Why are we so fussed about religion and its relation to war and violence? It is because a particular narrative of the French Enlightenment identifies religion as an irrational mode of belief and goes on to claim, first, that the irrationality of religion is linked systematically to disgraceful practices and to retrogressive political and moral regimes, and second, that these regimes are to a quite special degree implicated in violence. The narrative has anticipations in Montaigne and his comments on the relation between religious faith and a predisposition to conflict fostered by experience of the French ‘wars of religion’.
We have been dealing with a banal and empirically unproductive truth which leads nowhere except to a fresh and negative dogmatism about a falsely hypostasised ‘entity’, religion in general and religion at all times. It leads by a far from obvious extension to the assertion not only that religion is essentially irrational, but to the dogmatic claim that there is an intrinsic connection between irrational beliefs and evil behaviour, between, that is, the true and the good. A dogmatic claim of this kind, shorn of the provisional character intrinsic to science, reminds one of similar statements found in certain kinds of Christian discourse: for example, the medieval Catholic notion that because the theologically dualist Cathars were doctrinally mistaken and heretical they were bound to be morally deviant and perverse.
We have to ask what historical experiences, interests and perspectives predisposed intellectuals in France to adopt a narrative which identified religion rather than other equally obvious factors as peculiarly responsible for bellicose behaviour. The same applies to a narrative constructed in the Anglo-American Enlightenment which estimated religion much more positively. For Thomas Paine much depended on separating natural religion from specific claims to revelation and all religion from entanglement with state power following the model of voluntary religion that provided Paine’s own background and found untrammelled expression in America.1 Protestant thinking pinned most of the blame on Catholicism and priestcraft. Herbert Spencer adopted the same approach in the nineteenth century when he identified Protestantism with a commercial liberal pacifism.
There has been a Catholic master narrative locating warlike and imperialist tendencies in the link between Protestantism and capitalism. Contemporary agnostic or atheist identifications of religion with war fuse the French Enlightenment narrative with the Protestant and Catholic narrative, and feed in a revival of a nineteenth-century narrative identifying religion with fundamentalist opposition to science, in particular evolutionary biology. This is reinforced by the construction of the category of a specifically religious terrorism which ignores anti-religious terrorism, for example anarchism.
This is backed up by thought experiments, first about the possible consequences of accepting beliefs that cannot be proved empirically, and second about accepting beliefs on authority: God told me to act violently and has promised me an eternal reward. Here one might ask just why ‘ignorant and unlearned men’, and women, should not feel empowered under the impulse of the Spirit to speak what is in their hearts as well as professional intellectuals. In any case, most of our life choices, religious or otherwise, are unprovable, and that includes atheism, scientism, the human rights discourse and all political ideologies. As I have already indicated in my comments above on nationalism, there is a vast area of non-rational, non-empirical characteristics shared alike by politics and religion.
I make three observations. First, most of our life choices are commitments: no one lives by proof alone. Second, taking opinions on the basis of authority and acting on them is normal, even if it is the opinion of a scientist on matters he knows little about, or public opinion, or Zeitgeist, or nationalist or political fervour. Third, acts of violence are not necessarily irrational or unjustifiable. They may serve the cause of justice. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had to suppress his religious scruples to join the Hitler bomb plot, but the plot was morally justified. We cannot even assume that Islamicist terrorism is pure gratuitous evil. There are oppressive situations that might lead us to redefine religious or irreligious terrorism as legitimate acts of war. At the very moment of writing (August 2012) there is clearly a major body of educated and morally responsible opinion that classifies ‘acts of terrorism’ by the rebels in Syria as legitimate acts of war in the service of democracy and freedom, though the evidence suggests a context of contestation much more complex and ambiguous than that. We at least need to consider the justifiability of violent responses to those largely secular western powers which have propped up corrupt regimes because they cooperate with western economic and political imperialism and have pushed democratic impulses in North Africa and the Middle East in an Islamic, even an Islamist, direction. There are plausible parallels with the oppression of Poland by the militantly secularist regime of Soviet Russia and the strong identification of religion with the movements for democratic and national self-determination that emerged in consequence. Maybe political, cultural and economic imperialism in Britain, France, Soviet Russia and Imperial or Communist China is a geopolitical constant dependent on power and opportunity, whether religious or not. Maybe war, irrational fervour, the spread of virus-like enthusiasms and the acceptance of authority are also semi-constants, which we load onto religion rather than face empirical social reality.
