Third World War: The real showdown between Christians and Muslims isn’t in the Mideast

By Philip Jenkins
April 01, 2010 Issue
American Conservative

Nobody is sure how it started. Perhaps Christian activists sent text messages warning that Muslims were trying to poison them. Maybe Muslims tried to storm a church. Whatever the cause, the consequence this past January was mayhem for the Nigerian city of Jos. Muslim-Christian rioting killed up to 500 people before the government intervened with its customary heavy hand.

The most striking point about these battles was that nobody found them striking. In Jos, as in countless other regions across Africa and Asia, violence between Christians and Muslims can erupt at any time, with the potential to detonate riots, civil wars, and persecutions. While these events are poorly reported in the West, they matter profoundly. All the attention in the Global War on Terror focuses on regions in which the U.S. is engaged militarily, but another war is raging across whole continents, one that will ultimately shape the strategic future. Uncomfortably for American policymakers, it is a war of religions and beliefs—a battle not for hearts and minds but for souls. the rest