Hello everyone. I wanted to share an engrossing and thought-provoking book I came across online called “The Myth of Religious Violence”. It was written by William T. Cavanaugh. Here is the Amazon synopsis:
The “myth” in question can be summarizes as such: “more violence has been caused by religion than any other institution in history.” It’s a favorite notion for New Atheists as well as earlier proponents of secularism in the Enlightenment.
In the first two chapters Cavanaugh points out that, for all the criticism of religion published within the last 30 years, very few authors even go as far as to provide a definition for what a religion is. Those which do tend to be too exclusive or inclusive when going with a substantialist definition (i.e. a definition based on the content of the belief). Some substantialist definitions end up excluding things like Buddhism or Confucianism, while others include things like Nationalism, Marxism, Nazism, or even Veganism.
I suppose part of what drew me to this book was a growing skepticism I had toward the idea of the “liberal or secular world order” as a pure product of reason and above metaphysical beliefs or assertions or revelations about reality. It seemed to me that people definitely have worldviews with metaphysical assertions, replete with ethical code, anthropology, eschatology, etc., but don’t get called religious for some reason. As the synopsis states, what gets characterized as a religion in the West more often than not has more to do with the question of whether that worldview is seen as having legitimacy in influencing politics and governance. As a Muslim one cannot foist one’s religious views on the public. Mandatory salutes to the American flag however, can be, since nationalism/patriotism is not deemed a religion, in spite of all its similarities in terms of symbolism, effects of social cohesion, claimed ordainment by God (especially in the United States), and eschatological “manifest destiny.” The argument given by Cavanaugh as to why nationalism is not considered a religion, for all intents and purposes a civic religion is because it is seen as of essential service to the State, which obviously would love to have blind loyalty and obedience and to have people die for it. It is problematic for the liberal secular state to treat, say, Christianity, as having political legitimacy because Christians may be called to act in ways that are antithetical to the State. The example given in the book was the Jehovas Witness protests against flag saluting during WW2, for which they were severely punished by independent actors with the tacit support of the state). In a word, these faiths need to be isolated from governance because the mandate to kill or die for your faith may interfere with your duties to die or kill for the state.
Since Cavanaugh has laid out many points well I will defer to him. I quote summaries by chapter here.
First Chapter
Here were some of the conclusions on each chapter. Sorry if it’s a lot. The text body of each chapter was very well resourced, and explained the reasoning (which may be glossed over in conclusions) very carefully, particularly when it came to dissecting the modern attempts to define religion when linking it to violence in chapter two and to the plethora of historical examples in chapter three.
Chapter One Conclusion: Anatomy of the Myth
Chapter Two Conclusion: The Invention of Religion
Chapter Three Conclusion: The Creation Myth of the Wars of Religion
Chapter Four Conclusion: The Uses of the Myth
I really enjoyed the history elucidated in this book. I'm not the most educated about the conflicts between the Popes, Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Calvinists and so on. So the lesson was appreciated.
I feel like the book is a solid work, but in some way incomplete in terms of exploring the implications of such. For example, if some ideas are considered acceptable in politics, but shouldn't be (depending on your moral framework), does that mean it's "religious?" Is Neomarxist Postmodern ideology religious? Is patriotism? Should both of those categorically be removed from the public discourse? And what standard of values are we using to circumscribe which ideas are in and which are out? And what values are we using to define those values as the golden standard by which we order our society? It seems like an ouroboros.
Whether or not you have interest or comments or criticisms of the book, I want to ask in general, is it even possible in principle to separate religion from politics? If our government lacks an official religion, does it follow that there's an unofficial state crypto-religion being (like nationalism or globalism) being followed?
The idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence 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 liberal democracy in the Middle East. William T. Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores how the category 'religion' has been constructed in the modern West and in colonial contexts according to specific configurations of political power. Cavanaugh draws on this scholarship to examine how timeless and transcultural categories of 'religion and 'the secular' are used in arguments that religion causes violence. He argues three points: 1) There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion. What counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of political configurations of power; 2) Such a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion as non-rational and prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of Western society; 3) This myth can be and is used to legitimate neo-colonial violence against non-Western others, particularly the Muslim world.
The “myth” in question can be summarizes as such: “more violence has been caused by religion than any other institution in history.” It’s a favorite notion for New Atheists as well as earlier proponents of secularism in the Enlightenment.
In the first two chapters Cavanaugh points out that, for all the criticism of religion published within the last 30 years, very few authors even go as far as to provide a definition for what a religion is. Those which do tend to be too exclusive or inclusive when going with a substantialist definition (i.e. a definition based on the content of the belief). Some substantialist definitions end up excluding things like Buddhism or Confucianism, while others include things like Nationalism, Marxism, Nazism, or even Veganism.
I suppose part of what drew me to this book was a growing skepticism I had toward the idea of the “liberal or secular world order” as a pure product of reason and above metaphysical beliefs or assertions or revelations about reality. It seemed to me that people definitely have worldviews with metaphysical assertions, replete with ethical code, anthropology, eschatology, etc., but don’t get called religious for some reason. As the synopsis states, what gets characterized as a religion in the West more often than not has more to do with the question of whether that worldview is seen as having legitimacy in influencing politics and governance. As a Muslim one cannot foist one’s religious views on the public. Mandatory salutes to the American flag however, can be, since nationalism/patriotism is not deemed a religion, in spite of all its similarities in terms of symbolism, effects of social cohesion, claimed ordainment by God (especially in the United States), and eschatological “manifest destiny.” The argument given by Cavanaugh as to why nationalism is not considered a religion, for all intents and purposes a civic religion is because it is seen as of essential service to the State, which obviously would love to have blind loyalty and obedience and to have people die for it. It is problematic for the liberal secular state to treat, say, Christianity, as having political legitimacy because Christians may be called to act in ways that are antithetical to the State. The example given in the book was the Jehovas Witness protests against flag saluting during WW2, for which they were severely punished by independent actors with the tacit support of the state). In a word, these faiths need to be isolated from governance because the mandate to kill or die for your faith may interfere with your duties to die or kill for the state.
