Christianity
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Does Religion Cause Violence?
Tonight I am going to challenge that conventional wisdom, but not in the ways it is usually challenged by people who identify themselves as religious. Such people will sometimes argue that the real motivation behind so-called religious violence is in fact economic and political, not religious. Others will argue that people who do violence are, by definition, not religious. The Crusader is not really a Christian, for example, because he doesn’t really understand the meaning of Christianity. I don’t think that either of these arguments works. In the first place, it is impossible to separate out religious from economic and political motives in such a way that religious motives are innocent of violence. How could one, for example, separate religion fromEveryone knows that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote
violence. This story is part of the conventional wisdom of Western
societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from
limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote democracy in
the Middle East.
politics in Islam, when Muslims themselves make no such separation? In the second place, it may be the case that the Crusader has misappropriated the true message of Christ, but one cannot therefore excuse Christianity of all responsibility. Christianity is not primarily a set of doctrines, but a lived historical experience embodied and shaped by the empirically observable actions of Christians. So I have no intention of excusing Christianity or Islam or any other faith system from careful analysis. Given certain conditions, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths can and do contribute to violence. But what is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge tonight. I will do so in two steps.
First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, “If the idea that there is something called ‘religion’ that is more violent than so-called ‘secular’ phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?” The answer, I
think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful. The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state. We like to believe that the liberal state arose to make peace between warring religious factions. Today, the Western liberal state is charged with the burden of creating peace in the face of the cruel religious fanaticism of the Muslim world. The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.
Everyone knows that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence. This story is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East.
INTRODUCTION
THE INCOHERENCE OF THE ARGUMENT
The English-speaking academic world has been inundated – especially since September 11, 2001 – by books and articles attempting to explain why religion has a peculiar tendency toward violence. They come from authors in many different fields –sociology, political science, religious studies, history, theology.
I don’t have time tonight to analyze each argument in depth, but I will examine a variety of examples – taken from some of the most prominent books on the subject – of what they all have in common: an inability to find a convincing way to separate religious violence from secular violence.
Charles Kimball’s book When Religion Becomes Evil begins with the following claim: “It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.” Kimball apparently considers this claim too trite to need proving, for he makes no attempt to reinforce it with evidence. If one were to try to prove it, one would need a concept of religion that would be at least theoretically separable from other institutional forces over the course of history. Kimball does not identify those rival institutional forces, but an obvious contender might be political institutions: tribes, empires, kingdoms, fiefs, states, and so on. The problem is that religion was not considered something separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then primarily in the West. What sense could be made of separating out Egyptian or Roman “religion” from the Egyptian or Roman “state”? Is Aztec “politics” to blame for their bloody human sacrifices, or is Aztec “religion” to blame? As Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed in his landmark 1962 book The Meaning and End of Religion, “religion” as a discrete category of human activity separable from “culture,” “politics,” and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West. In the course of a detailed historical study of the concept “religion,” Smith was compelled to conclude that in premodern Europe there was no significant concept equivalent to
what we think of as “religion,” and furthermore there is no “closely equivalent concept in any culture that has not been influenced by the modern West.” Since Smith’s book, Russell McCutcheon, Richard King, Derek Peterson, and a host of other scholars have demonstrated how European colonial bureaucrats invented the concept of religion in the course of categorizing non-Western
colonized cultures as irrational and antimodern. Now that we do have a separate concept of “religion,” though, is the concept a coherent one? Jonathan Z. Smith writes “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study... Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.”
Brian C. Wilson says that the inability to define religion is “almost an article of methodological dogma” in the field of religious studies. Timothy Fitzgerald argues that there is no coherent concept of religion; the term should be regarded as a form of mystification and scrapped. We have one group of scholars convinced that religion causes violence, and another group of scholars who do not think that there is such a thing as “religion,” except as an intellectual construct of highly dubious value.
The former group carries on as if the latter did not exist. Kimball is one of the few who acknowledges the problem, but he dismisses it as merely semantic. Describing how flustered his students become when he asks them to write a definition of “religion,” Kimball asserts “Clearly these bright students
know what religion is”; they just have trouble defining it. After all, Kimball assures us, “Religion is a central feature of human life. We all see many indications of it every day, and we all know it when we see it.” When an academic says such a thing, you should react as you would when a
used car salesman says “Everybody knows this is a good car.” The fact is that we don’t all know it when we see it. A survey of religious studies literature finds totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism, sports, free market ideology, and a host of other institutions and practices treated under the rubric “religion.” If one tries to limit the definition of religion to belief in God or gods, then certain belief systems that are usually called “religions” are eliminated, such as Theravada Buddhism and Confucianism. If the definition is expanded to include such belief systems, then all sorts of practices, including many that are usually labeled “secular,” fall under the definition of religion. Many institutions and ideologies that do not explicitly refer to God or gods function in the same way as those that do. The case for nationalism
as a religion, for example, has been made repeatedly from Carlton Hayes’ 1960 classic Nationalism:
A Religion to more recent works by Peter van der Veer, Talal Asad, Carolyn Marvin, and others.
