May 5, 2015 03:23 PM
http://www.thenation.com/article/205649/power-and-piety
EXCERPT: [...] since 9/11 we have lived in a world newly conscious of the geopolitical power of piety. Defenders of faith have of necessity adopted the same focus, albeit to opposite ends. “The idea that religion has a tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies,” writes William Cavanaugh in his revealingly titled The Myth of Religious Violence (2009). Karen Armstrong sharpens the point in the opening paragraph of Fields of Blood, her new inquiry into the relationship between religion and violence: “Modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.”
[...] But even assuming that religion is increasingly powerful rather than embattled, the polarizing question at the center of [William] Cavanaugh’s and [Karen] Armstrong’s broadsides remains important: Is the promotion of violence inherent to any religion, or is violence committed in the name of religion a mutation or betrayal of an inherently benevolent faith?
The question is a very old one, but it began to be asked with a new urgency in the 16th and 17th centuries, when emerging theological differences between Catholics and Protestants provided a rallying cry for wars that would decimate Europe. [...] This violence led many hallowed names of what might loosely be called the Enlightenment—Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Hamilton, Jefferson—to puzzle over the proper relation between piety and politics. The conclusions of their troubled cogitations left many traces, perhaps none more consequential than those in the Constitution of these United States.
Today it is fashionable to suggest that because Enlightenment thinkers were a product of their times, we should not draw general principles from their observations about religion and their ideas about states. “The category ‘religion’ has been invented in the modern West and in colonial contexts according to specific configurations of political power,” Cavanaugh argues. Because “there is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion…attempts to separate religious violence from secular violence are incoherent.” They are also, in his judgment, colonialist and self-serving: “The myth of religious violence serves to cast non-secular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of villain,” while at the same time justifying the violent acts of “secular” Western powers against others.
Like Cavanaugh, Armstrong stresses in Fields of Blood that our concepts of religion are of a piece with our times, and in turn suggests that they cannot be used to analyze the religious practices of other times and places. (This prohibition does not, however, stop her from using the word “religion” throughout the book, and from making generalizations about religion in every historical period.) She too claims that worries about religion’s role in violence are motivated by an antireligious bias, and she too sees this prejudice converging on Islam. Her book—which concludes with a discussion of “Global Jihad”—can be read as a plaidoyer for the relative innocence of Islam, and the relative guilt of the “secular” West, in generating the violence routinely attributed to Islam. But she parts company with Cavanaugh in her relentless effort to separate the religious from the political and the secular, in order to absolve the former and condemn the latter of all guilt for violence.
Armstrong’s argument is simple: “From the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft.” By “organized theft,” she means the activities of the kings, aristocrats, warriors, and other leaders of the agrarian societies that began to appear in written records in Mesopotamia in the third millennium bce. In other words, not religion but politics—the struggle for power to seize the fruits of others’ labor—has always been responsible for violence. Yet in making this claim, Armstrong draws the very distinction between religion and nonreligion that she insists cannot be made before the modern period. This is a substantial inconsistency (Cavanaugh would call it incoherent), but it needn’t necessarily compromise her broader argument, which seems to be, here and throughout the book, that religion only becomes complicit with violence when it is captured and deformed by politics, or when believers are oppressed by injustice, poverty, and violence, or, more recently, when the faithful are humiliated by atheists.
[...] In a socio-evolutionary excursus at the beginning of Fields of Blood, Armstrong even resorts to evolutionary biology to attempt to separate faith and dominion. It seems that our greedy, self-interested, and power-hungry impulses derive from the lizard brain with which we crawled out of the slime some 500 million years ago; empathy, sacrifice, and (eventually) religion, on the other hand, are the products of our mammalian limbic system and humanoid neocortex. According to Armstrong, we have “three distinct brains,” and religion belongs to the good, human(e) one, which is fighting constantly against the cruel reptilian forces within us. It is possible to make suggestive sociobiological arguments about the evolutionary role of religion in enabling pro-social behavior (Ara Norenzayan offers one in his recent Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict), but this is not one of them.
