Truth
America, Christianity and Violence
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 26 September 2008
Does Religion Cause Violence?
William T Cavanaugh, Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota, wrote an article entitled “Does Religion Cause Violence?” in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin which begins terribly but ends better. He says in his second paragraph:
Given certain conditions, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths can and do contribute to violence.
After this admission, the rest of the essay should be very short, “Yes”. No doubt the editors of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin would have been disappointed by such a short work, and so, two paragraphs into the essay, the author changes his mind. He does not want to discuss something that has to be so briefly admitted, but something else:
What is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular”.
The author is more ready to refute this “conventional wisdom” than the one expressed in his title. It seems that he can do nothing better than to show Christians are no worse than anyone else at being violent. Yet a moment’s thinking shows that any such admission is itself an utter condemnation of the so called Christian ethic of love, especially love of one’s enemies. Indeed, if Christians, after 2000 years of practice, are no better at loving others than any other human being, whether of a religious temperament or not, then Christianity is utterly valueless in its central objective. The author has already said:
Christianity is not primarily a set of doctrines, but a lived historical experience embodied and shaped by the “empirically observable actions” of Christians.
It is therefore easy to distinguish Christians from others by their “empirically observed actions”, and Christianity, Christians will accept, even if others do not, is a religion. Now other religions, especially those with common origins with Christianity, namely the patriarchal religions, must be similarly distinguishable by their “empirically observed actions”. So we have a group of religions, the practitioners of which are easily identifiable by their behaviour.
Arbitrary and Incoherent
To attempt a refutation of the association of religion and violence, the essay begins with Charles Kimball (When Religion Becomes Evil) who says more violence has been perpetrated by religion than by any other institution in human history. It seems that to prove it, religion must be separable from other institutions in history, yet “what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions”, and “the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ is an arbitrary and incoherent division”.
We are on the third paragraph, and we have some sort of authority talking incoherently about what he deems to be incoherent itself. He is obviously no judge of what is coherent or not, and that is hardly surprising given that he is a theologian. It is typical apologetic double talk, but this theologian is too idiotic even to disguise it. He has just told us that Christians can be recognized empirically by their actions, and, by analogy, so too can others such as Moslems and Jews, then he cites a list of academic authors who say religion cannot be defined, and so cannot be recognized or distinguished from other human institutions. Which does he believe? The answer must be both! He needs to think religion cannot be distinguished from, say, fascism so that religion cannot easily be blamed for fascism’s sins, but likes to think that Christianity is otherwise easily distinguishable, presumably because, in his mind, Christians are supernaturally good.
Despite his original claims that Christians are easily distinguished by their behaviour, Cavanaugh argues that people cannot be adequately divided on the basis of their religiosity. The argument that religion is the pre-eminent fomenter of violence therefore cannot be true because people cannot be easily distinguished on the basis of their religion. Jehovah’s witnesses were persecuted by patriotic Yankees in the 1940s for refusing to salute the flag, an example given by Martin Marty Politics, Religion, and the Common Good. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were hardly responsible for the violence in this instance, it was the Yankee patriots, but nine out of ten of these patriots, being among the 90% of Americans who are Christians, were not displaying any Christian love in their actions, quite the opposite. And the hatred they displayed would have been exacerbated by their perceived heresy of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Indeed, patriotism was probably a cover for religious enmity, it being war time.
The author thinks that when he has exposed one falsehood in the evidence of one of his opponents, he has disposed of the argument. No doubt it is a result of the heavy conditioning of Christianity that authority matters. Discredit an authority in some way, and all his evidence is thereby disposed of. His personal credibilty might be, but evidence rarely depends on one person, and when it does it is poor evidence. The resurrection of Christ is in that category, but it does not faze this writer. Martin Marty might have not considered what really motivated the people who castrated the Jehovah’s Witnesses in those vile persecutions, but even if this were a genuine instance of patriotism oppressing religion, it is but one instance in the opposite scale from the massive weight of anti-Christian evidence. Weight of evidence matters.
Fuzziness of Definition
A supposed fuzziness of definitions means Christianity cannot be singled out to blame when Christian fascists try to set up a fascist world, as the German Nazis did in the 1930s. The Germans were Christians for centuries before anyone thought of fascism, and spent many of those centuries, along with Christians of other nationalities, killing people, before they decided to call themselves fascists. Modern US Christians like to boast that 90% of Americans are Christians, and the same was true of Germans in 1933. Plainly, then fascism was built and supported by Germans who had been brought up as and professed Christianity.
