Religion, violence, secularism, and spirituality
Jonas Atlas in conversation with professor William Cavanaugh
Many years ago, when I first read Professor William Cavanaugh’s book The myth of religious violence, it thoroughly shook my views on religion and secularism. Religion is generally thought of as something inherently violent because it is based on irrational beliefs, while secularism is seen as a rational way of organizing difference of opinion. Cavanaugh’s book, however, completely upends such commonplace assumptions. Considering the continuing popularity of the book, I clearly was not the only one who found his arguments intriguing. Even though the book was published in 2009, he was recently invited to the Netherlands to give several lectures on the topic at various universities. We met in Nijmegen, where he ended his tour, and had a long, in-depth conversation about various blind spots in the daily discourses on religion, secularism, and spirituality.
Jonas: When the topic of religion enters the conversation — whether in a talk show or at a family dinner — often someone will say: “Religion is the biggest cause of violence, so the world would be far better off without it!” I guess you’re no stranger to such clichés. So, what has become your general response?
William: I must admit that having a book called The Myth of Religious Violence sometimes feels like having a book called The Myth of the Spherical Earth. People just look at you like you’re a Flat Earther or somebody who’s just not in touch with reality. That’s why I often start my talks by emphasizing what I’m not trying to say. My argument is not that the causes of violence are not really religious because they are in essence political or economic. Just listen to what certain religious fanatics have to say about their reasons for doing things. Neither do I think it helps to say: “Oh, the Crusaders aren’t really Christians” or “ISIS is not really Islamic.” Normatively, I think it’s important for Christians to say: “The Crusaders got it wrong,” and for Muslims to say: “ISIS does not comprehend Islam” but descriptively and empirically, you can’t just excuse your own tribe by saying: “Oh, they don’t really belong to us, and anybody who does bad things is not really a Christian or a Muslim.”
So, I fully accept that people can do violence inspired by Christianity, Islam, or any other tradition, but what I call the myth of religious violence is the idea that something called ‘religion’ is inherently more prone to violence than ‘secular’ ideologies and institutions. That’s of crucial importance: the whole notion of religion being so overly violent, is always based on a comparison with the secular. However, when you simply look at the last hundred years and ask: “Who’s done more violence, atheists or Muslims?” The answer is “atheists.” And it’s not even close. Under communist regimes, tens of millions of people were killed. Another example is World War I, which was driven by nationalism and resulted in 38 million casualties. That completely dwarfed the numbers from four centuries of crusades. Or take a typical example like the Spanish Inquisition. Over the course of 350 years, the estimates are that between three and five thousand people were killed for heresy. That’s about the same number of people the Khmer Rouge killed every three days.
Jonas: When you present such obvious facts, it seems rather bizarre that they’re so easily brushed over and that the violence of religion is continuously contrasted with the supposed peacefulness of secularism.
William: One of the problems is of course that those two categories are often very unstable. People have in mind that religion means Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Islam while Marxism, nationalism, atheism, or capitalism are secular. However, in a lot of literature on the topic, there’s all sorts of smoke and mirrors going on, making the distinction very unclear. The famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, for example, looked at the violence of certain communist regimes and decided that you could actually describe them as religious. In contrast, he thought that Martin Luther King was not really a Christian. Since Christianity is a religion and therefore violent, what King was doing couldn’t have been religious. So, everything he disliked simply ended up in the category of religion while everything he liked ended up in the category of secularism.
Jonas: If the distinction between religion and secularism eventually does not help us to make much sense of the violence around us, why do people hold on to it? Where does the myth of religious violence get its strength?
William: It serves a specific ideological purpose. The concept originated in the early modern conflicts between the Church and the state, supporting the political efforts to marginalize the Church. Once that had happened, the same idea was exported to the rest of the world in the process of colonization. People were told to keep their religion private, while the state or the colonial power would deal with the public affairs.
Today, in domestic policy, the myth helps to reinforce secular arrangements. It allows you to exclude Christians, Muslims, and others from certain kinds of presence in the public sphere, for example in education or politics. Policies like banning school prayer or not allowing the state to subsidize Catholic schools often stem from the idea that the danger of religious violence must be prevented.
