Insights ▪︎ William Cavanaugh, Depaul University
The ‘Insights’ series presents interviews, conversations and discussions with scholars from academia that provide policy-makers and practitioners with insight on issues at the intersection of religion and local and global affairs.
Dr William T. Cavanaugh is a Professor of Theology at DePaul University. His specialist areas are political theology, economic ethics and ecclesiology. He recently wrote a book entitled ‘The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict’ (published 2009), in which he challenges conventional wisdom in Western Societies which posits that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence. Tabah Futures Initiative sat with Dr. Cavanaugh for a wide-ranging conversation on themes related to religion within international affairs.
TFI: Why is it difficult for scholars of religious studies to define religion?
WC: Religion is not just something that exists in the world. It is a constructed concept and people construct in all sorts of different ways under many different circumstances for all types of political purposes.
TFI: In your book, The Myth of Religious Violence, why was it important to include a section on the genealogy of religion as a concept?
WC: There is a lot about the category of religion within the discourse on religion and violence. So the purpose of the genealogy is to explain why there is so much confusion. The reason that there is so much confusion is because of our conception of history. What the concept of religion has meant in different times and different places is extremely varied. What I am trying to do is add nuance to the discussion, and avoid making blanket and essentialist arguments such as the idea that believing in a supreme God makes you more naturally inclined towards violence.
TFI: Many public and official debates on what we deem to be religious violence have called for the re-affirmation of the separation between religion and secular authority, but yet the separation is not fully practised around the world. Do you think striving for separation is an adequate solution to what we see as the problem of religious violence?
WC: No. It is not a blanket solution. First, you have to deal with the question of what do you mean when you talk about religion and what do you mean when you separate it from politics. That is going to vary from context to context. Indeed, it is simply not a distinction that people on the ground may feel comfortable with. In certain Muslim societies, the distinction between religion and politics just does not compute. It is not something that can be translated into that context; in other contexts it can. It is certainly not a solution to violence because you can have secular or atheist regimes that are violent. You can make the argument that atheistic North Korea is a violent and irrational regime. I am trying to get away from broad categorisations that state that Islam or separation is the solution for everyone.
TFI: Are people in religious studies academia and society realising that these clear distinctions and separations are not very practical?
WC: I do not know if I can make optimistic statements about societal trends. If you look at societal trends in America, they are not very encouraging. Rationality in the public sphere is lacking somewhat. I think the conversation in religious studies has moved on and there are more people trying to make nuanced and clear distinctions around these issues and problematise the categories such as ‘religious’ and ‘secular’. There is a huge movement within international relations to do just that.
TFI: In the book you argue that the West ascribes violence to religion in order to undermine religion. However, when Muslim terrorists and Jewish settlers use violence, and justify it through religious laws, wouldn’t you say this is an internal religious problem rather than Western influence?
WC: It certainly is an internal problem. It doesn’t do Muslims well to say that ISIS members are not really Muslim, just as Christians cannot say that the Crusaders or the Inquisitors were not really Christians. On the one hand, if you are Muslim you want to make the argument that ISIS have misunderstood their religion and Christians would want to make the argument that the Crusaders misunderstood their religion, and so on. But empirically speaking, we cannot disown those movements. It is an internal problem when our co-religionists commit violence in that way. But it is not just an internal problem. You cannot understand the rise of militant Shia Islam in Iran without first going back and understanding what happened after the imposition of the Shah following a military coup in 1953 supported by the US. He led a brutal regime for 26 years, which tortured and killed thousands of people. There are internal and external factors, both of which need to be looked at. In the West, we prefer to ignore the external factors and act as if we were minding our own business when one day these crazy people attacked us, ignoring the whole history of the West’s presence in the Middle East over the past century.
TFI: Would you say that modern cases of religious violence are inextricably tied to politics where politics has been a causal reason for what we have tended to term as religious violence?
WC: Without question, I think this is the case. You cannot understand Muslim fundamentalism in the 20thcentury without understanding Western intervention in the Middle East. It would be absurd to try even though some people have. Some people read and interpret Wahabi literature in a vacuum, ignoring the external political factors that influenced the thought.
TFI: You intimate in the book that absolutism in an ideology leads to violence. Wouldn’t you say every religion is absolutist? For instance, when religion talks about salvation, there is an element of absolutism there. Or when people talk about democratising the world, there is an element of absolutism.