Any fuzziness is immaterial. People whose raison d’etre was supposed to be love, actually supported a hateful regime and ideology, ones which on the face of it were incompatible with their prior beliefs. If fascism alone was to blame then Christianity was no use in resisting this evil, was it now? The question is, “Was it at all helpful in establishing it?”. If the love of Christianity, whatever the Christian Lord meant by it, had come to mean self-love, and a preference by God for them over other human beings, then Christianity is precisely the justification of an elitist class. It is then sociologically and psychologically identical with fascism, and the religion of Christianity is a mirror of the political ideology of fascism.
Though Cavanaugh thinks the definition of religion is too fuzzy to allow adequate distinctions to be made to be able to label some violence as religious and other violence as secular, when it comes to Richard Wentz (Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion), we find that he “casts a very wide net when considering religion”. One might have thought from this extended attempt to persuade us of the fuzziness of religion that the best way to overcome it is indeed to cast a wide net, but it is not, it seems. No, now we learn:
The term “religion” is so broad that it serves no useful analytical purpose.
Notice that what was once fuzzy, now is clear enough to be seen as inappropriately caught in this wide net! The terrible fuzziness that was such a problem after paragraph three now is no problem at all in discerning that “faith in technology, secular humanism, consumerism, football fanaticism” are not forms of religion. So the fuzziness could be sorted out by classifying activities into the “technology, secular humanism, consumerism, and football fanaticism” class that is evidently easily discerned and the religious class where we have a criterion provided by Cavanaugh, the “empirically observed actions” of religious believers. You might be getting the notion that here is a typical Christian cod scholar. He writes whatever suits him paragraph to paragraph hoping that his audience, believers, evidently will not notice his incoherence, especially as he is so good at pointing it out in Christian critics.
Apparently the accusers of Christianity erect arbitrary barriers between “secular and religious ideologies and institutions, and ignore the former”. The example considered shows this is false. It might be true in the Christian mind that Christianity is distinct from fascism, nationalism or whatever, but it is not so in reality, though one would have thought it was, if Christianity meant anything to its professors.
God and Fanaticism
We learn that Mark Juergensmeyer (Terror in the Mind of God) says religion is not only divisive but elevates division to the cosmic level of a supposed cosmic war of God against Evil. But Juergensmeyer cannot see that the US is a religious fundamentalism because he is dazzled by its secular constitution, and blind to the religiosity of its people and rulers, whereas Cavanaugh seems to blame US faults on to its alleged secularism. Secular conflicts are primarily conflicts of ownership, and they are bad enough, but how much worse they become when God is behind the disagreement. Jews, who are usually rational, and not excessively religious people, become fanatical when they think they are following God’s instructions of 3,500 years ago in landgrabbing Palestine from the people who lived there for the last 1300 years. Only religion can so easily distort normal ideas of justice to justify such blatant theft.
Sensible Jews have no desire to enter the conflict by settling on Palestinian fields, when they have comfortable and successful urban lives in the west, exposing we goyim as lazy selfish layabouts. And, if Christians had any sense, and believed their own God, they would certainly not be provoking conflict in Israel by siding with and financing the oppressors. At the time of Christ, the Christian God was a Jew oppressed by a military power, the Romans, and favoured the poor. The Romans have now gone, but the Jews are still with us. Christian and Jewish oppression of the Palestinians might have the same outcome. The oppressed survive, the oppressors disappear.
The author is on to the fanaticism argument, though, calling it “absolutism”:
Absolutism that makes obedience blind and causes the believer to subjugate all means to a transcendent end.
It turns out to be no go for the absolute is decided a priori and cannot be tested empirically. The author chooses this term, “absolutism”, then tells us it is not scientific. Well indeed, it is not, if it means God, yet that has not bothered any believer hitherto, and the observer of religions has no need to prove God to be able to discover who thinks there is such a being. People who believe in an Almighty God who is watching them and judging them will behave in a characteristic way, and their belief can be seen in their behaviour. It is the criterion that Cavanaugh gave himself. If someone is willing to give their life for their belief in a supernatural being, then we can be fairly certain that the belief is sincere whether it is true or not, though some people might be tricked into giving their lives when they would not have wanted to. Nor does it matter whether this supposed absolute is absolute or not, because the characteristic called absoluteness is a fancy just as God is a figment. What matters is that the believer is convinced the god is mighty enough to give supernatural rewards and punishments.
Which God? Does it Matter?
The real question is, what god is actually being worshiped?
