The Myth of Religious Violence (Chapter One, Part One): The Anatomy of the Myth
[To see the first post in this series, click here]
Cavanaugh begins this chapter by reiterating "the myth," of religious violence:
Religion Causes Violence Because It Is Absolutist
Scholar One: John Hick. Hick's basic argument is a common one, for example the ultimacy of revelation in Christ has incited Christians to violence against Jews and others. This is not a dynamic unique to Christianity, says Hick, but is endemic to the nature of religion itself and so can be summarized as the absolutism of religion which often either causes or instigates violence. The problem so to speak is one of religion as such, thus the essential plurality of religions must be emphasized. Hick appeals to a transhistorical/transcultural concept of religion: "a definition of religion as an understanding of the universe, together with an appropriate way of living within it, which involves reference beyond the natural world to God or gods or to the Absolute or to a transcendent order and process." He confidently asserts this excludes "naturalistic" systems of belief like Marxism, communism, or humanism. In a later work (An Interpretation of Religion) Hick is no longer so certain about the boundary lines of religion. For example Confucianism, Theravada Buddhism, and Marxism should be called religions, he says, yet none have a deity. Thus he moves on to a "family resemblances" concept reminiscent of Wittgenstein's metaphor for language--each member of the group (religion) shares at least one characteristic with another member of the group, even though there is no one characteristic or "essence" they all share which marks them. Hick is thus confident he is able to locate, e.g., Marxism, as a distant cousin of Christianity and Islam.
Against Hick, Cavanaugh levels two major arguments (20-21): 1.) One the one hand Hick has rightly seen the flaw in attempting to identify an essence of religion, and rightly points out there is no one single meaningful category to group such widely varying phenomena while excluding others like football fanaticism and nationalism, as to render the attempt meaningless. Yet Hick still continues to distinguish between institutions that are religious and those that are secular. Marxism and nationalism are excluded "when speaking of more central members of the family resemblances of religion," but are included when we speak "more broadly about inclusions on the periphery in the extended family of religions." Which leads to the related second argument against Hick: 2) He never gives criteria which allows him to distinguish between central and peripheral phenomena. Had he done so consistently the difference between "religion" and "secular" would be dissolved, and without a clear distinction between the religious and the secular any argument that religion per se does or does not cause violence is hopeless arbitrary.
Scholar Two: Charles Kimball Kimball's book, When Religion Becomes Evil is marred, says Cavanaugh, by its inability, much like Hick, to provide any convincing way to distinguish religion from the secular. Kimball first provides five warning signs of when a religion could turn violent: absolute truth claims, blind obedience, establishment of an "ideal" time, ends justify any means, and a declaration of holy war (which, as Cavanaugh points out, is hardly helpful, since Nationalism for example easily fulfills all of these requirements). At the beginning of his book he writes how his students become flustered when he asks them to write a definition of religion, but he regards this merely as a semantic problem since "clearly" he says, "these bright students know what religion is." But do they, and does anyone, really? Cavanaugh writes "A survey of religious literature finds totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism sports, free market ideology, and a host of other institutions/practices under the rubric of religion," and ironically Kimball recognizes none of these as religious. Instead he proposes the entirely circular method of recommending a comparative empirical analysis that begins by gathering data and organizing the facts about particular religions, which, of course, it begs the question about what qualifies as a religion in the first place. Back to square one.
Scholar Three: Richard Wentz. One possible way of solving the contradictions is to move from an essentialist definition of religion, to a functionalist definition, which openly expands the definition of religion to include ideologies and practices which are usually labeled secular. This is, according to Cavanaugh, exactly what religious studies scholar Richard Wentz attempts to do in Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion. Here too, Wentz identifies the absolutism of religion (defined functionally) as the basic problem of religious violence. Wentz speculates, much like Feuerbach, that the absolute is a projection screen of a fictional, unlimited self. We shore up a shaky self image through the creation of bogus absolutes, and react in violence when others do not accept them (one can also discern shades of Freud in his concept). Thus "people frequently do bad things in the name of religion because they have taken a phantom of reason and fashioned them into an absolute." (p.25) Thus religion appears to have a particular tendency toward absolutism, and therefore violence, under Wentz' analysis. What exactly religion turns out to be in any particular instance is much more difficult to discern in Wentz' book. He lists some of the usual suspects, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, buddhism, "The Great Asian traditions,". Yet Cavanaugh notes earlier in the book religion for Wentz indicates a great deal more. "African clitorectomies, Zen koans, and Sunday church services" are defined as religious by their "uselessness." That is, "religious behaviors relate to the aspects of human life that transcend mere biological purposes. People tell stories of order and meaning." Thus Wentz writes: "from this observation it is possible to conclude that most human beings are (or have been) religious." But on the next page, "most" becomes "all." All: To be human is to be religious, says Wentz. Even those who explicitly reject organized religion are still acting religiously, and Wentz gives a particularly funny example of a Monday Night Football fan, arranging his beer and sandwiches just so, colonizing his favorite recliner, etc...in his weekly ritual.