We in the West elide such an interpretative move because our sense of an ordered social universe depends on a secular master narrative of progress and elides instances and movements that may contradict it. We are swayed by the Whig interpretation of history, and that includes our estimate of what we call the Enlightenment, neglecting its racism, its autocracy, its expansionism and its demand for assimilation to its preferred norms, as incidental to its real liberating character.2 As I shall indicate, the distinction between real and incidental is central to rhetorical moves in this debate: Torquemada was not a real Christian; Stalin’s atheism was coincidental to his monstrous behaviour and his persecution of Christians.
However, contemporary contentions about the peculiar capacity of unproved beliefs, including specifically religious beliefs, to issue in violence do not depend on psychological constructs. They are also backed up by simply pointing to instances where religion plays a role in conflict, in particular conflicts and wars conventionally grouped under the rubric of ‘the wars of religion’ but also in similar instances today in Bosnia, or Israel or Sudan. This tactic of pointing makes an appeal to ‘the obvious’. President Assad is an Alawite; his opponents in Syria and other ‘combatants by proxy’ in the Gulf States are mostly Sunni. His supporters in Iran are Shia, therefore this is a religious war. Syria is in fact an interesting case because western media have (up to the point of writing) largely avoided the terminology of ‘sectarian conflict’ that skews our perception of the nationalist/loyalist conflict in Northern Ireland. That is because Syria is so far assimilated with Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, to the narrative of increasing progress towards democracy. We have to enquire just when the terminology of sectarian conflict is felt appropriate and why.
That pushes us to ask those questions that characterise the social sciences and are in addition rather more realistic than implausible psychological experiments as to the consequences of holding unproved and unprovable beliefs of all kinds, like utopian socialism or human rights discourse. These social scientific questions begin with an interrogation of the basic terms of the debate and of their historical genesis, not just the word ‘religion’ but also science and the rhetorically loaded terminology of warfare, terrorism, civil war, genocide etc. From the seventeenth century on natural science has released itself from an imprecise and historically and culturally embedded vocabulary, whereas social science has rightly and inevitably retained fundamental concepts that are embedded in the semantic auras of subjectively and historically located meanings. In sociology concepts are not bounded thing-like entities, though one might mention in passing that modern natural science is not at all straightforwardly a matter of entities, and involves the use of metaphors (like ‘the selfish gene’) along the lines discussed by philosophers of science like Mary Hesse. In sociology much depends on the way context inflects meanings, on the determination of the boundaries of usable concepts, and on the way these boundaries are expanded and contracted as part of the rhetoric of public contention over ‘religion’.
Let me illustrate this rhetorical manipulation. You can manipulate the reception of arguments over the value or otherwise of religion by expansions and contractions of what you take to count as religion, or science, or terrorism or war. Let us suppose someone points to the oppressive regime in North Korea as an instance of an atheist regime more bellicose than (say) the relatively religious and relatively peaceful Philippines. You can shift this instance from the irreligious column to the religious column by dropping the substantive definition of religion in favour of a functional definition, allowing you to include the mobilising power of mass rituals and the icons of sacred nationalism such as one observes in North Korea under the label of religion. For the purposes of argument you opportunistically sacrifice the contrast between atheism and theism. Christopher Hitchens did precisely this in a lecture given in Tennessee in 2004. Alternatively you play a game of comparative moral statistics over historical time: the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were responsible for so many million deaths, while religious regimes were responsible for many fewer or many more deaths.
