INTRODUCTION
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there has been a dramatic increase in social scientific literature on the topic of “religious violence,” much of it arguing that there is a uniquely intense and disturbing connection between religion and political conflict and bloodshed. According to Charles Selengut, “faith is different than other commitments” and the “rules and directives of religion are understood by the faithful to be entirely outside ordinary social rules and interactions.” Unlike “secular” terrorism, he writes, religious violence or “sacred fury” is particularly lethal and intractable because it is “carried out for transcendental religious purposes without regard for utilitarian concerns or political goals” (Selengut Reference Selengut2008, 6, 195). J.P. Larsson declares that, “the intensity and lethality of this [religious] violence ... far outweighs purely secular forms of political violence,” generating “a higher frequency of casualties and destruction” (Larsson Reference Larsson2004, 106). The reason, he continues, is because “religious violence” is “incompatible with compromise and conflict resolution” — a fact that is “prevalent within all religious traditions.” “Whether taken literally or as a metaphor, any religious claim is necessarily a premise for sacred warfare. Once a religious conflict has been entered into, there is no possibility either of compromise or of withdrawing from it” (Larsson Reference Larsson2004, 106). Throughout history and continuing into the present, Stephen Stein meanwhile declares, there is an unbroken “web that binds religion and violence” so that “an overwhelming sense of shame … begins to envelop the soul and spirit of the religious person.” “The indictment of religion appears universal,” for the “conventional rules governing human interaction — civility, decency, responsibility — seem to fall away when religion is challenged in some ultimate sense” (Stein Reference Stein2002, 108).
Perhaps the most widely cited author on the topic of religious violence remains Mark Jurgensmeyer, whose 2000 book Terror in the Mind of God, revised and updated in 2003, offers a series of in-depth case studies of religious terrorism in order to illuminate what he calls the “dark alliance between religion and violence.” According to Jurgensmeyer, religious violence is uniquely characterized: (1) by its deliberately exaggerated and theatrical nature, with participants seeking to dramatize a symbolic universe rather than to achieve clear strategic goals; (2) by concepts of cosmic warfare, divine struggle, and transcendent morality, so that religious actors demonstrate a ritual intensity that is “particularly savage and relentless”; and (3) by a morbid attraction in its participants to martyrdom and sacrificial death, with “gory acts of sacrifice” being “central to religion” (Juergensmeyer Reference Juergensmeyer2003, 149, 171). We cannot say that religion causes violence in a directly linear sense, Jurgensmeyer concedes. Nevertheless, he finds “an odd attraction of religion and violence” and a “symbiosis between symbolic and real violence” that “goes to the very heart of the religious imagination” (Juergensmeyer Reference Juergensmeyer2003, 164).
Numerous other scholars, including believers and unbelievers alike, have similarly argued that violence is particularly savage, prolonged, intense, intractable, or likely to occur where “religion” is also present. They acknowledge the complexity of the phenomenon they are describing, including religion's capacity for promoting peace. However, this has not prevented them from making generalized statements about how “religion,” of its very nature, tempts the faithful to a distinct and universally recognizable category of violence — across history, geography, and culture — that “secular” persons are somehow immune from. Catholic historian R. Scott Appleby, for example, documents how religious believers in different times and places have committed acts of terrible violence but also acts of remarkable moral courage as a result of their faiths. Following German theologian Rudolph Otto's description of “the sacred” as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” Appleby defines religious persons as those who have experienced a “mystery” that leaves them with a “feeling of dread evoked by its overpowering and uncontrollable presence,” mingled with “feelings of awe, wonder, and fascination” (Appleby Reference Appleby2000, 28). “Religion” for Appleby is thus an essentially non-rational (or perhaps supra-rational), and emotional or ecstatic form of “mystical union” with the transcendent. It “compels the human-spirit, drawing it beyond the ordinary range of imagination and desire” (Appleby Reference Appleby2000, 29). As such, “religion” is also largely incommunicable to others. Violence erupts not because of any ambivalence “in the sacred itself,” Appleby suggests, but because finite humans cannot adequately interpret or put into words their encounters with “the numinous” and so come into conflict with others who are equally convinced they have had an encounter with Ultimate Reality but who interpret their mystical experiences differently. Hence, he concludes, we must not “underestimate [religion's] ability to underwrite deadly conflict on its own terms” (Appleby Reference Appleby2000, 30).
In this article, I would like to challenge mainstream accounts of “religious violence” such as these, which in different ways all argue for the uniquely dangerous properties or propensities of what is often referred to in the singular form as “the religious imagination.” I will do so with an illustrative example from the 16th century of the theoretical and empirical problems with all such essentialist claims. The public dispute between Jesuit philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Dominican bishop Bartolomé de las Casas over the justice of Spain's conquest of the Americas lends support to Appleby's arguments for “the ambivalence of the sacred.” However, it also helps to cast light on what has been all too often obscured in “religious violence” literature, namely, the ambiguity of “religion” — a highly contested and constantly evolving concept. Unlike Appleby, I see no reason to accept Otto's description of “religion” as being essentially a matter of mystical union with “the numinous.” I am more persuaded by functionalist approaches to “religion” in the tradition of Émile Durkheim that detect “the sacred” in those meaning structures and symbols that serve to generate powerful group loyalties and cohesion, extending from what is typically referred to as “religion” all the way through “secular” rites of patriotic flag veneration that organize killing violence on behalf of the nation-state. Yet this article is not a defense of functionalist definitions of religion either. It is a critical exploration of history and of recent scholarship in which I attempt to follow Timothy Fitzgerald's advice that “The category ‘religion’ should be the object, not the tool, of analysis” (Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald1999, 106).
