By: Bishop Jeffrey Lee, Episcopal Bishop of Chicago

I recently visited Renk, Sudan, a city that sits on the border between that country’s mostly Arab and Muslim north and its primarily African and Christian south. If you have followed the situation in this oil-rich, yet impoverished country, which teeters always on the precipice of civil war, you might assume that I observed the conflict in microcosm, witnessed outbursts of violence and repression, and sensed the simmering tension between adherents of Africa’s two largest religions. I assumed as much myself before I went to Renk.

What I experienced, instead, in the market center of a sprawling farming belt, was a place where Christians and Muslims live peacefully together, where Muslim children attend Christian schools and where soldiers act as peacemakers. In Renk, people living fragile lives in sometimes desperate economic conditions work together, regardless of religious differences, because they recognize that they depend on one another to survive. In this regard, it is emblematic of what I have come to think of as the Sudan that happens when no one is looking.

What you learn in Renk is that we in the West are mistaken in thinking of Sudan’s civil war as a religious conflict. Rather, it is a conflict in which men with self-serving political and financial motives have created a climate of terror, forcing people who fear for their lives, and the lives of their families, to seek security in whatever identity seems most advantageous. In such a climate, minorities are easy to identify, and their persecution easier to justify.

We will do well to keep the proclivity of Sudan’s rulers to turn the nation’s people against one another in the run-up to the January 9 balloting in which experts believe that southern Sudan will choose to secede and form a separate government. If there is violence in the aftermath of this vote, it will stem not from interreligious animus, but from the strategic cultivation of hatred and grievance by Sudan’s rulers.

Misunderstanding the causes of the Sudanese conflict could have devastating consequences.

There are political and military leaders in those parts of Africa where Muslims and Christians are present in roughly equal numbers pursuing a quest for dominance by instilling mistrust among people of different faiths. But in Renk and elsewhere, people of differing faiths coexist in relative harmony when left to their own devices. The problem is not ancient religious hatreds, but self-seeking political and religious figures who view the Christian and Muslim faithful as tinder for their conflagrations.

The proper response to this reality is not to choose a side, but to encourage a sense of security and stability rooted in the recognition that many of Sudan’s people live lives so precarious that any impediment to cooperation is potentially lethal.

As a religious leader, I have learned that Sudanese Christians feel a special affinity for the Old Testament, an affinity that many American Christians do not share. They live in a world in which the Old Testament perils of draught, famine, warfare and forced migration inform the collective consciousness, and Old Testament concerns—Where will I live? What will I eat? What shall become of me, and of mine? —have a special immediacy. They live in closer proximity to death and devastation, than most of us do, and their faith is more urgent, and less abstracted as a result. They see more clearly than we do, the hand of God, and the hands of those who oppose God, at work in their daily lives.

I heard sorrow in the voices of many residents of my fellow Christians in Renk as they spoke of the devastation wrecked by Sudan’s long civil conflict. But I heard something else, a healthy, exasperated impatience with misguided political leaders, religious empire builders and anyone who views the Sudanese people as a means to a personal end.

In the days after January 9, my counterpart, Bishop Joseph Garang Atem Zorial of the Diocese of Renk, and his people intend to be what the prophet Isaiah referred to as “repairers of the breach.” Other leaders may choose a different course, and camouflage their culpability with arguments about intractable religious hatreds. Much will ride our willingness to support those who are speaking the truth.