For Wentz then, religiousness is an inescapable universal human characteristic. Therefore violence does not result from the fact of religiousness, and that some are and others arent, but from the fact that many misunderstand religion and are incapable of living with nonabsolutes and unertainty. Thus the problem, he acknowledges, is not limited to things we usually identify as religion: "faith in technology, secular humanism, consumerism, and a host of other views," all are religious and all contain proclivities to violence. Thus Wentz "is compelled to conclude, "Perhaps all of us do bad things in the name of (or as a representative of) religion." But Cavanaugh somewhat humorously concludes his overview of Wentz with these thoughts:
Cavanaugh begins this chapter by reiterating "the myth," of religious violence:
The idea that religion causes violence is one of the most prevalent myths in Western culture. From first year university students to media commentators to federal judges, the view is widespread that religion, if it does not simply cause violence, is at least a significant contributing factor in a great many of the conflicts in human history. Academic studies of religion seem to bear this out, and indeed the evidence seems incontrovertable. Blood sacrifices...holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, and pogroms have marked religious behavior. Religions were implicated in spreading European imperialism. Religion has legitimated the oppression of the poor, and of women...Add terrorism by Muslim fundamentalists and other religious groups, and the evidence against religion seems conclusive. (p.15)However, says Cavanaugh, what is meant by "religion" is by no means clear (16). In fact, in Cavanaugh's extensive research, most scholars who write on religion and violence "give no definition of religion. Others will acknowledge the now notorious difficulty of providing a definition of religion, but nonetheless will give some version of the assertion that "everybody knows what we mean when we say 'religion.'" It is a sure sign that when academics say such things, something is very wrong. Thus Cavanaugh sets up the purpose of this chapter:
The arguments I examine [in this chapter] attempt to separate a category called religion which is prone to violence because it is absolutist, divisive, and nonrational, from a secular, or nonreligious reality that is less prone to violence, presumably because it is less absolutist, more unitive, and more rational. As we shall see, such arguments do not stand up to scrutiny, because they cannot find any coherent way to separate religious from secular violence. Once we begin to ask what the religion-and-violence arguments mean by religion, we find that their explanatory power is hobbled by a number of indefensible assumptions about what does and does not count as religion. We are presented with a range of ideologies, practicies, and institutionss--Islam, Marxism, capitalism, Christianity, nationalism, Confucianism, Americanism, Judaism, the nation-state, liberalism, Shinto, secularism, Hinduism, and so on--all of which have been known to support violence under certain conditions. A careful examination of the varieties of each and the empirical conditions under which each does in fact support violence is helpful and necessary. What is not helpful is the attempt to divide the above list into religious and secular phenomena and then claim that the former are more prone to violence. As we shall see, such a division is arbitrary and unsustainable on either theoretical or empirical grounds.(16)And before he begins the examination he once again wants to make himself clear:
I am not assuming their is such a thing called religion, and then arguing that religion is not absolutist, divisive, or irrational. Rather, I analyze a variety of arguments that religion causes violence and how, in each case, the author himself cannot manage to maintain a coherent division between religious and secular violence.(17)In order to make his argument in this chapter Cavanaugh embarks on a thorough (and sometimes frustratingly so) analysis of nine scholars who are considered authorities on the religion and violence argument. He also distinguishes between definitions of religion which are "Essentialist" (i.e. they identify a common characteristic "essence" to identify religion) and definitions which are "Functionalist" (i.e. instead of identifying common characteristics always present, religion can be identified in theory by what it does or what function it performs/fulfills). To do this he uses three categories and divvies up three scholars per category:
Category 1: Religion Causes Violence Because It Is Absolutist.It should be noted that roughly all the scholars could have made it into any of the categories, so the particular categories they ended up in are somewhat arbitrary and are used for heuristic illustration. Moving them from one or another category, however, does nothing to hinder or alter Cavanaugh's argument. Thus I ask for some patience as, though I certainly will not reproduce all the details of the chapter, I feel that in order to give a fair representation of it, all three categories, and snippets from the representative scholars and Cavanaugh's deconstruction of them, is quite warranted. Ive decided due to length to break this up into several posts.