Since Cavanaugh has laid out many points well I will defer to him. I quote summaries by chapter here.
First Chapter
There is much more at stake here than academics haggling over definitions. Once we begin to ask what the religion-and-violence arguments mean by “religion,” we find that their explanatory power is hobbled by a number of indefensible assumptions about what does and does not count as religion.
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My hypothesis is that religion-and-violence arguments serve a particular need for their consumers in the West. These arguments are part of a broader Enlightenment narrative that has invented a dichotomy between the religious and the secular and constructed the former as an irrational and dangerous impulse that must give way in public to rational, secular forms of power.
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I have no doubt that ideologies and practices of all kinds—including, for example, Islam and Christianity—can and do promote violence under certain conditions. What I challenge as incoherent is the argument that there is something called religion—a genus of which Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and so on are species—which is necessarily more inclined toward violence than are ideologies and institutions that are identified as secular.
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Christianity is not simply a set of doctrines immune to historical circumstance, but a lived historical experience embodied and shaped by the empirically observable actions of Christians.
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The myth of religious violence tries to establish as timeless, universal, and natural a very contingent set of categories—religious and secular—that are in fact constructions of the modern West. Those who do not accept these categories as timeless, universal, and natural are subject to coercion.
I use the term “myth” to describe this claim, not merely to indicate that it is false, but to give a sense of the power of the claim in Western societies. A story takes on the status of myth when it becomes unquestioned. It becomes very difficult to think outside the paradigm that the myth establishes and reflects because myth and reality become mutually reinforcing. Society is structured to conform to the apparent truths that the myth reveals, and what is taken as real increasingly takes on the color of the myth.
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Particular configurations of power in society may be groundless, but that is precisely why they are difficult to argue against, because they were not established by argument to begin with. The religious-secular distinction, for example, was not established as a rational theory about how best to describe human social life; as I show in chapters 2 and 3, it was established as the result of some contingent shifts in how power was distributed between civil and ecclesiastical authorities in early modern Europe.
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The more a myth eludes our ordinary practices of verification and refutation, the more sustained must be the attempt to unmask it. It is not simply that the myth is pervasive, but that the very categories under which the discussion takes place—especially the categories of religious-secular and religion-politics—are so firmly established as to appear natural. Only a thorough genealogy can show that their construction is anything but inevitable.
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This book consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I examine arguments from nine of the most prominent academic proponents of the idea that religion is peculiarly prone to violence. The examples range widely across different scholarly disciplines and give different types of explanations for why religion is prone to violence: religion is absolutist, religion is divisive, religion is irrational. They all suffer from the same defect: the inability to find a convincing way to separate religious violence from secular violence. Each of the arguments I examine is beset by internal contradictions. Most assume a substantivist concept of religion, whereby religion can be separated from secular phenomena based on the nature of religious beliefs. I show how such distinctions break down in the course of each author’s own analysis. One of the authors discussed, seeing the contradictions involved in substantivist concepts of religion, employs a functionalist concept of religion and openly expands the definition of religion to include ideologies and practices that are usually called secular, such as nationalism and consumerism. As a result, however, the term religion comes to cover virtually anything humans do that gives their lives order and meaning. In that scholar’s work, the term religion is so broad that it serves no useful analytical purpose.
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violence. I argue that so-called secular ideologies and institutions like nationalism and liberalism can be just as absolutist, divisive, and irrational as those called religious. People kill for all sorts of things. An adequate approach to the problem would be resolutely empirical: under what conditions do certain beliefs and practices—jihad, the “invisible hand” of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, the role of the United States as worldwide liberator—turn violent? There is certainly much useful work to be done on concrete empirical cases. Where the authors discussed go wrong is in trying to construct an argument about religion as such. The point is not simply that secular violence should be given equal attention to religious violence. The point is that the very distinction between secular and religious violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying.
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The first conclusion is that there is no such thing as a transhistorical or transcultural “religion” that is essentially separate from politics. Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority. The second conclusion is that the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West. In this context, religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public, secular rationality. To construe Christianity as a religion, therefore, helps to separate loyalty to God from one’s public loyalty to the nation-state. The idea that religion has a tendency to cause violence—and is therefore to be removed from public power—is one type of this essentialist construction of religion.
In chapter 3, I examine one of the most commonly cited historical examples of religious violence: the “wars of religion” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. The story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state. According to this myth, Protestants and Catholics began killing each other over doctrinal differences, thus showing the intractability and inherent violence of religious disagreements. The modern state was born as a peace maker in this process, relegating religion to private life and uniting people of various religions around loyalty to the sovereign state.
In this chapter, I question the standard story by looking at the historical record. The case is not as simple as the standard story implies. Christians certainly did kill each other, marking a signal failure of Christians to resist violence. But the transfer of power from the church to the state was not simply a remedy for the violence. Indeed, the transfer of power from the church to the state predated the division of Christendom into Catholics and Protestants and in many ways was a cause of the violence of the so-called wars of religion. The shift from medieval to modern—from church power to state power—was a long, complex process with gains and losses. Whatever it was, it was not a simple progressive march from violence to peace. The gradual transfer of loyalty from international church to national state was not the end of violence in Europe, but a migration of the holy from church to state in the establishment of the ideal of dying and killing for one’s country
The first section of chapter 3 shows how the story of the wars of religion is told by early modern thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and by contemporary political theorists such as Judith Shklar, John Rawls, and Francis Fukuyama. Despite variations, all these thinkers present the cause of these wars as strife between Catholics and Protestants over religious beliefs, and the solution to these wars as the rise of the modern secular state. In subsequent sections of chapter 3, I break down the myth of the wars of religion into four components and show how each is historically misleading and inaccurate.
