What a cartoon gets right—and wrong—about religious disagreement
By John W. Morehead
Recently I came across a cartoon I hadn’t seen before. Titled “An Army Lines Up For Battle,” the cartoon by Paul Noth was originally published in The New Yorker.[i] The cartoon draws its inspiration from the rabbit-duck illustration illusion you may have seen, where depending upon your interpretation of the image you are either looking at a rabbit or duck. In Noth’s use of this image, two armies face each other across a battlefield. Each carries their banners. On one side it’s a rabbit. On the other it’s a duck. Beneath the image, the caption reads: “There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God.” To see the cartoon click here: https://share.google/2mkaBnqQLEgUfTBUv
I encountered this cartoon through a Substack post someone had made. I posted a comment and suggested that what it entails is problematic on several levels. For example, it assumes that the religious differences are all fiction, making them foolish and irrelevant, and that religions always resort to war and violence over such trivial differences. Unfortunately, the individual who posted the image ignored my comments and doubled down on the critique of religion, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized this cartoon makes for a good launching pad for a discussion about religious disagreement.
Many feel that the cartoon rings true, especially if they’re atheists, or perhaps religious pluralists to whom religious differences are really illusions and ultimately teach the same thing regardless of surface difference. On another level the cartoon feels right because we recognize the pattern immediately. People dividing, hardening, and even fighting over what seem, at least from the outside, to be small or arbitrary differences. The cartoon captures something many of us have felt, especially when looking at religious conflict: Why does this matter so much? Why can’t people just let it go? And in that sense, the cartoon gets something right.
But it also misses something essential. And that “something” may be the difference between continuing cycles of distrust and finding a way to build trust even when agreement is out of reach.
What the Cartoon Gets Right
Let’s start with honesty. Yes, human beings have fought over religious differences. Yes, groups sometimes demand conversion, conformity, or surrender.[ii] Yes, certainty can become coercive. And yes, when people feel that their deepest convictions are under threat, they often respond defensively, even aggressively. The cartoon exposes this dynamic with uncomfortable clarity. It reminds us how quickly conviction can slide into caricature, and how easily moral seriousness can become moral dismissal of others. The instinct it critiques is real: “If only they would change, things would be fine.” That instinct has fueled more than a few conflicts across history.
Why This Cartoon Persuades So Easily
Part of the cartoon’s power is how quickly it simplifies things, so much so that it becomes a form of reductionism. It reduces complex traditions to symbols. It removes history, relationships, and lived experience. It gives us a comfortable vantage point because we are not the ones holding the banners. Then it invites a quiet conclusion: “If only people were more rational, more enlightened, more like us, this wouldn’t happen.”
There’s also a subtle emotional payoff. The cartoon allows us to feel a bit superior and removed from the irrationality it depicts. We become observers of the problem rather than participants in it. But that conclusion deserves a second look, because the same pattern shows up far beyond religion.
People clash over politics, justice, identity, nation, and the future of society with just as much intensity. In those cases, the differences don’t feel like “rabbit versus duck.” They feel like something far more serious; something tied to dignity, survival, and the kind of world we are handing to the next generation. So perhaps the cartoon isn’t revealing the absurdity of religion as much as it is revealing something deeper about all of us.
What the Cartoon Misses
The problem is not that people care deeply. The problem is how we interpret what they care about, and how we respond to it. Despite the assumed assurance of the cartoon, these are not arbitrary differences. From a distance, a rabbit and a duck look interchangeable. That’s the point of the cartoon.But for the people holding those banners, their convictions are not arbitrary. They are formed through families, communities, cultures, sacred texts, personal experiences, and long histories of reflection and struggle. They are reinforced through practices, rituals, and relationships that shape not just belief, but identity.
To dismiss those convictions as trivial is not neutral, it is itself a kind of judgment. I wish I could say that people don’t organize or risk their lives over cartoons. But they do. At least over the ideas that are seen as threatening. Recall the terror attacks in January 2015 in Paris when two Algerian Islamists killed 12 people and injured 11 others over the satirical depiction of the Prophet Muhammed in cartoon form on the cover of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper.[iii] While this is an extreme example, people act on what they believe is true, what they believe is good, and what they believe must be protected. And often, they act because they believe that failing to do so would result in harm, not just to themselves, but to others they feel responsible for.
Conflict Is Not Just About Beliefs
The cartoon suggests the conflict is about which god is correct. We argue and fight about this a lot. This debate can be important. Consider the arguments about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God.[iv] But most real conflicts run deeper than that. They involve questions like:
- What kind of world should we live in?
