The Myth of Religious Violence Chapter One (Part Three): The Anatomy of a Myth
In this first chapter we have seen that Cavanaugh moves from the scholars that make the general argument that religions cause violence because they are "absolutist," (first section) to scholars who tend to argue that religons cause violence because they are "divisive" (second section) to the third and final section of the first chapter, scholars who believe religions cause violence because they are at base irrational (42ff). Thus, so the argument goes, there can be no reasoning with them, and they cannot reason with each other or with outsiders. There is for them only one language: force. As we proceed in this final section of the first chapter we have to remember that the three "divisions" Cavanaugh is using to organize scholars (religion is absolutist, divisive, irrational) are not absolute but heuristic: each scholar makes numerous arguments that could theoretically fall into any of the three categories. That they show up in one or another is merely to help clarify their arguments and Cavanaugh's presentation.
1.) Bhikhu Parekh: Knowing that the more times I type his name, the higher probability there is I will brutally misspell it, I will abbreviate and call him "BP." BP is a professor of political theology at Hall University, who summarizes his stance on religion as this:
At this point, though, Cavanaugh rightly asks, "If religion is so thoroughly entwined with life and property [for BP] why are they clearly secular matters, given that secular apparently defines what is not essentially religious? What could it possibly mean to define religion in such a way that "life" falls outside its direct purview?" (43). This is not isolated in BP's work. In fact he spends most of the time "blurring the lines between religion and the secular." He even admits that "several secular ideologies such as some varieties of Marxism, conservatism, and even liberalism have a quasi-religious orientation and form, and conversely formally religious language sometimes have a secular content, so the dividing line between a secular and a religious language is sometimes difficult to draw." Of course if this is true, where does this leave his "searing indictment of religion?" Powerful nonrational impulses appear to be popping up all over in BP's analysis, "forcing the creation of the category 'quasi-religious' to try and somehow corral them back under the heading religion." (44). But of course if liberalism, which is based on the religious-secular distinction, itself is a religious impulse, the entire discussion collapses into a "heap of contradictions."
2.) R. Scott Appleby: As a historian, and as the director for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame, Appleby has bee influential in countering the argument that religion necessarily tends toward violence (to his credit). And unlike many of the previous academics that Cavanaugh has commented upon, Appleby is careful to provide a definition of religion that will guide his study The Ambivalence of the Sacred: "Religion is the human response to a reality perceived as sacred...At this point, suffice it to say that religion, as an interpreter of the sacred, discloses and celebrates the transcendent source and significance of human existence. It develops from myths--symbol laden narratives of sacred encounter--and fins official expression in doctrine and dogmas...Thus religion constitutes an integral culture, capable of forming personal and social identity and influencing subsequent experience and behavior in profound ways." (45).
While Cavanaugh says that while at this point questions could be raised about the absence of creeds and doctrines and dogmas from some things that Appleby considers religion (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc...) nonetheless the idea of creeds etc... do not appear to be central to his definition. Rather, what separates religion from other "integral cultures" is its perceived encounter with the sacred. "It is," says Cavanaugh, "the sacred that [for Appleby] accounts for the ambivalent nature of religion, tis capacity for extremes of violence and peace." To understand just what constitutes the sacred, Appleby is reliant upon Rudolph Otto's famous study, The Idea of the Holy. The sacred is "what remains of religion when its rational and ethical elements have been excluded." Which is to say, the sacred is a "transhistorical and transcultural reality experienced as an undifferentiated power beyond the moral, neither good nor evil in its immediacy. The sacred projects a numinous quality that evokes extraordinary feelings in the devout." (45). Human religion fundamentally tries to capture this encounter in codification. Yet the ambivalence of religions power for good or evil, for Appleby, stems precisely from the fact that the numinous sacred can never be domesticated into any finite account. This can either lead to intense love, acceptance, and humility, or a zeal which attempts to expunge all rival accounts. For Appleby, the sacred itself need not be ambivalent, merely the human perception, codification, and policing of it. (46).