I show how much of the wars of religion involved Catholics killing Catholics, Lutherans killing Lutherans, and Catholic-Protestant collaboration. To cite only one example: Cardinal Richelieu and Catholic France intervened in the Thirty Years’ War on the side of Lutheran Sweden, and the last half of the Thirty Years’ War was essentially a battle between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, the two great Catholic dynasties of Europe. Historians generally acknowledge—as political theorists do not—that other factors besides religion were at work in the wars of religion: political, economic, and social factors. The question then becomes: what is the relative importance of the various factors? Are political, economic, and social factors important enough that we are no longer justified in calling these wars “of religion”? I show how historians are divided on this question. To decide between these two groups of scholars, one would need to be able to separate religion from politics, economics, and social factors. I argue that such attempts at separation are prone to essentialism and anachronism. In the sixteenth century, the modern invention of the twins of religion and society was in its infancy; where the Eucharist was the primary symbol of social order, there simply was no divide between religious and social or political causes. This means that there is no way to pinpoint something called religion as the cause of these wars and excise it from the exercise of public power. The standard narrative says that the modern state identified religion as the root of the problem and separated it from politics. However, there was no separation of religion and politics. What we see in reality is what John Bossy describes as a “migration of the holy” from the church to the state. Ostensibly, the holy was separated from politics for the sake of peace; in reality, the emerging state appropriated the holy to become itself a new kind of religion.
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In the fourth and final chapter of the book, I ask: what purpose does the idea that religion causes violence serve for its consumers in the contemporary West? I show how useful the myth has been in the United States in authorizing certain types of power in both domestic politics and foreign policy. In domestic politics, it has helped to marginalize certain practices such as public school prayer and aid to parochial schools. At the same time, it has helped to reinforce patriotic adherence to the nation-state as that which saves us from our other, more divisive, identities. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence helps to reinforce and justify Western attitudes and policies toward the non-Western world, especially Muslims, whose primary point of difference with the West is said to be their stubborn refusal to tame religious passions in the public sphere. It is important to note that arguments about religion and violence are not necessarily antireligion, but are anti-public religion. Although the majority of Americans consider themselves to be religious, the overwhelming majority also regard the secularization of politics as foundational to any rational and civilized society. Muslims are commonly stereotyped as fanatical and dangerous because they have not learned, as “we” have, to separate politics from religion. In the first section of chapter 4, I examine the use of the myth of religious violence in U.S. Supreme Court decisions since the 1940s. Previously, religion was generally seen as a unitive force, a glue that helped to bind the nation together. Beginning in the 1940s, however, the specter of religious violence was cited in case after case involving the religion clauses of the First Amendment, as the Court moved to ban school prayer, state aid for parochial schools, public religious displays on government grounds, and other practices. I note that the myth of religious violence was found useful at a moment in U.S. history in which the threat of the kind of sectarian violence against which it warned had never been more remote. I show as well how patriotism has been invoked by the Court as the cure for religious divisiveness. Patriotic public invocations of God are specifically excluded from the category of religion and are therefore not subject to the kind of restrictions put on religion. Once again, what counts as religion and what does not is not dependent on the presence or absence of belief in God, but on a political decision about the inculcation of loyalty to the nation-state.
In the next two sections of chapter 4, I analyze the way that the myth of religious violence helps to construct non-Western Others and to legitimate violence against them. I examine both academic and journalistic uses of the myth by such figures as Mark Juergensmeyer, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Sullivan, and Christopher Hitchens and show that the argument that religion is prone to violence is a significant component in the construction of an opposition between the West and the rest. If religion has a peculiar tendency to promote violence, then societies that have learned to tame religious passions in public are seen as superior and more inherently peaceable than societies which have not. Muslim societies, in particular, are seen as essentially problematic because they lack the proper distinction between religion and the secular. Indeed, Islam itself is seen as a peculiar and abnormal religion because it “mixes” politics with pure religion. Clashes between Western and Islamic governments and cultures can therefore be explained in terms of the inherently pathological nature of the latter. In attempting to understand why, for example, Iran since 1979 has seen the United States as its great enemy, U.S. support for the coup that installed the Shah’s brutal, secularizing regime in 1953 can be overlooked in favor of “deeper” causes, in particular the inherently volatile nature of religion and its poisonous effects on Iranian politics. I show how the myth of religious violence is commonly used to bypass actual historical events and to find the answer to the question “Why do they hate us?” in the pathological irrationality of religiously based social orders.
Here were some of the conclusions on each chapter. Sorry if it’s a lot. The text body of each chapter was very well resourced, and explained the reasoning (which may be glossed over in conclusions) very carefully, particularly when it came to dissecting the modern attempts to define religion when linking it to violence in chapter two and to the plethora of historical examples in chapter three.
Chapter One Conclusion: Anatomy of the Myth
There is plenty of important empirical and theoretical work to be done on the violence of certain groups of self-identified Christians, Hindus, Muslims, etc., and there are no grounds for exempting their beliefs and practices from the causal factors that produce violence. For example, there is no doubt that, under certain circumstances, particular construals of Islam or Christianity contribute to violence. The works discussed above—especially those of Juergensmeyer and Appleby—contain a wealth of empirical data on various ideologies and the production of violence. Where the above arguments—and others like them—fail is in trying to separate a category called religion with a peculiar tendency toward violence from a putatively secular reality that is less prone to violence.
There is no reason to suppose that so-called secular ideologies such as nationalism, patriotism, capitalism, Marxism, and liberalism are any less prone to be absolutist, divisive, and irrational than belief in, for example, the biblical God. As Marty himself implies, belief in the righteousness of the United States and its solemn duty to impose liberal democracy on the rest of the world has all of the ultimate concern, community, myth, ritual, and required behavior of any so-called religion. The debate that was revived in the late twentieth century over a ban on flag burning is replete with references to the “desecration” of the flag, as if it were a sacred object.162 Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle’s Blood Sacrifice and the Nation is a detailed analysis of U.S. patriotism as a civil religion—focused on the flag totem—whose regeneration depends on periodic blood sacrifice in war.163 Secular nationalism of that kind can be just as absolutist, divisive, and irrationally fanatical as certain types of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu militancy.
