Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict > Status Update

"Under the de facto Protestant establishment, government was expected to give public recognition to a generic version of the biblical God and otherwise reinforce the conservative cultural values that religion represented... When separation of church and state was advocated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it usually appeared in a Protestant version meant to keep government from providing any aid to Catholic schools."

"By the 1940s, however, U.S. jurisprudence regarding religion had begun to shift to what Gedicks calls a “secular individualist” discourse, in which the inherent divisiveness of religion is highlighted. According to Edward Purcell, factors behind this shift included the influence of post-Darwinian naturalism, the prestige of the Enlightenment that accompanied the professionalization of American higher education, and the rise of legal realism. The secularization thesis accepted by so many intellectuals was beginning to manifest itself in jurisprudence. Religion was no longer seen as the glue of society, but as a nonrational and potentially regressive force that must be confined to private life to protect rational public conversation from the subjectivity and divisiveness of religion. The myth of religious violence came for the first time to be invoked in important cases involving the interpretation of the First Amendment."

"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the myth of religious violence in U.S. jurisprudence is the fact that it was made useful at a moment in U.S. history when the violence against which it warned was least likely to occur. Was the Supreme Court seriously concerned in 1971 that a marauding band of enraged Rhode Island Presbyterians would attack St. Agnes grade school and shoot the social studies teacher in the middle of her Mt. Rushmore slide show? The nation had by then elected its first Catholic president, and suspicion of Catholics as agents of a foreign potentate—the pope—although not absent, was at a historical low. Despite dire warnings about the volatility of the issues at hand, none of the Supreme Court opinions was able to point to any actual disruptions of the peace that were less than a couple of centuries old. The Rhode Island and Pennsylvania legislatures had passed the offending legislation several years before Lemon v. Kurtzman, without apparently causing more violent disagreement than other funding bills dealing with highways and health care."

"The Supreme Court’s use of the myth of religious violence has never been a response to empirical fact as much as it has been a useful narrative that has been produced by and has helped to produce consent to certain changes in the American social order. Stories of the inherent danger and divisiveness of religion helped to facilitate a shift from a predominant religious communitarianism to a predominant secular individualism in American jurisprudence and American culture."

"The second danger in the hierarchization of types of violence is that there is a pro-Western bias built into the analysis. Those who have not yet learned to disassociate religion from the use of force are threats to the peace of the world and must be dealt with as such. Their violence—being tainted by religion—is uncontrolled, absolutist, fanatical, irrational, and divisive. Our violence— being secular—is controlled, modest, rational, beneficial, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence. It is no secret who the primary “they” are today. We in the West are said to be threatened by a Muslim culture whose primary point of difference with ours is its stubborn refusal to tame religious passions in the public sphere. We in the West long ago learned the sobering lessons of religious warfare and have moved toward the secularization of the use of force. Now, we only seek to share our solution with the Muslim world."

"The "problem" is not just that various religions hold certain beliefs that can lend themselves to violence. The problem is that religious people take their beliefs too absolutely. Their obedience to authorities is too uncritical or blind. This fanaticism leads to valuing ends over means and other excesses. The problem with religion is a problem of degree. In good liberal fashion, we cannot argue about the actual content of ultimate beliefs and values, because this is beyond the ken of reason. In liberalism, individuals have a right to believe anything they want, and we cannot adjudicate between true and false. We can merely ask that these beliefs not be taken too seriously in public. At the same time, there is no theoretical limit on the degree of one’s obedience to the secular nation-state. Those who make the “ultimate sacrifice” for the flag, to the point of killing and dying for it, are not called “fanatics,” but “patriots.”"

"[Sam] Harris’s logic is impeccable: if religious people hold irrational beliefs so fervently that they will do violence for them, then there is no use trying to reason with them. They can only be dealt with by force. The myth of religious violence thus becomes a justification for the use of violence. We will have peace once we have bombed the Muslims into being reasonable."

"[Christopher] Hitchens attempts to answer the objection that secular regimes such as those of Stalin and Hitler can be just as brutal or worse than religious regimes. Hitchens responds by denying that such regimes are secular. According to Hitchens, they are religious precisely because they are totalitarian. At the heart of totalitarianism is the demand that one relinquish control of one’s life entirely to the state or supreme leader... Hitchens contends that “the object of perfecting the species—which is the very root and source of the totalitarian impulse—is in essence a religious one.” Secular totalitarian regimes are therefore religious, because they have simply taken religion and transmuted it into a different form. Even when—like Stalin’s regime—they claim to be atheist and actively work to extirpate religion from society, root and branch, totalitarian regimes thereby show themselves to be truly religious: “All that the totalitarians have demonstrated is that the religious impulse—the need to worship—can take even more monstrous forms if it is repressed.”"

As it turns out, "Religion Poisons Everything" because Hitchens identifies everything poisonous as religion.

“Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.” - Christopher Hitchens

"The fact that “religion kills” [as Hitchens states over and over in his works] cannot alone be an indictment against religion, then, because killing in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem with religion is that it kills for the wrong reasons. Killing for the right reasons can be not only justifiable but pleasing."

"The true believer in secularism can not rest until the whole world has been made safe for secularism. The United States in particular has a mission to spread the good news of secularism to the whole world, and Americans must not shy away from using military means to accomplish that mission. Thus, again, is the myth of religious violence employed not to resist violence, but to justify it, and indeed to celebrate it, so long as such violence is secular."

"President George W. Bush raised the question “Why do they hate us?” after the September 11 attacks, only to answer it with “They hate our freedoms.” As we have seen, the myth of religious violence allows its users to ignore or dismiss American actions as a significant cause of hatred of the United States because the true cause is located in the inherent irrationality, absolutism, and violent tendencies of religious actors. They are so essentially evil that our very goodness—our freedoms—is what they hate about us. This kind of self-serving nonsense generally passes in the United States for informed and sober analysis of global reality in the post 9/11 world. There might be insane people out there who hate freedom, but the well of resentment from which anti-American militancy draws is much deeper and broader than such insanity, and the solution to it is unlikely to be military."