An unfortunate and serious difficult arises for Appleby's definition, however, when one realizes that he defines religion in terms of the sacred, and the sacred in terms of religion:
He attempts to safeguard his tenuous essentialist definition of religion by coining the term "ethnoreligious," while nonetheless acknowledging that "the difference between ethnic and religious motivations are seldom, if ever, clear in practice," and that he calls "many of the conflicts 'ethnoreligious' because it is virtually impossible to disaggregate the precise roles of religion and ethnicity." (48) He even goes on to state several times that "ethnic identity itself" can often have mythic and transcendent normative dimensions which hold "inexhaustible depths of value and meaning." At this point by his own admission, says Cavanaugh, it would make more sense to simply acknowledge that ethnicity and nationalism evoke attachments that are often just as nonrational and transcendent as Christian or Muslim faiths. "To do so however would threaten [his thesis] of the singularity and peculiarity of religion as an irrational cause of violence." And for whatever reason Appleby seems compelled to continue to "pin violence on religion."
At this point Cavanaugh notes:
While Selengut gives a fairly standard definition of violence, as is often the case he gives no attempt to define religion, merely that religious violence is beyond the bounds of normal violence which attempts to secure secular things like money, land, power status, and instead fight for "sacred" goals related to God and his honor. (52) Yet Selengut directly contradicts his own description when he notes for the first three centuries of its existence Christianity was pacifist, until post-Constantine it identified itself with the Roman State. If this is the case Christianity only began to engage in "holy war" when it identified with the "secular" goals of the state: power, security, order. When turning to a more psychological analysis of religious violence, Selengut is just as confused. He notes that religious violence is often the way society deals with pent up anxiety and fear: it must find an outlet, a "scapegoat," to vent upon lest it be destroyed by internal pressures. "The violence expressed takes religious form." He goes on, though, and notes "put bluntly religious battles are not about religion, but take religious form." (53). What could it possibly mean to say this? Cavanaugh notes that like Rapaport the definition of religion in Selengut is oscillating between 1.) some set of ideas and institutions which commonly includes Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc... and 2.) myths and practices by which a social order--even a secular one--deal with conflict. Yet "only by equivocating on the meaning of religion could a secular society resolve its conflicts in a religious way."
Concluson
Writes Cavanaugh:
1.) Bhikhu Parekh: Knowing that the more times I type his name, the higher probability there is I will brutally misspell it, I will abbreviate and call him "BP." BP is a professor of political theology at Hall University, who summarizes his stance on religion as this:
Although religion can make a valuable contribution to political life, it can also be a pernicious influence, as liberals rightly highlight. It is often absolutist, self-righteous, arrogant, dogmatic, and impatient of compromise. It arouses powerful and sometimes irrational impulses and can easily destabilize society, cause political havoc, and create a veritable hell on earth. Since it is generally of ancient origin, it is sometimes deeply conservative, hidebound, insensitive to changes in the social climate and people's moral aspirations, and harbors a deep anti-female bias. It often breeds intolerance of other religions as well as of internal dissent, and has a propensity toward violence (42).And while BP is not a unilateral critic of religion, often championing that liberal society must be more tolerant of all cultures and beliefs (and even affirming that religion can evoke the best in people in a way secular society often lacks), Cavanaugh notes that BP's ultimate narrative of "man come of age" and discarding "the irrational fantasy of youth," is essentially on par with the standard Enlightenment narrative, or sociological accounts like Auguste Comte. Indeed BP has a very Weberian view of religion: namely that what religion is at bottom is a zealous (contentless) impulse that can be channeled for good or ill. Though, he does not believe that religions only deal with the "otherworldly," and in fact they have much to say about "secular" matters: "life and property are clearly secular matters. But they raise such questions as when life begins and ends, whether human life should enjoy absolute priority over animal life, what respect for it entails . . . Every religion has a view on and is actively interested in these and related questions. Matters of global justice, universal human rights, legitimacy of war, whether a country has obligations to outsiders...and the human relation to nature are again all secular, but, again, religion has much to say about them." (43).