An objection can be raised that goes something like this: certainly, secular ideologies can get out of hand and produce fanaticism and violence, but religious ideologies have a much greater tendency to do so precisely because the object of their beliefs is claimed to be absolute. The capitalist knows that money is just a human creation, the liberal is avowedly modest about what can be known beyond human reason, the nationalist knows that her country is made up of land and mortal people, but the religious believer claims divine sanction from a god or gods or at least a transcendent reality that lays claim to absolute validity. It is this absolutism that makes obedience blind and causes the believer to subjugate all means to a transcendent end.
The problem with this objection is that what counts as “absolute” is decided a priori and appears immune to any empirical testing. How people actually behave is ignored in favor of theological descriptions of their beliefs. Of course, Jewish and Christian and Muslim orthodoxy would make the theological claim that God is absolute in a way that nothing else is. The problem, as the Ten Commandments make plain, is that humans are constantly tempted to idolatry, to putting what is merely relative in the place of God. It is not enough, therefore, to claim that worship of God is absolutist. The real question is, what god is actually being worshipped?
But surely, the objection might go, nobody really thinks the flag or the nation or money or sports idols are their “gods”—those are just metaphors. However, the question is not simply one of belief, but of behavior. If a person claims to believe in the Christian God but never gets off the couch on Sunday morning and spends the rest of the week in the obsessive pursuit of profits in the bond market, then what is absolute in that person’s life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God. Matthew 6:24 personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes.
Suppose we apply an empirical test to the question of absolutism. Absolute is itself a vague term, but in the religion-and-violence arguments, it appears to indicate the tendency to take something so seriously that violence results. An empirically testable definition of absolute, then, might be “that for which one is willing to kill.” This test has the advantage of covering behavior and not simply what one claims to believe. Now, let us ask the following two questions: what percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? Whether we attempt to answer these questions by survey or by observing American Christians’ behavior in wartime, it seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state—Hobbes’s “mortal god”—is subject to far more absolutist fervor than religion. For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most would take for granted the necessity of being willing to kill for their country, should circumstances dictate.
We must conclude that there is no coherent way to isolate religious ideologies with a peculiar tendency toward violence from their tamer secular counterparts. People kill for all kinds of reasons. An adequate approach to the problem must begin with empirical investigations into the conditions under which beliefs and practices such as jihad, the invisible hand of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, and the role of the United States as worldwide liberator turn violent. The point is not simply that secular violence should be given equal attention to religious violence. The point is that the distinction between secular and religious violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying, and it should be avoided altogether. In the next chapter, I will investigate the modern origins of the distinction between religious and secular. For now, we may conclude that we do not need theories about religion and violence, but careful studies of violence and empirically based theories about the specific conditions under which ideologies and practices of all kinds turn lethal.
Chapter Two Conclusion: The Invention of Religion
What can we conclude from this brief survey of some functionalist approaches to religion? The first thing to note is that, if the functionalists are right in saying that secular phenomena like capitalism and nationalism are really religions, then all of the arguments in chapter 1—except that of the functionalist Richard Wentz—fall apart. There is simply no basis for including Islam and Hinduism in the indictment of religious violence while excluding U.S. nationalism and Marxism. And we have good reasons for preferring the functionalist to the substantivist approach. The question “Does religion cause violence?” is a question of how religion functions. If secular nationalism functions in the same way as Islam to produce violence under certain circumstances, there is no reason to indict the latter and ignore the former. Even if we could come up with a substantive way to put Islam and nationalism in different categories—e.g., Islam believes in a “real” God, but the nation as god is “just a metaphor”—for our purposes, it would be as pointless as studying the violence of only ideologies that begin with the letters A through L.
Ultimately, however, functionalist approaches to the question of religion and violence are also unsatisfactory. To argue, as Wentz does, that religion has a peculiar tendency to cause violence, but to include nearly everything people take seriously under the rubric of religion, is not very helpful. At best, it is tautological: people do violence on behalf of those things they take seriously enough to do violence for. We have not learned much about the causes of violence. Not only do functionalist approaches cast the meaning of religion so widely as to render the category virtually useless, but they also suffer from the same essentialism from which substantivist approaches suffer. Functionalist approaches—like substantivist approaches—tend to assume that there really is something out there called religion that is a constant feature in all human societies across time; functionalists just argue for a more expansive definition of what religion really is, based on how it functions in all places and times. But in doing so, functionalists cling to the kind of transhistorical and transcultural idea of religion that we showed above to be groundless.
So, do we conclude that there is no such thing as religion, no coherent concept of religion, and therefore we need not bother with the question of religion and violence? No. The point is not that there is no such thing as religion. The concepts that we use do not simply refer to things out there in a one-to-one correspondence of words with things. In certain cultures, religion does exist, but as a product of human construction. Some scholars have cited James Leuba’s Psychological Study of Religion (1912), which lists more than fifty different definitions of religion, to conclude that there is no way to define religion. But as Jonathan Z. Smith points out, the lesson is not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined more than fifty different ways. There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion, but at different times and places, and for different purposes, some things have been constructed as religion and some things have not. For Western scholars in the nineteenth century, Confucianism was a religion. For Chinese nationalists, it emphatically was not.
Instead of searching—in either a substantivist or functionalist mode—for the timeless, transcultural essence of religion, therefore, let us ask why certain things are called religion under certain conditions. What configurations of power are authorized by changes in the way the concept of religion—and its counterpart, the secular—are used? What changes in practices correspond to changes in these concepts? Why deny that the natives have religion at first, then assign some of their practices to the category religion? Which practices become religion, and why? Why deny that Marxism is a religion? Why accept that Marxism is a religion but emphatically deny that U.S. nationalism is?
Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist acknowledged, in supporting a proposed amendment against “desecration” of the flag, that the flag is regarded by Americans “with an almost mystical reverence.”265 Here, the word “almost” is crucial, for American civil religion must deny that it is religion. Marvin and Ingle ask, and attempt to answer, the key question:
If nationalism is religious, why do we deny it? Because what is obligatory for group members must be separated, as holy things are, from what is contestable. To concede that nationalism is a religion is to expose it to challenge, to make it just the same as sectarian religion. By explicitly denying that our national symbols and duties are sacred, we shield them from competition with sectarian symbols. In so doing, we embrace the ancient command not to speak the sacred, ineffable name of god. The god is inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But that god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice.
Marvin and Ingle treat nationalism as a real religion, according to their definition.267 But for my purposes, whether or not nationalism is really a religion is beside the point. What is crucial are the questions they ask: why deny it is a religion? Why affirm it? What is authorized by either the denial or the affirmation? Why is it acceptable in some contexts for Abraham Lincoln to say that reverence for the Constitution is “the political religion of the nation,”268 or for George W. Bush to say that patriotism is “a living faith” that grows stronger when the United States is threatened?269 Why, in other contexts, is the U.S. constitutional order held as the model of secular government? With regard to the question of violence, why is violence on behalf of the Muslim umma religious, but violence on behalf of the American nation-state is secular? What is gained or lost by the insistence that violence on behalf of the United States is of a fundamentally different nature from violence on behalf of Islam?
To answer these types of questions, we must see how the religious- secular distinction is part of the legitimating conceptual apparatus of the modern Western nation-state. As I stated earlier, “the West,” “modernity,” “liberalism,” and so on are not simply monolithic realities, but are ideals or projects that are always contestable. Part of the function of ideology, however, is to present these projects as based on essential realities that are simply there, part of the way things are. As we saw in Locke’s writings, the religious-secular distinction is presented as embedded in the immutable nature of things. In fact, however, this distinction was born with a new configuration of power and authority in the West and was subsequently exported to parts of the world colonized by Europeans. Within the West, religion was invented as a transhistorical and transcultural impulse embedded in the human heart, essentially distinct from the public business of government and economic life. To mix religion with public life was said to court fanaticism, sectarianism, and violence. The religious-secular divide thus facilitated the transfer in the modern era of the public loyalty of the citizen from Christendom to the emergent nation-state. Outside the West, the creation of religion and its secular twin accompanied the attempts of colonial powers and indigenous modernizing elites to marginalize certain aspects of non-Western cultures and create public space for the smooth functioning of state and market interests.
The idea that religion has a tendency to promote violence is a variation on the idea that religion is an essentially private and nonrational human impulse, not amenable to conflict solving through public reason. In the contemporary context, therefore, the idea that there is something called religion with a tendency to promote violence continues to marginalize certain kinds of discourses and practices while authorizing others. Specifically, the idea that public religion causes violence authorizes the marginalization of those things called religion from having a divisive influence in public life, and thereby authorizes the state’s monopoly on violence and on public allegiance. Loyalty to one’s religion is private in origin and therefore optional; loyalty to the secular nation-state is what unifies us and is not optional.
None of this implies a grand conspiracy of intellectual and governmental elites to justify state violence. Discourse about the dangers of public religion is rather a normalizing discourse through which we explain to ourselves why things are arranged the way they are. And the dangers warned against are real. When public discourse blames terrorist attacks on religious fanaticism, common sense can see that there are dangerous pathologies linked to some of what is called religion. The problem with the myth of religious violence is not that it condemns certain kinds of violence, but that it diverts moral scrutiny from other kinds of violence. Violence labeled religious is always reprehensible; violence labeled secular is often necessary and sometimes praiseworthy.
Secularism need not be antireligion. It is rather against the undue influence of religion on public life. The first chapter of Martin Marty’s Politics, Religion, and the Common Good—whose stated thesis is “public religion can be dangerous; it should be handled with care”—is followed by his second chapter, entitled “Worth the Risk,” whose stated thesis is “public religion can and does contribute to the common good.”270 Marty tries to show how religion can participate in public life, provided it play by the rules established by the liberal nation-state. It must appeal to publicly accessible reason and avoid conflicts of loyalty between religious beliefs and the values of the nation-state.
It is possible, therefore, for many Americans to consider themselves religious and yet to maintain some version of the idea that the creation of a secular order—and the marginalization or domestication of religion in public life—is the salvation of the social order from the dangers of public religion. The divide between religious and secular must be maintained. We do so out of respect for both the secular and the religious spheres. From the secular point of view, to admit that secular nationalism is just as religious as Islam, for example, would question the whole foundation upon which the secular nation-state claims its legitimacy. From the religious point of view, it would also invite charges of idolatry. Despite the similarities between what is called religion and nationalism, then, we must deny that nationalism is really a religion. We acknowledge verbally that the nation and the flag are not really gods. The crucial test, however, is what people do with their bodies. 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. The religious-secular distinction thus helps to maintain the public and lethal loyalty of Christians to the nation-state, while avoiding direct confrontation with Christian beliefs about the supremacy of the Christian God over all other gods.
In this chapter, I have argued for two conclusions: first, that the religious-secular divide upon which the myth of religious violence depends is not a transhistorical and transcultural reality, and second, that it is part of the legitimating mythology of the modern liberal state. In the next two chapters, I will give more historical specificity to this second claim, first by examining the tale of the wars of religion and its place in legitimating the modern state in chapter 3, and then in chapter 4 by examining the contemporary uses of the myth of religious violence in marginalizing domestic religion and justifying the use of force against non-Western, especially Muslim, Others.
