The Myth of Religious Violence Chapter Two (Part Four): The Invention of Religion Outside the West
Cavanaugh starts this next section by writing: "The theories of religious violence we encountered in ch. 1 are not only transhistorical, but transcultural as well. The genus religion extends over both time and space. Religion is seen as potentially problematic at all times and in all places. Religion is not merely a Western phenomon [on these accounts] but is something found worldwide, in the world religions of which varying lists are provided. In this section I will show how deeply problematic is the assumption of the transcultural essence of religion. In searching for the concept of religion outside the West, Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote: 'One is tempted indeed to ask whether there is a closely equivalent concept in any culture that has not been influenced by the modern west.' Smith gives in to this temptation and answers the question, 'No.'" (85).
Cavanaugh continues by noting that since Smith's seminal work a generation of scholars have shown in increasing detail his answer "No" is correct (86) and that "the concept of religion was introduced outside the West in the context of European colonization, and the introduction of the concept often served the interests of the colonizers." Intriguing to note is that "in their initial contact with native peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Pacific Islands, European explorers reported, with remarkable consistency that the local people had no religion at all. Nor was this merely equivalent to the report that they were "Godless." It was more to the effect that there was no formalized phenomenon that could stand as an equivalent to the set of types of belief Europeans had become accustomed to associate with the term. In order to assimilate peoples in an easier manner, then, this alien reality had to be tamed and so a set of items conforming to the category had to be abstracted, invented, or otherwise severed from the overall lived context of native life to produce a distilled set easy to identify, and so easy to control. Europeans denying religion to indigenous peoples was a way of denying them rights. If they lacked a [supposed] basic human characteristic like religion, or once invented as a category for them, a dreadfully inferior form of religion, the native peoples could be treated as subhuman.
"Once the native people were conquered and colonized, however, it was 'discovered' that they did in fact have religions after all, which were then fitted into the genus-and-species taxonomies of religion. Chidester's richly detailed work on the career of the concept of religion in southern Africa shows how the British and Dutch denied religion to the native peoples when they were at war with them, but subsequently discovered Hottentot, Xhosa, and Zulu religions once they had been subjugated...When they were subdued, attributing religion to indigenous peoples was at once a way of depoliticizing their cultures and a way of entering their cultures into a comparative framework in which--compared to the norm of religion, Christianity--their practices would be found wanting. And when religion was discovered, it was of course 'primitive' religion at the lower end of the evolutionary scale that culminated in Christianity." (86)
Cavanaugh quotes Derek Peterson's study of the colonial government among the Gikuyu people of Kenya [as an editorial note I would like to point out that I, Derrick Peterson, am delighted to cite Cavanaugh citing a Derek Peterson]: "Religion was supposed to be an otherworldly belief system, a contract agreed upon by God and believer. This disembodied, propositional definition of religion was the template that allowed European intellectuals to make sense of the ideas of colonized subjects. By reducing difference to sameness, by disembodying subject's ideas and practices, comparative religion functioned as a strategy of intellectual control." (87).
Or take the history of the concept in India. Smith finds no religion named "Hinduism" until 1829, and even the term "Hindu" was actually unknown in classical India. Hindu was a Persian term used to refer to those on the far side of the Sindhu river. Indeed Cavanaugh notes that in precolonial India there was no concept equivalent to religion (88) "The invention of Hinduism as a religion allowed for the differentiation of Hinduism from politics, economics, and other aspects of social life, and it also allowed for the distinction of Hinduism from other religions such as Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Such differentiation was not simply an improvement on the former system of classification, however, as if new terms suddenly allowed Indians to see what they had been missing before. To the contrary the use of the term religion has produced confusion and misdescription of the phenomenon of Indian life. As Timothy Fitzgerald points out, the seperation of religion from society in India is misleading in a context in which caste heirarchy, exchange of goods, ritual, and political power are densely intertwined."
Similarly, the differences among Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, animists, and others are poorly served by the term religion. For some purposes, what we Westerners often consider other religions than Hinduism can actually be included under the rubric of Hinduism. Where differences among these groups becomes important, Cavanaugh notes, "it is often not purely 'religious' differences that are informative." When determining the differences caste position for example is far more determinative than "religious beliefs,"; indeed Muslims and Hindus in India worship at each other's shrines.