Category 2: Religion Causes Violence Because It Is Divisive
Category 3: Religion Causes Violence Because It Is Insufficiently Rational
Religion Causes Violence Because It Is Absolutist
Scholar One: John Hick. Hick's basic argument is a common one, for example the ultimacy of revelation in Christ has incited Christians to violence against Jews and others. This is not a dynamic unique to Christianity, says Hick, but is endemic to the nature of religion itself and so can be summarized as the absolutism of religion which often either causes or instigates violence. The problem so to speak is one of religion as such, thus the essential plurality of religions must be emphasized. Hick appeals to a transhistorical/transcultural concept of religion: "a definition of religion as an understanding of the universe, together with an appropriate way of living within it, which involves reference beyond the natural world to God or gods or to the Absolute or to a transcendent order and process." He confidently asserts this excludes "naturalistic" systems of belief like Marxism, communism, or humanism. In a later work (An Interpretation of Religion) Hick is no longer so certain about the boundary lines of religion. For example Confucianism, Theravada Buddhism, and Marxism should be called religions, he says, yet none have a deity. Thus he moves on to a "family resemblances" concept reminiscent of Wittgenstein's metaphor for language--each member of the group (religion) shares at least one characteristic with another member of the group, even though there is no one characteristic or "essence" they all share which marks them. Hick is thus confident he is able to locate, e.g., Marxism, as a distant cousin of Christianity and Islam.
Against Hick, Cavanaugh levels two major arguments (20-21): 1.) One the one hand Hick has rightly seen the flaw in attempting to identify an essence of religion, and rightly points out there is no one single meaningful category to group such widely varying phenomena while excluding others like football fanaticism and nationalism, as to render the attempt meaningless. Yet Hick still continues to distinguish between institutions that are religious and those that are secular. Marxism and nationalism are excluded "when speaking of more central members of the family resemblances of religion," but are included when we speak "more broadly about inclusions on the periphery in the extended family of religions." Which leads to the related second argument against Hick: 2) He never gives criteria which allows him to distinguish between central and peripheral phenomena. Had he done so consistently the difference between "religion" and "secular" would be dissolved, and without a clear distinction between the religious and the secular any argument that religion per se does or does not cause violence is hopeless arbitrary.
Scholar Two: Charles Kimball Kimball's book, When Religion Becomes Evil is marred, says Cavanaugh, by its inability, much like Hick, to provide any convincing way to distinguish religion from the secular. Kimball first provides five warning signs of when a religion could turn violent: absolute truth claims, blind obedience, establishment of an "ideal" time, ends justify any means, and a declaration of holy war (which, as Cavanaugh points out, is hardly helpful, since Nationalism for example easily fulfills all of these requirements). At the beginning of his book he writes how his students become flustered when he asks them to write a definition of religion, but he regards this merely as a semantic problem since "clearly" he says, "these bright students know what religion is." But do they, and does anyone, really? Cavanaugh writes "A survey of religious literature finds totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism sports, free market ideology, and a host of other institutions/practices under the rubric of religion," and ironically Kimball recognizes none of these as religious. Instead he proposes the entirely circular method of recommending a comparative empirical analysis that begins by gathering data and organizing the facts about particular religions, which, of course, it begs the question about what qualifies as a religion in the first place. Back to square one.
