Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE SECULAR IDEOLOGY AND THE ROOTS OF MODERN > Status Update

"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 are ignored."


"We are presented with a range of ideologies, practices, and institutions—Islam, Marxism, capitalism, Christianity, nationalism, Confucianism, Americanism, Judaism, the nation-state, liberalism, Shinto, secularism, Hinduism, and so on—all of which have been known to support violence under certain conditions. A careful examination of the varieties of each and the empirical conditions under which each does in fact support violence is helpful and necessary. What is not helpful is the attempt to divide the above list into religious and secular phenomena and then claim that the former are more prone to violence. As we shall see, such a division is arbitrary and unsustainable on either theoretical or empirical grounds."

"The arguments I have examined can be sorted into three somewhat overlapping types: religion causes violence because it is (1) absolutist, (2) divisive, and (3) insufficiently rational."

Cavanaugh then examines nine different scholars from various disciplines (economical, sociological, political, historical, psychological) who have made the argument that religion produces violence or is in some way uniquely violent.

"Kimball is typical of those who make the argument that religion is prone to violence in that he assumes a sharp distinction between the religious and the secular, without explicitly analyzing or defending such a distinction. This is not a peripheral issue; the entire force of the argument rests on this distinction. In making this assumption, Kimball and others ignore the growing body of scholarly work that calls the distinction into question. The case for nationalism as a religion, for example, has been made repeatedly, from Carlton Hayes’s 1960 classic, 'Nationalism: A Religion', to more recent works by Peter van der Veer, Talal Asad, Carolyn Marvin, and others. Marvin and David Ingle argue that “nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States.” Kimball and others who make the religion-and-violence argument might wish to defend the religious-secular distinction against these other lines of argument, but in fact they do not. The argument that religion is prone to violence goes on as if “we all know religion when we see it,” while arbitrary and undefended decisions are made as to what constitutes a religion and what does not."

"There is no reason to suppose that so called secular ideologies such as nationalism, patriotism, capitalism, Marxism, and liberalism are any less prone to be absolutist, divisive, and irrational than belief in, for example, the biblical God. As Marty himself implies, belief in the righteousness of the United States 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. The debate that was revived in the late twentieth century over a ban on flag burning is replete with references to the “desecration” of the flag, as if it were a sacred object. It is not enough, therefore, to claim that worship of God is absolutist. The real question is, what god is actually being worshipped?"

"But surely, the objection might go, nobody really thinks the flag or the nation or money or sports idols are their “gods”—those are just metaphors. However, the question is not simply one of belief, but of behavior. If a person claims to believe in the Christian God but never gets off the couch on Sunday morning and spends the rest of the week in the obsessive pursuit of profits in the bond market, then what is absolute in that person’s life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God. Matthew 6:24 personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes."

"Now, let us ask the following two questions: what percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? Whether we attempt to answer these questions by survey or by observing American Christians’ behavior in wartime, it seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state—Hobbes’s “mortal god”—is subject to far more absolutist fervor than religion. For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most would take for granted the necessity of being willing to kill for their country, should circumstances dictate."

"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 altogether"