Religious Violence
Dear Friends,
I recently read The Myth of Religious Violence. Since my history professors trained me too well to not provide citations, here is the complete citation if you should wish to read the book yourself:
Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
This is my second attempt to write a review of this book. Hopefully, gremlins will not mess with this version. St. Patrick, pray for me. In my original attempt, I had planned to give you guys the basic outline of Cavanaugh’s argument. In the intervening weeks, however, I have realized that his argument is too nuanced for me to fully share here and it would be doing him a disservice to try. Therefore! If you are interested in this topic, I do recommend this book because it is very interesting, and he covers a lot of detail. It is a rather academic book; so if you read it, be prepared to pay attention. What I am going to do here is share with you the three things that have stuck with me most from this book.
First, he asks, “How Do You Define Religion?” We have this dichotomy of religion versus secular. It is generally understood that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and practices like shamanism are religions or religious in nature. Whereas, nationalism, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, economics, business, and such are secular institutions. There might be good reasons and uses for these distinctions; but Cavanaugh argues that for the purposes of studying violence, these distinctions are basically arbitrary. What criteria do proponents of the argument that religions tend towards violence use to distinguish what is a religion or not? Belief in God or gods is not enough to define religion because Buddhism is just as atheistic as Marxism. The presence of ceremonies and rituals does not tell us if something is religious or secular because secular institutions have rituals too — think of how we swear in the president, salute the flag, the intense loyalty of the Marine Corps, or even how the Super Bowl is celebrated. Moreover, things like Marxism and Nazism which were both secular political regimes took on trappings of religion. (Don’t believe me? Read Sacred Causes by Michael Burleigh. I read sections in college, and it is very interesting. While it is not his main point, Burleigh does demonstrate that while stamping out religion, political regimes began acting like religions themselves.) Religious groups have engaged in war but so have secular organizations. Both have committed atrocities. So, why do we act as if religious violence is somehow different or worse than secular violence? They’re both awful.
All this to say that, for the purposes of studying violence, the distinction of religious versus secular is unhelpful because no one has been able to provide criteria to distinguish between religious and secular. What would be more helpful is to study the kinds of beliefs, situations, and fears that tend to radicalize people and move them toward violence. These can be religious or secular in nature, but what is common across groups that people are ready to die for?
The second thing that struck me was his discussion of the Wars of Religion. The idea of religions being violent and the secular state bringing peace between religions started in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century with writers such as John Locke and Voltaire. According to them, the various Protestants could not get along with each other or the Catholics, and the Catholics were out to get everybody; so there was constant wars. Then the state (the king or parliament or governing body of your choice) came along and forced all the groups to tolerate each other. Cavanaugh points out that in order for this to be the case, the combatants have to understand religion as a distinct sphere of life and choose to fight over it. This was not the case during the Middle Ages or in basically any other part of history. His whole discussion reminded me of a conversation I had with a jujutsu instructor. I asked whether jujutsu was associated with a religion historically speaking; the instructor said, “Yes. But, I mean, rice was associated with religion.” Religion formed the whole framework for every activity of life, and if you took away that frame, your life would collapse (not to say that everyone followed their religion very well, but if you keep track of your calendar by the holy days for the church, you need religion around just so that you can have a functioning schedule).
So in the Middle Ages, religion wasn’t even thought of as its own thing. It was life in that it was part of every part of life to the point where people didn’t even realize it. Then the Reformation came along and suddenly, you had the option of choosing which all-encompassing frame of life you were going to follow. Only then did people slowly start to view religion as a distinct area of life, but that was a slow painful process. This process was in its infancy during the Wars of Religion and the combatants still didn’t see religion as being a separate entity from politics or life. Therefore, according to Cavanaugh, it is anachronistic to say that the Wars of Religion were about religion.
Then he adds that if they were fighting over religion, we would expect to find that Catholics were always fighting Protestants, and Protestants of one denomination were always fighting the Protestants of another denomination, and everyone was fighting the Muslims. In so far as a very academic book can be funny, Cavanaugh’s refutation of that expectation is hilarious because he proceeds to go on for pages outlining some (but not all) of the various combinations of allies and enemies in the “Wars of Religion.” Here are a few: Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V vs. the pope, Catholic France with the Muslim Turks vs. the Catholic emperor, Catholic Bavaria with Lutheran princes vs. Catholic Habsburgs, Catholic governor with Protestant Huguenots vs. other Protestants, French Catholic and Protestant lower classes vs. the nobility and the Catholic crown, Protestants and Catholics vs. a Protestant ruler, Lutheran ruler of Saxony with Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II vs. Bohemia (whose religion is unspecified), and Catholic France and Protestant Sweden vs. Catholic Habsburgs. These are just a few of the many combinations, and religion does not seem to be the determining factor for who fights whom.
Cavanaugh concludes the chapter, “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 the 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.” (p. 179)
The third point that has stuck with me from reading this book was the discussion about how this myth has been used to justify violence. Cavanaugh argues that when a secular organization says someone is fighting for religious reasons, we mean that they cannot be argued with rationally and that because their reason is religious there can be no other cause. Since the religious cause is not rational and it is their sole cause, there can be no other response other than to fight them until they submit to rational, secular government. This then excuses secular governments and people from examining their own uses of violence. This is often used by Western governments to justify military actions in the Muslim Middle East. The idea circulating is, “We’re a secular nation that has learned to tolerate but not include religion in our civil discourse, this is good and therefore the things we do are good. But in the Middle East, religion is their reason for everything, and they don’t have other rational reasons for hating us.” But the secular West has perpetrated real wrongs and/or supported horrible dictators in the Middle East (Cavanaugh mentions several instances in the twentieth century that I had never heard about); these go unexamined while the jihadist terrorists are examined in minute detail. Thus, under the assumption that religions are particularly violent and secular institutions that are always restrained, secular violence is not examined.
He also notes that within the US, the myth of religious violence has been used to justify various laws and policies that exclude religion or religious groups from various areas of civic life — education being the most significant. This is interesting and problematic because a false myth (namely, that religions are particularly divisive and violent) should not be the basis for determining the proper relation between church and state.
Anyway, this was a very interesting book and I hope this post has provided you food for thought.
Pax!
DS
Post Script — A quick note on the pictures. I heard a story that the Medici family in Florence were very interested in Machiavelli and his writings about how to be the strongest ruler. In an experiment to see his theories play out in real time, they decided to pit the two leading artistic geniuses against each other. So, they commissioned Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to come paint battle scenes on opposite sides of the same room. These two artists both had a fair amount of pride and, needless to say, working in the same space didn’t go very well. As a result, both artists became furious and left their battle scenes incomplete never to work near each other again. At least, so goes the tale.