No it is not. All gods are idols, so the name or substance of the god is quite irrelevant. What matters is the belief in the supernatural agent. It has to be a belief capable of generating fanaticism. Football fans can be tribal and “fanatical”, but few are willing to lay down their lives for their heroes because they do not believe there is any supernatural reward for doing it. The absolutism that Cavanaugh invented is religious belief in a supernatural judge of some kind. Believing in such a being is what can make people fanatical, and it is a characteristic of religion not football.
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 obsessive pursuit of profit in the bond market, then what is “absolute” in that person’s life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God.
Is this the same absolute that Cavanaugh just told us could not be tested empirically? Suddenly he has discovered that he can test it empirically, and what he has found is sufficiently wrong to satisfy him. The real observer would want to do a little more careful observation than that described here. The man could believe, as many US Christians do now and Old Testament Jews did that God rewards believers in this world financially. Ironically, the author mentions here Mammon, the idol of greed in the passage in Matthew (Mt 6:24) warning Christians not to make this mistake, because God is not Mammon, though US Christians have convinced thenmselves He is. The point is that believers can and do convince themselves that what they believe anyway is what God wants. It makes them just the same as non-believers, except that they think God backs them. That is what engenders the violence and intolerance of Christianity.
The author cannot see any difference between the higher fanaticism of religious war and war in general. Secular outlooks might progress to be world views, and a religion is also a world view, but although it is true to say that communism, for example, is a world view and in that sense a religion, there is no supernatural God behind such a secular world view, and it is the justification believed to be given by an Almighty God that transforms any common argument into a holy war or jihad. Holy warriors are madmen. They think they have God with them, yet they have only their own fanaticism, and will never know otherwise once they decide to lay down their lives for their beliefs. No religious beliefs are worth dying for. Unless the circumstances are exceptional, only your children are worth dying for.
It seems the invoking of a holy war by the US president in his war on terror refutes the obvious association of holy war with religion. The unbridled Christian religiosity of Bush seems to have escaped Cavanaugh. The jihadic character of Bush’s war and rhetoric is the product of his Christian fanaticism, magnified by his desire to get the support of the 60 million other evangelical Christian fanatics registered to vote in the US. Bush seems to believe his own propaganda but he is still singing to the choir.
Much of Cavanaugh’s essay is an extended straw man, or a series of straw men. He sets up one straw man after another in the pretence of criticising some fault in the arguments of his targets, but rarely are the arguments the ones presented, or they are not as presented. They are meant to be easily knocked down. Thus his “absolute” argument is an argument against his own construction. His readers think he is being devastatingly criticial of his targets when he is being devstatingly critical of the straw men he puts before the reader to be able to knock over easily, and look like a hero.
Religious or Secular Fanaticism?
He thinks the American is more likely to be willing to die for their country than for their religion. That refutes the general argument that people are more fanatical about religion than country! Of course it does no such thing, even if it is true. It is a straw man. The US is a rather special country, set up as an ideal democracy, and Americans are rightly proud of that, and are more willing to defend it than, say, Zimbabweans are willing to die for their country. Yet Pakistanis who might not be keen on dying for Pakistan, might be more willing to die for their Moslem religion. Not only that, but the American case does not even dispose of the Christian case in general. Certainly, in history Christians have been ready to die for their Christianity, and the practice had to be forbidden by declaring suicide to be a mortal sin that did not bring salvation, as many had thought before then! It simply cannot be gainsaid, and the evidence of 2000 years of Christian history, not to refer to any other religion, proves that Christianity has a terrible record of murder and torture. It is fanaticism and the delusion that Christians can do no wrong, that has caused it.
Then again, secularism is tarred by the religious brush because even liberalism is a religion, we learn. Yet, liberals proper do not accept any influence of supernatural beings in worldly life, though they tolerate those who do as long as they do not try to foist their false beliefs on to others. It is something believers cannot stop doing because they need the comfort of others equally deluded. If there are any gods, they leave us to do the living because we are mortal and should have no pretensions to immortality. Having pretensions to immortality is the God delusion. Believers think they will end up immortal. They think they will become gods, and some think they will become gods by dying in the act of killing others for God.
Being a liberal, I cannot see any God that has created us as His creatures looking favourably on any of us undoing His work with bunker bombs, semtex or machine guns out of fanatical belief, even if it is belief in God. Moreover, I know, because I too can read the Christian bible, that the Christian God was adamant that love, even love of one’s enemy, was the proper way to live. What we find always is the fanaticism without the acceptance or even understanding of the pacific and loving message. It is this that makes Christians cruel and violent, and certainly condemned to hell fire, if their holy book is to be believed at all.
