The first few centuries of the church brought together Jew and Gentile, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free. Our texts and inscriptions from this period reveal the unparalleled success of a movement united in the conviction that all humanity bears the divine image and that God himself bore the image of a man willing to die for others on a cross. This amounted to a moral revolution, and its slogans, ''love your enemies'' and ''do to others as you would have them do to you'', were as divisive as they were unifying. Roman elites despised the bleeding-heart ethic of the crucified Lord, just as Nietzsche would 1800 years later. But the movement gained momentum. By the 3rd century there were more people on the church's daily food roster than were listed in all other Roman clubs and associations. By the 4th century, a troubled Emperor Julian wrote to his pagan officials warning of the influence of Christian charity: ''For it is disgraceful,'' he wrote to the high priest Arsacius in AD362, ''that the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours, too.'' Christians have not always lived up to their ideals. But just as we would not judge Bach's sublime Cello Suites on a novice's performance, we should pause before judging the composition of Christ on the sometimes ordinary performance of his followers. Dr John Dickson is a director of the Centre for Public Christianity and teaches the history of early Christianity at Macquarie and Sydney universities.

THE LAWYER RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH That religion is divisive is a funny sort of argument that assumes that religion has some inherent tendency to engender conflict. How is such a charge to be reconciled with the millions of people whose religious convictions in fact provide them with the exact opposite? Guidance to live peaceful, ethical lives? Lives dedicated to charity? To turning the other cheek? To pursuing the greatest jihad, self-restraint? To shunning materialism? Not every believer is an evangelist, intent on dividing to conquer in the name of God. If we are to accept the proposition that religion divides, arguably secularism should unite. Likewise, if you argue religion unites, secularism presumably divides. Our world is far more complex. But if you happen to advocate we all abandon religion in some kind of quest for unity, one must ask whether a world free of religion would achieve a world free from division? Surely the human race has proved it is capable of dividing itself for a plethora of reasons, religion being one of many possible sources of fracture and discord: class, race, gender, colour, the environment, resource allocation, politics, territory, love, sport, science. Channel Nine or Channel Seven? MasterChef or The Biggest Loser? Sydney or Melbourne, AFL or rugby league? I could go on.

As human beings we are prone to fiercely embracing many ideological convictions - religion merely being one - and using such convictions in either positive or negative ways. Perhaps blood has not been shed over whether Sydney is superior to Melbourne (it isn't, by the way), but fanatical convictions - even secular fanaticism - can be just as divisive, if not more divisive, than arguments over the afterlife. Many wars have been fought which were ostensibly about religion but which were launched using religion as a mere pretext. It is all very well to aspire to ''unity''. But unity is an overrated, undefined ideal, and division is a fact of life. So long as we obey the law, respect fundamental human rights and ''live and let live'', it should not matter what our respective beliefs are. There are many conditions of injustice that must first be addressed and that have nothing to do with how one prays or which holy book one believes in before we ever enjoy a world in which all are afforded their inalienable rights. To target religion as the root of all evil is a copout that ignores the many sources of misery in this world. We are all capable of projecting a dogmatic disdain for those who disagree with us. Ultimately, it is the tyranny of any absolutist conviction that we should fear. Randa Abdel-Fattah is an author and lawyer.

THE AUTHOR PATRICK HOLLAND I HAVE recently returned from the central highlands of Vietnam where I was investigating the Communist government's persecution of the indigenous Montagnard people (the name covers a dozen different tribes, including the Bahnar and J'rai). The Vietnamese government has stamped especially hard on the Montagnard's Christian practice, a thing they link to grassroots democracy movements. I spent Christmas Eve with Bahnar orphans and the nuns who care for them. We joined people from all the tribes of Kon Tum region to hear Mass sung in the languages of the hills. The government, which knows well the distinction between holidays and vacations, makes sure the students of the Montagnard orphanages have no ''holy days''. The children had been to school that day, and they must wake up early on Christmas Day to take the most important exam of the year. This was meant to dissuade them from going to Christmas Mass. It did not work.

Christmas in Kon Tum reveals both the unifying and divisive powers of religion. Anyone claiming religion is a purely unifying force is not only innocent of life as it is lived outside Sunday service, but innocent of scripture. Christ says in Matthew chapter 10 verse 34, ''I come not to bring peace but a sword.'' Before we trouble too much about religion's unifying capacity, we might ask whether unity is always and everywhere desirable. I think not. You would hope that at some point a cannibalistic society became divided against itself and the status quo disrupted. Christ was a disturber of the peace. He un-wrote an ancient law when he stopped the stoning of a prostitute. He tore apart a temple market with a whip and was crucified for sedition. The fact that his name has been co-opted into Smithian capitalism and reverence for established power is a feat of political engineering that would earn Machiavelli's applause.

But for all the politicians' efforts, the Christ of scripture still disturbs our peace. Pools of ink are spent by academics in an effort to diminish the poor Palestinian carpenter who wrote but a few words in the sand that were blown away. And while the anti-theists, like the religious fundamentalists, preach to their respective choirs and solidify the lines of old enmities, the man who said he would, and does, divide people, strangely, quietly, draws thousands from the 12 distinct tribes of the Vietnamese central highlands to celebrate his birth. Patrick Holland is the author of The Mary Smokes Boys and the short story collection The Source of the Sound. THE ACADEMIC MARION MADDOX LIKE political rallies and mass uprisings, religious events generate a special kind of togetherness. Euphoria carries everyone along, and the feeling of being united for a cause remains when the ecstatic moment has passed.

But where political revolutions are once-in-a-lifetime experiences, religion can give you that feeling - or a muted version - every week. So, at least, thought the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, whose classic The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life celebrates its centenary this year. The upside of such powerful forces is the strong experience of bonding: you know where you belong, who your people are, who will help when tragedy strikes. The downside is that the minute we create an ''us'' we risk creating a ''them''. The more intensely we feel for our lot, the less time we have for the others. And we are becoming more segregated. Nearly 40 per cent of Australian secondary students attend private schools - which overwhelmingly means Christian schools. The proportion in senior secondary is higher, and climbing. Some such schools do an outstanding job of teaching about the range of religious and non-religious worldviews in multicultural Australia; some do not. The handbook of one (available online) assures prospective parents that its students ''are trained to be not primarily good citizens of Australia but soldiers … who go out into the world equipped physically, mentally, spiritually and socially to do battle for their Lord in a world which rejects His laws and dominion''. It is one of the new Christian independent schools, which, MySchool shows, receives 78 per cent of its income from government sources. I do not want my taxes training soldiers of the Lord. I want them educating citizens who know and understand their fellow citizens.

Durkheim had a solution. We lose our hostile sense of ''them'' by getting to know people different from ourselves. They are no longer ''them'', but ''us''. Beyond our different religious beliefs and nationalities, he imagined a common human identity sacred to us all. Accepting that, we would hold each other's values as sacred as our own. If that sounds familiar, the founders of the world's great religions said much the same. Marion Maddox is the director of Macquarie University's centre for research on social inclusion.