Monday August 28, 2000
Ted Turner’s Gift to Mankind
The UN is still pursuing global peace,
even if it has to start a global religion to get it.
By Shafer Parker
If prevention of world wars is the standard by which international peace organizations are judged, then the United Nations has been a smashing success, especially when compared to its hapless predecessor, the League of Nations. But by any lesser measure, the UN has failed. Despite an alphabet soup of committees, organizations and commissions striving for the betterment of mankind over 80 at last count the world seems no closer than it ever was to achieving universal peace and prosperity. More than 100 armed conflicts have erupted in over 70 locations during the last decade alone. And since the Second World War ended in 1945, more than 27 million people have lost their lives in various wars.
Nevertheless, the UN has not given up searching for the magic formula. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, UN operatives argued that peace would arrive with the eradication of poverty and a reduction of the birth rate in Third-World countries. Now they have added a third ingredient to the mix religion.
The first Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders (https://www.millenniumpeacesummit.com) will take place at UN headquarters in New York City beginning August 28. For the four days following, more than 1,000 leaders from the world’s religious traditions will meet together for prayer, ceremony and interfaith discussions. Summit organizers plan to produce a Declaration for World Peace that will condemn all violence in the name of religion. They also hope to establish a permanent International Advisory Council of Religious and Spiritual Leaders that will advise the UN Secretary-General on conflict prevention and resolution. The advisory committee is ultimately intended to do more than talk. In the words of summit organizer Bawa Jain, Secretary-General of the Secretariat’s office for the World Peace Summit, members of the advisory body could potentially be “parachuted into trouble spots” to persuade their followers to lay down their arms.
The invitation list for the World Peace Summit reads like a Who’s Who of interfaith networking. Roman Catholic Cardinal Francis Arinze, the Nigerian-born president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue at the Vatican, will attend. The Reverend Konrad Raiser, Secretary-General of the World Council of Churches, will be there, along with Njongonkulu Ndungane, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town in South Africa.
World Orthodoxy will be represented by Metropolitan Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and Karekin II, patriarch of the Armenian Orthodox Church. Speaking for Judaism will be Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Chief Rabbi of Israel, who will attend alongside Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, Secretary-General of the Muslim World League and the Jingu Daiguji of the Grand Shrine of Ise, the centre of Shinto worship in Japan. Leaders have also been invited from Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Confucianism.
American civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King are coming, along with leaders of indigenous peoples from all parts of the globe. The latter group includes North American Indians, Australian Aborigines and even eight Q’ero people from remote villages in the Andes who are directly descended from the Inca. According to Dena Merriam, vice-chairwoman of the World Peace Summit, the Q’ero are coming to speak out on behalf of the earth “because of what they see happening to the environment in the Amazon, Mongolia, Australia and Africa.” How exactly they have seen anything in these places is unclear. To bring them into the environment of New York, summit organizers had to rent horses for the first stage out of the mountains, and help them acquire birth certificates and passports. Ms. Merriam reports the Q’ero were particularly moved by their first sight of the ocean. Other indigenous leaders are also travelling to New York on tickets purchased by the UN.
The only prominent religious leader not originally invited was the Dalai Lama, a concession to the Chinese government which has never forgiven him for bringing its forced annexation of Tibet to the world’s attention. “But a miracle of international diplomacy may allow the Buddhist leader to attend after all,” Mr. Jain reports.
At first glance, it appears UN officials are simply admitting that religion can matter as much for global well-being as a full belly or broadband access to the Internet. But observers point out that a major influence and source of funds for the World Peace Summit is U.S. media mogul Ted Turner, vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner and owner of the Turner Broadcasting System, including CNN. Mr. Turner will also serve as honorary chairman. They do not doubt his good intentions, but believe he is trying to manipulate forces beyond his understanding.
“With people like Ted Turner, and the UN in general,” says Michael Horowitz, director for the Hudson Institute’s Project for International Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C., “there’s a bottom-line judgment that all religious conviction is some kind of dangerous zealotry. Their view is, ‘Why fight? Why not sit in a room and work it all out?’ That view is characteristic of those who have no abiding religious faith and don’t understand it.” Mr. Horowitz suspects the summit will “make some effort to reduce all religions to some lowest-common-denominator pap” that could strip its participants’ credibility with their followers.
According to Secretary-General Jain, Mr. Turner was key to the summit’s creation. “The idea was born during the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions,” he says. But it really began to take shape after an August 1997 meeting between Mr. Turner and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “Mr. Turner told Kofi, ‘If you want to have peace in the world, you should bring religious leaders together and ask them to sign a commitment to peace,'” Mr. Jain reports. “Kofi said, ‘good idea.'”
