Our August Myths: The Legitimacy of Theology in a Secular Age (Part D)
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Educating About, And Repenting for, Violence
Before we
conclude, and I test your patience more than I already have, I want to add one
more work—perhaps my favorite among the bunch—by the Catholic scholar William
Cavanaugh called The Myth of Religious
Violence. The title is of course
provocative, and is linked to the commonplace truism that religion causes
violence, or indeed is more prone to violence, than its secular counterparts. “What I call the myth of religious violence,”
he opens, “is the idea that religion is a transhistorical, transcultural
feature of human life, essentially distinct from secular features such as
politics and economics, which has a peculiarly dangerous inclination to promote
violence.”[i] Apart from typical “apologetic” treatments of
this theme what Cavanaugh is not trying
to do is either to exculpate Christianity from its dark past, nor to argue away
this or that instance of religious violence is “really” motivated by economics
or politics. Rather, what he is trying
to do is to argue:
what counts as religious or secular in any given
context is a function of different configurations of power....what I challenge
as incoherent is the argument that there is something called religion--a genus
of which Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and so on are species--which is
necessarily more inclined toward violence than are ideologies and institutions
that are identified as secular. I do not argue that religion either does or
does not promote violence, but rather I analyze the political conditions under
which the very category of religion is constructed.[ii]
And further:
The purpose of this book is negative: to
contribute to a dismantling of the myth of religious violence. To dismantle the
myth would have multiple benefits...It would free empirical studies of violence
from the distorting categories of religious and secular. It would help us to
see that the foundational possibilities for social orders, in the Islamic world
and the West, are not limited to a stark choice between theocracy and
secularism. It would help us to see past the stereotype of nonsecular Others as
religious fanatics, and it would question the justifications for war against
those Others. It would help Americans to eliminate one of the main obstacles to
having a serious conversation about the question "why do they hate
us?"--a conversation that would not overlook the historical U.S. dealings
with the Middle East in favor of pinning the cause on religious fanaticism.[iii]
This
perhaps already sounds familiar to us given our presentation, but without
getting into the details, lets continue a bit.
Cavanaugh notes after going over no less than nine current scholars on
the “religion causes violence” thesis to conclude that they fail to be able to
consistently and logically demonstrate there is a category called “religion”
distinct from that called “secular.” As
he writes, this does not provide a license to cease empirical study of the
conditions under which ideology becomes threatening, but it does call into
question the helpfulness of the religion/secular binary as an investigative
device. For example “as [Martin] 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.”[iv] The argument here, it should be noted, is not
that the definitions of religion and secularity are fuzzy and as such should be
discarded. Because of course any given
definition is going to have somewhat fluid boundaries. Rather what Cavanaugh is arguing is actually
that any definition of religion or the secular is always too specific.[v] It knows exactly what it wants to include, or
to exclude, and its definitions are always (somewhat feeble) post-hoc attempts
to get what it already knows it wants.
Here is the focus I want to call attention to as we end this paper: we
“know it when we see it” so to speak, because our object, “religion” has
already been historically constructed for
us by Christian colonialism.
As Brent Nongbri has put it:
Because of the pervasive use of the
word religion in the cultures of the modern western world (the “we” here) we
already intuitively know what religion is before we even try to define it:
religion is anything sufficiently resembling modern Protestant Christianity…Most
of the debates about whether or not this “ism” (Confucianism, Marxism, etc…) is
really a religion boils down to the
question of whether or not they are sufficiently similar to modern Protestant
Christianity.[vi]
In fact Cavanaugh and Nongbri
both—along with other scholars like Talal Asad and Tomoko Masuzawa—trace how
the evolution of the concept of what we today call “religion” stemmed from
fundamentally western, Christian attempts to both, after the so-called “Wars of
Religion,” find some peaceful “common-denominator” type set of abstracted
“religious” propositions everyone could agree on, and in addition also—in conjunction
to Christian missionary efforts— specifically locate the “pieces” of indigenous
culture that Christianity would “dislocate.”
