What's God got to do with diplomacy? Former submarine commander Douglas Johnston believes that religion is 'the missing dimension of statecraft'. He tells his story to Bob Webb - Douglas Johnston

For A Change, Feb-March, 2004 by Bob Webb

In the heat of the Cold War, Douglas M Johnston Jr served in the US nuclear submarine service. He sometimes pondered how he would react it ordered to fire a missile signalling the start of World War III, without evidence that an enemy attack was imminent.

But all that's behind him now as he engages in what is perhaps the major challenge of his life: at age 65, when many men retire, Johnston is the founder and President of the Washington DC based International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD). Quietly but assiduously, he works to bring peace in Sudan where two civil wars have taken two million lives and displaced countless others. Also quietly but assiduously, he works to help defuse the tensions in Kashmir with its associated threat of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. His commitment to peace spans the globe. His view is that religion--so often the trigger or presumed trigger of violence--can play a major role in averting conflict.

INCONGRUITY

So how did a US Naval Academy graduate and hard-charging submarine officer come to establish a centre increasingly recognized for its contributions to peace?

'It was a combination of two things,' Johnston says. 'First was a thought I had near the end of the Cold War about the incongruity of both sides spending trillions of dollars on weapons systems, the sole purpose of which was to enhance deterrence--so that they would never be used--while much of the world continued to starve. Second was an awareness (born of an extended involvement with the National Prayer Breakfast movement) of the good that lay people operating on the basis of their personal faith were doing in various parts of the world, reconciling differences between people and factions--sometimes even bringing wars to a halt with no one the wiser as to how it took place.'

The National Prayer Breakfast movement annually attracts about 4,000 people--non-Christians as well as Christians--to Washington for an event widely heralded and extensively covered in the press. But the movement also includes weekly prayer breakfasts where people share their faith, seek spiritual help and reinforce one another in serving the disadvantaged. When Johnston shared the vision of his new centre at one such breakfast gathering in 1999, a former political advisor to the President of Sudan invited Johnston to visit Sudan to see if he could help the peace effort there.

That set off a chain of events leading to the birth of the Sudan Inter-Religious Council (SIRC), a monthly forum where Muslim and Christian religious leaders work out their problems and cooperate in securing a lasting peace. 'It took our centre two-and-a-half years to develop the relationships required to put this council in place,' says Johnston. In an interview last August, Al Tayib Zein Al Abdin, Secretary-General of the SIRC, defined the council as 'an independent, voluntary association of religious leaders'. He said it 'aims at contributing to religious coexistence and cooperation between different groups--Muslims, Christians and African religionist--for the purpose of bringing greater harmony and peace among them. Specifically, SIRC will focus on issues such as the protection of religious freedoms and places of worship; promoting reconciliation and peaceful resolution of conflict; and building a new social and political environment conducive to the building of peace and the maintenance and promotion of national unity.'

Small wonder the US peace envoy to Sudan, former US Senator Jack Danforth, met SIRC before he met the government on his first official trip there last year. Dr Al-Abdin said, 'We conveyed to Danforth the role of SIRC in addressing religious issues of a practical nature that concern different religious groups. We suggested to him that the prospective peace treaty should give a priority to religious freedom and the rehabilitation of places of worship destroyed during the war.'

ABRAHAMIC DELEGATION

Small wonder, too, that Johnston was one of a small group of Muslims, Jews and Christians who travelled to Iran last summer. This 'Abrahamic delegation' was headed by Cardinal Theodore E McCarrick, the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, and included, among others, Rabbi Jack Bemporad, director of the Center for Interreligious Understanding in Secaucus, NJ, and Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf, founder of the Asma Society. The delegation's aim was to begin a faith-based dialogue with Iron that might help avoid another Iraq.

Despite a crowded agenda that would seem to leave scant time for diversion, Johnston swims, sails and skis. His wife, Janean, is a lawyer who conducts ethics audits of law firms for the State Bar of Virginia. Between them, they have five grown-up sons and daughters.

What surprised Johnston on the first of his 14 trips to Sudan was to find Christians and women in high-level government positions in Khartoum. He also learned that three of the six commanders of the guerrilla forces in the South were Muslims. Most of what he'd seen in the press had painted a different picture. There was clearly more to the war than a struggle between Muslims in the North and Christians in the South. Johnston is confident the SIRC can become a major healing influence, complementing the peace efforts of Danforth and others at the official level.