In Section One, I revisit the debate between Sepúlveda and Las Casas and show how contemporary interpreters have distorted or elided historical evidence in order to drive us toward a highly essentialist narrative of “religious violence” as an explanation for events. In Section Two, I argue that these interpreters fail on their own assumptions of a sharp sacred/secular divide to attend to the ambivalence of “religion” in Valladolid, Spain in the 16th-century, even if they might in theory acknowledge that ambivalence always exists where “religion” is concerned. More significantly, I argue in Section Three, these scholars fail to seriously wrestle with the ambiguity of “religion,” which had a very different meaning in earlier times than it does in contemporary academic discourse. The terms employed in the construction of “religious violence,” I suggest in Section Four, might today just as easily be applied to the violence of the putatively “secular” nation-state. My point throughout this article is not that “sacred” or “religious” conflict is somehow less violent than “secular” conflict. It is that framing the debate in these binary terms, as William Cavanaugh compellingly demonstrates, is itself part of a political project that had a very particular historical beginning and that conceals as much as it reveals about the nature of violence, both in the past and in the present.
1. SIXTEENTH CENTURY CHRISTIANITIES AND THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS: A STORY OF TWO BELIEVERS
In 1550, in the city of Valladolid, Spain, Jesuit philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Dominican bishop Bartolomé de las Casas entered into a series of bitter public disputations over the justice of Europe's conquest of the Americas and its treatment of the Indians. The debate was deemed of such importance that King Carlos V ordered a halt for a full year to all further conquests in the New World pending a verdict on their arguments, although in the end a court of senior lawyers could not reach a judgment and the conquest proceeded unchecked. In reality, Sven Lindqvist observes, no judgment in the world could have halted the destruction of the Americas already set in motion (Lindqvist Reference Lindqvist and Joan1996, 112). Nevertheless, the episode offers important insights into the role of religion in both legitimating and resisting violence, including slavery and what today would fall under the definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity. The confrontation between Las Casas and Sepúlveda also brings into sharp focus the two greatest challenges to any general theory of the relationship between religion and violence, namely, the ambivalence and the ambiguity of the sacred.
Sepúlveda had translated Aristotle's Politics into Latin and was one of the most distinguished Aristotelian authorities of the period. His defense of Spanish imperialism rested upon arguments drawn primarily from Greek and Roman political theory, including doctrines of the natural superiority and inferiority of different human beings. Nature, he argued, is essentially hierarchical, consisting of “the domination of perfection over imperfection, of force over weakness, of eminent virtue over vice” (Todorov Reference Todorov1999, 152). The Indians were “barbarians” whose depraved customs and lack of technological skill proved that they did not possess true humanitas. As such, they could not qualify as rational, free, and civilized subjects of the Spanish Crown. The conquistadors were therefore fully justified in seizing control of the continent and imposing servitude on its inhabitants, even by the most violent means (Rivera Reference Rivera1992, 134–135).
It was not only from Aristotle, however, that Sepúlveda had learned that some people have the right if not the duty to dominate others. As a careful reader of the Hebrew Bible, the Jesuit scholar found ample moral warrant for Spain's conquest of the New World in the pages of Holy Scripture itself. “[T]he Lord did insinuate to the Jews and inspire them that they should persecute the Canaanites, Amorites, and Perizzites with most severe and unstinting war, and exterminate them all” for their “worship of false idols,” Sepúlveda declared. The implication of these passages for European treatment of the inhabitants in the Americas, he continued, was unambiguous. “We may believe, then, that God has given great and exceedingly clear instructions respecting the destruction of these barbarians” (Las Casas Reference Las Casas and Knight2003, 104–105).
Michael Steele thus cites Sepúlveda's role as apologist for genocidal violence against the Indians in order to expose what he sees as a deep pathology at the heart of the Christian faith. Sepúlveda, Steele writes, is one important figure in a “long litany of sacred violence conceptualized and implemented by Christianity against The Other.” From the late fourth century until the 20th, “institutional Christianity was quite willing to exercise all the considerable power at its command to change (‘convert’) or destroy The Other whenever and wherever encountered” (Steele Reference Steele2003, 89, 93). Steele's account of the “sacred violence” of Christianity toward the “Other” builds on historian Forrest G. Wood's assertion that Europeans in the Americas “embraced slavery because they were Christians, not in spite of it” (Steele Reference Steele2003, 88). Hector Avalos meanwhile carries the argument much further, calling attention not only to Christian complicity in the institution of slavery in the historical past but to what he sees as something deeply rooted in the very nature of monotheistic belief and practice, if not in all religions. The “Abrahamic religions” even today, he writes, “still are permeated by a slave mentality” in which concepts of obedience to God reinforce a master/slave dialectic, tempting the faithful to either domination or servility in their relations with others and so perpetuating patterns of violence and intolerance up to the present (Avalos Reference Avalos2005, 371). The only solution to the problem of “religious violence,” Avalos concludes, is to systematically dismantle religious beliefs using the critical tools of “empirico-rationalism or naturalism” (Avalos Reference Avalos2005, 28).