WC: It depends on what you mean by absolutism. If what you mean is the idea that there is one idea or reality that is more important than the rest and trumps them, then sure, any major ideology such as Christianity, Islam, liberal democracy, capitalism will have that sort of element of absolutism within it. The idea that this necessarily produces violence is not the case. It will under certain circumstances and we need to look at those circumstances. I don’t think you can simply draw a direct line and say “believing in God and his laws is absolutist, and therefore anybody that believes in God is going to be more prone to producing violence than somebody that doesn’t”.
TFI: It goes back to the point about the politicisation of religion, in that you can have a religion that has absolutist views about the world or say the hereafter, but there are factors that could translate that absolutism into violence, but it is not necessary the case all the time.
WC: Salvation is an interesting case. People make the argument that if you have a belief in salvation and the afterlife then you are more willing to commit violence and be a martyr; but you can just as easily make the argument that not having a salvation and afterlife means that you do not have to worry about eternal punishment and you can do whatever you want in this world without eternal consequences. It needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis.
TFI: You argue in the book that the European wars of religion between the 16th and 17th centuries were not primarily about religion, yet the European consciousness concluded that there were. Do you think that the drive towards the triumph of liberalism over religiosity means that bias has crept into history? As a result, history is viewed through a subjective lens that elevates liberalism and denigrates religion.
WC: You see arguments from the premise that the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants over religious differences were so brutal and irrational that it required liberalism to be invented in order to save us from religious violence. These kinds of argument are almost entirely untethered from historical fact. You had Catholics killing Catholics and Protestants killing Protestants in these wars. The whole idea of religious v. secular emerged from these wars for purposes that were simultaneously theological and political. Victors get to tell history in the way want to tell history. So the idea that liberalism is the peace-maker, the state is the peace-maker is the conveyed narrative. Except the fact that liberalism was not actually invented until 150 years after the end of the wars of religion, and even then, it was over on the other side of the Atlantic. But that is kind of an inconvenient truth that the narrative over the wars of religion almost never even mentions. Undoubtedly, the history of these wars has been abused for ideological purposes.
TFI: The discipline of International Relations essentially began after those wars with the emergence of the Nation State. In its essence, International Relations is tied to a quintessentially secular moment, the so-called rise of the peace of Westphalia. However, there is a trend to reintegrate religion back in or find a way to include it within these existing paradigms of International Relations. Do you think we need a radical shift in the way that we think about International Relations and religion? Or do you think there is room within the discipline to factor in religion that does appreciate religion and its complexity?
WC:I think there needs to be a deep re-examination of the categories as they have been established, not just simply bringing religion back in. Academics such as Dan Philpot, Tim Shaw and others are pursuing this course of re-examination, but I do not think they have problematised the whole question of religion adequately. The idea of religion having been away and now it’s back is false. It didn’t really go away and come back. Instead, what is sacred migrates; for example, the idea of the ‘nation’ and independence became sacred in the 19thand 20thcenturies.
I think the categories need to be better problematised. I got in trouble with this when I gave a talk about the myth of religious violence at the University of California, Berkley. The students objected because they said they had been trying to get people to this very secular university to talk about religion; finally, they got people like me and there I was saying “lets’ not talk about it!” They were right in a sense, but let us talk about religion but as a category, as a discreet category, and not just as something out there in the world that you trip into. If we can talk about it and problematise these categories of religious and secular, then the whole conversation becomes a lot more interesting.
TFI:What would be the three most important arguments in your book, The Myth of Religious Violence, that would be important for policy and government circles?
WC: First, the world is not divided up into simple facts and beliefs. We have to recognise that everybody believes in something, and we need to be able to discuss with each other. Often this religious secular divide separates people into those with faith and those with facts, and I think that is essentially misleading. This informs a certain kind of violence in and of itself.
Another thing we ought to do is examine the violence that so-called secular regimes undertake. We need to level the playing field. Yes, of course, we should examine the idea of jihad as the providence of violent ideas in certain conditions; but we should also examine the violence that can be done through generating the idea that freedom is something we understand and need to impose on the rest of the world.
The third thing is to examine the way the West’s interaction with peoples of other parts of the world has contributed to the blowback. Leave the narrative of innocence. Former President, George W. Bush, after 9/11, asked the question ‘why do they hate us?’ and his answer was that they hate our freedoms. That is a very self-serving and misleading answer. Indeed, we create a picture that secular people are essentially peace-loving and rational whereas religious people are seen as essentially prone to irrationality and violence and therefore we need to bomb them. We need to get away from the one-size-fits-all notion, and the idea that we know better than everyone else. ■
