Politics & Power Quote by Robert Runcie

Runcie’s line is a cleric’s diagnosis delivered with the calm certainty of someone who has watched good intentions curdle into catastrophe. He doesn’t call war “inevitable” or “ancient”; he calls it misdirected worship. The engine, in his framing, isn’t hatred so much as love and loyalty - the very virtues societies celebrate - detached from their proper object and fastened onto a “God substitute.” That phrase is the sting: it treats modern ideologies less like opinions and more like rival religions, complete with sacred symbols, rituals, heresies, and demands for sacrifice.

Nationalism is singled out not because it’s the only idol, but because it’s uniquely able to masquerade as moral duty. It borrows the emotional architecture of faith - belonging, meaning, redemption - and relocates it onto the nation-state, which then claims an almost unlimited right to command. In that subtext, war isn’t just policy failure; it’s liturgy. The fallen become offerings, the flag becomes an altar, dissent becomes blasphemy.

The historical context sharpens the warning. Runcie, as Archbishop of Canterbury in the late Cold War, spoke in a Britain shaped by the memory of two world wars and still negotiating imperial aftershocks, nuclear anxiety, and contested national identity. His target is a comforting story: that wars are started by monsters. He insists they’re often started by ordinary people doing what they think is noble - loving “us” with religious intensity. The intent is pastoral and political at once: reattach ultimate loyalty to a transcendent standard so the nation can be valued, even defended, without being deified.