Yet Sepúlveda was not simply a spokesman for imperial violence enacted in the name of Christianity. His notoriety rests upon the fact that he was one actor in a religio-political drama that would never have unfolded had it not been for the vigorous activism of another Christian thinker, who was no less devout a believer and no less important a figure within the institutional structure of the Catholic Church. Indeed, Sepúlveda's name might well have been forgotten by historians were it not for the role he played as a foil to Las Casas, who led perhaps the first human rights campaign in history to stop an ongoing genocide, and who did so on irreducibly religious grounds.
Las Casas was a man of his time who accepted without question many of that age's prejudices, including Spain's right to colonize the Americas, the institution of slavery, and the Catholic Church's obligation to convert the Native Americans to the Christian faith (Rawson Reference Rawson2001, 20). Nevertheless, as a first-hand witness to the genocidal savagery of the conquistadors in the West Indies (which included such depredations as roasting Indians alive over fires for sport), he responded to Sepúlveda's logic of rational/righteous extermination with horror and righteous anger. Las Casas appealed to earlier Papal Bulls that should have protected the Indians from such crimes, and to a radically different vision of human nature, which he also drew directly from the pages of Scripture (Stark Reference Stark2003, 291).Footnote 1 The bishop graphically recounted the brutalities being committed against the Indians and accused his fellow countrymen of being avaricious lackeys of the devil, “filled with the ferocity and savagery of wild beasts” (Las Casas Reference Las Casas and Knight2003, xxvii, 85). Where Sepúlveda upheld the classical view that those who lack the full use of “reason” are intrinsically inferior to those who possess it and invoked the most violent and exclusionary passages of the Hebrew Bible as normative guides for 16th century European conduct, Las Casas championed the idea of human equality and universal rights by appealing to the life and teachings of the Christ of the New Testament (Todorov Reference Todorov1999, 160–162).
The Indians were “true men,” he asserted, whose attacks against the Spaniards were “for good and just reason and in holy justice” (Todorov Reference Todorov1999, 11). Europeans should have sought to convert the Native Americans to the Christian faith through methods of non-coercive, non-violent persuasion (that is, by the same methods Avalos declares should be used to convert all religious believers to secular rationalism!). Instead, the conquistadors had shown that they were no true Christians at all. According to the Dominican bishop, God was standing in judgment of Spain for its violence. “[A]ll nations of the world are human and there is only one definition for each and all of them,” Las Casas declared: “they are all rational; all possess understanding and will and freedom, formed to the image and likeness of God” (Rivera Reference Rivera1992, 142). Tzvetan Todorov describes the politics of Las Casas, in distinction to those of Sepúlveda, as being both authentically Christian and thoroughly modern precisely in his “affirmation of transindividual values” and human equality as matters of religious faith (Todorov Reference Todorov1999, 155–156). “Aristotle, farewell!” Las Casas declared in his final speech at Valladolid. “From Christ, the eternal truth, we have the commandment ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself’” (Todorov Reference Todorov1999, 160).
These facts notwithstanding, Leonard Glick writes, the confrontation between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in 1550 illustrates not the potency of the New Testament narrative or religious faith as a source of resistance to violence in an age of empire. Instead, the bishop stands for “an appeal to human decency as the foundation of virtue” (innate decency being, it seems, a sufficient explanation for Las Casas’ actions in Glick's view). Sepúlveda, by contrast, represents “insistence that the demands of revealed truth override all other considerations” (Glick Reference Glick and Charny1994, 53). The story of Las Casas versus Sepúlveda is therefore construed by Glick as a tale of natural sympathy versus religious devotion. Under the subheading “Christians in the New World,” Glick (correctly) observes that Spain's conquest of the Americas “had arisen on foundations of pious religiosity” (albeit a piety “coupled with unbridled greed”). The evidence from Valladolid and elsewhere, he concludes, is that “if we are ever to reach the point where genocidal massacres will have become a thing of the past, it will not be owing to religions: they are part of the problem.” (Glick Reference Glick and Charny1994, 61). Yet while religious ideologies in different times and places have undeniably contributed much to violence of all kinds, including slavery, colonialism, genocides, and crimes against humanity, it is important to observe that Glick has exactly inverted the epistemological and hermeneutical strategies of Las Casas and Sepúlveda to help sustain his conclusion about the violent tendencies of the abstraction known as “religion.” There is no question that Christianity as an institution was deeply implicated in the project of European colonialism and empire. But it was Las Casas, not Sepúlveda, who most clearly and forcefully insisted that revealed truth — namely, Christ's example in the New Testament of selfless love for the Other — should override all other considerations, including the best of what we would today call “secular” reason.