These and other considerations have led scholars like Frits Staal to comment: "Hinduism does not merely fail to be a religion; it is not even a meaningful unit of discourse." (89); or R.N. Dandekar writes: Hinduism can hardly be called a religion in the properly understood sense of the term," and Simon Weightman notes "Hinduism displays few of the characteristics that are generally expected of a religion,": no founder, no prophets, no creed, no dogma, no system of theology, no single moral code, no uniquely authoritative scripture, no ecclesiastical organization, and so on... Thus Cavanaugh writes: "There was a time when no one in India though he or she had a religion named Hinduism. A change occurred only after more than a century of British rule. Might there be a connection? The fact that Weightman's list of what is 'generally expected of a religion' would only fully apply to Christianity should alert the reader that religion is originally a Western concept."
At first of course the problem of fitting Hinduism into the Western category was not seen by colonizers as a deficiency in the category itself, but regarded the irrationality of Hindu "religion." S.N. Balagangadhara writes "it did not occur to people then, as it does not seem to occur to people now, that this amorphous nature of Hinduism might have little to do with its 'amazing capacities.' It is more likely that the absence of structure has something to do with the fact that it is an imaginary entity." (90). In this regard opinion of Hindu religion oscillated between two poles: on type accused Hinduism of being coarsely ritualistic, obsessed with endless and meaningless ceremonies. "On this score," writes Cavanaugh, "Hinduism was routinely compared to Catholicism by European Protestants." On the other hand Hinduism was also (paradoxically) seen as mystical and otherworldly. Yet what both of these different types of attacks have in common, says Cavanaugh, is their common structure: "both...have in common..the idea that a proper religion should be essentially interior, a direct, ahistorical, and apolitical relation of the individual soul to a larger, superhuman, cosmic reality."
But again the categories continued to exist despite these tensions because they also had a certain use: "The creation of a unified religion called Hinduism established something structurally parallel to Christianity so that Christian missionaries could compare and contrast the Christian and Hindu creeds. Of course, in such a comparison, Hinduism was seen as woefully deficient." (91) But also: "Crucial to the imperial ordering of India were the binary distinctions between rational and nonrational, modern and ancient, public and private. The western concept of religion served these distinctions well...the focus on Hindu mysticism helped to separate Hinduism from the essentially distinct realms of politics and economics. If Hinduism is a religion, then it is essentially removed from the ambit of worldly power. In reality, the [now] amorphous nature of Hinduism is due to the fact that Hinduism originally included all that it means to be an Indian, including what modern Westerners divided into religion, politics, economics, and so on. But if Hinduism is what it means to be Indian, then by identifying and isolating a religion called Hinduism, the British were able to marginalize what it means to be Indian. Under British colonization, to be British is to be public; to be Indian was to be private. The very concept of religion was a tool in removing native Indian culture and Indians themselves from the exercise of public power." [italics added]
Of course Cavanaugh notes that the hegemony of this process should not be exaggerated. "In India, nineteenth century Brahmins themselves had a key role in establishing a certain high-culture Brahmanism based on Sanskrit texts as the norm for all of Hinduism." (92). It should be noted at this point that saying that Hinduism fails as a meaningful unit of discourse or as a religion is not an insult to Hinduism. This cannot be stressed enough. In fact even contemporary advocates of Hindu nationalism like the BJP party reject the confinement of Hinduism to a religion.
Similar qualifications apply to Buddhism, another "religion" of originally Indian origin. Philip Almond writes that "Buddhism" as an entity was an "imaginative creation" of Western scholars, and thus writes scathingly: "Buddhism by 1860, had come to exist, not in the Orient, but in the Oriental libraries and institutes of the West, in its texts and manuscripts, at the desks of the Western savants who interpreted it." This does not mean that the phenomena labeled Buddhism did not exist before 1860; it is rather to insist that before the nineteenth century it is not clear that there was a separate religion called Buddhism. Tomoko Masuzawa writes: "Until that time, neither European observers nor, for the most part, native practitioners of those various devotional, contemplative, divinatory, funereal, and other ordinary and extraordinary cults that are now roundly called Buddhist had thought of these divergent rites and widely scattered institutions as constituting a single religion."
The largest difficulty of defining Buddhism as a religion is, of course, that many Buddhist traditions explicitly deny belief in God or gods. (93). Martin Southwold thus poses the dilemma that arises: either theistic definitions of religion are false, or Buddhism is not a religion. Yet even here he is beholden to the categories he is calling into question, as Cavanaugh notes: Southwold, determined that Buddhism must be a religion, expands the definition to include any phenomenon that has at least one from a list of twelve selected attributes. But this is odd. What he has done is begun with the conviction that Buddhism must be a religion, and then expanded the definition of religion to include it. But why go to such great lengths, asks Cavanaugh, "to construct a religion made up of such heterogenous and atheistic practices?" (94). Of what use is the classification "religion"?