Chapter Three Conclusion: The Creation Myth of the Wars of Religion
(Prefacing this section: the myth of religious violence is predicated on the following axioms for understanding what were known as the Religious Wars of 16th and 17th century Europe:
A. Combatants opposed each other based on religious difference.
B. The primary cause of the wars was religion, as opposed to merely political, economic, or social causes.
C. Religious causes must be at least analytically separable from political, economic, and social causes at the time of the wars.
D. The rise of the modern state was not a cause of the wars, but rather provided a solution to the wars.)
We must conclude that the myth of the wars of religion is finally incredible, which is to say, false. A significant proportion of the violence was between members of the same church, and members of different churches often collaborated (A). It is impossible to separate religious motives from political, economic, and social causes (B and C). And the idea that the advent of the state solved the violence ignores abundant evidence that state building was perhaps the most significant cause of the violence (D).
One might perhaps grant that the myth of the wars of religion as commonly told is implausible, but still try to claim that the inseparability of religion and politics was precisely the problem in the early modern period. In other words, the problem with the early modern state was that it was not yet secularized. We have now learned that violence can be tamed by privatizing religion.
One might perhaps grant that the myth of the wars of religion as commonly told is implausible, but still try to claim that the inseparability of religion and politics was precisely the problem in the early modern period. In other words, the problem with the early modern state was that it was not yet secularized. We have now learned that violence can be tamed by privatizing religion.
One might perhaps grant that the myth of the wars of religion as commonly told is implausible, but still try to claim that the inseparability of religion and politics was precisely the problem in the early modern period. In other words, the problem with the early modern state was that it was not yet secularized. We have now learned that violence can be tamed by privatizing religion.
This objection continues to see politics and religion as two essentially different human activities that can be, and should be, sorted out. It imagines that, once the state had laid claim to the holy, the state voluntarily relinquished it by banning religion from direct access to the public square. However, if it is true, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, that nationalism exhibits many of the characteristics of religion—including, most important for our purposes, the ability to organize killing energies—then what we have is not a separation of religion from politics but rather the substitution of the religion of the state for the religion of the church. The gap that liberal theorists propose between early modern and modern is not as wide as we would like to believe. In his study of Louis XIV, John Wolf writes, “[T]he deification of the person of the king in this theocentric era was accomplished in much the same way and with the same intentions that secular societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have deified the state.”305 After detailing the elaborate ceremonies dedicated to the Sun King, Wolf comments:
Before we leave these hymns of praise and celebrations, we should note that a study of this literature will call to mind the small-town, pre-motorized age of patriotic celebrations and ceremonies of July 4 or of July 14 (Bastille Day) and other such days that men set aside to instill patriotism and love for the Republic. The words in a society dedicated to popular sovereignty will be different from those used by men who believe that authority comes from God, but the impact is very similar. The orators who extolled the glories of the Republic, the heroism of its soldiers, and the faultless purity of its national policies were creating a secular deity out of the state, and their hearers were thrilled by their words and made more ready to obey the laws that were set above them.
As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, ours is an unliturgical age in most respects, with one enormous exception: the public life of the citizen of the nation-state. Citizenship in secular countries is tied to symbols and rituals that have been invented for the purpose of expressing and reinforcing devotion to the nation-state.
The migration of the holy is much easier for a modern person to identify in early modern Europe than in the contemporary liberal nation-state. Civil religion in the contemporary United States is in some respects similar, but in others quite dissimilar, to the worship practices of the Christian churches. When the topic is religion and violence, however, the most relevant aspect of the holy is the ability to organize lethal forces; the argument, after all, is that religion is especially prone to compel believers to die and kill. If it is true that “in the West the power to compel believers to die passed from Christianity to the nation-state, where it largely remains,”308 then in this most relevant aspect, the migration of the holy from the church to the state is plain to see. If the state had relinquished the holy, we would expect that martyrdom would have faded from human history, at least in the West. As the poet Wilfred Owen would note during World War I, however, “the old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori” would carry more weight than ever in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Benedict Anderson has remarked that, in modernity, the nation replaces the church as the primary institution that deals with death. Nations provide a new kind of salvation; my death is not in vain if it is for the nation, which lives on into a limitless future.309 According to Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, the nation not only gives death meaning, but sacrifice for the nation-state provides the glue that binds a liberal social order together:
Americans generally see their nation as a secular culture possessed of few myths, or with weak myths everywhere, but none central and organizing. We see American nationalism as a ritual system organized around a core myth of violently sacrificed divinity manifest in the highest patriotic ceremony and the most accessible popular culture.
Any uncomplicated tale of progress from the barbarous religious past to a peaceable secular present must reckon with the staggering amount of energy, resources, and devotion marshaled by the militaries of Western nations, especially the United States.
To say that the foundational myth of the wars of religion is false is not to say that liberal principles are therefore false; the separation of church and state is, to my mind, important to uphold for several reasons, some of them theological. It is to say, however, that the triumphalist narrative that sees the liberal state as the solution to the violence of religion needs to be abandoned. To reject the myth by no means implies nostalgia for medieval forms of governance, any more than Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish implies nostalgia for corporal punishment.311 Foucault’s famous study shows the modern transition from public torture and execution aimed at the body to imprisonment aimed at the soul as part of a larger movement in modernity toward more invisible—and therefore more effective—types of discipline and power. Foucault’s aim is not to hold up medieval practices as a paradigm, but to question the triumphalist narrative that Western modernity prefers to tell about itself, in which barbarism is progressively conquered by rationality and freedom. Likewise, I want to question the triumphalist view of the liberal state. The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.
In this chapter, it has not been my intention to provide anything like a complete historical account of the European wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To do so would be a monumental undertaking, beyond my competence. The purpose of this chapter instead has been negative: to show that the myth of the wars of religion cannot stand up to historical fact. I am not therefore required to substitute another grand narrative in its place.
