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

"Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist acknowledged, in supporting a proposed amendment against “desecration” of the flag, that the flag is regarded by Americans “with an almost mystical reverence.” Here, the word “almost” is crucial, for American civil religion must deny that it is religion. This then is the key question: If nationalism is religious, why do we deny it? Because what is obligatory for group members must be separated, as holy things are, from what is contestable. To concede that nationalism is a religion is to expose it to challenge, to make it just the same as sectarian religion. By explicitly denying that our national symbols and duties are sacred, we shield them from competition with sectarian symbols. In so doing, we embrace the ancient command not to speak the sacred, ineffable name of god. The god is inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But that god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice."

""The West,” “modernity,” “liberalism,” and so on are not simply monolithic realities, but are ideals or projects that are always contestable. Part of the function of ideology, however, is to present these projects as based on essential realities that are simply there, part of the way things are. The religious-secular distinction is presented as embedded in the immutable nature of things. Within the West, "religion" was invented as a transhistorical and transcultural impulse embedded in the human heart, essentially distinct from the public business of government and economic life. To mix religion with public life was said to court fanaticism, sectarianism, and violence. The religious-secular divide thus facilitated the transfer in the modern era of the public loyalty of the citizen from Christendom to the emergent nation-state."

"None of this implies a grand conspiracy of intellectual and governmental elites to justify state violence. Discourse about the dangers of public religion is rather a normalizing discourse through which we explain to ourselves why things are arranged the way they are. And the dangers warned against are real. When public discourse blames terrorist attacks on religious fanaticism, common sense can see that there are dangerous pathologies linked to some of what is called religion. The problem with the myth of religious violence is not that it condemns certain kinds of violence, but that it diverts moral scrutiny from other kinds of violence. Violence labeled religious is always reprehensible; violence labeled secular is often necessary and sometimes praiseworthy. Secularism, therefore, need not be antireligion. It is rather against the undue influence of religion on public life."