In a similar vein, the myth also legitimizes foreign policy, primarily in the way we deal with Muslims all over the world. The idea is: “We are secular and therefore peaceful, while they still mix religion and politics, which makes them inherently dangerous.” Their violence is thus seen as fanatical, our own violence is seen as rational. As a result, we feel obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy.
Jonas: The contemporary ideological use of the myth of religious violence is of course build on a long history of important social dynamics. In your books you often refer to those as “migrations of the holy.” I’ve always found it a very useful concept to put the religion versus secularism binary in perspective.
William: It certainly is. In fact, I’ve borrowed that concept from the historian John Bossy, who talks about the way the holy migrates from the Church to the state in the period of the 15th to the 18th century. One example is the divine right of kings. That’s not a medieval idea. It came to the fore in early modernity, when people like Louis the 14th, the famous Sun King, started borrowing Christian symbols to deify their monarchy. In later periods this migration of the holy continues. In the economics sphere, for example, there’s Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism: commodities in capitalism take on an exalted life of their own, while the life of human beings is being drained away as they become mere tools for the production of those commodities. And when it comes to politics, a lot of scholars argue that nationalism replaced Christianity in the West. Issues of “transcendence” and “belonging” increasingly became a matter of devotion to the nation from the 19th century onwards. No longer were you supposed to kill and die for God, but now you were expected to do so for your country. So, you can see migrations of the holy in several areas that we usually call secular, and exactly by calling them secular we can ignore just how much they are being treated as divine.
Jonas: This blindness to the sacralization of secular concepts also often distorts our perception of violence in other parts of the world. In India for example, extremist forms of Hindu nationalism are on the rise, supported as they are by the BJP government. However, their violence, which is perpetrated against various minorities, is mostly explained as a form of “religious fanaticism” while we could just as well call it “nationalist fanaticism.” The secular and religious ideologies simply cannot be separated in this case. The same is true in a country like Iran. A few years ago, while travelling there, it struck me how ‘religion’ certainly isn’t the first thing you’ll encounter when driving from the airport to a hotel in Teheran. The call to prayer, for example, is a lot more subdued than in other Islamic countries. You almost don’t hear it unless you’re really close to a mosque. National flags, on the other hand, are everywhere, as are the many portraits of martyrs who died protecting their homeland. So, why focus on the religious elements and ignore the nationalist elements when they are inextricably linked?
William: In the case of Iran, we could even add another interesting layer to this problem. When the Islamic Revolution happened in 1979, people in the US of course started paying attention and were surprised: “What is this? What are these crazy people doing? They seem to hate us for no reason at all! Those Shiites must have some bizarre religious convictions!” So, we shrugged our shoulders and portrayed it as yet another obvious example of religious violence. Doing so allowed people to ignore everything that had been going on before the revolution. But the fact of the matter is that in 1953 the United States and Great Britain had overthrown a democratically elected government in Iran. They installed the Shah, who imposed a secular dress code and spend the next 26 years torturing and killing people with full American support. It’s a prime example of the myth of religious violence: by portraying all the violence in modern day Iran as merely the result of religion, we don’t have to look at the whole history of American imperialism in Iran and other parts of the Middle East.
Jonas: And to take the complexity one last step further, it’s a little-known fact that Khomeini used to write mystical poetry. During the Iran-Iraq war his poetry inspired the soldiers, often by recalling the image of al-Hallaj, a famous Sufi mystic. Al-Hallaj was presented as a freedom loving Persian who had been killed by violent Arabs. So, just like al-Hallaj, the soldiers had to be willing to die for truth and freedom. I bring this up because people generally perceive Sufism as “the spiritual side of Islam” and therefore do not associate it with dogmatic leaders like Khomeini, let alone with violence. Nevertheless, many other examples of spiritual violence could be given, not just related to Sufism but to all sorts of spiritual traditions. So, I’m wondering whether this ignorance of spiritual violence might also be an important part of the myth of religious violence because the concept of ‘spirituality’ allows people to do all sorts of religious stuff, but still see themselves as secular. In a sense, it even makes a sort of distinction between ‘good religion’ and ‘bad religion’. The former is called ‘spirituality’ and is seen as devoid of violence, while the latter is called ‘organized religion’ and is portrayed as inherently oppressive. In your book, however, you do not strongly engage with the concept of spirituality. So, how would you assess its place?