Here again the story is interestingly intertwined with colonialism. Many (especially Protestants), when Buddhism was classified as a religion, saw many of its hierarchical institutions as reminiscent of the Catholic hierarchy, and read these therefore as a corruption of the original purity of Buddhism. British Buddhologist L. Austine Waddell writes then that this schema helped spur on British help in recovering the "pristine state of Buddhism in Tibet" from the "intolerable tyranny of the Lamas." Again though, the exterior pressure should not be exaggerated. Buddhism as a world religion was also the creation of many elites in Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. This "Buddhist modernism" as it has been called as a movement presented itself as compatible in general with these aformentioned Western tendencies. The Dalai Lama, perhaps the most important present-day advocate of Buddhist modernism, "by universalizing and interiorizing Tibetan Buddhism as a religion, the Dalai Lama has offered a transcultural, beatific Buddhism easily digestible by Western consumers." (95). The problem with this, as Lopez points out, is that "the Tibetan religion has been made to float free of Tibet" such that it is now possible to embrace said Buddhism and forget Tibet.
Cavanaugh goes on to list other examples as well, but we are already risking being over-pedantic and they repeat many of the narrative features we have seen with these two examples. He concludes this section with two points.
1.) Religion is not a transcultural reality (98). Tomoko Masuzaway puts it bluntly: "This concept of religion as a general, transcultural phenomenon, yet also as a distinct sphere in its own right...is patently groundless; it came from nowhere, and there is no credible way of demonstrating its factual and empirical substantiality." Religion is originally a Western concept, and it only became a worldwide concept through Western influences (99).
2.) The transcultural concept of religion has been adopted because it is useful for certain purposes (100) "In other words religion is not a neutral scientific tool but is applied under certain circumstances in which configurations of power are relevant...As we have seen, this is most obviously the case in circumstances of direct colonial control...perhaps most importantly the discourse of religion was also a tool of secularization, the cordoning off of significant elements of non-Western cultures into a personal, apolitical realm of belief. The irony here is that, as Russel McCutcheon says, the very conception of religion as self-caused, as directly related to individual consciousness and not directly related to material factors, and therefore utterly distinct from issues of power, is itself an instrument of colonial and neocolonial strategies of power. The idea that there is a transcultural phenomenon called religion that has a dangerous tendency toward violence--and must therefore be domesticated--is not only a misdescription of reality. The idea itself should be interrogated for the kinds of power that it authorizes. The attempt to domesticate certain practices as religion, both at home and abroad, is not innocent of political use." (101).
Cavanaugh continues by noting that since Smith's seminal work a generation of scholars have shown in increasing detail his answer "No" is correct (86) and that "the concept of religion was introduced outside the West in the context of European colonization, and the introduction of the concept often served the interests of the colonizers." Intriguing to note is that "in their initial contact with native peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Pacific Islands, European explorers reported, with remarkable consistency that the local people had no religion at all. Nor was this merely equivalent to the report that they were "Godless." It was more to the effect that there was no formalized phenomenon that could stand as an equivalent to the set of types of belief Europeans had become accustomed to associate with the term. In order to assimilate peoples in an easier manner, then, this alien reality had to be tamed and so a set of items conforming to the category had to be abstracted, invented, or otherwise severed from the overall lived context of native life to produce a distilled set easy to identify, and so easy to control. Europeans denying religion to indigenous peoples was a way of denying them rights. If they lacked a [supposed] basic human characteristic like religion, or once invented as a category for them, a dreadfully inferior form of religion, the native peoples could be treated as subhuman.
"Once the native people were conquered and colonized, however, it was 'discovered' that they did in fact have religions after all, which were then fitted into the genus-and-species taxonomies of religion. Chidester's richly detailed work on the career of the concept of religion in southern Africa shows how the British and Dutch denied religion to the native peoples when they were at war with them, but subsequently discovered Hottentot, Xhosa, and Zulu religions once they had been subjugated...When they were subdued, attributing religion to indigenous peoples was at once a way of depoliticizing their cultures and a way of entering their cultures into a comparative framework in which--compared to the norm of religion, Christianity--their practices would be found wanting. And when religion was discovered, it was of course 'primitive' religion at the lower end of the evolutionary scale that culminated in Christianity." (86)
Cavanaugh quotes Derek Peterson's study of the colonial government among the Gikuyu people of Kenya [as an editorial note I would like to point out that I, Derrick Peterson, am delighted to cite Cavanaugh citing a Derek Peterson]: "Religion was supposed to be an otherworldly belief system, a contract agreed upon by God and believer. This disembodied, propositional definition of religion was the template that allowed European intellectuals to make sense of the ideas of colonized subjects. By reducing difference to sameness, by disembodying subject's ideas and practices, comparative religion functioned as a strategy of intellectual control." (87).