Shortly after that meeting, Canadian billionaire and former Ontario Hydro CEO Maurice Strong was brought in to help with summit planning; he continues to serve as chairman of the International Advisory Board for the World Peace Summit. As board chairman he selected Mr. Jain to head up summit administration, helped to identify participants and continues to provide input on the still-to-be-finalized Declaration for World Peace.
To students of recent history there is something incongruous about Mr. Turner’s involvement in a movement that recognizes the importance of religion. During an awards ceremony at the University of Texas in 1989 he famously dismissed the Ten Commandments as “outmoded.” Nobody pays attention to them, he said, “because they’re too old. When Moses went up on the mountain there were no nuclear weapons, there was no poverty. Today the commandments wouldn’t go over. Nobody around likes to be commanded.”
In place of the original Ten Commandments, Mr. Turner suggested Ten Voluntary Initiatives, which included a promise to “have love and respect for the planet Earth and living things thereon, especially my fellow species humankind.” The father of five listed as his third initiative a “promise to have no more than two children,” or, in what was almost certainly a bow toward China’s one-child policy, “no more than my nation suggests.” The other initiatives support a cleaner environment, human rights and the “United Nations efforts to collectively improve the conditions of the planet.”
Over the past decade Mr. Turner has found other opportunities to insult Christianity. In one sally he accused Christians of having failed after trying for “two thousand years to solve the world’s problems.” His suggestion? “Why don’t we start over.” He has also singled out John Paul II to be the butt of tasteless jokes.
But Mr. Jain says North Americans should note that not only has Mr. Turner apologized to the Pope, he has also expressed an inspiring personal vision of his own. “He told a television audience about a year ago that his father had taught him to set goals too big to accomplish in a lifetime,” Mr. Jain says. “Years before he had the idea for a summit he had set a personal goal to bring peace to the world. I think his heart is in the right place. He just has a problem with institutionalized religion.”
Proof that Mr. Turner’s commitment to world peace is heartfelt can be found in his committing a substantial portion of his personal treasure to the project. In 1998 he created the United Nations Foundation (UNF) through which flows funding for the World Peace Summit with a dramatic pledge of $1 billion. He signed up Tim Wirth to be the foundation’s executive director (Mr. Wirth is also on the board of directors for the World Peace Summit) and immediately began pouring money into his favourite causes. When this magazine asked Mr. Turner at an Edmonton press conference earlier this month to describe the philosophy that guides his philanthropy, he said, “I’m just trying to make the world a better place, both for its human inhabitants and all the other creatures that inhabit this planet with us.”
Mr. Wirth is well-suited to put Mr. Turner’s ideas into action. He previously ran the U.S. government’s efforts during the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo 1994). There he developed a reputation as an ideological functionary who threatened various governments with financial reprisals if they resisted U.S. efforts to promote population control within their borders.
The UNF motto is a direct quotation from Mr. Turner: “I see the whole field of environmentalism and population as nothing more than the survival of the human species.” And while the motto’s fractured syntax expresses a lofty sentiment, when filtered through the minds of Messrs. Turner and Wirth it means condom distribution in Third-World countries instead of money for food and clean water, and manual vacuum aspirators (inexpensive abortion devices) instead of penicillin. Due to Mr. Turner’s support of UN population control efforts, the UN Population Fund’s own research has found that 22% of Haitian women have access to clean water, but 88% have access to contraceptives. That pattern has been repeated throughout the Third World.
Observers suspect the World Peace Summit will come off sounding like an echo of the man who is paying the bills. “I see this as being the usual claptrap of population control and radical environmentalism,” says Austin Ruse, director of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute in New York. “This is Ted Turner trying to use religion to take the sting out of activities that are not always popular in the countries where they take place.” But Mr. Ruse is even more concerned about various hints that the World Peace Summit may be, at least on the part of its organizers, a self-conscious effort to promulgate a new world religion. Mr. Jain, for instance, is a member of the United Religions Initiative (URI) (https://www.united-religions.org), which since 1995 has offered itself as “a spiritual partner of the United Nations.”
In 1995, U.S. Episcopal Bishop William E. Swing, a URI founder, noted the world is moving toward unity in terms of a global economy, global media and global ecological system. “What is missing,” he said, “is a global soul.” Bishop Swing has also condemned Christianity’s traditional commitment to evangelism. This aversion to evangelism, widely shared by global religionists, could have a direct bearing on the type of pressure the World Peace Summit will exert on the religious leaders who attend.
