two-hour segments Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

It's hard to overstate the impact religious fundamentalists have had in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, Amanpour said in an interview last month after a CNN session with critics in Los Angeles.

"We're talking about the (members) of these three faiths who feel that they have a direct line to God and that religion needs to be brought from the personal into the public sphere," Amanpour said.

"We traveled to several states (in the U.S.), to the U.K., the Netherlands, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the occupied West Bank. It was a huge undertaking."

For the segment on Christian activists, scheduled to air Thursday, Amanpour sat down with the Rev. Jerry Falwell for what turned out to be the evangelist's last interview before his death in May.

The winner of numerous awards for her war reporting from the Middle East, Bosnia and elsewhere, Amanpour, 49, was raised in Tehran, Iran, by a Catholic mother and a Muslim father.

Educated in Iran, England and the U.S., she is based in London and is married to a Jewish American, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin.

"I've lived my personal life in a multiethnic, multifaith, multicultural environment," Amanpour said, "and I've spent my professional life dealing with the opposite, (covering) wars based on divisions among faiths."

For the Jewish segment of the report, which airs first, Amanpour and her crew visited Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, whose legitimacy has been debated by other Israelis for 40 years.

"These are religious people who really believe they're chosen, that this is their Promised Land," she said.

A source of outrage to Palestinians, the settlements "have a huge impact on (Israel's) ability to hammer out a peace agreement."

The segment also looks at U.S. Zionists, including a New York state legislator and his wife who raise large sums to support the settlements and evangelical Christians who work for the same cause in the belief that the Jewish settlements are divinely ordained.

For the middle segment, on Muslim activism, Amanpour returned to Iran, where visiting the members of a particularly devout sect meant donning a black robe and scarf that allowed only part of her face to peek out.

"We use Iran as a historic look at martyrdom — where it comes from, what it means and how it was first demonstrated," she said.

The final two hours, filmed entirely in the U.S., focus on Christian activists from Washington, D.C., to Washington state, with stops in Virginia and Minnesota.

Amanpour found this portion of her research the most surprising part of the project.

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Liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.

(snip)

if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation — and we cannot — we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease coexistence. The best should not be the enemy of the good?

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It's a wonderfully articulate article.

He gets a little wishy-washy at the end. I suspect this is to whet our appetites just a little bit in anticipation of his book.

If I met him, I would argue that he gives too much credit to Hobbes and Rousseau, and none to Descartes, from whom both men drew their philosophical water. Descartes was a man of faith too, who spent his career trying to reconcile his faith with his radical outlook, and in my view , failed. But he understood that before we were a people who sought a connection to the divine, we were an animal imbued with will. Human will, that which makes us sentient, and defines us as more than a chimara, an instrument of God. Before divine convictions, we follow will, and all human endevours are initiated by will, if guided by faith. With the will of one, we are an individual species before we are a collective one, and it is these individual impulses that give rise to our social behavior. Yes, our religious convictions are shaped by our will before anything else.

But, certainly he's correct that the achilles heel of liberal modernism is its faith in its own inevitability. It is not. In fact, modernism is the most fragile ideology of all, with no underpinning except a fool's trust in the future. Ahmadinijad is correct in his assessment: the world's people have found liberalism wanting. The coming era will indubitably be a time of faith and authority. It has already begun. Everyone here reads newspapers, so I'm sure my last statement is not shocking to those who can take in the larger picture. In this country, we have not seen the last overtly religious president; this, in fact, will be a de rigeur quality for public officials in the future, and in Europe as well. This then, will be a conservative century, when the world will push back towards tradition and social circumscription. Gender roles will be more clearly defined: you're already seeing that here; it will follow in Europe. Secularism will wane: that his also underway here and will follow in Europe. As Islam is waxing in the Middle East, Christianity will full in the West, and has begun in America. This unfortunately, augurs a religious war. Unfortunately, there are far too many people on both "shores" who relish that possibility.

To me there is no question that religious extremism posses the same threat in the 21st century that ideologies did in the last. Zeroing in on Islamism misses the bigger picture - especially how the zealots on all sides are feeding into each other's cause e.g. Jewish settlers empowering Hamas and in turn being helped in their aganda by Hamas uncompromising stance. Not to forget the vision probably shared by the likes of Osama and Pat Robertson: Holy war on a global scale preferably with nukes to bring on Armageddon.

The big challenge of our time is to confront and exterminate religious extremism in all its guises. There can not be any compromise with any of these zealots because they are inborn incapable of compromise. I feel strongly that any legitimate means of accomplishing this end has to be employed.