Kimballs definition of religion is unjustifiably clear about what does and does not qualify as religion. Kimball for example, subjects the violence of Hinduism to close scrutiny, but passes over the violence of other kinds of nationalism in silence, despite telling us that 'blind religious zealotry is similar to unfettered nationalism.' How are they different? Nationalism does not appeal to God or to gods, but neither do some of the institutions Kimball himself lists a religious. Kimball is typical of those who make the argument that religion is prone to violence, in that he assumes a sharp distinction between the religious and the secular, without explicitly analyzing or defending such a distinction. This is not a peripheral issue; the entire force of the argument [that religion per se causes violence] rests on this distinction...Perhaps...Kimball would want to acknowledge the difficulties with claiming that religious ideologies have a greater tendency toward violence than do secular ideologies, and simply claim that his book is about one side of the problem. In other words "yes secular ideologies can be violent too, but this is a book about how to deal with religious violence. Someone else can write a book about other types of violence." This answer would be inadequate, however, for the very distinction between religious violence and secular violence is what needs to be explained and defended. Without such a defense and explanation, there is no reason to exclude putatively secular ideologies...if [Kimball's] five warning signs also apply to secular ideologies why not frame the book as an analysis of the circumstances under which any institution or ideology becomes evil? (24)
Scholar Three: Richard Wentz. One possible way of solving the contradictions is to move from an essentialist definition of religion, to a functionalist definition, which openly expands the definition of religion to include ideologies and practices which are usually labeled secular. This is, according to Cavanaugh, exactly what religious studies scholar Richard Wentz attempts to do in Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion. Here too, Wentz identifies the absolutism of religion (defined functionally) as the basic problem of religious violence. Wentz speculates, much like Feuerbach, that the absolute is a projection screen of a fictional, unlimited self. We shore up a shaky self image through the creation of bogus absolutes, and react in violence when others do not accept them (one can also discern shades of Freud in his concept). Thus "people frequently do bad things in the name of religion because they have taken a phantom of reason and fashioned them into an absolute." (p.25) Thus religion appears to have a particular tendency toward absolutism, and therefore violence, under Wentz' analysis. What exactly religion turns out to be in any particular instance is much more difficult to discern in Wentz' book. He lists some of the usual suspects, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, buddhism, "The Great Asian traditions,". Yet Cavanaugh notes earlier in the book religion for Wentz indicates a great deal more. "African clitorectomies, Zen koans, and Sunday church services" are defined as religious by their "uselessness." That is, "religious behaviors relate to the aspects of human life that transcend mere biological purposes. People tell stories of order and meaning." Thus Wentz writes: "from this observation it is possible to conclude that most human beings are (or have been) religious." But on the next page, "most" becomes "all." All: To be human is to be religious, says Wentz. Even those who explicitly reject organized religion are still acting religiously, and Wentz gives a particularly funny example of a Monday Night Football fan, arranging his beer and sandwiches just so, colonizing his favorite recliner, etc...in his weekly ritual.
For Wentz then, religiousness is an inescapable universal human characteristic. Therefore violence does not result from the fact of religiousness, and that some are and others arent, but from the fact that many misunderstand religion and are incapable of living with nonabsolutes and unertainty. Thus the problem, he acknowledges, is not limited to things we usually identify as religion: "faith in technology, secular humanism, consumerism, and a host of other views," all are religious and all contain proclivities to violence. Thus Wentz "is compelled to conclude, "Perhaps all of us do bad things in the name of (or as a representative of) religion." But Cavanaugh somewhat humorously concludes his overview of Wentz with these thoughts:
Wentz may be right in blurring the lines between what is usually considered religion and other types of world views. he should be commended in his consistency in not trying to erect an artificial division between religious and secular types of absolutism. The price of consistency, however, is that Wentz evacuates his own religion-and-violence argument of any explanatory force or usefulness. A more economical title for his book would have been Why People Do Bad Things. The word "religion" in the title ends up meaning everything that people do that ives their lives order and purpose. The term religion is therefore so broad that it serves no useful analytic function.. It is here that I am going to end this post. The next will be dealing with the next three scholars who argue "religion causes violence because it is divisive." On a final note Cavanaugh's last sentence is in fact telling: Cavanaugh is of the opinion, not necessarily that we should find a more analytically useful definition of "religion," but that perhaps the term be dropped altogether. As we have already briefly seen, Cavanaugh wants to move towards more empirically based analysis on the historical contexts and situtations in which violence has occured, rather than using "deductive" explanations utilizing the "essence" of religion or secularism to identify primal causes. Ideologies, so to speak, have concrete circumstances which can lead them to be violent, and analyzing these are more helpful than isomorphically identifying and thus separating, different types of violence as religious or secular.
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