Leadership Quote by Alcee Hastings

Hastings is doing something politicians do when they want to talk about conflict without lighting a fuse: he flatters the ideals, then indicts the practice. By opening with the claim that “few religious leaders and scholars would doubt the commonalities,” he invokes an elite consensus - the idea that, at the level of doctrine and ethics, religions overlap more than they diverge. It’s a strategically safe premise: who wants to be the theologian arguing for irreconcilable hatred?

Then comes the pivot: “unfortunately,” the problem isn’t theology, it’s the “followers.” That word choice quietly shifts accountability away from institutions and onto the mass of everyday believers, suggesting the gap between religion as taught and religion as lived. It also lets him critique sectarian violence without naming a specific faith, country, or flashpoint. The sentence performs neutrality, which is often the first requirement for any public call to tolerance.

The subtext is more pointed: if the experts can find common ground, the obstacles to coexistence are political, social, and psychological - identity, grievance, power, and the tribal pleasures of belonging. Hastings hints that conflict is less about God than about humans using God as a badge.

Context matters because Hastings, as a U.S. congressman, spoke from within a post-Cold War, post-9/11 landscape where interfaith rhetoric doubled as civic triage. The quote reads like a legislative appeal for pluralism: soothe the abstract, pressure the crowd, and keep the state positioned as the mediator that can translate shared values into shared space.