Leadership Quote by Alcee Hastings

Hastings is doing something politicians rarely do well: diagnosing a conflict without flattering anyone involved. The opening concession - that most religions share basic values - is not a feel-good platitude so much as a strategic premise. If the moral overlap is real, then sectarian hostility can’t be explained as inevitable or natural. It has to be manufactured, or at least exploited.

The phrase "played off against each other" carries the real charge. It implies agency and manipulation: someone benefits when believers are turned into rival blocs. Hastings doesn’t name the player, but the subtext points toward power brokers who trade in identity for leverage - campaign operatives, demagogues, media ecosystems, even geopolitical actors. By keeping it passive and general, he makes the claim broadly portable while avoiding a partisan finger-point that would let readers dismiss it as "just politics."

Then he offers a deliberately modest fix: ignorance. "One possible reason" is cautious, almost lawyerly, softening what is actually an indictment. If people "do not know enough" about others’ beliefs, the problem isn’t theology; it’s civic literacy. That’s a very Washington kind of remedy: education, dialogue, exposure. It’s also a subtle rebuke to insular communities and to leaders who prefer their congregations uninformed because informed people are harder to mobilize through fear.

Context matters: Hastings spent decades in the U.S. Congress, where religious identity often gets instrumentalized into voting coalitions. His line reads like a plea for a different kind of politics - one that treats faith as a shared moral language, not a weaponized boundary.