Course Material Synthesis
Religion and Violence:
Religion and violence have historically been incredibly intertwined. Although many religious texts espouse violence as a means of religious proliferation, “religion is not the cause of all violence.” Rather, it is the law of scarcity that is the main culprit of societal violence. In most cases, “poverty, politics, nationalism, and even neuropsychological factors may generate violence.” As a result, “when religion causes violence, it usually does so because it has created a scarce resource.”
The propagation of violence under the guise of religion is often times an attempt to achieve other economic or political goals. In a scenario where those responsible for the violence consider themselves as righteous, their enemies are consequently, “by definition, evil.” As a result, “their deaths mean nothing” and “the only killing worth being concerned about is the slaughter of the innocents, which by definition are the ones on the righteous side, even if they were the ones who initiated the violence.”
Ironically, terrorism has become a more potent global political force than the organized political efforts to control and contain it. These rites of violence have brought an alternative view of public reality- not just of a single society in transition but a world challenged by strident religious visions of transforming change.
Jean Baudrillard also explains how in modern times, the nature of religious violence has shifted based on the development of an electronic media apparatus which directly impacts public consciousness. Terrorist acts have emerged “less from passion than from the screen: a violence in the nature of the image.” In some cases, an act of violence sends two messages at the same time: a broad message aimed at the general public and a specific communication targeted at a narrower audience.
Christianity and Violence:
Christianity has historically been “three distinct overarching faith traditions- Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism.” Each of these traditions has directly been involved with violence over the years. Christians, in a bid for global spiritual hegemony, “have resorted to violence against people of other faiths.” However, the violence is not limited to inter-faith skirmishes: “Christians have come into conflict with other Christians, not only one Christianity against another but sometimes within the same tradition, denomination, or even within the same local church body.” Subsequently, Christianity is intrinsically linked to colonialist missionary efforts “that have been coercive and oppressive to indigenous peoples, and the three Christian traditions, in their own claim to exercise coercive power, have had occasion to direct violence against those who self-identified as Christian but who were deemed subversive to church authority.”
The Christian approach to the problem of violence “includes an important tradition of pacifism”, but Christian thinkers have also embraced a realist vision that views violence as a tool that can be used justifiably, even to go to war. Since the fourth century, “Christian moral theology has advanced a tradition of thinking about justified uses of force associated with the idea of just war. Just war thinking is Christianity’s clearest institutionalized, church-related justification for using coercive force.” Just war ideas rationalize violence and serve national-self interest, yet fail to serve justice and peace in most regards. The Christian perception of holy war is an embrace of a divinely authorized war that is accepted by all the monotheistic religions of the West.
However, ultimately, “Christianity’s long history of involvement with power politics, contributing theological and ethical resources in support of using force of arms to resist evil and oppression, will prevent it from ever unifying around the pacifism so much associated with Jesus’s ethic of forgiveness and love of enemies.”
Examples:
"In Christian history, some of the clearest examples of the relationship between violence and sacred space may be found in the First Crusade and the propaganda meant to incite Christians to join it. The speech that initiated this crusade was delivered by Urban II at Clermont in 1095. This speech has not been directly preserved, but we have various versions of it from supposed witnesses or recorders. These testimonies are all gathered in the monumental Recueil des historiens des Croisades (RHC), which still forms a basic source for all studies of the Crusades."
"At the most extreme level of violence, group privileging resulted in the extermination of at least some groups of people that were seen to threaten the privileged group in power. This most clear in a number of passages, such as the following:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you— the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you- and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 7:1-6)"
"The Holy Roman Church… firmly believes, confesses and proclaims that outside the Catholic Church no one, neither heathen nor Jew nor unbeliever nor schismatic will have a share in eternal life, but will, rather, be the subject to everlasting fire."
"Within the city of Karakorum, people of different faiths had no choice but to live together. This was deeply unfamiliar for the Christians, and William was not pleased to learn that he would have to live side by side with Orthodox priests from Georgia, Russia, Syria, Greece, and Armenia, and to practice Christian rites in compulsory harmony. They all claimed to worship the same God, yet none of the Christians seemed to like one another, and they had no experience of worshipping together in their home countries. For more than two hundred years the Orthodox Christians and Catholic Christians had waged nearly perpetual war against one another. Each had excommunicated the other and condemned their believers to hell. When the Catholics had not been able to defeat the Muslims in the Crusades, they had often turned their fury on the Orthodox, looting churches and even the cathedral of Constantinople."
Islam and Violence:
The prophet said, “Allah… assigns for a person who participates in (holy battles) in Allah’s Cause and nothing causes him to do so except belief in Allah and in His Messengers, that he will be recompensed by Allah with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr).”
The above quote is one of many Quranic justifications for violence among Muslims. This sort of self-attribution by practitioners of a religion “certainly would count as strong evidence that violence was due to religious beliefs.” The hadith, the traditions about Muhammad, are permeated by the feeling of superiority among Muslims. In one instance, Al-Bukhari discusses the issue of a boy's religious status. The boy has a non-Muslim mother and a Muslim father. A group of Muslims state that custody must be given to the Muslim parent. The episode concludes with the statement that “Islam is always superior and never inferior.” Such a view, in turn, has led to the subjugation and killing of non-Muslims throughout Islamic history.
If we begin at the start of Islam, “the first expression of violence and Islam is not violence directed by or sanctified through Islam but rather violence against Muslims.” Often that violence was a response to efforts by early Muslims to curtail pre-Islamic forms of violence. Jihad, when it does occurs, appears only as an ancillary, incidental concept. Of course, early Muslim warriors were motivated by the prospect of either booty (if they survived) or paradise (if they were slain), but jihad entered as “a product of the rise of Islam, not a cause of it- a product, to be exact, of the impact of the new concept of the umma on the old (tribal) idea that one fought, even to the death, for one’s own community.”
The beginning of Islamic entrenchment in conflict was a bid for self-preservation rather than a truly religious motivation to engage in violence. Consequently, much of Islamic violence has tended to stem from societal, political, and economic disenfranchisement. It has historically been used as a necessary catalyst for change.
Modernization of Religion:
Just as Christian rulers have striven to neutralize pagan winter rituals by incorporating them into Christmas traditions, so have Christian and Muslim conquerors employed syncretism to defuse the sacred sites of rival religions.
Sacred places tend to be indivisible because “the religious events that occur there render them irreplaceable in the eyes of the believers.” Subsequently, “by worshipping at the actual place at which a revelation or miracle took place,” pilgrims expect a more intimate interaction with God. As a result, it is impossible for believers to place a value on these sites.
Religious authorities face the risk of censure if they deviate too much from positions acceptable to their followers, so inducing their cooperation in the administering of holy places can be difficult. Yet under the right circumstances, “religious leaders can introduce flexibility into the rules governing holy places and contribute a measure of harmony to contests over holy sites.”
From this perspective, today’s major organized religions have undergone a reassembling of the critical components that have historically constituted them as an operational system- a feature to be distinguished from their status as belief systems. One way of describing this shift is that they are now part of a different assemblage of elements that can include the old but also the new, as for instance in the debate within the Anglican Church about having gay bishops.
Religion has emerged as one key organizing and legitimating passion, even as it is often not the cause. It has long had the power to turn around a condition of relative peace and to mobilize and justify brutality against those who may have been your friendly neighbors. In the context of this global, multisited map of asymmetric wars and skirmishes, it can become an easy and lethal source for action that is mostly self-destructive- both in the short and in the long run.