The Myth of Religious Violence: Introduction

Last semester I had the pleasure of reading William Cavanaugh's latest book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict and honestly I thought it was absolutely brilliant, and certainly opened my eyes in many respects to common preconceptions and categories we use (religious, secular, etc...) and how they are employed in different constellations of power. I had previously read only two books by Cavanaugh, Being Consumed and his Theopolitical Imagination (I have been wanting to read Torture and Eucharist for some time, but havent gotten around to it) and this is an excellent continuation of Cavanaugh's overall project. I thought it would be an interesting thing to blog through the book, chapter by chapter (there are only four, or five if you count the intro which we will cover today).

Introduction

The title of Cavanaugh's book is certainly provocative. It seems to have become a commonplace truism that religion causes violence, and indeed that it is more prone to violence than other phenomena, and that this type of fervor seems to actually be connected, in one way or another, with the very "essence" of what religion is (that is, it is by nature inflammatory). But by "the myth of religious violence" Cavanaugh doesnt merely mean "that which is not true." What he means by the phrase is rather explicitly laid out in the opening pages of the intro:

What I call the "myth of religious violence" is the idea that religion is a transhistorical and transcultural feature of human life, essentially distinct from "secular" features such as politics and economics, which has a peculiarly dangerous inclination to promote violence. [According to the myth] Religion must therefore be tamed by restricting its access to public power. The secular nation-state then appears as natural, corresponding to a universal and timeless truth about the inherent dangers of religion. (p.3)

Thus

I use the term "myth" to describe this claim, not merely to indicate it is false, but to give a sense of the power of the claim in Western society. A story takes on the status of myth when it becomes unquestioned. It becomes very difficult to think outside the paradigm of the myth...because myth and reality become mutually reinforcing. Society is structured to conform to the apparent truths that the myth reveals, and what is taken as real increasingly takes on the color of the myth. (p.6)

Cavanaugh's essential thesis, then, is that "there is no transhistorical, transcultural essence of religion and that essentialist attempts to separate religious violence from secular violence are incoherent." (p.4). Thus what Cavanaugh is not trying to do (and this is incredibly important to note) is to defend "religion" from charges of violence (by, e.g. saying they are "actually" economically or politically motivated). What he is trying to argue is that

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. (p.4-5)

. So to speak, by identifying "religion" (or their different supposed exemplifications in Christianity, Hinduism, etc..) as violent, an implicit premise, to summarize Cavanaugh, is that the myth of religious violence tries to establish as timeless, universal, and natural a very contingent set of categories (religious and secular). So to speak, to say "religion is..." or "the secular is..." as either essentialist or even functionalist claims of the things themselves is to ignore the historically embedded location of any given definition and the constellations of power which authorize such a definition. Cavanaugh argues that "the only way I can hope to refute the myth is to do a genealogy of these contingent [historical] shifts [which led to the creation of a division between something called "religion" and something called "the secular"] and show that the problem the myth of religious violence claims to identify and solve--the problem of violence in society--is in fact exacerbated by the forms of power that the myth authorizes." (p.7). What Cavanaugh means by this will become more clear as we examine the four main chapters of his book in upcoming posts. This book is important for Cavanaugh not just to debunk false claims regarding the nature of religion as violent made that grumpy band of roving fundamentalist atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, etc... but because Cavanaugh believes the myth is so prevalent it actually shapes political policy, both domestic and foreign, by

helping to construct and marginalize a religious Other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-making, secular subject. This myth can be and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalization of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the nation-states monopoly on its citizens willingness to sacrifice and kill....My hypothesis is that religion-and-violence arguments serve a particular need for their consumers in the West. These arguments are part of a broader Enlightenment narrative that invented a dichotomy between the religious and the secular and constructed the former as an irrational and dangerous impulse that must give way in public to rational, secular forms of power. In the West, revulsion toward killing and dying in the name of one's religion is one of the principle means by which we become convinced killing and dying in the name of the nation-state is laudible and proper. The myth of religious violence also provides secular social orders with a stock character, the religious fanatic, to serve as an enemy...the danger is that, in establishing an Other who is essentially irrational, fanatical, and violent, we legitimate coercive measures against that Other. (p.5)

Thus Cavanaugh lays down the essential goal of his book:

I do not have an alternative theopolitics of my own to present in this book. 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 fnatics, and it would question of the 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. (p.14)

Thus as this basic outline of his thesis is set, we can now in upcoming posts deal with the four chapters which make up the bulk of Cavanaugh's book. In chapter one, entitled "The Anatomy of the Myth" Cavanaugh details in painstaking manner nine prominent sociologists, political theorists, etc... who in one way or another defined religion as essentially or functionally violent, and thus in one way or another utilize the what Cavanaugh has called "The Myth of Religious Violence." We will get a feel for specifics of the myth in this chapter.

In Chapter Two, "The Invention of Religion," Cavanaugh outlines a historical survey of how our contemporary notions of "religion" came to exist and how they fail to do an adequate job of outlining any sort of useful definition of either religion or the secular. Chapter Three, "The Creation Myth of the Wars of Religion," Cavanaugh goes over the history of the so-called "wars of religion" which, as the chapter title indicates, Cavanaugh details the traditional telling of the history as the "creation myth" of the modern secular state, which supposedly "overcame" religious zeal. And finally in Ch. 4 "The Uses of the Myth," Cavanaugh examines how contemporary policy, theory, and practice have actually been shaped and formed by the utlization of the Myth of Religious Violence. Look for posts in the upcoming weeks, and I hope that this series can provide a stimulating synopsis to a book that certainly opened my eyes in many ways.