ABSTRACT
When I showed this post to a friend she said “that’s not a blog — it’s a dissertation!” So I thought maybe a brief summary of the argument might be in order. In a nutshell the argument is as follows: When people claim that religion causes violence they tend to assume that religion is either a private matter of belief and ritual practice or that religion is whatever functions as ultimate in the lives of people. If we adopt the first model (religion as private belief in the gods) then the idea that this is the cause of violence is silly and manifestly false. If we adopt the second model (religion as our commitments to whatever we consider ultimate) then the claim that religion “causes” violence translates into the rather unsurprising (and unenlightening) claim that people will kill and die for whatever they hold to be of ultimate importance. This is doubtless true but hardly helpful unless we want to imagine a world where nothing much matters to any of us.
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“The history of western religion is a horror story, a history of intolerance, persecutions, and massacres.” Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic, p.xiii
Everyone “knows” that there is some deep connection between religion and violence. It is mostly an un-argued assumption that finds its way not only into our everyday conversations and most media reportage but also into our theoretical discourse about law, politics, religion, and war. It is practically a cliché that the genius of modern democratic states consists in a rigid separation between church and state, precisely because of this presumed connection between religion and violence. The one meaning of “secularization” that almost everyone in the west celebrates is the creation of a system that supposedly allows for religious freedom and conflict-free religious pluralism by privatizing religion and creating a religiously neutral state apparatus that deals with the issues of the common good without reference to the irrational passions and beliefs of the pious.
This rather rosy and self-serving story is the deep grammar of the way we understand the situation in the Middle East. Much of our talk about the threat to our civilization (and indeed, to the global order) by “Muslim terrorists” or “Islamic jihadists” is based on the assumption that these “primitives” and “monsters” just don’t understand the essential separateness of the political and the religious domains.
The generous use of scare quotes will have already tipped everybody off that there is not much about this story that I find credible. Despite its “obviousness” it is barely even intelligible, let alone true. To make a case for my heresy would take more than a blog posting or two, but perhaps I can at least sketch some of the reasons for my skepticism.
Part of the founding mythology of Modernism and its story of progressive secularization is that the demarcation of private religion from the neutral public state was a reaction to the wars of religion that ravaged Europe following the Protestant Reformation. On the usual account these were wars over theological (i.e. belief) differences. Enflamed by their theological differences people slaughtered each other and left over a third of the population dead. Even on the face of it, this is a silly story. Instead of helping us understand the violence it obfuscates it. We simply can’t imagine people killing each other over ideas that by definition have no bearing on real human existence. Yet our explanation of these wars depends on just such an incredible idea and we thereby turn our forebears into irrational monsters who killed each other over notions that are at best private matters of taste. As they say in Latin, de gustibus non est disputandum – about matters of taste there can be no dispute.
But as Karen Armstrong makes clear in her “The Myth of Religious Violence” the matter is not quite as simple as the standard secularization version would have it. In her words “while there is no doubt that the participants certainly experienced these wars as a life-and-death religious struggle, this was also a conflict between two sets of state-builders: the princes of Germany and the other kings of Europe were battling against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his ambition to establish a trans-European hegemony modelled after the Ottoman empire.” (For the whole essay see http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/-sp-karen-armstrong-religious-violence-myth-secular)
There are at least two good reasons to question the claim that these are religious wars in the sense of wars over theological belief or cultic practice — that is, they weren’t wars about how to understand God or how to celebrate the Eucharist. First, instead of Catholics and Protestants simply fighting each other in some cases they fought on the same side. This doubtless had something to do with the fact that they weren’t just Catholic and Protestant but also German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, etc. The divisions and allegiances criss-crossed sectarian lines but also ethnic and national boundaries. To quote Armstrong again: “These wars were neither “all about religion” nor “all about politics”. Nor was it a question of the state simply “using” religion for political ends. There was as yet no coherent way to divide religious causes from social causes. People were fighting for different visions of society, but they would not, and could not, have distinguished between religious and temporal factors in these conflicts. Until the 18th century, dissociating the two would have been like trying to take the gin out of a cocktail.”
The only caveat that I would register about this quote is that we still have no coherent way to distinguish the “religious” from the “temporal”. Just what on earth is a non-temporal matter? I’m guessing that the intended contrast is between religion (the eternal) and the socio-political (the temporal). But very few who consider themselves “religious” (except for Modernists) would ever have regarded these as separate or even separable, for that matter. And most of the peoples of the world still don’t. What is a religion that has no social, ethical, and political dimensions? It is a thoroughly Modern and Western idea that we keep trying to foist on the rest of the world – violently whenever we deem necessary – in the name of Democracy and Freedom.
Second, if the issue were simply about sectarian religion intruding into public life then after the so-called separation of church and state war in the Western world should have become a thing of the past. In fact, however, with the rise of the Nation state and despite the invention of separate private “religion” the world has been almost constantly at war: colonial wars, imperialist wars, civil wars, world wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocides. True believers in the myth of religious violence will of course want to blame this ongoing reality on the persistence of expansionary religion (i.e. religion refusing its private place). But this won’t do. The two world wars were fought in supposedly secular Europe. So-called secular America (that paragon of Democracy with its purist separation of church and state) has waged an average of four armed conflicts per year for the past 50 years. Some of the most grotesque violence of the twentieth century (in Stalin’s gulags and the killing fields of Southeast Asia) was committed by self-confessed atheists. So taming the religious monster has done little or nothing to put an end to the fields of blood.
