- Welcome to Rehm Library.
I'm Tom Landy.
I'm the Director of the Rev.
Michael C. McFarland, S.J.
Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.
I only say that whole long
thing one time a semester so.
The McFarland Center sponsors
lectures, conferences,
discussions, other programs
that explore questions
of meaning, morality
and mutual obligation.
The Center also leads an
initiative on global Catholicism
called Catholics and Cultures
which explores diverse
and little known ways that
people around the world
live out their and practice their faith,
in particular, cultural contexts.
We've packed our spring schedule
with some great speakers and topics,
and I encourage you to visit our website
at holycross.edu/mcfarlandcenter
to find out
more about them and see
what else interests you.
Today's lecture is one
of the Deitchman Family Lectures
on Religion and Modernity,
a series that looks at
the place of religious
and spiritual life in a
world that's sometimes
at odds with faith, other
times in search of it,
and always at work reshaping it.
Special thanks to the Deitchman family
for funding that and making that possible,
and also to my colleague
Professor Matt Eggemeier
for suggesting this and helping
this to come to be today.
We're recording today's talk,
as we do with many of them.
They'll be available for a
number of classes on Moodle
and in a few days for public
viewing on our website.
You get the best part
'cause you're here live,
but if you have friends
who you can tell them later
they can see it on the website.
Does religion promote violence?
We're grateful to have William Cavanaugh
from DePaul University here today
to help us think more deeply
about what counts as religious
and about the rationality behind it.
Bill Cavanaugh is Professor
of Catholic Studies
and the Director of the
Center for World Catholicism
and Intercultural Theology at
DePaul University in Chicago.
That center focuses on theological issues
and the encounters between the
global south and the north.
Bill's scholarship focuses
on political theology,
economic ethics and ecclesiology.
He's author of six books including
the Myth of Religious
Violence: Secular Ideology
and the Roots of Modern Conflict,
Migrations of the Holy:
Theologies of State and Church
which won first place in
the social concerns category
for the Catholic Press
Association Book Awards.
Being Consumed: Economics
and Christian Desire,
and his newest title which just came out.
We both have just gotten our copies
and that's Field Hospital:
The Church's Engagement
with a Wounded World.
Prior to teaching, Bill
was a lay associate
with the Holy Cross Order in a
poor area of Santiago, Chile,
and worked with the Center on
Civil Rights and Human Rights
in the Notre Dame Law School.
We're really delighted to
have him here at Holy Cross,
so please join me in
welcoming Bill Cavanaugh.
(applause)
- Thanks Tom for that kind introduction,
and thanks for the hospitality
to Tom and Matt Eggemeier, Peter Fritz,
Pat Hinchliffe and everybody
that's made this visit possible.
I'm really delighted that you invited me
to come this winter as
opposed to last winter.
(laughter)
I think that's probably a good idea.
I think about Holy Cross a lot
because I'm teaching a class
on Intro to World Catholicism
and students do presentations
from this Catholics and Cultures website
as a part of every class period.
So, it's what y'all are
doing here is exciting
and really interesting.
I was out, not too long ago, walking
and I came upon a very distraught man
who was ready to jump off a bridge.
And I said, "Wait, don't do it.
"There's so much to live for.
"Do you believe in God?"
And he said, "Yes."
And I said, "Me too, are
you Christian or a Jew?"
And he said, "I'm a Christian."
And I said, "Me too.
"Protestant or Catholic?"
And he said, "Protestant."
And I said, "Me too, what kind?"
And he said, "Baptist."
And I said, "Me too.
"Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
And he said, "Northern Baptist."
And I said, "Me too.
"Northern Conservative Baptist
or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
And he said, "Northern
Conservative Baptist"
And I said, "Me too.
"Northern Conservative
Baptist Great Lakes region
"or Northern Conservative
Baptist New England region?"
And he said, "Northern
Conservative Baptist
"Great Lakes Region."
And I said, "Me too.
"Northern Conservative
Baptist Great Lakes Region
"Council of 1879 or Northern
Conservative Baptist
"Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?"
And he said, "Northern
Conservative Baptist
"Great Lakes Region Council of 1912."
And I said, "Die heretic!" and
I shoved him off the bridge.