One can make the rhetorical move whereby a Christian person or regime that is oppressive and violent, like Torquemada or the Inquisition, was not truly Christian; or suggest that a Christian person or regime that is non-violent, for example Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement, was not truly Christian or only incidentally Christian; and by the same token argue that an oppressive and violent person or regime, for example Stalin and scientific atheism, was not truly atheistic or properly scientific or only incidentally atheistic. Definitions that might seem crucial to the impact and reception of an argument are routinely expanded or contracted for rhetorical purposes.
I return to the possibility that violent acts are justifiable, given that the participants in contemporary debates assume that being peaceable and non-violent is good. They make an ethical (not an empirical) judgement which is not absolute but dependent on circumstances. So, maybe, arguments over these matters are not solely or essentially empirical at all, even when the media celebrities who conduct them, like Richard Dawkins, are implicitly or explicitly dogmatic empiricists. It is all too clear that crucial aspects of debate turn on contradictory ethical and politico-ethical judgements. As I earlier hinted, large parts of the western intelligentsia celebrate guerrilla activities and warlike martyrs like Che Guevara, and condemn Pentecostals in Latin America for supine quietism in the face of injustice. Half-hearted warriors for justice are not preferred to whole-hearted ones, and that includes the Sunni in Syria, and associated Jihadis and Salafists, whose religion helps them endure in the face of oppression. And yet religion is roundly condemned for ‘causing war’ irrespective of the justice of the cause.
The issues are complicated. Christianity has doctrines relating to the criteria for waging just war which were invoked by the papacy and other Christian leaders to condemn the attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his oppressive (and ‘secular’) Ba’athist regime. That reminds us again that one major critique of Christianity focusses on its reluctance to fight and focusses on the opportunities and comfort such reluctance may offer aggressors. As with modern criticism of Pentecostal quietism, so in classical and Renaissance times the monkish virtues of Christianity were contrasted with the citizen virtues, including readiness to fight against external and internal enemies. Humility and turning the other cheek militate against the necessities inherent in political power: Rome cannot forgive Carthage and still hope to secure the dominance on which Pax Romana depends. The same applies to all hegemons, including Britain and the USA. Britain paid very heavily for its inter-war pacifism which had a strong Christian component. Peace depends on power and the ability to respond with force, as the history of the inter-war period illustrates.
I return to difficulties associated with the blanket category of religion. Religion is an essentially contested category and one that has particular historical antecedents, for example the way it partly derives from a Christian binary between the religious and the secular originally expressed in the binary opposition between faith and ‘the world’, the saeculum, and partly, following Talal Asad, from the colonial encounter and the need to characterise the practices of non-Christians.3
The final part of my argument concerns the different relations between religion and violence depending on the type of society, in particular the contrast between cosmological religions in large-scale archaic civilisations and the developments of the Axial Age in the first millennium BC. When engaged in argument about what ‘religion’ is or does one has to specify the type of society in question and not just pluck useful instances from any period and type of society. One has in particular to look at the implications for violence and religion in the Axial Age of the different angles of transcendence emerging in Greece, Israel, Persia, India and China, and at the different degrees of world rejection they imply, including rejection of sacred kingship, sacred sexuality and sacred violence. Clearly the proclivity for violence may be a generalised biological constant based on mechanisms of evolutionary survival, but equally clearly, the way that is channelled or challenged by religion varies, and enters a new phase in the Axial Age.
In archaic civilisations religion and power are intertwined and the cosmic and the political orders reinforce each other. Sacred violence is executed by rulers to restore cosmic order against the threat of chaos. That is as true of contemporary China as of archaic China. Older configurations are constantly carried forward, so that the Axial Age carries forward formations from the archaic period, including in the Hebrew Scriptures the God of war and moral bargaining with God or the gods, and these are further embedded by the stabilisations made possible by text, as pointed out by Bellah, Assmann and others.4 Thereafter these embedded elements provide a varied repertoire that can be drawn upon according to political necessity or the requirements of different kinds of political order.