So perhaps the idea that religion causes war by forgetting its private place and intruding itself into public political matters is just a bit simplistic. The concept of religion as a set of beliefs (mostly about the supernatural and the hereafter) is itself a modern invention and insofar as there are any such “religions” they exist as a result of the modern (essentially political) struggle over the powers of the nation state relative to ecclesiastical power. (For historical and anthropological evidence see Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion, Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular, and Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood). Just as we invented museum art we also invented private religion. Art used to be a worldly, public affair adorning market places and temples and homes. It was about life and death and love and war. In the modern age we defined it as self-expression and enshrined it in museums. In a way, “religion” is a similar phenomenon. People have always worshipped and prayed but also saw these activities as intrinsically connected to work and play and politics and eating and dying. In the modern equivalent of museum religion we kept the worship bit, added a major dose of “believing” and insisted that politics and commerce and food were not religious matters. Museum religion became primarily about (otherworldly) belief.
Note two features of this development: First, it depends on a very Western (and specifically) Christian vision. Pre-modern Christianity was never just about belief in God and the hereafter but over time the “people of the Way” came to place a great deal of emphasis on the beyond of this life and the importance of correct belief. The Modernist version of religion is this story taken to its extreme. Modernism takes a certain (arguably decadent) version of Christianity, pares it down until it is nothing but beliefs about the hereafter and/or the supernatural and decrees that a) this is a universal essence of religion that fits humans everywhere and b) it is essentially private and disconnected from this-worldly issues of life.
Second, as William Cavanaugh has cogently argued in The Myth of Religious Violence, we have a vested interest in defining religion in this way. We need to render religious loyalties private in order to make the world safe for our real consequential loyalty to the Nation State. As he says, “it is clear that, among those who identify themselves as Christians in the United States, there are very few who would be willing to kill in the name of the Christian God, whereas the willingness, under certain circumstances, to kill and die for the nation in war is generally taken for granted” (p. 122). So we privatize religion supposedly in order to save the world from religious violence but the killing does not cease. Only the object of our ultimate loyalty changes from God to the nation state, in whose name we now kill and die.
Religion defined as “private belief in god(s) and the hereafter” that is separate (or at least separable) from the rest of life is clearly problematic in other ways. Confronted with a phenomenon like Buddhism, for example, we have to ignore or obscure the fact that in many of its forms Buddhism is atheistic and has no concept of salvation in an afterlife. Confronted with Islam with its undifferentiated commitment to serving Allah not only in the mosque but also in the market, the home, and the state we can only see this as a religious and political muddle because it fails to separate religion from life. Yet, if only a bastardized, museum version of Christianity fits the category of religion in its modernist sense, is the fault with Buddhism and Islam for failing our definitions, or might it be the other way round?
It becomes increasingly clear that far from being a self-evident truth, the modernist concept of religion as a matter of private belief is itself an ideological or theological proposal. It was invented in the interest of emptying religion of any substance that might interfere with our ultimate loyalty to the nation state. What is in fact a highly controversial theological/political proposal is used as the measure of sanity and civilization. But as a theological or sociological interpretation of religion it fails to make much sense of the human experience of the sacred as connected to the whole of life. As a historical explanation of the so-called wars of religion it fails to make sense of the fact that the combatants were not neatly divided along religious lines. As a socio-political proposal for how to save the world from war it is clearly a failure given the history of armed conflict in the modern era. Yet, anyone who refuses this concept of religion is a scary barbarian in need of secularization/salvation.
I have often argued that there is no such thing as religion. Hopefully, we are now in a position to see more precisely what this seemingly outrageous claim might mean. It means that “religion” as a separate, private obsession with beliefs about the supernatural and the hereafter is a modern (museum) phenomenon totally incapable of being the cause of anything of significance, let alone a war. We “moderns” can be indifferent to “religious” difference because for us religion makes no difference to anything – it literally doesn’t matter! Given the state monopoly on violence — the military and the police are instruments of state power — and the reduction of religion to matters of private taste (separation of church and state) there is no monster called “Religion” that could be the cause of the ongoing militaristic bloodshed around the world. “Religion” so defined is a (mostly imaginary) pussycat without claws.
It might seem that so-called Islamic states are obvious examples where the failure to privatize religion has turned the Middle East into a constant battlefield. Needless to say, once again the true picture is much more complex. Only the most blinkered of us could fail to register the profound impact of Western interests in the region. The story of Iraq and Iran simply cannot be told as a story of wars of religion. It would clearly be much more accurate to call them the oil wars and/or colonial wars and to look at the interventions and manipulations of Britain, France, Russia, and America in the region as major factors in the ongoing conflicts.