(laughter)
Not a true story.
That's a joke by Emo Philips.
It was named the funniest religion joke
in an online poll.
And I think the fact that it was named
the funniest religion
joke tells you something
about the way people think
about religion and violence, right?
Everybody knows that religion has
this tendency to promote violence.
When I gave a talk with a similar title
at a college, that'll remain
nameless, a while ago,
I was on my way to the lecture hall
and I saw a poster for the talk.
And somebody had scrawled the word duh
over the poster.
And I thought yeah, that pretty much,
that kind of sums it up, right?
Everybody knows religion
has this dangerous tendency
to promote violence.
Everybody can cite many examples of this.
And some people try to deny this
by saying that the violence
is really political
or really economic and
not really religious,
but I think that such
arguments are easily refuted
by the terrorists' own words.
And it also assumes a distinction
between religious and
political and economic factors
that ultimately, I think,
is impossible to pull off.
And that's part of what
I'm gonna argue today.
And I don't think it works also to claim
that the Crusaders were
not really Christians
or Islamic terrorists,
ISIS, is not really,
not really Muslims and so on.
I think, on the one hand,
normatively it is important
for Christians and Muslims to claim
that Crusaders and terrorists
have gotten the message
of Christianity and Islam all wrong.
Descriptively, however, I
think it's disingenuous.
It's dishonest for Christians and Muslims
to absolve their own group from wrongdoing
by disowning their bad
co-religionists, right?
We have to do penance collectively
for our collective sins.
I learned that as a Catholic.
The idea that religion promotes violence
is part of the conventional
wisdom of Western societies
and it affects our
domestic policies and laws
that keep religion out
of the public sphere,
and it also affects our foreign policies
that seek to promote liberal social orders
in other countries by
military power if necessary.
And this mention of military power
for liberal politics
indicates that people kill
for other things besides religion,
and that seems undeniable and obvious too.
Behind the common tale of
religion and violence, therefore,
there has to be a stronger claim,
not just that religion promotes violence,
but that religion has a greater tendency
to promote violence than
what is not religion, right?
And what is not religion
is called secular.
So, the idea that
religion promotes violence
depends entirely on this distinction
between the religious and the secular.
It depends entirely on that distinction
between the religious and the secular,
so I want you to keep your
eye on this distinction
as we proceed today.
So, what I call the myth
of religious violence goes like this.
Religion is this transhistorical
and transcultural,
meaning all times, all places,
human impulse that's essentially distinct
from secular ideologies and institutions.
Religion is more prone to promote violence
than secular ideologies and institutions,
and therefore, religion
should be marginalized
from public power and we should fight
to defend and spread
secular ideals, right?
So, the myth of religious
violence depends entirely
on this sharp religious
secular distinction
as in this table here, right?
So, keep an eye on this
distinction as we go along
'cause the argument that
religion causes violence
depends entirely on this.
In the religious column are
generally included things
like Christianity,
Islam, Buddhism, Jainism
Judaism, Hinduism,
Confucianism, et cetera.
Under secular, we find
non-religious categories
of human life like politics and economics
as well as ideologies and practices like
nationalism, atheism, Marxism, capitalism,
liberalism, et cetera.
That's not religion, right?
That's the secular.
So, the common notion that religion
is peculiarly prone to violence depends
on the idea that these secular matters
have less of a tendency
to promote violence
and it's commonly assumed that they do so
because they deal with
purely mundane affairs.
Whereas, religion, on the other hand
is seen as peculiarly
incendiary because it raises
the stakes to another level where reason
is trumped by passion.
So, in academic literature
about religion and violence,
religion is commonly assumed
to be peculiarly absolutist,
divisive, irrational and so on.
Now, if we cast a glance over
the extraordinarily bloody
last hundred years or so,
complicating evidence
begins to press upon us.
World War I, for example,
to which nationalism
is generally assigned as a primary cause,
resulted in 38 million military
and civilian casualties.
Suppose we ask, who has killed more people
over the last hundred
years, Muslims or atheists?
Well, it's not really even close.
The death toll under
the three regimes alone
of Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge
ranges from a low of 21 million
to a high of 70 million, and
all were militantly atheists.