In different ways these axial civilisations embody angles of transcendence and rejections of ‘the world as it is’ that generate visions of a new kingdom of peace and righteousness. In the case of Israel these visions are initially embedded in a covenant relation between God and a particular people that is then broadened out into a vision of Jerusalem at the heart of a restored world. A restored world can either be brought into existence by violence or it may lie in wait in God’s good time. After the Jews had more than once attempted unsuccessfully to ‘restore the kingdom’ by violence the rabbis of the second century BC shifted to a pacific stance whereby the faithful were enjoined to wait in patience for the divine restoration. This was a religious expression not of power but of powerlessness. The same was true of Christianity: it emerged on a despised margin and rejected all violence. Of course, when it was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire it bifurcated into the non-violence of the powerless and the exigencies of power as expressed in a partially renewed relation between the cosmos and the political powers: partial because the subversive imagery of the peaceful kingdom is also carried forward ‘on the books’.5 This bifurcation constantly reappeared – for example in pristine monasticism, the Lollard movement and the Radical Reformation – and there is a discernible relation between the political realism of the powerful and territory and the political idealism of the powerless and voluntary association, or alternatively of what some sociologists call ‘vicinal segregation’ like the territorial enclaves maintained by the Amish. Both synagogue and church were initially non-territorial voluntary associations, and Judaism and Christianity may be jointly credited with the invention of a crucial feature of the modern world, with major premonitions in early modernity.
Christianity explicitly universalised the idea of the coming kingdom, maintaining that it was both already present and to come, and elevating the kingdom and Jerusalem to the realm ‘above’. Moreover, the Christian angle of transcendence both accepted the world as good and rejected it as ruined and in need of redemption, and this tension between the actual world and the kingdom in waiting, and between the particular role of Israel and the universal message to the Gentiles, created a symbolic logic of themes in tension and paradoxical images: the themes of the particular in tension with the universal and of the genealogical continuity of the fathers in tension with the break of a new birth that released the universal fraternity of the brothers; the disfigured face of man and the transfigured face of man; the paradoxical images of the vulnerable child who also holds the whole world in his hands; the defeated and derided man who also rises triumphant over sin and death. Occasionally it seems possible that the powerless may seize power and inaugurate a new kingdom, but these revolutions always fail and leave a pacific deposit of small radical cells, like the Quakers, and of radical themes that fructify far beyond the borders of institutional religion.
This tension is superimposed on tensions within social reality itself. There is a tension between the solidarity of the group, which generates the category of those with us and those against, thereby giving rise to potential conflict, and between the logic of universality that creates a border between those who accept the universal message and those who do not. These are twin sources of conflict written in from the beginning. Perhaps the solidarity of the group against the ‘Other’ is rooted in biological mechanisms of survival that include cooperation and empathy alongside hierarchy and defence/aggression, but the prerequisites of cultural survival are roughly the same. In short, the inevitable cost of solidarity is conflict, and insofar as religion, or some other factor like nationalism, reinforces solidarity, it generates conflict.
However, apart from Us and Them there are many sources of conflict, such as face and honour, rivalries in love and war, tensions over territory and resources, and the logic that decrees that you either expand or accept contraction, leading to overstretch and to the formation of alliances against hegemons. This social logic is inimical to primitive Christianity because it lacks an analysis of power and simply contrasts spiritual power with wickedness in high places. Only when it experiences power can it work out a casuistry of the proper use of force and the just war; but by then it is entangled in the exigencies of power, as the history of the medieval papacy illustrates, and becomes a power base in its own right. That entanglement in turn gives rise to the distinction between Church and state, originally embodied in the Dominical distinction between God and Caesar, in the Gelasian doctrine of the Two Swords, with all that implies for the slow enlargement of a free space between religious organisation and political power.
1 John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995).
2 Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
3 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular.
4 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution; Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
5 Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Jesus and the Subversion of Violence: Wrestling with the New Testament Evidence (London: SPCK, 2011).