In 16th century Spain, there was no categorical distinction between the realms of “secular” and “religious” reasoning, politics, or personal identity. This is not to say that there was no separation between the monarchy and the church in medieval political theory. But the separation was based upon the idea of complementary rather than conflicting organizing principles within an overarching cosmological framework (Asad Reference Asad, Sullivan and de Vries2006a, 498). The natural world for practically all Europeans (as for virtually all people in the world) was still seen as “enchanted” by divine purpose. The fabric of society was believed to mirror the kingdom of God or “higher laws” in important ways. Individuals understood themselves to be existentially embedded in a universe of transcendent meaning, and this perception of an larger realm of values ordering both nature and society — what Charles Taylor has described as a sense of cosmic plenitude or “fullness” (Taylor Reference Taylor2007, 25–26) — was reinforced through countless ritual practices, not all directly mediated by the Church. The modern conception of “religion” as a set of interiorized propositional beliefs thus simply did not exist. The term religio (from the Latin religare meaning “to bind together”) throughout the medieval period was used to describe various monastic orders and spiritual disciplines so that its primary sense was not private beliefs but rather public virtues associated with ecclesial practices and relationships in the community (Cavanaugh Reference Cavanaugh2002, 32–33).
Still, insofar as we can disentangle (using anachronistic post-Enlightenment categories, which we must also critically examine in due course) the “rational” from the “religious” or theological justifications offered by the two believers, Las Casas offered the most direct appeal to biblical authority while Sepúlveda based his arguments far less upon the normative importance of Israel's genocide of the Canaanites in the Hebrew Bible than upon Aristotelian ontology and “reason” as a moral justification for violence toward “natural” inferiors.
It cannot be said that Sepúlveda did not know his Aristotle, any more than it can be said that Las Casas did not know his New Testament. In the Politics, Aristotle had written, “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule” (Aristotle Reference Everson1988, 16). “True” mastery is not merely tyrannical force, Aristotle asserted. Rather, the true master is paternalistically responsible for the slave, treating inferiors as “a living but separated part of his own bodily frame. Hence, where the relation of master and slave between them is natural they are friends and have a common interest, but where it rests merely on convention and force the reverse is true” (Aristotle Reference Everson1988, 19). Nevertheless, Aristotle declared, “as superior power is only found where there is superior excellence of some kind, power seems to imply excellence” (Aristotle Reference Everson1988, 18). Further, for “men of pre-eminent excellence there is no law — they are themselves a law” (Aristotle Reference Everson1988, 82). The distinction between tyrannical force and justifiable or “natural” force is in this way rendered sufficiently ambiguous in Aristotle to give masters virtually complete discretionary freedom in the treatment of slaves. The powerful are excellent in virtue of their power, and the excellent “are themselves a law,” hence, what the powerful do is, ipso facto, lawful and excellent. Aristotle concludes his discussion of masters and slaves with this highly suggestive statement: “But the art of acquiring slaves, I mean of justly acquiring them, differs both from the art of the master and the art of the slave, being a species of hunting and war” (Aristotle Reference Everson1988, 19).
These classical notions of the natural inferiority and superiority of different humans and the moral permissibility if not necessity of enslavement and violent conquest would be recast in the 19th century in still more virulent forms based upon social Darwinian and biological theories, capitalist economic doctrines, and faith in the advance of Western Civilization. The men who would oversee such innovations as concentration camps to exterminate the Herero in Namibia, the chopping off of hands of Congolese villagers who failed to meet rubber production quotas, the annihilation by Maxim guns of tens of thousands of resistant Dervishes in the Sudan, and free fire zones in the Philippines, included their share of pious if not fanatical missionaries committed to advancing empire “for God and Country” (Dedering Reference Dedering, Levene and Roberts1999, 205–222; Hochschild Reference Hochschild1998; Lindqvist Reference Lindqvist and Joan1996; Fellman Reference Fellman2010, 186–231). More often, though, the key implementers of 19th century colonialism (the kinds of individuals who inspired the Director of the Great Trading Company in Joseph Conrad's 1896 short story, “An Outpost of Progress,” and Kurtz in his 1899 masterpiece, Heart of Darkness) were men of ruthless efficiency who justified atrocities in the name of economic, biological, and cultural Progress and scientific reason — that is, on what we have come to refer to as “secular” grounds.