World Summit advisory board chairman Strong is a vital component of yet another organization devoted to developing a single world religion. He is chairman of the Earth Charter Commission, which, he explains in an interview published on the Earth Charter Web site (https://www.earthcharter.org), is an attempt to distill from the world’s religions the “principles to which we must aspire.” He compares his charter a paragon of New Age individualism and megalomania to the Ten Commandments and predicts a day when “everyone will try to base their lives on these principles and only by doing that can we ensure that the Earth will remain a safe and hospitable home for those who follow us on it.”
Which leaves Mr. Ruse wondering why Pope John Paul II is sending a delegation to a meeting held under the auspices of men who are committed to principles that are anathema to the Catholic Church. “There may be a legitimate contribution for the Church to make,” he says. “But the Vatican has already condemned the URI as syncretistic. It is not clear that the World Peace Summit will go down that same road, but it seems possible.”
Cardinal Arinze could not respond to the concerns raised by Mr. Ruse. But a ranking member of the Holy See delegation to the World Peace Summit, who asks to remain anonymous, told this magazine that Catholics should be reassured that “we will not compromise fundamental doctrine.”
The delegate points out that Catholic leaders have long used interfaith gatherings to “show the world that the Church is involved with issues that concern the human person.” He is aware that grounds for co-operation between the various religions will be one of the first topics taken up at the summit. But the subject is fraught with difficulties, he says. He predicts the discussion will take more time than organizers have allotted. And he is not certain that other announced topics, particularly population control, will even get discussed. Any attempt to talk about solutions for ongoing world conflicts, he adds, could quickly degenerate into conflict at the summit. He also characterizes the formulation of a permanent advisory council as “an ambitious outcome for this summit.”
However, in the delegate’s view, the summit will not be wasted if the religious leaders’ exposure to one another in New York leads to greater mutual respect and forebearance between adherents of various religious groups in future. He also thinks the summit could usefully pressure western governments to stop arms sales to warring factions in Third-World countries and to forgive the crippling debt burden that weighs down the economies of many African countries. But Catholics should not fear that their church will sign away their right to religious freedom, including to right to evangelize. “The politicization of religious freedom will not be brought up in this forum,” he says.
Mr. Jain insists the summit will address world conflict. “We are committed to creating an advisory council, together with regional councils around the world,” he says. “We must explore how far this partnership can go.” He also contradicts the Catholic delegate’s confidence that the right to evangelize will be protected. “The declaration the religious leaders will sign,” he says, “will endorse diversity, tolerance and mutual existence. Religious workers should go first to their own adherents and teach them to be more faithful to their own traditions.” He suggests that one purpose for regional advisory councils will be to reduce tensions between “reviving indigenous traditions and Christianity.”
Students of international affairs hold little hope that the World Peace Summit will accomplish its aims, partly because it so transparently grows out of the UN’s 1995 global governance project, which also calls for a standing army, taxation powers and the right to interfere, when necessary, in the internal affairs of sovereign states. Any attempt to extend the UN’s reach from the secular realm into the spiritual is even more apt to produce a backlash. “If religious leaders are parachuted into some of the world’s trouble spots, they could be seen as meddlers at best, or agents from the opposite side at worst,” says Ted Carpenter, vice-president for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. “I wouldn’t want to be holding the life insurance policies on those guys.”
Mr. Carpenter agrees that in limited circumstances the UN has played a useful role in promoting peace. “But as can be seen in Somalia and Kosovo,” he says, “outside powers are usually overreaching when they attempt direct crisis intervention and nation building.” He predicts that by pursuing such a course, the UN risks alienating its more cautious supporters and creating even more distrust within the U.S.
Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., says that the UN and its supporters have put forward what is essentially a messianic agenda. “For people like Ted Turner,” he says, “the UN becomes the focus of an inchoate attempt to meet their own spiritual needs. Human beings have a natural tendency toward God. If they don’t turn toward the authentic deity, they will seek salvation in such things as population control and saving the environment.” The irony, Mr. Royal says, is that the alarmists are simply wrong. For a variety of reasons the world’s population will begin shrinking within the next 30 years and sustainability will cease to be an issue.
Nevertheless, Mr. Royal is unwilling to write off the World Peace Summit completely. “Right now Christians are being persecuted around the world, from the Philippines to the Sudan,” he says. “It would be good if we could get a dialogue going about what religions do and do not sanction toward other religions.”
But despite the possibility that interfaith dialogue can produce limited benefits in local areas, Mr. Royal says that as long as there are many faiths in the world, conflict is inevitable. “The UN has bought into the idea that at bottom all religions are about the same thing,” he says. “But a serious examination of the differences between the teachings of Jesus Christ and Muhammad, let alone the host of other religions out there, shows you that they are not.”