Armstrong’s yearning to think of religion as separate from power is unsatisfying and unpersuasive, but it is also an exceedingly common position among Westerners today. Perhaps we should think of this tendency as the secularized form of a religious idea—namely, a particular self-understanding of Christianity as a persecuted and nonpolitical religion of love. This possibility points to another conviction common to Fields of Blood and much other writing on the topic of religion and violence: that it is easy to distinguish between religious and secular ideas, between religious and nonreligious motives for violence.
Consider, as a silly example, the “God and War” audit released by the BBC some years ago. Surveying some 3,500 years of conflict, the auditors looked for evidence of religious motivation, leadership, or targets and rated each episode on a six-point scale from zero to five, with five being the highest degree of religious motivation. The Peloponnesian War (460–445 bce) rates a zero for religion, whereas the early Islamic conquests and the Christian Crusades rate a five. No modern war receives a five, but Al Qaeda’s current jihad is assigned a four. Nevertheless, according to the authors, although Osama bin Laden justified his campaigns in religious terms, his real concerns were “more about political order in the Arab countries, and the presence of US forces in Muslim countries.” On the other hand, “The US and allied invasion of Iraq is a war that has arguably been caused by religion: the religious conviction of one man, President George W. Bush.”
How can one minimize the role of faith in bin Laden’s actions, while maximizing it in the case of George Bush? That discrepancy alone suggests that audits like this one reveal more about the convictions of the accountants than they do about the experiences of people in the past. Where they rated the Crusaders a five, another auditor might prefer to stress (as Armstrong does) that “Crusaders would always be motivated by social and economic factors, as well as by religious zeal.”
The problem only worsens in observations about the modern age: These too often assume that the religious and the secular can at last be treated as distinct, despite the fact that so many modern conflicts have also been buttressed by religious claims.
[...] It is difficult to doubt, as we see religion invoked in so many of the conflicts of our day, that the topic Karen Armstrong has chosen is an important one. Yet that importance cannot be realized by those who, like her, separate religion too sharply from violence, nor by those who, like Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), would blame it for most of the world’s ills. Many religions have the potential to legitimize attitudes ranging from pacifism and tolerance to total extermination...
EXCERPT: [...] since 9/11 we have lived in a world newly conscious of the geopolitical power of piety. Defenders of faith have of necessity adopted the same focus, albeit to opposite ends. “The idea that religion has a tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies,” writes William Cavanaugh in his revealingly titled The Myth of Religious Violence (2009). Karen Armstrong sharpens the point in the opening paragraph of Fields of Blood, her new inquiry into the relationship between religion and violence: “Modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.”
[...] But even assuming that religion is increasingly powerful rather than embattled, the polarizing question at the center of [William] Cavanaugh’s and [Karen] Armstrong’s broadsides remains important: Is the promotion of violence inherent to any religion, or is violence committed in the name of religion a mutation or betrayal of an inherently benevolent faith?
The question is a very old one, but it began to be asked with a new urgency in the 16th and 17th centuries, when emerging theological differences between Catholics and Protestants provided a rallying cry for wars that would decimate Europe. [...] This violence led many hallowed names of what might loosely be called the Enlightenment—Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Hamilton, Jefferson—to puzzle over the proper relation between piety and politics. The conclusions of their troubled cogitations left many traces, perhaps none more consequential than those in the Constitution of these United States.
Today it is fashionable to suggest that because Enlightenment thinkers were a product of their times, we should not draw general principles from their observations about religion and their ideas about states. “The category ‘religion’ has been invented in the modern West and in colonial contexts according to specific configurations of political power,” Cavanaugh argues. Because “there is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion…attempts to separate religious violence from secular violence are incoherent.” They are also, in his judgment, colonialist and self-serving: “The myth of religious violence serves to cast non-secular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of villain,” while at the same time justifying the violent acts of “secular” Western powers against others.