Or take the history of the concept in India. Smith finds no religion named "Hinduism" until 1829, and even the term "Hindu" was actually unknown in classical India. Hindu was a Persian term used to refer to those on the far side of the Sindhu river. Indeed Cavanaugh notes that in precolonial India there was no concept equivalent to religion (88) "The invention of Hinduism as a religion allowed for the differentiation of Hinduism from politics, economics, and other aspects of social life, and it also allowed for the distinction of Hinduism from other religions such as Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Such differentiation was not simply an improvement on the former system of classification, however, as if new terms suddenly allowed Indians to see what they had been missing before. To the contrary the use of the term religion has produced confusion and misdescription of the phenomenon of Indian life. As Timothy Fitzgerald points out, the seperation of religion from society in India is misleading in a context in which caste heirarchy, exchange of goods, ritual, and political power are densely intertwined."
Similarly, the differences among Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, animists, and others are poorly served by the term religion. For some purposes, what we Westerners often consider other religions than Hinduism can actually be included under the rubric of Hinduism. Where differences among these groups becomes important, Cavanaugh notes, "it is often not purely 'religious' differences that are informative." When determining the differences caste position for example is far more determinative than "religious beliefs,"; indeed Muslims and Hindus in India worship at each other's shrines.
These and other considerations have led scholars like Frits Staal to comment: "Hinduism does not merely fail to be a religion; it is not even a meaningful unit of discourse." (89); or R.N. Dandekar writes: Hinduism can hardly be called a religion in the properly understood sense of the term," and Simon Weightman notes "Hinduism displays few of the characteristics that are generally expected of a religion,": no founder, no prophets, no creed, no dogma, no system of theology, no single moral code, no uniquely authoritative scripture, no ecclesiastical organization, and so on... Thus Cavanaugh writes: "There was a time when no one in India though he or she had a religion named Hinduism. A change occurred only after more than a century of British rule. Might there be a connection? The fact that Weightman's list of what is 'generally expected of a religion' would only fully apply to Christianity should alert the reader that religion is originally a Western concept."
At first of course the problem of fitting Hinduism into the Western category was not seen by colonizers as a deficiency in the category itself, but regarded the irrationality of Hindu "religion." S.N. Balagangadhara writes "it did not occur to people then, as it does not seem to occur to people now, that this amorphous nature of Hinduism might have little to do with its 'amazing capacities.' It is more likely that the absence of structure has something to do with the fact that it is an imaginary entity." (90). In this regard opinion of Hindu religion oscillated between two poles: on type accused Hinduism of being coarsely ritualistic, obsessed with endless and meaningless ceremonies. "On this score," writes Cavanaugh, "Hinduism was routinely compared to Catholicism by European Protestants." On the other hand Hinduism was also (paradoxically) seen as mystical and otherworldly. Yet what both of these different types of attacks have in common, says Cavanaugh, is their common structure: "both...have in common..the idea that a proper religion should be essentially interior, a direct, ahistorical, and apolitical relation of the individual soul to a larger, superhuman, cosmic reality."
But again the categories continued to exist despite these tensions because they also had a certain use: "The creation of a unified religion called Hinduism established something structurally parallel to Christianity so that Christian missionaries could compare and contrast the Christian and Hindu creeds. Of course, in such a comparison, Hinduism was seen as woefully deficient." (91) But also: "Crucial to the imperial ordering of India were the binary distinctions between rational and nonrational, modern and ancient, public and private. The western concept of religion served these distinctions well...the focus on Hindu mysticism helped to separate Hinduism from the essentially distinct realms of politics and economics. If Hinduism is a religion, then it is essentially removed from the ambit of worldly power. In reality, the [now] amorphous nature of Hinduism is due to the fact that Hinduism originally included all that it means to be an Indian, including what modern Westerners divided into religion, politics, economics, and so on. But if Hinduism is what it means to be Indian, then by identifying and isolating a religion called Hinduism, the British were able to marginalize what it means to be Indian. Under British colonization, to be British is to be public; to be Indian was to be private. The very concept of religion was a tool in removing native Indian culture and Indians themselves from the exercise of public power." [italics added]
Of course Cavanaugh notes that the hegemony of this process should not be exaggerated. "In India, nineteenth century Brahmins themselves had a key role in establishing a certain high-culture Brahmanism based on Sanskrit texts as the norm for all of Hinduism." (92). It should be noted at this point that saying that Hinduism fails as a meaningful unit of discourse or as a religion is not an insult to Hinduism. This cannot be stressed enough. In fact even contemporary advocates of Hindu nationalism like the BJP party reject the confinement of Hinduism to a religion.