Deaths under Marxist regimes are estimated
in figures that range
as high as 110 million.
The last hundred years
have seen frequent war
waged for oil, land, flags,
free markets, democracy, ethnicity,
a host of other supposedly secular causes.
So, what becomes of the idea that religion
has a peculiar tendency
to promote violence
in the face of this evidence.
Well, for some religion
and violence theorists,
the answer to this problem is simple.
You just move the offending ideologies
over to the other side of the table.
Atheist, Christopher
Hitchens, takes this approach
in his best-selling book God is Not Great
which is subtitled with
difficult British understatement,
How Religion Poisons Everything.
And he says totalitarianism
aims at human perfection
which is essentially a religious impulse,
and therefore, religion poisons everything
because everything poisonous
gets identified as religion.
And at same time, everything good ends up
on the other side of the
religious/secular divide.
Hitchens says of Martin Luther King Jr.,
"In no real as opposed to nominal sense,
"was he a Christian."
And he bases this remarkable conclusion
on the fact that King was non-violent
and therefore, he couldn't
possibly be religious
because religion is defined as violent.
So, this is what it looks like then.
This is what the distinction
looks like for Hitchens then.
All of the things that he doesn't like
get moved over to the
category of religion.
And so, North Korean and Soviet atheism,
Marxism, violent things, et cetera.
They all end up over there,
and Hitchens is not alone in this.
Once we start examining arguments
that religion causes violence,
we find that the sort of
smoke and mirrors is the norm.
The argument that religion has
a peculiar disposition towards violence
depends upon this sharp dividing line
between the religious and the secular.
But, things are constantly
smuggled back and forth
across this line.
Political theorist, Bhikhu
Parekh, for example,
issues a blistering
indictment of religion.
He says, "It arouses powerful
"and sometimes irrational impulses
"and can easily destabilize society,
"cause political havoc, and create
"a veritable hell on earth."
He goes on to confess, however, that quote
"several secular ideologies,
such as some varieties
"of Marxism, conservatism,
and even liberalism
"have a quasi-religious
orientation and form,
"and conversely formally
religious languages sometimes
"have a secular content,
so that the dividing line
"between a secular and
a religious language
"is sometimes difficult to draw."
So, violence and irrational impulses
are popping up everywhere,
even in liberalism,
which inspires the creation of
the category quasi-religious
to try to corral them
all back onto religious,
under the religion side of the ledger.
So, this is what it looks like.
Marxism, conservatism, liberalism
on the religion and quasi-religion side,
and the secular ends up with
"formally religious languages"
which I'm not exactly
sure what that means.
Consider the case of the
preeminent historian Martin Marty.
In a book on public religion, Marty argues
that religion has a peculiar tendency
to be divisive and therefore violent.
But, Marty lists 17 different
definitions or religion,
and then he begs off
giving his own definition
since he says quote
"scholars will never agree
"on the definition of religion".
And so, instead, Marty gives
a list of five features
that mark a religion, which
he says is not a definition.
He then proceeds to show how politics
displays all five of the same features.
Religion focuses our ultimate concern
and so does politics.
Religion builds community
and so does politics.
Religion appeals to myth and symbol.
Politics mimics this appeal
in devotion to the flag,
war memorials and so on down the list.
So, he offers five defining
features of religion
and shows how politics fits all five.
He's trying to show how closely
intertwined religion and politics are,
but he ends up demolishing
any theoretical basis
for separating the two.
So, what becomes of the
religious/secular distinction here?
It's not clear.
Another example, sociologist
Mark Juergensmeyer
whose book Terror in the Mind of God,
one of the most widely read academic books
on religion and violence,
argues that religion
exacerbates the tendency to divide people
into friends and enemies, good and evil,
us and them, by ratcheting
divisions up to a cosmic level.
But, he's forced to admit the difficulty
of separating religious
violence from secular violence.
He writes, "Secular
nationalism, like religion,
"embraces what one scholar
calls 'a doctrine of destiny,'
"One can take this way of looking
"at secular nationalism a step further
"and state flatly that secular
nationalism is 'a religion.'"
Now, that's an important
concession as is his claim
that the secular is a sort
of advanced form of religion.
But, if it's true, it's
subverts the entire basis
of his argument.