Like Cavanaugh, Armstrong stresses in Fields of Blood that our concepts of religion are of a piece with our times, and in turn suggests that they cannot be used to analyze the religious practices of other times and places. (This prohibition does not, however, stop her from using the word “religion” throughout the book, and from making generalizations about religion in every historical period.) She too claims that worries about religion’s role in violence are motivated by an antireligious bias, and she too sees this prejudice converging on Islam. Her book—which concludes with a discussion of “Global Jihad”—can be read as a plaidoyer for the relative innocence of Islam, and the relative guilt of the “secular” West, in generating the violence routinely attributed to Islam. But she parts company with Cavanaugh in her relentless effort to separate the religious from the political and the secular, in order to absolve the former and condemn the latter of all guilt for violence.
Armstrong’s argument is simple: “From the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft.” By “organized theft,” she means the activities of the kings, aristocrats, warriors, and other leaders of the agrarian societies that began to appear in written records in Mesopotamia in the third millennium bce. In other words, not religion but politics—the struggle for power to seize the fruits of others’ labor—has always been responsible for violence. Yet in making this claim, Armstrong draws the very distinction between religion and nonreligion that she insists cannot be made before the modern period. This is a substantial inconsistency (Cavanaugh would call it incoherent), but it needn’t necessarily compromise her broader argument, which seems to be, here and throughout the book, that religion only becomes complicit with violence when it is captured and deformed by politics, or when believers are oppressed by injustice, poverty, and violence, or, more recently, when the faithful are humiliated by atheists.
[...] In a socio-evolutionary excursus at the beginning of Fields of Blood, Armstrong even resorts to evolutionary biology to attempt to separate faith and dominion. It seems that our greedy, self-interested, and power-hungry impulses derive from the lizard brain with which we crawled out of the slime some 500 million years ago; empathy, sacrifice, and (eventually) religion, on the other hand, are the products of our mammalian limbic system and humanoid neocortex. According to Armstrong, we have “three distinct brains,” and religion belongs to the good, human(e) one, which is fighting constantly against the cruel reptilian forces within us. It is possible to make suggestive sociobiological arguments about the evolutionary role of religion in enabling pro-social behavior (Ara Norenzayan offers one in his recent Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict), but this is not one of them.
Armstrong’s yearning to think of religion as separate from power is unsatisfying and unpersuasive, but it is also an exceedingly common position among Westerners today. Perhaps we should think of this tendency as the secularized form of a religious idea—namely, a particular self-understanding of Christianity as a persecuted and nonpolitical religion of love. This possibility points to another conviction common to Fields of Blood and much other writing on the topic of religion and violence: that it is easy to distinguish between religious and secular ideas, between religious and nonreligious motives for violence.
Consider, as a silly example, the “God and War” audit released by the BBC some years ago. Surveying some 3,500 years of conflict, the auditors looked for evidence of religious motivation, leadership, or targets and rated each episode on a six-point scale from zero to five, with five being the highest degree of religious motivation. The Peloponnesian War (460–445 bce) rates a zero for religion, whereas the early Islamic conquests and the Christian Crusades rate a five. No modern war receives a five, but Al Qaeda’s current jihad is assigned a four. Nevertheless, according to the authors, although Osama bin Laden justified his campaigns in religious terms, his real concerns were “more about political order in the Arab countries, and the presence of US forces in Muslim countries.” On the other hand, “The US and allied invasion of Iraq is a war that has arguably been caused by religion: the religious conviction of one man, President George W. Bush.”
How can one minimize the role of faith in bin Laden’s actions, while maximizing it in the case of George Bush? That discrepancy alone suggests that audits like this one reveal more about the convictions of the accountants than they do about the experiences of people in the past. Where they rated the Crusaders a five, another auditor might prefer to stress (as Armstrong does) that “Crusaders would always be motivated by social and economic factors, as well as by religious zeal.”
The problem only worsens in observations about the modern age: These too often assume that the religious and the secular can at last be treated as distinct, despite the fact that so many modern conflicts have also been buttressed by religious claims.
[...] It is difficult to doubt, as we see religion invoked in so many of the conflicts of our day, that the topic Karen Armstrong has chosen is an important one. Yet that importance cannot be realized by those who, like her, separate religion too sharply from violence, nor by those who, like Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), would blame it for most of the world’s ills. Many religions have the potential to legitimize attitudes ranging from pacifism and tolerance to total extermination...