At this point, though, Cavanaugh rightly asks, "If religion is so thoroughly entwined with life and property [for BP] why are they clearly secular matters, given that secular apparently defines what is not essentially religious? What could it possibly mean to define religion in such a way that "life" falls outside its direct purview?" (43). This is not isolated in BP's work. In fact he spends most of the time "blurring the lines between religion and the secular." He even admits that "several secular ideologies such as some varieties of Marxism, conservatism, and even liberalism have a quasi-religious orientation and form, and conversely formally religious language sometimes have a secular content, so the dividing line between a secular and a religious language is sometimes difficult to draw." Of course if this is true, where does this leave his "searing indictment of religion?" Powerful nonrational impulses appear to be popping up all over in BP's analysis, "forcing the creation of the category 'quasi-religious' to try and somehow corral them back under the heading religion." (44). But of course if liberalism, which is based on the religious-secular distinction, itself is a religious impulse, the entire discussion collapses into a "heap of contradictions."
2.) R. Scott Appleby: As a historian, and as the director for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame, Appleby has bee influential in countering the argument that religion necessarily tends toward violence (to his credit). And unlike many of the previous academics that Cavanaugh has commented upon, Appleby is careful to provide a definition of religion that will guide his study The Ambivalence of the Sacred: "Religion is the human response to a reality perceived as sacred...At this point, suffice it to say that religion, as an interpreter of the sacred, discloses and celebrates the transcendent source and significance of human existence. It develops from myths--symbol laden narratives of sacred encounter--and fins official expression in doctrine and dogmas...Thus religion constitutes an integral culture, capable of forming personal and social identity and influencing subsequent experience and behavior in profound ways." (45).
While Cavanaugh says that while at this point questions could be raised about the absence of creeds and doctrines and dogmas from some things that Appleby considers religion (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc...) nonetheless the idea of creeds etc... do not appear to be central to his definition. Rather, what separates religion from other "integral cultures" is its perceived encounter with the sacred. "It is," says Cavanaugh, "the sacred that [for Appleby] accounts for the ambivalent nature of religion, tis capacity for extremes of violence and peace." To understand just what constitutes the sacred, Appleby is reliant upon Rudolph Otto's famous study, The Idea of the Holy. The sacred is "what remains of religion when its rational and ethical elements have been excluded." Which is to say, the sacred is a "transhistorical and transcultural reality experienced as an undifferentiated power beyond the moral, neither good nor evil in its immediacy. The sacred projects a numinous quality that evokes extraordinary feelings in the devout." (45). Human religion fundamentally tries to capture this encounter in codification. Yet the ambivalence of religions power for good or evil, for Appleby, stems precisely from the fact that the numinous sacred can never be domesticated into any finite account. This can either lead to intense love, acceptance, and humility, or a zeal which attempts to expunge all rival accounts. For Appleby, the sacred itself need not be ambivalent, merely the human perception, codification, and policing of it. (46).
An unfortunate and serious difficult arises for Appleby's definition, however, when one realizes that he defines religion in terms of the sacred, and the sacred in terms of religion:
Religion is a response to the sacred, and the sacred is what remains of religion when the rational and ethical elements are stripped away. Appleby's definition...depends on the acceptance of Otto's contention that, at the heart of the sacred, there exists a uniquely numinous state of mind that is essentially religious. Appleby's definition of religion would not be merely circular if Otto could provide independent verification of the existence of the numinous as he defines it. However, Otto says 'this mental state [of the numinous] is completely self-generating'...for Otto the sacred is a mysterious yet universal aspect of human experience that cannot be directly studied. Otto's analysis prioritizes an internal, intuitive, essentialist, and ahistorical category of experience that, by its nature, is secreted away in the heart of the individual and thereby unavailable to the researcher. (46)This is ironic, because as a historian Appleby rightly notes: "it is erroneous...to imagine that some kind of transhistorical, transcultural 'essence' determines the attitudes and practices of a religion's adherents apart from the concrete social and cultural circumstances in which they live." This is, says Cavanaugh, "a salutary warning, but it directly conflicts with Appleby's definition of religion in terms of Otto's sacred. He seems torn between, on the one hand, a (very helpful) descriptive approach to the ways that, for example, Muslims and Christians use symbols in the pursuit of violence, and, on the other hand, the need for a transhistorical, transcultural essence of religion in order to pursue a more general (and not very helpful) argument about religion and violence. (47) His book is thus full of incredibly insightful particular analyses of particular uses of symbolism in violence. Yet as a whole the analysis is hampered by his general definition of religion. Such definitions "makes it necessary for Appleby to say, for example, that phenomena such as 'political Islam' and 'Hindu nationalism' are 'hybrids' of religion and politics, as if one could make sense of a purely religious Islam prior to its being 'mixed' with politics, or a Hinduism unrelated to what it means to be Indian."
