Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE SECULAR IDEOLOGY AND THE ROOTS OF MODERN > Status Update
Andrew Meredith
is 7% done
"There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion, and essentialist attempts to separate religious violence from secular violence are incoherent. In "Western" societies, the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state."
— Apr 28, 2026 02:35AM
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Andrew’s Previous Updates
Andrew Meredith
is 79% done
"Well into the twentieth century, ...religion was considered to be one of the principal binding forces that held a civilized society together. Church and state were separate institutions, but religion was not separate from the culture and political life of the nation. Government was expected to protect the rights of dissenters, but it was not expected to remain neutral with regard to religion."
— May 06, 2026 11:19AM
Andrew Meredith
is 60% done
The myth of "The Wars of Religion" has "a foundational importance for the secular West, because it explains the origin of its way of life and its system of governance. It is a creation myth for modernity." It "is also a soteriology, a story of our salvation from mortal peril."
— May 05, 2026 12:47PM
Andrew Meredith
is 42% done
Cavanaugh traces the history of the word "religion" to show how it developed from the idea of "a binding duty" in the ancient world to mean "a unified system of metaphysical beliefs" (or something like this, there are over 50 different potential definitions, and that's part of the problem this chapter addresses) in the modern area.
The trick is to define it so as not to include secular "isms," which can't be done.
— May 04, 2026 12:12PM
The trick is to define it so as not to include secular "isms," which can't be done.
Andrew Meredith
is 20% done
"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 will give some version of the assertion that “everybody knows what we mean when we say ‘religion.’” This is a sign that something is probably wrong. One should react as one would when urged by a realtor to waive an inspection..."
— Apr 29, 2026 11:21AM
"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. Certain types of practices and institutions are condemned, while others—nationalism, for example—are ignored."
"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."
"What is implied in the conventional wisdom is that there is an essential difference between religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism, on the one hand, and secular ideologies and institutions such as nationalism, Marxism, capitalism, and liberalism, on the other, and that the former are essentially more prone to violence—more absolutist, divisive, and irrational—than the latter. It is this claim that I find both unsustainable and dangerous. It is unsustainable because ideologies and institutions labeled secular can be just as absolutist, divisive, and irrational as those labeled religious. It is dangerous because it helps to marginalize, and even legitimate violence against, those forms of life that are labeled religious."