Michael McKinley therefore detects strong parallels not between Sepúlveda's arguments and contemporary religious fundamentalisms (whether Christian, Islamist, or other) but rather between his Aristotelian logic and neo-liberal economic theories based upon thoroughly modernist assumptions with antecedents in ancient Greece of the superiority of Western “reason” as a way of paternalistically re-ordering indigenous cultures for the sake of the global good. Native American culture was deemed barbarous by Sepúlveda because, in the first instance, it refused to accept European civilization's free offer of progress and development based upon private property rights and the self-evident superiority of European culture and institutions. The Indians, Sepúlveda argued against Las Casas, “refuse the governance which more prudent, powerful, and perfect human beings offer and which would result in their great benefit (magnas commoditates).” However, “By natural right and for the good of all (ultriusque bene), the material ought to obey the form, the body the soul, the appetite the reason, the brutes the human being, the woman her husband, the imperfect the perfect, and the worse the better” (McKinley Reference McKinley2007, 183). The fact that the Indians refused to passively submit to their own enslavement and colonization therefore justified what McKinley describes as a “pedagogic violence” against them to overcome their irrational resistance to the civilized West's political and technological mastery as well as its material bounties (McKinley Reference McKinley2007, 183).
2. THE AMBIVALENCE OF “SACRED VIOLENCE”
The story of the confrontation between Las Casas and Sepúlveda illustrates the great obstacles to any general theory of the relationship between religion and violence. Among these is what Appleby refers to as “the ambivalence of the sacred,” that is, the “tension between the use and the sublimation of violence” that may be found in virtually every religious tradition (Appleby Reference Appleby2000, 11). There is no reason to doubt the depth of Sepúlveda's religious beliefs or the prevalence of his thinking among other 16th century Catholics as well as Protestants. Individual believers and religious institutions have undeniably been complicit in countless ways in violence and atrocities throughout history, providing influential theological rationalizations and a sacred aura for policies of extermination and oppression of the non-religious or “heretical” Other. Religion can be a powerful instrument and motivating force of violence.
Nevertheless, events in history are rarely if ever mono-causal, and even within a single religious tradition — in this case the Christian tradition, and more specifically, the Catholic tradition, and more narrowly, the Catholic Church post-Constantine (that is, after the fourth century when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire and so closely wedded to the coercive power of the “state”), and more particularly still, the Catholic Church in Spain in the year 1550 — we discover not a monolithic and univocal ideological structure or psychological disposition that can be easily isolated as “religious” and then linked to violent outcomes. Instead, we find a complex and highly contingent site of contested meanings, textual interpretations, beliefs, rationalizations, and moral visions offered in response to other historical, political, and economic realities, including the influence of Greek philosophy and concepts of natural law, the assumed violence of the Israelites as they conquered Canaan in the biblical story, the nonviolence of Christ toward his enemies according to the Gospel narratives, and the mercenary practices of the conquistadors in the New World (who were by all accounts motivated primarily by enticements to easy plunder). As Talal Asad observes, “historically Christians (and Jews) have valued a wide range of often inconsistent things on the basis of different interpretations of traditional texts” (Asad Reference Asad, Sullivan and de Vries2006a, 495). In Valladolid, Spain, in the middle of the 16th century, there was not a singular “Christianity” when it came to the question of violence against the Indians but rather competing Christianities.
This poses an insurmountable challenge to all essentialist and acontextual accounts of religion and conflict, whether these accounts seek to show that “true” religion tends toward either peaceful or toward violent social outcomes. Religious beliefs of different sorts can tend toward either, and in different times and places the same beliefs may yield one or the other, as well as complex and morally ambiguous configurations of both. The task facing the social scientist, then, is not to tell grand causal stories that abstract from history in order to make strong claims about the inherent tendencies of “religion” or the “religious imagination.” It is, rather, to clarify the specific, historically inscribed belief structures that can in different contexts move believers and unbelievers alike toward extremely violent actions but also toward courageous defenses of human rights and nonviolent peacemaking.
What we find in much recent literature on the problem of “religious violence,” however, is a highly selective and simplifying presentation of evidence that often omits contrary cases in order to drive us toward a view of the allegedly essential tendencies or latent properties of “religion,” whether as a force for peace or for violence. Nowhere, for example, do Steele, Glick, or Avalos — all of whom seek to demonstrate the social and political dangers of religious beliefs — discuss the religiously inspired abolitionism of figures such as William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison, whose activism against slavery cannot be understood apart from their devout evangelicalism, and who did more than any other individuals to force the slavery issue into public consciousness as a matter of social injustice and moral sin (Mayer Reference Mayer1998; Hochschild Reference Hochschild2005). Nor do any of these scholars, in their otherwise insightful analyses of Christian complicity in slavery, mention the sociologically incredible fact that it was not only slaveholders or white abolitionists who appealed to the Christian faith to justify their politics and ethics. Slaves themselves also embraced Christianity, which they fused with traditional African beliefs and reinterpreted in subversive, liberationist terms (Raboteau 1978; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2004). Unless we are prepared to deny these individuals all agency and dismiss African-American and Latin-American liberation theologies as nothing more than cases of “false consciousness,” somehow less authentically Christian than the theologies of European racists, we must therefore come to terms with the fact that institutional Christianity was both a powerful legitimating ideology in imperialist and colonialist projects and a powerful force of resistance to these same ideologies and political configurations.