What becomes of the
religious/secular divide
if the secular is a
form of religion, right?
It's just not clear what is left
for the other side of the ledger.
Now, some religion and violence theorists
deal with this problem by
openly and consistently
expanding the category of religion.
So, Richard Wentz's book
Why People Do Bad Things
in the Name of Religion
includes not only Islam,
Christianity, Buddhism and the like,
but also consumerism, secular humanism,
football fanaticism, faith in technology.
He's got this great
scene where he describes
the guy watching Monday Night Football
and he kind of lets his
belly pop open, his fly,
and he arranges his beer
and sandwiches just so.
And he describes this all in
kind of eucharistic terms.
Faith in technology, a host
of other ideologies and practices.
Wentz includes those all
under the rubric religion
and so he concludes,
rather lamely I think,
perhaps all of us do bad things
in the name of, or as a
representative, of religion.
Now, I think Wentz has intuited correctly
that people do violence for
all sorts of reasons, right?
Where he goes wrong is in thinking
that he can obliterate the line
between religious and secular
and still end up blaming
violence on religion.
Again, it's just not clear
if there's anything left over
on the other side of the table.
Maybe things that don't matter very much.
Everything that people
care about gets included
under the rubric religion,
which is just like
saying people kill for
things that they care about
which is true but not very interesting.
So, instead of an argument why religion
has a greater tendency than the secular
to promote violence, Wentz has simply
taken everything that
people do violence for
and labeled it religion.
Wentz is what is called a functionalist,
that is a scholar who believes
that religion is whatever
functions like one.
And there's a vast literature on Marxism
as a religion, for example.
(laughter)
But, you get the idea, right?
There's a vast functionalist literature
on Marxism as a religion.
There's an extensive body of scholarship
that explores civil religion
in the United States.
Robert Bellah says "civil
religion has its own seriousness
"and integrity and requires
the same care and understanding
"that any other religion does".
Carolyn Marvin similarly argues that quote
"nationalism is the most powerful religion
"in the United States" and
perhaps in many other countries.
"Nationalism is the most powerful religion
"in the United States."
She makes a good argument for it.
Scholars have explored the peculiar myths
and symbols and sacrifices
that surround the flag.
This was actually how
American schoolchildren
used to salute the American flag
and say the Pledge of
Allegiance before Hitler
made this gesture unpopular in the 1930s
and it was changed to
the hand over the heart.
This was the image that I actually
asked Oxford University Press to put
on the cover of the book The
Myth of Religious Violence,
but they thought it was a little
bit too incendiary I guess.
Shocking.
More pictures of the same.
This is not Nuremberg.
This is Dayton, Ohio.
(laughter)
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Just had to get one.
(laughter)
Come on, you miss him.
And yeah.
This here is what you see if you go
into the Capitol Building in Washington DC
and look up into the dome,
this is a painting called
the Apotheosis of Washington.
Apotheoisis, the becoming
god of Washington
and it's George Washington
ascending to heaven.
Bodily, being assumed, bodily into heaven
amongst all of these kind
of mythological figures.
So, more examples of civil religion.
In the wake of rolling
blackouts in California in 2001,
one of the architects of the deregulation
of California's electrical utilities
that caused all the havoc was quoted
in the New York Times
expressing his belief
that free markets always work better
than state control, and he said,
"I believe in that premise as
a matter of religious faith."
And so, a scholar who takes
a functionalist approach
will just take him at his word, right?
If it walks like a duck,
and quacks like a duck,
it's a duck, right?
So, a survey of religious
studies literature
finds the following treated
under the rubric religion,
totems, witchcraft, human rights,
Marxism, liberalism, Freudianism,
Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism,
sports fanaticism, free market ideology,
Alcoholics Anonymous and
the list goes on and on.
Alcoholics Anonymous was
actually declared a religion
by a federal judge in 2002.
Now, OK, at this point,
you might be thinking
OK, all of these people
are just wrong, right?
I know what religion is.
It's belief in God or gods, right?
So, just go back to that
first slide that you showed
about the religious/secular distinction.
That's clear enough.
Let's just stick with that, right?
OK, well let's give that a try then.
