BBC Thought for the Day, 11 May 2009 -Clifford Longley

This is the time of year when gardeners have to fight to keep the weeds at bay, otherwise they will take over. This struck me as a good seasonal metaphor for something Pope Benedict said in Jordan. He was answering the charge that religion leads not to peace and harmony but to communal conflict. He admitted it can happen, but added "Often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence, in society." But how do we distinguished between ideology and true religion, between weeds and flowers? They can look very alike. And the day after you've got rid of your weeds, they start coming back. The day after you've cleaned up your religion by getting rid of all the ideological weeds, they start to grow again. The most common ideology that tries to take over religion is nationalism, and the moment the two fuse together to make up ethnic and cultural identity, you've got trouble. There are plenty of places in the Middle East and beyond - though not Jordan, the Pope emphasised - where Christian minorities are being told you can't be a proper Egyptian, Pakistani, Iraqi or a Saudi unless you are a Muslim. Sometimes it's Muslims themselves who are the victims of this entanglement of religion with ideological nationalism. And sometimes this has happened at the hands of Christians, as in Bosnia and Kosovo. Occasionally you can catch the manipulation in the act, when a politician blatantly tries to whip up ill feeling against a religious minority as his passport to power. Think of Randolph Churchill's infamous proposal that his party should "play the Orange card" to divide Protestant from Catholic in Ireland. He hoped not only to defeat Gladstone's plan for Irish Home Rule, but to force his Government from power altogether. This was a perfect example of deliberately mixing religion with nationalist ideology in the naked pursuit of power. It worked so well we are still living with the damage it did, more than a century later. Religion does have a respectable role in politics, as the Pope also said on Jordan. It can even bring people together to fight injustice. For instance it's generally accepted that the Catholic Church in Germany, Pope Benedict's homeland, ought to have opposed Hitler far more vigorously. I don't think you'll find many modern secularists who think the Church should have stayed out of politics on that occasion. If anything, the Church was itself too much in thrall to the ideology of German nationalism. So keeping religion free from ideology, like flowers from weeds, is a constant and difficult battle. It is about rendering to God the things that are God's, and not confusing them with the things that are Caesar's. The secret is to know which is which.