April 5 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart . …The only backbone to our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my firm, my country, my success—responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged."

Those words, addressed to the U.S. Congress, came not from Billy Graham or Pat Robertson but from V‡clav Havel, the president of what some judge as the least religious country on earth, the Czech Republic.

A year ago, when Havel was invited to serve as guest editor of the magazine Civilization, he devoted the issue to the need for religious foundations, concluding that "the crisis of … global responsibility is in principle due to the fact that we have lost the certainty that the Universe, nature, existence, and our lives are the work of creation guided by a definite intention, that it has a definite meaning and follows a definite purpose." He warned that modern Western civilization is "the first atheistic civilization in the history of humankind."

The letters section of the next issue included a chorus of outcries. How could an intellectual like Havel call for a return to religion? Doesn't he know that religion gives rise to violence, racism, censorship, and intolerance? Havel could do so, of course, because he had lived under an atheistic regime that outdid any misguided religion in those categories.

Havel does not call himself a Christian, for he rightly understands that to do so would require acknowledging Jesus as an incarnation of God. His "theology" remains vague, akin to classical deism: God created the world, then entrusted ...