And look at what you find
included under religion
are some things that are not,
that don't have belief in God or gods
as a central concept, Buddahism,
Daoism, Confucianism and so on.
So, if you follow this idea that religion
is belief in God or gods,
there are some things that
we usually call religions
that end up on the secular side.
Conversely, OK, so then you say,
OK, let's come up with a broader
definition of religion then
and see if we can get Buddhism and Daoism
and Confucianism and Shinto and so on
back over on the other
side where we want them,
on the religious side.
So, let's try transcendence, right?
Now, we can move them back over here.
Religion is belief in
something transcendent,
but now nationalism and
Marxism and things like that
follow us back over to the religious side
of the ledger, right?
Expand, many institutions and ideologies
that don't explicitly refer to God or gods
function in the same way as those that do.
So, expanding the concept of religion
to include godless Buddhism makes it
very hard to exclude
godless Marxism, right?
And it's hard to imagine
a better candidate
for transcendence than
something like nationalism.
The term transcendence is
a tool of Western scholars
of religion who borrowed it
from the Judaeo-Christian tradition
into where you have this distinction
between a transcendent
god and an eminent order,
but there is no such
distinction in Buddhism.
So, in order to use that
distinction to include Buddhism,
it has to be defined
in a very vague manner,
and the vaguer it gets, the
more it becomes difficult
to exclude things like
Marxism and nationalism.
And the exclusivity of the term religion
breaks down very quickly.
Now, even if all of
that were not the case,
and we could find a way to stabilize
the categories of religious and secular
and get everybody to agree what belongs
in each category, would it be any help
with the question of violence?
Is there any good reason to suppose
that people are more
likely to kill for a god
than for a nation?
Try these two questions.
What percentage of American Christians
would be willing to kill for Jesus?
And what percentage of
Americans Christians
would be willing to kill for
the United States of America?
All right, it seems clear,
at least among American Christians
that the nation state is far,
is subject to far more fervor
than Christianity for the
majority of American Christians,
even public evangelization
is in in bad taste, right?
When somebody comes knockin' at the door,
we think ew, right?
But, people take it for granted
that slaughter on behalf of a nation
is sometimes necessary and often laudable.
And so, I think we have to conclude
that there is no coherent way
to isolate religious ideologies
with a peculiar tendency toward violence
from their tamer secular counterparts.
So-called secular
ideologies and institutions
like nationalism and
capitalism can inspire
just as much violence
as so-called religion.
And if it seems like this
is academic hair-splitting
over definitions, it's really
nothing more complicated
than what the Bible says
about idolatry, right?
This is the theological implication
of everything that I've been saying,
and this is just a basic
idea from the Bible.
People treat all things,
all kinds of things,
as if they were gods,
golden calves and armies
and mammon and even their own bellies,
as Paul says to Philippians.
The Bible, of course, teaches
that there is one true God
among the many false gods,
but the Bible doesn't think that there
is one set of religious pursuits
and another, essentially
different set of secular pursuits.
People, in actual fact,
treat all kinds of things
as gods and so-called
religious and secular ideas
and practices often
function in the same way.
Does anybody know what this
statue is from?
Anybody recognize it?
Yeah.
- [Voiceover] (speaker muffled)
- Yeah, yeah absolutely, thank you.
Yeah, that's, it's on
Wall Street in New York.
Anyway little, a quote from Pope Francis.
OK, so the myth of
religious violence fails
because it depends entirely
on a stable religious/secular
divide that doesn't exist.
There is no once-and-for-all
definition of religion.
Religion is a category
constructed in different ways
and different places and times,
and according to the interests
of who's doing the construction.
And so, to understand why
there is so much confusion
around the category of religion,
I want to briefly examine its history.
That's the next part of what I'm gonna do.
So, Charles Kimball's book
When Religion Becomes Evil
begins with the following claim.
"It is somewhat trite, but
nevertheless sadly true,
"to say that more wars have been waged,
"more people killed and
these days more evil
"perpetrated in the name of religion
"than other institutional
force in human history."
Now, if one were to try
to prove this claim,
you would need a transhistorical
and transcultural concept
of religion that would be at
least theoretically separable
from other institutional forces
over the course of history,
political institutions for example.
