you can easily interchange Nationalism with Pride into your list as well. -------------
Very true Cmte.
Since 1914, two world wars and over a hundred smaller conflicts have spilled an ocean of blood. A century ago, French writer Guy de Maupassant said that “the egg from which wars are hatched” is patriotism, which he called “a kind of religion.” In fact, The Encyclopedia of Religion says that patriotism’s cousin, nationalism, “has become a dominant form of religion in the modern world, preempting a void left by the deterioration of traditional religious values.”
By failing to promote true worship, false religion created the spiritual vacuum into which nationalism was able to pour. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in Nazi Germany, whose citizens at the beginning of World War II claimed to be 94.4 percent Christian. Of all places, Germany—birthplace of Protestantism and praised in 1914 by Pope Pius X as home of “the best Catholics in the world”—should have represented the very best that Christendom had to offer.
The part Christendom played in both world wars led to a severe loss of prestige. As the Concise Dictionary of the Christian World Mission explains: “Non-Christians had before their eyes . . . the evident fact that nations with a thousand years of Christian teaching behind them had failed to control their passions and had set the whole world ablaze for the satisfaction of less than admirable ambitions.” Of course, religiously motivated wars are nothing new. But in contrast with the past when nations of different religions warred with one another, the 20th century has increasingly found nations of the same religion locked in bitter conflict. The god of nationalism has clearly been able to manipulate the gods of religion. Thus, during World War II, while Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain and the United States were killing Catholics and Protestants in Italy and Germany, Buddhists in Japan were doing the same to their Buddhist brothers in southeast Asia.