He attempts to safeguard his tenuous essentialist definition of religion by coining the term "ethnoreligious," while nonetheless acknowledging that "the difference between ethnic and religious motivations are seldom, if ever, clear in practice," and that he calls "many of the conflicts 'ethnoreligious' because it is virtually impossible to disaggregate the precise roles of religion and ethnicity." (48) He even goes on to state several times that "ethnic identity itself" can often have mythic and transcendent normative dimensions which hold "inexhaustible depths of value and meaning." At this point by his own admission, says Cavanaugh, it would make more sense to simply acknowledge that ethnicity and nationalism evoke attachments that are often just as nonrational and transcendent as Christian or Muslim faiths. "To do so however would threaten [his thesis] of the singularity and peculiarity of religion as an irrational cause of violence." And for whatever reason Appleby seems compelled to continue to "pin violence on religion."
At this point Cavanaugh notes:
There is no point in trying to exonerate Yugoslav Christians and Muslims and their faith commitments from complicity in the violence that rent their nation. Appleby's analysis of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia gives a richly detailed description of Christian and Muslim participation in the violence, the use of [their] symbols to legitimate violence, and the complicity [of their] churches and mosques in condoning violence. What it does not do is provide a serious warrant for attributing violence to a sui generis interior impulse called religion.Moreover, in a bizarre move for such a careful historian, against those who attempt to (wrongly) exonerate these Christians and Muslims by noting Yugoslavia was thoroughly secularized under Tito, as a rebuttal Appleby unfortunately just starts using the violence itself as evidence for its religious nature: "Indeed, one might conclude," says Appleby, "that the enormity of the aggressors acts, the demonic character of which one observer described as 'beyond evil,' indicates the presence of intense 'religious impulses or emotion.'" (49) As in Juergensmeyer (who was covered in section two) the argument that irrational religions cause violence is here reversed: if it is violent and irrational, it must be religious. Indeed even in the aftermath of Tito's secularization, where Appleby himself admits that ignorance of religious doctrine and creed rose, while church and mosque influence declined, nonetheless to continue the obloquy against religion by arguing the religious sensibilities of the populace were merely "driven underground into the psyche."