The problem is that there was no religion
considered as something
separable from politics
until the modern era, and
then primarily in the West.
The Romans had the term religio,
but there was no religion/politics
distinction, right?
How could there be when Caesar is a god.
Likewise, if you ask the question
is Aztec politics or
Aztec religion to blame
for their bloody human sacrifices?
It's just at anachronism.
They just don't have that distinction.
As Wilfred Cantwell Smith
showed in his landmark 1962 book
The Meaning and End of Religion,
religion, as a discrete
category of human activities
separable from culture,
politics, et cetera,
is an invention of the modern West.
The ancient Romans had the term religio,
where we get our term religion,
but it covered all kinds of
civic duties and relations
of respect that we would
consider to be secular.
So, Saint Augustine, for example, says
"We have no right to
affirm with confidence
"that religio is confined
to the worship of God
"since it seems that this
word has been detached
"from its normal meaning,
in which it refers
"to an attitude of respect in relations
"between a man and his neighbor."
Nothing like what we mean
by religion, in other words.
In the Medieval era, the
religious/secular distinction
was the distinction between
two different kinds of Catholic priests,
those who belonged to an order
and those who belonged to a diocese.
Catholics still refer
to joining the Jesuits
as joining the religious,
entering the religious life.
Maybe they shouldn't, I
don't know, but anyway.
In 1400, the religions, if you look
in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1400,
the religions of England
were the Dominicans,
the Franciscans, the
Benedictans, et cetera.
There was no realm of secular pursuits
to which God was indifferent.
And though there was a distinction
between civil and
ecclesiastical authorities,
there was no distinction between religion
and politics as we know it.
This distinction, the
religious/secular distinction,
was the creation of the
early modern struggles
for power between ecclesiastical
and civil authorities.
And this happens between the
15th and the 17th centuries.
I'm gonna make a very
long and complicated story
very short here.
But, religion was invented in this period
as an essentially
interior, private impulse
that is essentially separate
from political/secular concerns.
Why, because that was
a way for civil rulers
to take what the church did
and push it out of the
public realm, right?
It's basically the result, the
religious/secular distinction
we have is the result of
a power struggle in which
civil authorities defeated
ecclesiastic authorities.
So, it's just a contingent
power arrangement
from early modern Europe.
It's not just the way things are,
but it was subsequently then, exported
to the non-Western world in
the process of colonization.
Smith's study concludes quote "There is no
"closely equivalent concept to religion
"in any culture that
has not been influenced
"by the modern West."
He goes looking for, end quote,
he goes looking for it in ancient Greece,
China, Egypt, India and
he finds it nowhere.
In their initial encounters
with the non-Western world,
it's interesting, colonizers
reported back home
to Europe with remarkable consistency
that the natives have no religion at all.
And I've got a whole
list of these in my book.
Once they're colonized though,
then the Europeans begin to employ
this religious/secular distinction
because it's useful, right?
Hinduism, let me just
give you one example,
Hinduism, which is a
term that's first used
in the 1780s, you got Hindus before then.
You don't have Hinduism until the 1780s.
It becomes a religion.
It becomes classified as a religion
over the course of the 19th century,
despite the fact that it encompasses
the entire Indian way of life.
Everything that we would conclude,
or we would divide up
into culture, politics,
religion, economics,
all of that is Hinduism.
This is made into a
religion by the British.
Why, Fritz Staal concludes quote
"Hinduism does not merely
fail to be a religion,
"it is not even a meaningful
unitive discourse," end quote.
Now, that's not an insult to Hindus.
What he's saying is that
it encompasses so much
that it's almost as meaningless as talking
about Americanism.
What does that mean?
Well, that could mean a
million different things.
A classification of Hinduism
proves useful though
because it means you can
take everything it means
to be Indian, call it a religion,
and therefore, privatize it, right?
So, to be British is to be public
and to be Indian is to be private.
And that's exactly why so
many contemporary advocates
of Hindu nationalism refuse
to call Hinduism a religion.
As Richard Cohen says "precisely because
"they want to emphasize that Hinduism
"is more than mere internalized beliefs.
"It is social, political,
economic, familial in nature."
And you can see these
struggles going on elsewhere.
