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 here. 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.
Does Religion Cause Violence? | Harvard Divinity School. If I could make America’s journalists and pundits read just one book, it would be William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence. (via ayjay)
Yes, read The Myth of Religious Violence. If you want to read the rest of Cavanaugh’s writing, I liked Migrations of the Holy the best.
To be able to love one another, we must pray much, for prayer gives a clean heart and a clean heart can see God in our neighbor. If now we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten how to see God in one another. If each person saw God in his neighbor, do you think we would need guns and bombs?
Christians repudiate violence, not by means of their own falen will but by the power that the Crucified himself works in and through his church: its preachings and sacraments, its prayers and practices. Christians are opposed to war, therefore, for the sake of the world’s redemption in and through Jesus Christ.
We have too often assumed that the nation-state defines the boundaries of a unitary common space and promotes the common good within that space. We have allowed those borders to define identity and belonging, and have turned those attachments into a kind of ersatz religion with its own ersatz liturgy. We have have expected salvation from those identities, and resorted to violence to defend them. And we have thereby obscured our identities as members of a different body, the body of Christ.
Only a justice shaped by the practice of reconciliation makes it possible for Christians to be a people of peace in a world of violence. We are called to witness to this peaceableness even while we wait upon it.
This is a beauty that does not hover over or beyond history, recalled as privation and hoped for simply as futurity, but pervades time as a music that now even the most frenetic din of violence cannot drown out.
To accept Christ as a real and appearing beauty, capable of assuming and sustaining his shape within time, is to be confronted by the limitations of the aesthetic of totality, its wearisome motifs of the hero, the peasant, and the occasional beautiful soul; the beauty Christ discloses remains invisible to anyone who finds beauty in a violent stilling of violence, in tragic grandeur lifted up above the squalor of creaturely abjection.
Only a justice shaped by the practice of reconciliation makes it possible for Christians to be a people of peace in a world of violence. We are called to witness to this peaceableness even while we wait upon it.
I say I’m a pacifist because I’m a violent son of a b****. I’m a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I’ve got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it’s too passive. But by avowing it, I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all. That’s part of what nonviolence is—the attempt to make our lives vulnerable to others in a way that we need one another. To be against war—which is clearly violent—is a good place to start. But you never know where the violence is in your own life. To say you’re nonviolent is not some position of self-righteousness—you kill and I don’t. It’s rather to make your life available to others in a way that they can help you discover ways you’re implicated in violence that you hadn’t even noticed.
I don’t think religion causes violence, historically. I don’t think religion causes much of anything. I studied history at my university, and the first thing that the professors taught me, literally the first thing, was that, in doing history, one should never, ever, point at religious ideology as the purpose behind an historical act. There’s always a more rational explanation. Ockham’s razor, people. One of my professors (in a class on Medieval Europe) stated flatly that anyone arguing that John Calvin, Johann Tetzel or Charles V were motivated by religion, no matter how clever their thesis, would receive no higher than a C.
To look at religion as a cause for anything is just a lazy way of doing history. Causes are almost always political, though history is made through economics, as well. I think it is telling that, on Sept. 11, 2001, the buildings targeted were political and economic—not religious, yet they were still touted as Islamist, religious attacks. Religion has always been used as a rallying standard—something to mobilize people—to political causes, but it is never, I think, the underlying purpose for inter-religious violence. Fear, ignorance, potential for power, miseducation, and an imbalance in wealth are much better, and much more reasonable, options.
While I understand the point you’re making and partially agree with it, I do think you’re kind of overstating your case. Every history class I’ve taken at college, and I’m a history major so I’ve taken a fair amount, has discussed the role of religious beliefs in people’s lives, not because it’s a lazy thing for historians to do (which it can be), but because religious beliefs are important to understanding behavior. We spent several weeks this past semester having a rigorous debate about the role of Christianity in the Civil Rights Movement. While I agree that issues such as segregation and the imbalance of power did compel many of the leaders and participants of the Civil Rights Movement, I think there’s a strong case to be made for the impetus their religion gave them.
On the issue of religious violence, in particular, I’m more likely to agree. Cavanaugh’s Myth of Religious Violence makes a very compelling argument that it is intellectually lazy to blame violence on religious fervor, because the definition of ‘religion’ is simultaneously too narrow and broad to actually mean anything.