3. THE AMBIGUITY OF “SACRED VIOLENCE”
Yet the case of Las Casas contra Sepúlveda illustrates a still greater problem with mainstream accounts of religious violence, namely, the problem of determining what “religion” is. If the ambivalence of the sacred is one of the key challenges social scientists concerned with the relationship between beliefs and conflict must wrestle with, the ambiguity of “religion” or “the sacred” is another. As Asad writes, “there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discoursive processes” (Asad Reference Asad and Kunin2006b, 180). The same goes for those belief structures often labeled “secular” (which Charles Taylor has excavated in great depth and which it turns out are a good deal less “secular” than previously imagined).Footnote 2
Having shown that Sepúlveda's religio-imperialist rhetoric in many ways anticipated neo-liberal economic orthodoxies that have resulted in deeply embedded forms of structural violence in our own age, McKinley concludes not that Sepúlveda was actually inspired by “secular” logic but rather that the violence of economic globalization in the present is itself a form of “religious war.” Nowhere does he define what “religion” is (even though “religious war” is part of the title of his book), but the implication of his argument against economic neo-liberalism or the so-called “Washington Consensus” is that whatever can be shown to be “irrational” and sinister and that leads to violence (whether direct or structural) is somehow synonymous with “religious” thinking. We are living in a time “of monomania and aggression,” he writes, “and where argument cannot justify the means and ends, faith is explicitly demanded and acts as the sufficient ordinance for the world missions to hand” (McKinley Reference McKinley2007, 2).
There may be good reasons to think of various “secular” economic and political ideologies as alternative “religions” or “faiths.” Scholars such as Emilio Gentile, Michael Burleigh, Hans Maier, and Roger Griffin (reviving the concept of “political religion” first advanced by Luigi Sturzo, Eric Voegelin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Raymond Aaron, among others) have argued that avowedly atheistic or “secular” ideologies such as fascism, Leninism, and Juche in North Korea can only be fully grasped in terms of the psychology and sociology of religion (Gentile Reference Gentile2006; Burleigh Reference Burleigh2007; Maier Reference Maier1996; Griffin Reference Griffin2005). Robert Nelson makes a similar argument for economic ideologies (Nelson Reference Nelson2001). I have myself elsewhere applied the concept of “political religion” to the Shining Path insurgency in Peru (Osborn Reference Osborn2007). Nevertheless, there is a problematic tendency in political religion theory: instead of demonstrating how “religion” contributes to violent, totalitarian, or authoritarian outcomes, ideologies that are particularly violent, totalitarian, or authoritarian get labeled “religious” in virtue of how violent, totalitarian, or authoritarian they are. On the one hand, political religion theory helps to subvert the idea of a clear sacred/secular divide. On the other, “political religion” is strictly delimited in this literature in such a way that the violence of the “secular” or liberal nation-state is shielded from similar critical analysis. Kim Il Sung's cult of personality is an example of “political religion.” American patriotic nationalism in the service of violence is not.Footnote 3 (A similar arbitrary move is made by many of the so-called New Atheists to explain why atheism is innocent of violence and why “religion” cannot take any credit for its peacemakers. Christopher Hitchens, for example, argues that atheism cannot be implicated in the waves of collective violence unleashed by the totalitarian movements of the past century since Stalinism, Maoism, and fascism were in fact religious movements. Conversely, he claims, Martin Luther King Jr. was “a profound humanist” whose “legacy has very little to do with his professed theology.” See Hitchens Reference Hitchens2008, 180, 246).
If “secular” ideologies are to be re-categorized as religious, however, we must offer a more rigorous defense of our terminology and response to a question very familiar to social scientists, namely: How can we ensure that our terms do not become so broad as to lose all analytical value, so that we are engaging in what Giovanni Sartori (see Collier and Mahon Reference Collier and Mahon1993, 846) refers to as conceptual traveling (that is, the application of concepts to new cases) as opposed to conceptual stretching (the distortion of concepts in an attempt to relate them)? Complicating matters is the fact that religionists might plausibly reverse the argument and cite Sepúlveda and others like him as evidence not of the violence of faith but rather of “secular” or naturalistic reasoning when detached from the biblical grammar of the imago Dei. This was precisely Las Casas’ case against Sepúlveda, and it is an argument many believers continue to make in a variety of ways in response to mainstream literature on religious violence (Pearse Reference Pearse2007, 41).Footnote 4
Why, we must therefore ask, is “religion” so widely and easily cited as an independent variable of European slavery, colonialism, and genocide in the Americas, as well as a host of other violent outcomes in diverse times and places, while Aristotle and the classical political tradition, as well as later forms of scientific or secular reasoning — which can just as easily be shown to be historically implicated in violence of all kinds — get a free pass (or at least are seldom claimed to be violent at their very cores in the way religion often is)? Greek philosophy essentialized the institution of slavery in ways the Jewish and Christian traditions in their earliest formations never did.Footnote 5 Nineteenth century race eugenics naturalized and justified inequality in explicit opposition to the religiously inspired egalitarianism of Garrisonian abolitionists and others. But few scholars (myself included) would cite this as evidence of the inherently violent leanings of the “secular.” Why, then, is “religion” so often linked in highly essentialist ways, in both academic and popular discourse, with “violence”? If Sepúlveda is an example of “religious violence,” in any case, there is no straightforward answer to the question: What exactly was the brand of religious faith to which he subscribed? Aristotelian Christianity? Christianized Aristotelianism? Or something else entirely?