Here the argument takes the form of identifying religion with primitive, nonrational impulses that can be used in the service of violence. Despite his best his historical instincts and careful descriptive work, Appleby is poorly served by the a priori and essentialist presuppositions of Otto's definition of religion...The danger is that despite the author's best efforts, his general theory of religion and violence will reinforce the tendency to denigrate some forms of violence as primitive and irrational [and hence religious] and thereby call our attention away from other supposedly more rational forms of violence. For Westerners, it is comforting, for example, to find the source of Iranian Islamic militancy in some mysterious encounter with the sacred, instead of in the not-so-mysterious encounter of Iran with the U.S. and British military and economic might. In 1979, when our television screens were suddenly filled with black-robed militants in Tehran chanting and pumping fists, it was more convenient to blame the matter on a mystifying irrational religious experience than examine the empirical data, which would include the U.S. backed overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and the installation of the Shah's brutal regime. I am not advocating the reduction of Islam to political and social causes, but rather pointing out the impossibility of reducing Islam to a core nonrational, nonempirical personal experience of the sacred, which is only subsequently surrounded by various social and political institutions. (49-50).3.) Charles Selengut: Selengut, a sociologist of religion, wants to focus on the essential nonrational nature of religion and its ability to produce frenzy. Ultimately, though he acknowledges that all sorts of things can modulate religious fury, its fundamental engine remains to the "core faith commitment which is beyond rational control and comprehension." Thus again is this fundamental definition of religion transhistorical and transcultural. (50) For Selengut, "ordinary judgments, canons of logic, and evaluation of behavior simply to not apply to religious activity." While Selengut tries very hard to treat his objects of inquiry with all due fairness, nonetheless his analysis repeatedly boils down to the fundamental and sharp dichotomy between secular, Western rationality, and religious, non-Western irrationality. His lens is entirely Western: "we" are rational, "they" are irrational religious zealots "entirely outside normal social rules." (51) This lens in fact affects the entire narrative of history Selengut tells: by passing through Enlightenment, Christianity has traveled from the Dark Ages and Inquisition to tolerance, while the Muslim world, having no Bacons or Humes or Kants among them, remain irrational and violent. Nor are these merely the contingent realities: this historical narrative is saturated with a sort of natural, historical evolution for Selengut. "It thus follows [for Selengut] that Islam is merely at a more primitive stage of religion." (52)
While Selengut gives a fairly standard definition of violence, as is often the case he gives no attempt to define religion, merely that religious violence is beyond the bounds of normal violence which attempts to secure secular things like money, land, power status, and instead fight for "sacred" goals related to God and his honor. (52) Yet Selengut directly contradicts his own description when he notes for the first three centuries of its existence Christianity was pacifist, until post-Constantine it identified itself with the Roman State. If this is the case Christianity only began to engage in "holy war" when it identified with the "secular" goals of the state: power, security, order. When turning to a more psychological analysis of religious violence, Selengut is just as confused. He notes that religious violence is often the way society deals with pent up anxiety and fear: it must find an outlet, a "scapegoat," to vent upon lest it be destroyed by internal pressures. "The violence expressed takes religious form." He goes on, though, and notes "put bluntly religious battles are not about religion, but take religious form." (53). What could it possibly mean to say this? Cavanaugh notes that like Rapaport the definition of religion in Selengut is oscillating between 1.) some set of ideas and institutions which commonly includes Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc... and 2.) myths and practices by which a social order--even a secular one--deal with conflict. Yet "only by equivocating on the meaning of religion could a secular society resolve its conflicts in a religious way."
Concluson
Writes Cavanaugh:
There is plenty of important empirical and theoretical work to be done on the violence of certain groups of self-identitifed Christians, Hindus, Muslims, etc...and there are no grounds for exempting their beliefs and practices from the causal factors that produce violence...Where the above arguments--and others like them--fail is in trying to separate a category called religion with a peculiar tendency toward violence from a putatively secular reality that is less prone to violence. There is no reason to suppose that so-called secular ideologies such as nationalism, patriotism, capitalism, Marxism, and liberalism and any less prone to absolutist, divisive, and irrational than belief in, for example, the biblical God. As Marty himself implies belief in the righteousness of the US and its solemn duty to impose liberal democracy on the rest of the world has all of the ultimate concern, community, myth, ritual, and required behavior of any so-called religion...We must conclude that there is no coherent way to isolate religious ideologies with a peculiar tendency toward violence from their tamer secular counterparts. People kill for all kinds of reasons. An adequate approach to the problem must begin with empirical investigations into the conditions under which beliefs and practices such as jihad, the invisible hand of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, and the role of the US as worldwide liberator turn violent. The point is not simply that secular violence should be given equal attention to religious violence. The point is that the distinction between secular and religious violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying, and it should be avoided all-together...For now we may conclude that we do not need theories about religion and violence, but careful studies of violence, and empirically based studies of violence and empirically based theories about the specific conditions under which ideologies and practices of all kinds turn lethal. (54-56).
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