Cavanaugh is critical of any false dichotomy between religious violence and common violence because the “secular” west considers itself in an ideological war with an irrational and violent Islam in a “clash of civilizations” world view. Cavanaugh’s motivation in this is quite sound, but confused by the idea that it is “the west” that is acting and not the United States that is leading a western crusade, and that “the west” (ie the US) is acting as a secular state. Under Bush and and the Republican neocons, the US is anything but secular despite its deliberately secular constitution. The US is a Christian Fundamentalist theocracy wrapped in the disguise of a secular state. The Evangelical Republicans rule the US, and aim to make the US overtly right wing Christian. It is simply that at present it is not overt.
So the US war on terror is really a crusade against Islam in fact. The sad thing is that most US rednecks cannot seem to comprehend that the US has brought the hatred of the Third World on to itself by its long term foreign policy of upholding anti-populist right wing dictators everywhere. Americans simply ignore history in this, or are utterly ignorant of history and their own government’s foreign policy over the last century. Americans are fixated on the heroics of the US coming to the aid of Europe against the Nazis, whereupon they put on dark shades and have been unable to see what happened since, including the growth of fascism in their homeland.
They seem utterly unable to comprehend that the US financed and supported Saddam Hussein for several decades before they decided they had created such a monster that even they did not like him. Not surprisingly, Iraqis distrusted Yankees thereafter, and when hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens have been killed by Batman supposedly saving them from the Joker, their homes destroyed, and resources robbed, the survivors are scarcely likely to turn to Batman in gratitude, are they? Yet that is what Americans seem unable to comprehend. “Why do people hate us , when all we want to do is good?” Try looking at what you really do! Have you already forgotten killing two million Vietnamese? Or are they still just Gooks?
Yankees are quite unable to empathise with anyone outside their local church. Can they empathise at all? They cannot put themselves in the place of the Palestinians who have lived in peace and poverty for hundreds of years in their homeland on friendly terms with local Sephardic Jews, but had it all taken from them with bombs and bullets by the Jewish Ashkenazim exodus after WWII. The justification of the expulsion of the innocents from their own home was religious! Can Americans imagine what it is like to be evicted from their own home plot by a gang of motor bikers, who lay claim to the plot on the basis of some supposed deed written by the Founding Fathers. They can challenge the deed by any means they wish except violence which is uncivilized. Legal methods are a farce and a travesty, lasting forever, and meanwhile the bikers occupy what was once home, and the former occupants have to live in a shed at the bottom of the garden. Can they understand that?
That is what it feels like to be a Palestinian. And the treatment of Palestinians by a succession of US governments, all influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the power of the Jewish and Christian lobbies—religious lobbies—in the US has been the main factor in generating hatred of the US. These people do not hate the US lifestyle, they hate US hypocrisy, double standards, and meddling in other people’s affairs. If US foreign policy had been fairer, these Moslems would be finding ways of merging modernism with Islam, not rejecting it. Americans just cannot see their own faults. Their souls are so dazzlingly good, they cannot look at them, they cannot introspect or self-criticize. Consequently, their pious self-admiration is not shared by others, especially, but not only, by the Third World.
The Harvard Bulletin essayist can see some of this but sees it in purely secular terms, the defence of the secular state and way of life, when the US is not longer purely secular. Liberals in the truly secular states of western Europe are horrified at the fanatical adoption of fundamentalism by both US Christians and the Islamists. The violence that is now being fomented is unquestionably religious violence, and can be stopped by joining in sincere dialogue. Jaw, jaw is better than war, war. Sadly yet another US fundamentalist failing is their disdain for dialogue and compromise. The Korean withdrawal of cooperation over nuclear power highlights it. The US has refused to recognize Korean compromise by removing them in return from the list of rogue states. But the bad faith of US diplomacy is another story.
The argument of the violent history of Christianity is not that secular institutions are never aggressive, but that Christianity ought not to be, but nevertheless is, and often has been more disgustingly cruel than secular institutions generally, because the secular does not have the comfort of doing God’s supposed will. What has always made Christians worse than the ordinary person in these cruelties is their conviction that they are committing their crimes for God, just as in Stanley Milgram’s experiments people were more willing to go to extremes of cruelty when they were doing something an authority figure had ordered them to do. What such figure has more authority than God? Yet God is a figment of ther brain. It is simply that belief that people are doing God’s will allows them to do what others subject to the normal superego, their sense of guilt, would never do.
