Prophecy

Here's an amazing couple of paragraphs written over 20 years ago. They appear in historian/theologian Martin Marty's book Friendship (in a chapter in which he's discussing freedom and its relation to friendship):

If the future of the world is to be as full of fanaticism and intolerance as it bids fair to be, the prophecy of historian Hugh Thomas could come true. In the next century, he writes, the great human divisions may follow religious lines, not national lines. Religious zealotry is particularly prone to extreme suspicion of the non-orthodox, and because of this it poses special dangers to champions of variety and reform. The 1980s have seen a promise of Thomas's prediction in the new fanaticisms of all religions: in Shi'ite Islam in Iran, among the Gush Emunim of Israel, the Soka Gakkai in Japan, and the new Fundamentalists of the United States. People are gathering into tribes, into separatenesses that can help them keep their place and ward off presumed or real threats from outsiders.

In times like these, tolerance becomes too weak an attitude to be of help. Being tolerant has come to mean being wishy-washy, having no deep commitments. Because of its shallowness, tolerance has gotten a bad name and picked up some enemies who like to play into the hands of the intolerant. Only those who are certain are truly religious, they say. Only fundamentalism and fanaticism count for faith in such a market. Fanaticism, however, can exact terrible penalties in a world too full of weaponry, too ready for terrorism, too tiptoed toward the brink of religio-racial-cultural-ethnic warfare on almost all continents. (53-54)