In the late 19th century
between Chinese nationalists
and Western scholars,
Chinese nationalists say
"Confucianism is not a religion",
and Western scholars say, "Yes it is."
And it continues to go on under
the communist government here.
So, I'm gonna cut this short,
the story a little short.
Tomoko Masuzawa, in her book, called
The Invention of World Religions writes
"This concept of religion as a general,
"transcultural phenomenon,
yet also as a distinct sphere
"in its own right is patently groundless.
"It came from nowhere, and
there is no credible way
"of demonstrating its factual
and empirical substantiality."
I think she's right
except for where she says
it comes from nowhere.
It didn't come from nowhere.
It came from Europe,
and then it was exported
to the rest of the world.
The important point here is
that the religious/secular distinction
is not engraved in the nature of things.
It's a distinction that
is employed in Western
or Westernized societies to marginalize
certain kinds of beliefs and practices
and to authorize others.
Which brings me to the last part
of what I want to talk about.
This was, if you remember
from the beginning,
I talked about what the myth
of religious violence was.
The last part of it is that, therefore,
because it has this tendency
to promote violence,
religion should be
marginalized from public power
and we should fight to defend
and spread secular ideals.
And so, in this last part,
I wanna address the question
if the myth of religious
violence is so prevalent,
I'm sorry is so incoherent,
why is it so prevalent?
Right, whose interests is it serving?
If it's so incoherent,
why is it so prevalent?
Let's look at the first part of this.
Public power in the domestic spheres.
So, I'm gonna talk about
the domestic sphere
and then public policy.
Well into the 20th
century, religion was cited
in Supreme Court cases as
having a unifying social effect.
Beginning in the 1940s, however,
religion came to be seen
as a potentially dangerous
and divisive social force.
So, the first, it's really remarkable
what happens in, basically
1940 is the dividing line.
Before then, the Supreme Court cites it
as a unifying influence.
After that, as a divisive influence.
And the first Supreme
Court case to invoke this
what I call the myth of religious violence
was Minersville School
District v. Gobitis in 1940
which dealt with compulsory
pledging of allegiance
to the American flag.
Justice Felix Frankfurter
invoked the specter
of religious wars in addressing
the Jehovah's Witnesses'
right to dissent from patriotic rituals.
That was what was at stake.
The Jehovah's Witnesses
said that they shouldn't
have to be forced to
salute the American flag.
And Frankfurter, in his decision,
writes "Centuries of
strife over the erection
"of particular dogmas as exclusive
"or all-comprehending
faiths led to the inclusion
"of a guarantee for religious
freedom in the Bill of Rights.
"The First Amendment sought
to guard against repetition
"of those bitter religious struggles
"by prohibiting the
establishment of a state religion
"and by securing to every sect
"the free exercise of its faith."
Now, how do you think
Frankfurter ruled in this?
I mean, from this, it
sounds like he protected
the Jehovah's Witnesses'
right to dissent, right?
Wrong, he says it doesn't
apply to Jehovah's Witnesses
because they're dissent threatens
the "promotion of national cohesion.
"We are dealing with an
interest inferior to none
"in the hierarchy of legal values.
"National unity is the
basis of national security.
"What the school authorities
are really asserting
"is the right to awaken
in this child's mind
"considerations as to the
significance of the flag
"contrary to those
implanted by the parent."
If you're a parent, this is creepy, right?
The school can force your
kids against your beliefs
to salute the American
flag because nationalism
is our primary value, right?
Now, the court reversed
itself three years later,
but Frankfurter had
succeeded in introducing
this idea of religious violence
into Supreme Court cases.
And it would be invoked again
and again and again after this.
Now, Martin Marty discusses this case
and he cites the many instances
of Jehovah's Witnesses
who were attacked, beaten,
tarred, castrated, imprisoned
in the US in the 1940s
because they believed
that followers of Jesus Christ
should not salute a flag.
They thought it was idolatry.
Now, one would think that Marty
would draw the obvious conclusion
that zealous nationalism
can cause violence.
Astonishingly, he concludes,
"it became obvious that religion,
"which can pose 'us'
versus 'them' carries risks
"and can be perceived
by others as dangerous.
"Religion can cause all kinds of trouble
"in the public arena."