Carolyn Marvin argues that “nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States.” At this point I can imagine an objection being raised that goes like this: “So the concept of religion has some fuzzy edges. So does every concept. We might not be able to nail down, once and for
all and in all cases, what a ‘culture’ is, or what qualifies as ‘politics,’ for example, but nevertheless the concepts remain useful. All may not agree on the periphery of these concepts, but sufficient agreement on the center of such concepts makes them practical and functional. Most people know
that ‘religion’ includes Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the major ‘world religions.’ Whether or not Buddhism or Confucianism fits is a boundary dispute best left up to scholars who make their living splitting hairs.”
This appears to be a common sense response, but it misses the point rather completely. In the first place, when some scholars question whether the category of religion is useful at all, it is more than a boundary dispute. There are some who do not believe there is a center. In the second place,
and much more significantly, the problem with the “religion and violence” arguments is not that their working definitions of religion are too fuzzy. The problem is precisely the opposite. Their implicit definitions of religion are unjustifiably clear about what does and does not qualify as a
religion. Certain belief systems, like Islam, are condemned, while certain others, like nationalism, are arbitrarily ignored.
This becomes most apparent when the authors in question attempt to explain why religion is so prone to violence. Although theories vary, we can sort them into three categories: religion is absolutist, religion is divisive, and religion is irrational. Many authors appeal to more than one of these arguments. In the face of evidence that so-called “secular” ideologies and institutions can be just as absolutist, divisive, or irrational, these authors tend to erect an arbitrary barrier between “secular” and “religious” ideologies and institutions, and ignore the former.
Consider the case of the preeminent historian Martin Marty. In a book on public religion, Marty argues that religion has a particular tendency to be divisive and therefore violent. When it comes to defining what “religion” means, however, Marty lists seventeen different definitions of religion,
then begs off giving his own definition, since, he says, “[s]cholars will never agree on the definition of religion.”12 Instead Marty gives a list of five “features” that mark a religion. He then proceeds to show how “politics” displays all five of the same features. Religion focuses our ultimate concern,
and so does politics. Religion builds community, and so does politics. Religion appeals to myth and symbol, and politics “mimics” this appeal in devotion to the flag, war memorials, and so on.
Religion uses rites and ceremonies such as circumcision and baptism, and “[p]olitics also depends on rites and ceremonies,” even in avowedly secular nations. Religions require followers to behave in certain ways, and “[p]olitics and governments also demand certain behaviors.” Marty offers five defining features of “religion,” and shows how “politics” fits all five. He is trying to show how closely intertwined religion and politics are, but he ends up demolishing any theoretical basis for separating the two. Nevertheless, he continues on to warn of the dangers of religion, while ignoring the violent tendencies of supposedly “secular” politics. For example, Marty cites the many cases of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were attacked, beaten, tarred, castrated, and imprisoned in the U.S. in the 1940s because they believed that followers of Jesus Christ should not salute a flag. One would think that he would draw the obvious conclusion that zealous nationalism can cause violence.
Instead, Marty concludes “it became obvious that religion, which can pose ‘us’ versus ‘them’... carries risks and can be perceived by others as dangerous. Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena.” For Marty, “religion” refers not to the ritual vowing of allegiance to a flag, but only to the Jehovah’s Witnesses refusal to do so.
As you can see, we need not rely only on McCutcheon, Smith, King, Fitzgerald and the rest to show us that the religious/secular dichotomy is incoherent. Religion-and-violence theorists inevitably undermine their own distinctions. Take for example sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer’s book Terror
in the Mind of God, perhaps the most widely influential academic book on religion and violence.
According to Juergensmeyer, religion exacerbates the tendency to divide people into friends and enemies, good and evil, us and them, by ratcheting divisions up to a cosmic level. “What makes religious violence particularly savage and relentless” is that it puts worldly conflicts in a “larger than
life” context of “cosmic war.” Secular political conflicts – that is, “more rational” conflicts such as those over land – are of a fundamentally different character than those in which the stakes have been raised by religious absolutism to cosmic proportions.17 Religious violence differs from secular
violence in that it is symbolic, absolutist, and unrestrained by historical time.
See whole text http://www.catholicanarchy.org/cavan...20Violence.pdf
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Originally Posted by Óttar
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