Similar qualifications apply to Buddhism, another "religion" of originally Indian origin. Philip Almond writes that "Buddhism" as an entity was an "imaginative creation" of Western scholars, and thus writes scathingly: "Buddhism by 1860, had come to exist, not in the Orient, but in the Oriental libraries and institutes of the West, in its texts and manuscripts, at the desks of the Western savants who interpreted it." This does not mean that the phenomena labeled Buddhism did not exist before 1860; it is rather to insist that before the nineteenth century it is not clear that there was a separate religion called Buddhism. Tomoko Masuzawa writes: "Until that time, neither European observers nor, for the most part, native practitioners of those various devotional, contemplative, divinatory, funereal, and other ordinary and extraordinary cults that are now roundly called Buddhist had thought of these divergent rites and widely scattered institutions as constituting a single religion."
The largest difficulty of defining Buddhism as a religion is, of course, that many Buddhist traditions explicitly deny belief in God or gods. (93). Martin Southwold thus poses the dilemma that arises: either theistic definitions of religion are false, or Buddhism is not a religion. Yet even here he is beholden to the categories he is calling into question, as Cavanaugh notes: Southwold, determined that Buddhism must be a religion, expands the definition to include any phenomenon that has at least one from a list of twelve selected attributes. But this is odd. What he has done is begun with the conviction that Buddhism must be a religion, and then expanded the definition of religion to include it. But why go to such great lengths, asks Cavanaugh, "to construct a religion made up of such heterogenous and atheistic practices?" (94). Of what use is the classification "religion"?
Here again the story is interestingly intertwined with colonialism. Many (especially Protestants), when Buddhism was classified as a religion, saw many of its hierarchical institutions as reminiscent of the Catholic hierarchy, and read these therefore as a corruption of the original purity of Buddhism. British Buddhologist L. Austine Waddell writes then that this schema helped spur on British help in recovering the "pristine state of Buddhism in Tibet" from the "intolerable tyranny of the Lamas." Again though, the exterior pressure should not be exaggerated. Buddhism as a world religion was also the creation of many elites in Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. This "Buddhist modernism" as it has been called as a movement presented itself as compatible in general with these aformentioned Western tendencies. The Dalai Lama, perhaps the most important present-day advocate of Buddhist modernism, "by universalizing and interiorizing Tibetan Buddhism as a religion, the Dalai Lama has offered a transcultural, beatific Buddhism easily digestible by Western consumers." (95). The problem with this, as Lopez points out, is that "the Tibetan religion has been made to float free of Tibet" such that it is now possible to embrace said Buddhism and forget Tibet.
Cavanaugh goes on to list other examples as well, but we are already risking being over-pedantic and they repeat many of the narrative features we have seen with these two examples. He concludes this section with two points.
1.) Religion is not a transcultural reality (98). Tomoko Masuzaway puts it bluntly: "This concept of religion as a general, transcultural phenomenon, yet also as a distinct sphere in its own right...is patently groundless; it came from nowhere, and there is no credible way of demonstrating its factual and empirical substantiality." Religion is originally a Western concept, and it only became a worldwide concept through Western influences (99).
2.) The transcultural concept of religion has been adopted because it is useful for certain purposes (100) "In other words religion is not a neutral scientific tool but is applied under certain circumstances in which configurations of power are relevant...As we have seen, this is most obviously the case in circumstances of direct colonial control...perhaps most importantly the discourse of religion was also a tool of secularization, the cordoning off of significant elements of non-Western cultures into a personal, apolitical realm of belief. The irony here is that, as Russel McCutcheon says, the very conception of religion as self-caused, as directly related to individual consciousness and not directly related to material factors, and therefore utterly distinct from issues of power, is itself an instrument of colonial and neocolonial strategies of power. The idea that there is a transcultural phenomenon called religion that has a dangerous tendency toward violence--and must therefore be domesticated--is not only a misdescription of reality. The idea itself should be interrogated for the kinds of power that it authorizes. The attempt to domesticate certain practices as religion, both at home and abroad, is not innocent of political use." (101).
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