Leadership Quote by Conor Cruise O'Brien

Nothing turns a church meeting into a knife fight faster than the word "together". Conor Cruise O'Brien, a politician who spent a career watching noble language harden into factional weaponry, is calling out the trapdoor beneath ecumenical rhetoric: unity is never neutral. The minute someone invokes it, the room has to answer a brutal question - unity on whose terms, under which authority, at what cost to doctrine, memory, and power?

The line works because it’s built like a political aphorism rather than a pious lament. "Activate" is clinical, almost mechanistic; divisions are latent until the unity-talk flips the switch. That phrasing smuggles in a realist view of religious identity: denominations aren’t just theological disagreements, they’re institutions with borders, status hierarchies, and historical wounds. "Unity" threatens to redraw those borders. Even people who like the idea, in principle, start bargaining in self-defense.

O'Brien's Irish background matters. In a society where "Christian" could be a civic category as much as a creed - shorthand for community, schooling, marriage markets, and political allegiance - calls for unity could sound like pressure to dilute identity or, worse, to submit. Ecumenism then isn’t a gentle bridge; it’s a negotiation conducted under asymmetry.

The subtext is not anti-unity so much as anti-sentimentality. O'Brien is warning that unity-talk often functions as a moral cudgel: it implies that dissent is petty or sinful, which only makes dissenters dig in. In politics as in religion, the demand to merge is how you discover what people refuse to surrender.