None of these statements are meant to obscure or explain away through semantic wordplay the role that religions have played in cases of violence throughout history, or to suggest that socially constructed terms are any less real for being socially constructed. “With social realities,” Kevin Schilbrack writes, “if people find the term useful and live in its terms, this agreement is all that is needed for the alleged thing to exist” (Schilbrack Reference Schilbrack2010, 1134). We can therefore speak in a meaningful sense of the “religious” and the “secular,” even as we critically interrogate the genealogies of these words and deconstruct how they are now used. Deconstruction, in other words, need not be a sheer deconstruction that ends in an abandonment of any sense of meaning in everyday speech. But we must face the prevalence and the failure of what Richard King has described as “a modern trope” and William Cavanaugh has still more provocatively labeled “the myth of religious violence” (King Reference King, Hinnells and King2007, 214; Cavanaugh Reference Cavanaugh2009).
4. “RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE” AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE “SECULAR” NATION-STATE
The myth of religious violence, as Cavanaugh explains it, is the idea that there is a genus of ideologies we can clearly distinguish from all others as “religious,” to which every particular religious belief structure or worldview can then be taxonomically related as a subspecies. Further, the myth declares, this timeless, ahistorical, transcendent genus known as “religion” is uniquely prone to divisiveness, to intolerance, to irrationality, and to violence. From this analytical claim a clear normative conclusion follows: “religion” must be confined to a realm of strictly private beliefs and practices by the “secular” nation-state for the sake of preserving social harmony and minimizing violence. This very process of confinement, however, is also a constitutive exercise of power; “true” religion comes to be defined precisely as a matter of interiorized mental belief that must be apolitical and acquiescent with regard to the nation-state, while religions that transgress the private/public boundary are described in primitivist terms as atavistic throwbacks to pre-rational thinking or, worse still, uncontrollable and deadly passion.
But as Cavanaugh points out, this conclusion is both theoretically and empirically dubious. Religiously motivated actors may certainly engage in remarkably savage forms of violence for what they believe are sacred causes. This is not in dispute and the scholars cited at the start of this article have offered rich descriptive details of the lives and thinking of some of these individuals. It may be, for example, that Jurgensmeyer's account of “religious violence” captures a limited and very particular set of cases: self-consciously apocalyptic religious movements or individuals inspired by strong teleological visions of history and their own role as agents capable of inaugurating the millennium. But apocalypticism and “religion” are by no means synonymous concepts and it is simply a tautology to say that violent apocalypticism happens to be violent. The theoretical division of “religious” from “secular” violence on the grounds (a) that violent religious actors from such disparate groups as anti-abortionists in the United States, to apocalyptic cults in Japan, to Sikh militants in India, are all participants in a singular social phenomenon known as “religious violence”; and (b) that this “religious violence” is somehow “worse” or of a radically different kind as measured on scales of “savagery” (Jurgensmeyer's language) than the violence of other ideologies such as colonialism, imperialism, tribalism, Marxism, capitalism, fascism, neo-liberalism, and nationalism, does not stand up to scrutiny.
The first part of the argument cannot be sustained since any definition of religion broad enough to encompass both Western and non-Western metaphysics (ranging from Protestant Evangelicalism, to African animisms, which make no distinction between the natural and “supernatural,” to Zen Buddhism that posits no gods or God) must arbitrarily exclude a host of “secular” belief structures that exhibit the same or very similar functional as well as substantive features. Schoolchildren across America, for example, are taught to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in a daily catechism that has no Christian equivalent. They place their right hands over their hearts symbolizing their full devotion to the nation-state. The gesture was adopted in 1942 by government ruling to distinguish United States citizens from the members of another nationalistic faith; before 1942, Americans saluted the flag during the pledge with an extended arm and open palm, virtually identical to the Nazi salute (what was known as the Bellamy Salute). The American flag is also the only symbol for which the country's citizens are willing to kill and to die (or for which they will send their children away to kill and die) in great numbers. Next to this kind of devotion, Christianity along with every other “sectarian” faith is a pale and distant rival. What you are willing to kill and die for, Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle argue in their provocative 1999 book, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, is functionally what is most sacred to you (Marvin and Ingle Reference Marvin and Ingle1999). The flag serves as both the emblem and the source of the tribe's unity precisely because of the blood that has been shed for it. In an organization as otherwise cold and abstract as the nation-state, sacrificial blood may be the only thing strong enough to transcend differences and generate powerful emotions of group solidarity and sacrificial devotion. The flag is the visible marker or totem of this fact.