In fact in an absolutely fascinating subset of chapter two of his book
entitled “The Invention of Religion Outside the West,” Cavanaugh over and over
again points out that in notebooks and autobiographies of early missionaries in
the modern period, there is constant amazement at indigenous peoples that they
“had no religion.”[vii] This as a claim was not equivalent to saying
they were “godless,” or “heathen,” as one might expect. Instead it was a very genuine observation
that they had no compartmentalization of culture whose pieces of which could be
referred more or less one-to-one with what was becoming the modern picture of Protestant
“religion.” It thus became confusing for
the missionaries, with their own notion of what “religion” was, to understand
exactly what a “conversion” for these people would look like. Thus, though this is a simplistic summary,
pieces of indigenous cultures were arbitrarily broken out of and abstracted
from the wholes which they previously were integrated with, to discern these
peoples “religion.”
Cavanaugh cites the study of Derek
Peterson (not me, I should add, though he has a great name) regarding the
Gikuyu people of Kenya: "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."[viii] Or one more example, fun fact: There was no
religion named “Hinduism,” until 1829.
There were of course Hindus
for much, much longer. Yet “Hindu” was a
Persian term, used traditionally to refer to those on the far side of the
Sindhu river. Writes Cavanaugh:
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 separation of religion from
society in India is misleading in a context in which caste hierarchy, exchange
of goods, ritual, and political power are densely intertwined.[ix]
This is what
leads the scholar Frits Staal to say “Hinduism does not merely fail to be a
religion, it is not even a meaningful unit of discourse.”[x] Initially the problem of fitting Hinduism
into “religion” when they had no creed, prophets, founder, system of theology,
single moral code, etc… was thought to be due to the intrinsic irrationality of Hinduism itself. Cavanaugh, following many others, notes
rather that this impossible construct is actually due to the fact that it is an
abstract and imaginary entity masquerading as real. This should
not be conceived as an insult to Hinduism, or any other “ism” categorized
as religion, as if Cavanaugh’s claims were somehow themselves trying to demote
them below Christianity by this claim.
What it is to do is to situate
our ideas by calling to our attention the fact that these riven things named “religion,”
are abstract, virtual entities, which actually consisted of entire forms of
life before their configuration into a Western early-modern Protestant schema. They are ghosts longing for old bones.
Conclusion
I bring this
last example of Cavanaugh up not just because it fits into the basic pattern of
some thinkers I have represented as essentially attempting to overcome the
“meta-theological” dilemma by in a sense making problematic the very categories
“theology” or “religion” and the “secular,” as they have been constructed to oppose one another, but because it
brings to bear the fact that we as the Christian church, even in areas where we think we are doing the greatest good by being
missionaries and proclaiming the gospel to convert people, can do immense harm
precisely in what we perceive as good.
We are supposed to continue a type of “incarnational” ministry of
life-on-life encounter; what occurs more often than not, however, are
ideational abstractions and theoretical “boxes” that serve as just so many
coffins for the life we were supposed to encounter and be a part of. The fact that theology is, as I have argued,
really already everywhere is not a
call to theological triumphalism.
Because in addition to the fact that “theological legitimacy” lay in a
sense in the fact that everyone is in one way or another already doing theology (good or bad) also means that theology
itself, the church itself, is responsible at whatever remove for many of the ills
associated with “colonialism,” or this or that specific instance of violence or
even passive acquiescence to violence
perpetrated by others, even if these cannot be added together in a so-called
“myth of religious violence” (again,
there being no such thing to “cause” this violence).
Much like
Cavanaugh stated for his book, the purpose of this paper has been primarily
negative, to break down, or question some of our presuppositions about the
world we exist in and are doing theology for. I do this because I fundamentally think our
situation as theologians, as Christians (even if one doesn’t fancy themselves a
theologian) is much like a story G.K. Chesterton told at the beginning of The Everlasting Man. A boy has set out, bored of his mundane life,
to find adventure, to discover “the effigy or grave of some giant,” some
wondrous thing. Having packed his things,
and started his long journey downward from the hillock he lived upon, once a
good distance away he turned back for one, last look at his homestead, only to
discover what he thought was his homely and boring hill, was actually an exotic
thing, “shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a
shield, [which] were but parts of some gigantic figure, on which he had always
lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen.” Chesterton concludes “that, I think, is a true picture of progress of any really
independent intelligence today.”[xi] Theology begins in praise, and sometimes it
takes a moment of strangeness to realize that praiseful (and terrible) things
are actually already all around us. Our
job now, is to “read” the signs of the times and bring out this latent
strangeness of our all-too familiar homes.
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