The world this morning has suddenly become a more tense and dangerous place, as confrontation with Iraq comes ever closer. In the short term, perhaps all we can do is wait and pray but in the long term, do we face a century of wars and the clash of civilisations or is there another way. Earlier this year I stood at Ground Zero, together with leaders of the world's great faiths. The Archbishop of Canterbury said a prayer. So did a Muslim imam. The Chief Rabbi of Israel read a reflection. A Hindu sprinkled holy water from the Ganges. And I was struck by the sheer dissonance between this coming together of faiths in peace and the terrible religious extremism that stalks our world. Religion, I knew then, is like fire. It warms, but it also burns, and we are the guardians of the flame.

Far from dying, religion remains a significant factor in conflict zones throughout the world: Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, Kashmir - because, whereas the twentieth century was about the politics of ideology, the twenty-first century is about the politics of identity. Who am I and to which side do I belong? And to those questions, the great religions are our oldest and deepest answer. The trouble is that the politics of identity is inherently divisive because by creating an Us it also creates a Them, the people not like us: those outside our circle of belonging. Which is why peace is so hard across the great divide of different civilisations.

Peace is a paradox. Almost all the great religions praise it, and decry conflict and war. Yet those who show courage in battle are celebrated, while those who take risks for peace are often assassinated - Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin. War speaks to our sense of identity. There's an 'us' and a 'them' and no possibility of confusing the two. But peace involves a profound crisis of identity. When enemies shake hands, who is now the 'us' and who the 'them'? That is why the pursuit of peace can sometimes seem to be a kind of betrayal.

Which is why, as this century unfolds, we're going to need not just military strength but also spiritual courage, to reach out a hand of friendship across boundaries, to recognise the integrity of ways of life unlike our own, to listen to other people's stories and to see the trace of God in the face of a stranger. God has made many faiths and many civilisations but only one world in which to live together. And it's getting smaller all the time.

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