Stephen Stein's baneful conclusion quoted in my introduction about the violent tendencies of religion may thus very easily be rephrased and transferred to the modern nation-state itself: “conventional rules governing human interaction — civility, decency, responsibility — seem to fall away when the nation-state is challenged in some ultimate sense.” Academic discourse on the unique perils of “religious violence” in this regard conceals far more than it reveals. Without holding any nostalgia for the project of Western Christendom or advocating a new collapsing of church and state, King writes, “the way that the debate about [religious] violence has been framed effectively insulates the institutional forms, organizations and ideologies that govern modern (‘secular’) life from critical interrogation” (King Reference King, Hinnells and King2007, 227). Put another way, the modern framing or construction of religious violence is not itself innocent of violence but is a way of rendering certain institutions of power and violence immune from prophetic criticism.
This leads us to the second part of Jurgensmeyer's claim: that “religious violence” is somehow more “savage” than other forms of violence. This idea is unfortunately transparently false, as any review of the history of American saturation bombing with napalm and chemical defoliants in Vietnam or the actions of United States soldiers during the My Lai and other massacres would instantly reveal (see, for example, Bilton and Sim Reference Bilton and Sim1992). Nor would it be difficult to show that, for example, the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 fulfills virtually all of Jurgensmeyer's (Reference Juergensmeyer2003, 149, 171) criteria for “religious violence” outlined in my introduction, including: (1) being performed in an exaggerated and deliberately theatrical way designed to communicate potent messages to a larger audience (“shock and awe”); (2) being justified by way of appeal to concepts of transcendent morality (“axis of evil”); and (3) being enacted with an intensity that proved both savage and relentless (“secret renditions”; “enhanced interrogations”). As Fitzgerald writes by way of critique of Jurgensmeyer's work, “Naturally the attempt to impose ‘secular’ ideology on different non-western cultures is seen by such third world leaders as an act of imperialism…it is not clear whether or not he [Jurgensmeyer] accepts the point that these non-western leaders and commentators may actually be right, and that western secular nationalism really is as much a ‘religion’ as the ideologies with which it competes” (Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald1999, 108). Fitzgerald suggests that “we abandon, as an analytical concept, the word ‘religion’ and the religious versus secular dichotomy it implies” and instead treat such terminology “as an object of critical analysis regarding its origin, usage, and function within European and American ideology” (Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald1999, 106).
5. CONCLUSION
The social and academic construction of “religious violence,” King argues (following the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu), is a striking example of a doxa, that is, an “unquestionable truth or authority that frames the very possibilities of thought itself — the stage upon which orthodoxies and heterodoxies can be played out according to a set of rules and assumptions that none of the participants question” (King Reference King, Hinnells and King2007, 229). Returning to the story of the confrontation between Las Casas and Sepúlveda that I began this article with, we must note what the result would have been had the idea of “religion” as a realm of privatized, apolitical, propositional beliefs or else rationally incommunicable intuitions of the “numinous” been successfully enforced in 1550: Las Casas’ religiously-based and politically charged defense of human rights — which are inseparable from his ontology of the imago Dei and his theological ethics of imitatio Christi — would have been silenced, while Sepúlveda's defense of slavery and colonialism by way of appeal to universal Reason (in theory accessible to all) would have gone unchallenged. In the twentieth-century, suppression of the religious voice from the sphere of politics in the name of protecting the state from “irrational” and dangerous theological language would have meant no Martin Luther King Jr. speaking out for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War. In his ecumenical but still unequivocally Christian speech at Riverside Church in 1967, “A Time to Break Silence,” King described the United States in searing terms as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” After offering a devastating analysis of United States policies as a continuation of colonial and imperial practice, he counterpoised American nationalism and “the god of hate” with the “ultimate reality” revealed in the first epistle of John in the New Testament: “Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us” (King Reference King and Washington1986, 233, 242).
The academic construction of religious violence, scholars such as Cavanaugh, King, Asad, and Fitzgerald have helped us see, is a narrative about modernity and secularity that has a primarily political and ideological rather than analytical function. But general theories of “religious violence” are as problematic and ultimately vacuous as any attempt at their opposite would be. How many social scientists today would claim, on the basis of a limited set of case studies, that they have developed a theory of “secular violence” that captures some essential, universal, and timeless set of social properties and psychological dispositions that can be used to explain violent outcomes ranging from Green Peace clashes with Japanese whaling fleets, to America's Cold War nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, to ritualistic acts of torture by avowed atheists in Abhu Ghraib prison or elsewhere? Yet this is precisely the kind of sweeping claim that social scientists routinely make when confronted by religious actors and the “religious imagination.” There is a “strain of violence that may be found at the deepest levels of religious imagination,” Jurgensmeyer tells us. “It has colored religion's darker, more mysterious symbols. Images of death have never been far from the heart of religion's power to stir the imagination.” Why, he asks, “does religion seem to need violence, and violence religion?” (Jurgensmeyer Reference Juergensmeyer2003, 6–7). The real question, however, is: Why do scholars need grand narratives such as these about the sinister dangers of religion when they know full well that there is no singular genus we can label “religion” and so no primal dark heart of religion either?