- What is just or unjust?
- What must be preserved—and what must be resisted?
- What harm must be prevented, even at cost?
These are not abstract questions. They are lived questions, questions that shape laws, communities, and personal lives. In other words, conflict is often about rival visions of the good. And those visions are rarely trivial to the people who hold them. They are often experienced as obligations, not preferences.
We should also note that this isn’t just about religion. If we’re honest, we see the same pattern everywhere.Political movements. Cultural debates. Moral disagreements about identity, freedom, and responsibility.Consider how quickly disagreements escalate when people believe that their values are not just being challenged but erased. Or when they feel that what they hold sacred is being misunderstood or dismissed.In each case, people are not fighting because they think the stakes are small. They are fighting because they believe the stakes are ultimate.The banners that represent our ultimate values may change, but the dynamic does not.
The Real Trap: Peace = Agreement
Now return to the line beneath the cartoon: “There can be no peace until they renounce…” This is where the cartoon does its most important, and most dangerous work. It names a logic that quietly shapes much of our world: Peace requires agreement. Agreement requires change. Change means they must give up what they believe.
Once that logic takes hold, trust collapses. Every disagreement becomes a threat. Every rival becomes a problem to be solved or overcome. And over time, this logic produces a predictable cycle:
- misrecognition (“they don’t understand what matters”)
- moral typecasting (“they are dangerous or ignorant”)
- escalation (“they must be stopped”)
This dynamic doesn’t just create conflict, it sustains it.
A Different Possibility
But what if peace doesn’t require agreement? What if the real challenge is not to eliminate differences, but to build trust within them? At the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, we work with a different assumption: People will continue to hold deeply rooted, and sometimes incompatible, convictions about truth, justice, and the good life. Those differences are not going away. The question is whether we can learn to face them without collapsing into distrust or coercion, whether we can remain in relationship while openly contesting what we believe is true and good.
We call this rivaltrust.
Not agreement. Not relativism. Not avoidance. But a disciplined willingness to remain open to influence from a serious challenger, without betraying the people or convictions we hold most dear. It is a risk. It requires restraint. It requires courage. But it is also a way forward that does not demand surrender as the price of peace.
What Would Change If We Took This Seriously?
If we moved beyond the logic of the cartoon, several things would begin to shift. We would start by asking people not just what they believe, but how they came to believe it—their formation stories, their experiences, their fears, and their hopes. This changes the tone of engagement from abstract argument to human encounter.
We would learn to see rivals not as irrational obstacles, but as moral agents trying to protect something they believe matters, something that, from their perspective, is under threat.
We would shift from trying to win arguments to engaging in conversations where mutual influence is possible, where people can challenge one another without seeking to erase one another.
And perhaps most importantly, we would begin to recognize that trust is not built by eliminating disagreement, but by learning how to remain in honest relationship while contesting what matters most.
Returning to the Cartoon
The image of rabbit and duck banners is memorable because it simplifies something real. But the deeper problem is not that people care about different things. It’s that we’ve come to believe that caring deeply must lead to division, that conviction and trust cannot coexist. That assumption is worth challenging. Because the future of our communities—religious, political, and cultural—will not depend on whether we eliminate our differences. It will depend on whether we can learn to live with them in a different way. Not by renouncing what we believe. Nor by demanding surrender from others. But by building trust amid rival visions of the good.
[i] Paul Noth, “An Army Lines Up For Battle.” The New Yorker, 1 December 2014, p. 78.
[ii] A number of books have been published about the history of violence with religion being a major driving factor. For one analysis see Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). But the influence of religion has also been overestimated, and there is good scholarly analysis of religion as one factor among many contributing to violence, as well as studies that note religion’s positive cultural aspects, and that secular ideologies have also contributed to violence historically. On religions and their positive contributions see Karen Armstrong, Field of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). On secular ideologies and violence see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford, 2009).
[iii] https://tif.ssrc.org/2015/02/17/values-and-violence-thoughts-on-charlie-hebdo/ and https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/the-unresolved-legacy-of-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre.php
[iv] For a helpful discussion of this see Ronnie P. Campbell and Christopher Gnanakan, eds., Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews Worship the Same God? Four Views (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019).
John W. Morehead is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, and the Director of its Evangelical Chapter (Multifaith Matters). You may contact him at johnwmorehead@msn.com .