And who could deny the impacts of history, ethnicity, and nationalism? Or clearly “temporal” interests in scarce resources of water, land and oil. For example, the conflicts between Palestine and Israel are clearly wars over national sovereignty and territorial resources. One might note in passing the silliness of constantly assigning the motivation for this conflict in completely inconsistent ways that simply reflect the modernist prejudice about religion and war. No one assumes that the supposedly secular state of Israel is at war because of Judaism. Yet with monotonous regularity we refer to the Palestinians as Muslims and blindly ascribe Islam as the “cause” of their violent opposition to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
But I digress! I have been arguing that real issue with the “religion causes war” dogma is that what most people mean by “religion” is clearly, if it even exists, not the cause of anything at all. But there is another sense in which it might be said that “all wars are holy wars” that does not depend on defining religion as private belief and that on the face of it is much more plausible.
One way to approach this is via the “common-sense” intuition that people who are deeply committed to some cause, who are willing to kill and die for it, whose identity is tied up with the truth of something are in some sense being religious even if the focus of their commitment is not literally a god. It is worth noting that the earliest use of the word “religion” (religio in Latin) in western culture is to indicate zeal, commitment and duty, regardless of whether the focus of duty was the emperor, the city, or the family (Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, p. 61). So the logic goes something like this: if you ask if the culprit of a gruesome murder is insane for many people the question is moot. If they committed a violent and murderous act they are by definition insane. Likewise, if there are people who are willing to kill and die for an ideology or for their ethnic or tribal identity they are by definition “religious” in their comportment and motivations regardless of what they might or might not believe.
There is also a scholarly version of this argument. The scholarly community (anthropologists, historians, comparative religionists, etc.) in particular is fond of what are called functional definitions of religion. On this construal religion is not distinguished from other aspects of cultural life by its belief content but rather by the role or function that religion plays in people’s lives. Most functionalist accounts are variations on the themes found in Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Durkheim, specifically noting that there are religions without gods, defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions.” (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 46). It is important not to be misled by Durkheim’s reference to the “sacred.” The sacred is not a synonym for the supernatural. In fact, on Durkheim’s account, anything can be considered sacred by a given society as long as it represents and reinforces social solidarity. The sacred is just those realities for which we are prepared to sacrifice. (Note that etymologically “to sacrifice” means “to make sacred”). In other words, religion is the way we attend to and promote what fundamentally matters in the ongoing life of the community. Religion on this account is not about what people believe (gods, immortality, etc.) but how beliefs function or the role that some beliefs and practices play in the structuring of individual identity and social life. So for functionalists any system of orientation and devotion is religious whether it be the nation, the tribe, or the market. On this view religions may be theistic, humanistic, or even atheistic.
As Cavanaugh notes, “functionalist approaches have the advantage of being based on empirical observation of people’s actual behavior, and not simply on claims of what they believe in the confines of some interior and unobservable mental state. They are also less inclined to bother about restricting religion to some exclusive and arbitrary set of world religions. The disadvantage of functionalist approaches is that they expand the category of religion so broadly that the category tends to lose meaning. If nearly every ideological system or set of practices can be a religion, then calling something religious does not help to distinguish it from anything else” (Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, p.106).
But the problem runs deeper than the vagueness associated with the functionalist definition of religion. What started out as a thesis about the cause of religion, when coupled with the claim that anything and everything can be religious, amounts to the claim that anything and everything can be the cause of violence, or at least anything of profound significance. Instead of giving us a causal mechanism that explains violence “religion” simply becomes the name given to dimensions of individual and social life that are most important to people. And the claim that religion causes violence amounts to the rather un-illuminating claim that people will kill and die for whatever in their lives is of pre-eminent importance. If religion is defined as “commitment to the sacred” and the sacred is “those dimensions of our lives that we hold to be of the highest importance” then “religion” is at the center of everyone’s life and is hardly something we should expect to eliminate as long as life, love, caring, and commitment exist.
I once met an elderly gentleman in Colorado who told me with a twinkle in his eye that he had not re-married after the death of his wife because marriage causes divorce. In one sense he was, of course, correct. A necessary condition for the possibility of divorce is the existence of a marriage. Likewise religion, defined as commitment to anything that is of profound importance in life might be said to “cause” war. Or even more briefly, life causes war. Life with its corresponding systems of valuation and commitments is a prerequisite for war. This is doubtless true but sheds very little light on the tragedy of war. If the idea is to identify factors that we might be able to manipulate in order to avoid violent conflict then surely caring and commitment are unlikely candidates for elimination.
In his famous anthem to secularism John Lennon promises us that a world without religion will usher in a reign of peace. Now we might, with Lennon, be able to imagine there’s no heaven and no countries and no religion in the sense of belief in the gods, but our imaginations will fail if asked to imagine no one caring about starving children, the daily indignities of the occupying armies treading down refugees, or the disenfranchised and homeless ones haunting the urban sprawl of our cities. Imagine that no one cares about food or shelter. About the imprisonment of their sons and daughters. About the daily insults of being strip-searched or dragged off to jail in the name of the security of the privileged and the powerful. It’s not so easy, not even if you try.