Nevertheless, simply to refute the myth is not enough, for to do so raises important questions about why the myth was generated and perpetuated in the first place, if it appears so flimsy in light of the facts. My hypothesis is that the myth of the wars of religion—like the larger myth of religious violence—has been useful for the promotion of Western secular forms of governance as essentially peacemaking. According to the myth, only by carefully separating the dangerous impulses of religion from the mundane affairs of politics—as the liberal state has done—can a peaceful and prosperous world be finally achieved. In domestic politics, the myth serves both to legitimate devotion to the nation-state and to marginalize actors labeled religious from the public square. In foreign affairs, the myth serves to justify efforts to promote and propagate Western forms of governance in the non-Western world, by violence if necessary. In the next chapter, I will explore these uses of the myth of religious violence.
Chapter Four Conclusion: The Uses of the Myth
Despite the incoherence of attempts to identify a transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion, separate from politics, with a peculiar tendency to promote violence that is absent from secular realities, the myth of religious violence has proven to be an extraordinarily pervasive story in Western culture. The reason it is so prevalent is that it is so useful. For its many avid consumers in the West, the myth of religious violence serves on the domestic scene to marginalize discourses and practices labeled religious, especially those associated with Christian churches and, particularly in Europe, with Muslim groups. The myth helps to reinforce adherence to a secular social order and the nation-state that guarantees it. In foreign affairs, the myth of religious violence contributes to the presentation of non-Western and nonsecular social orders as inherently irrational and prone to violence. In doing so, it helps to create a blind spot in Western thinking about Westerners’ own complicity with violence; the history of our interactions with the non-Western world need not be investigated too closely, for the true roots of “rage” against the West are the violent impulses in religion that nonsecularist actors have failed to tame. The myth of religious violence is also useful, therefore, for justifying secular violence against religious actors; their irrational violence must be met with rational violence. We must share the blessings of secularism with them. If they are not sufficiently rational to be open to persuasion, we must regrettably bomb them into the higher rationality.
The myth of religious violence should finally be seen for what it is: an important part of the folklore of Western societies. It does not identify any facts about the world, but rather authorizes certain arrangements of power in the modern West. It is a story of salvation from mortal peril by the creation of the secular nation-state. As such, it legitimates the direction of the citizen’s ultimate loyalty to the nation-state and secures the nation-state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. In the United States, it helps to foster the idea that secular social orders are inherently peaceful, such that we become convinced that the nation that spends more on its military than do all the other nations of the world combined is in fact the world’s most peaceloving country. The myth also helps to identify Others and enemies, both internal and external, who threaten the social order and who provide the requisite villains against which the nation-state is said to protect us.
The myth of religious violence is false, and it has had a significant negative influence. The myth should be retired from respectable discourse. To do so would offer some important benefits.
First, it would free the valuable empirical work on violence done by Mark Juergensmeyer, Scott Appleby, and other scholars, such as those cited in chapter 1, from being hobbled by the religious-secular distinction. Rather than attempt to come up with reasons that a universal and timeless feature of human society called religion has a peculiar tendency to promote violence, the question for researchers would be, “Under what circumstances do ideologies and practices of all kinds promote violence?” Empirical investigations into violent uses of nationalism, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, the invisible hand of the market, jihad, Marxist utopias, and the view of the United States as worldwide liberator would not be hampered by an a priori division of such ideologies and practices into religious and secular. The illusory search for religion as if it were a constant in human society across all times and places would be dropped in favor of a more resolutely historical approach. Investigation into the link between religion and violence would then become investigation into the ways in which the twin terms religious and secular have been used to authorize different practices of power in the modern world. Included would be investigating how the construction of certain practices as religious has authorized certain kinds of violence labeled secular.
Second, abandoning the myth of religious violence would also help us to see that Western-style secularism is a contingent and local set of social arrangements and not the universal solution to the universal problem of religion. The range of options available to any given society, including our own, is not exhausted by a choice between theocracy on the one hand and militant secularism on the other. Abandoning the myth would mean that decisions in the United States, France, and other Western countries about the participation of churches, mosques, and other groups and individuals in civic life could be approached with more pragmatism than paranoia. With regard to Muslim countries, Western governments could adopt a more open approach to Muslim experiments with government that do not enforce a strict separation of mosque and state.
Third, more generally, eliminating the myth of religious violence would rid the West of one significant obstacle to understanding the non-Western, especially Muslim, world. Stereotypical images of “religious fanatics” wired for violence by their deepest beliefs have helped to poison Western dealings with the Muslim world. To eliminate the myth would help to open Western eyes to the complexity and crosscurrents within the Muslim world. Muslim cultures are not simply predetermined by some ahistorical religious depth. Different theopolitical identities are constantly being created and negotiated in ways for which essentialized accounts of religion cannot account.
Fourth, doing away with the myth of religious violence would help to eliminate one of the justifications for military action against religious actors. If the unreasonableness of an opponent were not determined a priori, the resort to violence might be forestalled long enough to permit a more peaceable outcome.
Fifth and finally, abandoning the myth of religious violence would help to rid citizens of the United States of one of the principal obstacles to having any serious public dialogue over the causes of opposition to U.S. policies abroad. President George W. Bush raised the question “Why do they hate us?” after the September 11 attacks, only to answer it with “They hate our freedoms.”204 As we have seen, the myth of religious violence allows its users to ignore or dismiss American actions as a significant cause of hatred of the United States because the true cause is located in the inherent irrationality, absolutism, and violent tendencies of religious actors. They are so essentially evil that our very goodness—our freedoms—is what they hate about us. This kind of self- serving nonsense generally passes in the United States for informed and sober analysis of global reality in the post-9/11 world. There might be insane people out there who hate freedom, but the well of resentment from which anti-American militancy draws is much deeper and broader than such insanity, and the solution to it is unlikely to be military. If there is ever going to be an end to terrorism, we will need to begin to understand its roots in the much larger context of anti-American sentiment. And understanding that context will require a hard look at U.S. foreign policies and their effects over the course of the twentieth century, not as the sole cause of anti-American sentiment, but as a significant factor that cannot be ignored or safely shelved, as Sam Harris and many others would prefer.