William: This is indeed not something I have given much thought so far, but it’s an interesting perspective. So let me give some quick thoughts. The term spirituality can of course be used in several ways. One of the more common approaches is a contrast with terms like faith, religion, or church. People say they’re not into institutional or public forms of religion but feel drawn to spirituality, which they see as something private and harmless. In that respect it simply reinforces the privatization of what is called “religion” by making it even more ethereal. So, that fits and emphasizes the myth of religious violence: religion should deal with our inner lives, while the state deals with our public lives.
However, another way of using the term might be to see it as overarching term for “technologies of the soul.” In a Christian context this could for example be related to the spiritual disciplines a monk undergoes. But once again, this way of looking at spirituality can also be applied to secular outlooks. For example, the discipline and dedication of a soldier, who devotes himself to a larger cause, could also be seen as a form of spirituality.
Jonas: Approaching spirituality as “technologies of the soul” in connection to soldiers, makes me think of yet another example of spiritual violence which is not often talked about: the militarization of mindfulness. I recently came across the work of Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist whose Ted-talk on mindfulness has been viewed many millions of times. As it turns out, she works with the US Army to measure the brain activity of soldiers and teach them mindfulness techniques. In an interview she once said that the main purpose of the project is “to understand how resilience training might provide soldiers with ‘mental armor’” and to help them “base their decisions on what is actually in front of them instead of on assumptions.” It’s all wrapped in soft sounding language, but eventually it comes down to using mindfulness as a tool for more focused shooting. It goes to show, yet again, how all sorts of ideas, whether religious, secular, or spiritual can all turn violent.
William: We could connect this to René Girard’s famous book Violence and the Sacred. A lot of people misread Girard and think that he’s arguing that religion causes violence, but his argument is actually the opposite: violence causes religion. To maintain social order, people start justifying the violence that they inflict on scapegoated groups by creating an aura of sacredness around their violence. Yet, this dynamic infects so called traditional religious societies as well as modern secular Western ones.
Girard was trying to level the playing field and that’s also what I’m after in my book. I wanted to show that it’s not only Christians and Muslims who portray those dynamics. Atheists and humanists do the same. People kill for all sorts of things. They kill for gods, but they also kill for flags and oil and freedom and ethnicity and free markets and on and on. So, let’s stop talking about religious violence and let’s simply talk about violence. Let’s question the roots of violence. And when we do so, we’ll see that violence feeds on binaries in a lot of ways. There’s always a story of “us versus them.” The binary of religious versus secular is just another one of those stories that can just as well lead to violence. Just look at the war in Iraq: it was based on the premise that we were going to transform the Middle East into the image of the secular west. In that case, the binary justified violence instead of opposing it.
Jonas: What then if we drop such problematic binaries and start wondering how to overcome violence? Which guiding principles would you propose?
William: That’s a good question, and not one to which I have a very complete answer at all. I’m trying to deal with one limited question about violence — the question of the relationship between religion and violence — but the question of what causes violence in general and how you deal with it is of course very complex. So let me narrow it down just a little and offer you a personal theological point of view in which I am influenced by René Girard as well. As a Christian, Girard proposes that the most important aspect about the figure of Christ lies in the identification of the divine with the victim. Normally people try to overcome their internal strife by projecting their violence on a scapegoat. A minority is portrayed as the cause of all evil and is viciously attacked, offering the perpetrators of the violence a sense of collective victory. It’s the logic of “us versus them” taken to its extreme. But the figure of Jesus subverts this ancient logic. His life and message are not about championing the victim in a reversal of the “us versus them”, they are about the actual identification of God with the victim, and thus about a breaching of the “us versus them”. To me, seeing God in the victim is a powerful way of understanding Christianity, and a very profound way of dealing with violence.
This interview is based on edited and redacted fragments of a longer podcast conversation in which William Cavanaugh and Jonas Atlas are joined by Paul Van der Velde, a professor of Hinduism and Buddhism at the Radboud University. Together they also discussed violence in historic and contemporary Buddhism, questioned whether or not words like “religion” and “secularism” should be completely abandoned, delved deeper in professor Cavanaugh’s views the Catholic Church’s relationship with violence, and wondered whether we could perhaps interpret Donald Trump’s view on life as a form of extremist positive thinking. You can listen to the whole conversation below or search for “Re-visioning Religion” in your favourite podcast app.