While justifying or excusing American misdeeds is not uncommon—the direct and intentional incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians at Dresden and Hiroshima is justified on the basis of some utilitarian calculation, for example, or U.S. support for terrorism in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s is excused as a byproduct of the Cold War—the most common response to American misdeeds abroad is to overlook them, either by simple amnesia or by distraction of the kind detailed above. Even if past deeds are not simply forgotten, their importance is downplayed as we search for deeper causes, such as religious beliefs. A realistic approach to the causes of anti-American resentment in the Muslim world would need to take a hard look at U.S. dealings with that world: the Iranian coup in 1953 and subsequent support for the Shah; support for Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and 1980s; virtual carte blanche for forty years of Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian land; sanctions in the 1990s that UNICEF estimated killed 500,000 Iraqi children, a price U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright declared “worth it”;205 support for corrupt and dictatorial regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Indonesia; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq; postwar profiteering in Iraq; the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and by “extraordinary rendition” to friendly regimes—these facts and more need close examination.
To refuse to ignore these facts is not thereby to find in them the sole explanation for opposition to the United States, much less to excuse terrorism. The problems of Muslim-majority societies cannot all be blamed on others. Painting the Islamic world as a passive victim of Western aggression would be just as unhelpful as ignoring the history of Muslim-Western interactions. There are clearly unhealthy dynamics within Muslim societies that also must be examined. Islam serves as a rallying point for not only anti-imperialist projects but imperialist projects as well. Muslim theologies are clearly relevant to the overall picture of Muslim militancy, and theologies are not immune to critique. But theologies do not exist unalloyed before they are mixed with politics. There is no “religion” that harbors an unchanging impulse toward absolutism; to blame violence on religion as such makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish good theology from bad theology, or peaceable forms of Islam from malignant forms.
Religious beliefs do not lurk essentially unchanged underneath historical circumstances, waiting to unleash their destructive power on history. And yet much Western commentary on contemporary Muslim militancy sees it as the intrusion of deep, archaic religious impulses into the modern world. As Mahmood Mamdani points out, such a reading fails to see what modern Muslim militancy is. It is the result of a distinctly modern encounter with colonial power. Afghanistan became the crucible of Muslim militancy first as the result of resistance to Soviet occupation. Furthermore, that resistance was largely orchestrated by the United States. The creation and support of the mujahideen was the largest covert operation in CIA history, far outstripping support for the Nicaraguan Contras. The United States did not merely fund the mujahideen, but played a key role in training them both tactically and ideologically. The launching of a jihad against the Soviet Union was a key part of U.S. strategy under CIA chief William Casey. He hoped to unite a billion Muslims against the Soviet Union and Marxism worldwide by borrowing from Islamic theology. The key tradition was jihad, which as Mamdani points out had been largely dormant in the preceding 400 years. The tradition of jihad was revived with significant U.S. help in the 1980s. Operating through the Pakistani intelligence services, the United States also recruited Osama bin Laden. None of this history is of much interest in American public discourse. Americans prefer to talk about Muslim militancy as a religious revival from a bygone era. But, as Mamdani remarks:
[E]ven if it evokes pre-modernity in its particular language and specific practices, the Taliban is the result of an encounter of a premodern people with modern imperial power. Given to a highly decentralized and localized mode of life, the Afghani people have been subjected to two highly centralized state projects in the past few decades: first, Soviet-supported Marxism, then, CIA-supported Islamization.
Jihad was subsequently exported to other parts of the Islamic world. The point is not that Islamization is a creation of the CIA. The point is rather that there is no pristine religion called Islam that can be separated from Muslim encounters with Western power. Understanding the theopolitical project of Muslim radicals is not a matter of understanding the timeless essence of religion, but rather requires analysis of how different theologies have been formed in encounters with modern forms of power. As Mamdani says, “Contemporary ‘fundamentalism’ is a modern political project, not a traditional cultural leftover.”207 (while It’s great he came out and said it, I am a little peeved the author didn’t mention the “Special Relationship” between the US and Saudi Arabia.)
This book has been an attempt to help us in the West see into a significant blind spot that we have created for ourselves. In constructing artificial distinctions between religious and secular violence, types of violence and exclusion labeled secular have escaped full moral scrutiny. In doing away with the myth of religious violence, we are not, of course, thereby licensed to create new blind spots, to ignore or excuse antisecular violence as justifiable. We must restore the full and complete picture of violence in our world, to level the playing field so that violence of all kinds is subject to the same scrutiny. This does not mean that all violence is therefore morally equivalent. To level the playing field is not to declare that the contest will result in a tie before it has even begun. It is rather to agree to call fouls committed by any and all participants and to penalize them equally. Understanding and defusing violence in our world requires clear moral vision, of not only the faults of others but our own.
Violence feeds on the need for enemies, the need to separate us from them. Such binary ways of dividing the world make the world understandable for us, but they also make the world unlivable for many. Doing away with the myth of religious violence is one way of resisting such binaries and, perhaps, turning some enemies into friends.
I really enjoyed the history elucidated in this book. I'm not the most educated about the conflicts between the Popes, Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Calvinists and so on. So the lesson was appreciated.
I feel like the book is a solid work, but in some way incomplete in terms of exploring the implications of such. For example, if some ideas are considered acceptable in politics, but shouldn't be (depending on your moral framework), does that mean it's "religious?" Is Neomarxist Postmodern ideology religious? Is patriotism? Should both of those categorically be removed from the public discourse? And what standard of values are we using to circumscribe which ideas are in and which are out? And what values are we using to define those values as the golden standard by which we order our society? It seems like an ouroboros.
Whether or not you have interest or comments or criticisms of the book, I want to ask in general, is it even possible in principle to separate religion from politics? If our government lacks an official religion, does it follow that there's an unofficial state crypto-religion being (like nationalism or globalism) being followed?