So, for Marty, religion refers
not to the ritual vowing
of allegiance to a flag, but only
to the Jehovah's Witnesses'
refusal to do so, right?
So, the myth of religious
violence is used here
to draw attention away
from nationalist violence
and towards so-called religious violence
even though in this case,
the religious people
were the ones suffering rather
than perpetrating the violence.
It was the Jehovah's Witnesses who were
getting the crap beat out of them.
But, somehow this becomes an argument
about why religion is dangerous.
In the succeeding decades, the myth
of religious violence then is invoked
in case after case, banning school prayer,
forbidding voluntary religious instruction
on public school property,
forbidding state aid
to parochial school teachers and so on.
When the court banned school prayer
in the Abington case in 1963,
again invoking the specter
of religious violence,
Justice Potter Stewart
dissented and warned
of the establishment of a religion
of secularism, he called it.
The establishment of a
religion of secularism.
Interesting language there.
And he noted the long
history of government's,
religious practice in the United States
including the fact that the Supreme Court
starts every session with
"God save this honorable court" right?
Well, Justices Goldberg
and Harlan responded
to that by saying you
can draw a sharp line
between patriotic invocations of God
and religious invocations
of God, and so they say,
"There is, of course, nothing
in the decision reach here
"that is inconsistent with the fact
"that school children
and others are officially
"encouraged to express
love for our country
"by reciting historical documents such
"the Declaration of Independence
which contain references
"to the Deity or by singing
officially espoused anthems
"which include the composer's profession
"of faith in a Supreme
Being, or with the fact
"that there are many manifestations
"in our public life of belief in God.
"Such patriotic or ceremonial occasions
"bear no true resemblance
to the unquestioned
"religious exercise that the state
"has sponsored in this
instance," school prayer.
Now, they don't offer any reason why
patriotic invocations of
God bear no true resemblance
to religious invocations.
But, it's clear that for
them, what separates religion
from what's not religion, is not
the invocation of God, right?
God can be invoked in public ceremonies
without those ceremonies
thereby becoming religious
as long as they express
love for our country.
So, separating religion from non-religion
depends not on the presence or absence
of expressions of faith in God,
but on the presence or
absence of expressions
of faith in the United States of America.
So, American nationalism is the antedote
for religious divisiveness
and more specifically,
to put a point on it,
revulsion to killing and dying
in the name of ones religion is one
of the principle means by which we become
convinced that killing and dying
in the name of America
is laudable and proper.
And that brings me to my final section
on foreign policy.
The conventional wisdom that religion
causes violence helps
to justify and reinforce
Western attitudes towards
the non-Western world,
especially Muslims, right?
In post-9/11 discourse, we tell ourselves,
we have this peaceful secular
type of government here.
Those people over there have this crazy
kind of religious political system,
and that's what creates
all the havoc over there.
They still mix religion and
politics which is dangerous.
Their violence is religious and therefore
it's irrational and divisive.
Our violence, on the other hand,
is secular and therefore it's peacemaking
and unitive and unfortunately sometimes
we find ourselves required to bomb them
into the higher rationality, right?
Now, that was a joke, sorry.
(laughter)
Hitchens, for example, skewers religion
for its violence, but he was
an enthusiastic supporter
of the Iraq War.
And despite his attempt
to draw Martin Luther King
to his side, Hitchens has
some very approving things
to say about killing people.
Some Hitchens quotes, "And
I say to the Christians
"while I'm at it, 'Go love
your own enemies, by the way.
"'Don't be loving mine.'
"I think the enemies
of civilization should
"be beaten and killed and defeated,
"and I don't make any apology for it."
For Hitchens, the Iraq War was part
of a broader war for secularism.
He has an article called
Bush's War for Secularism
and the Game is Zero Sum.
"It is not possible for me to say,
"well, you pursue your Shiite
dream of a hidden iman,
"and I pursue my study of
Thomas Paine and George Orwell,
"and the world is big
enough for both of us.
"The true believer cannot rest until
"the whole world bows the knee."
Now, of course, the true
believer he has in mind
is the Muslim, right?
But, the message, I
think, is also the case
that the true believer in secularism
cannot rest until the whole
world has been converted
to secularism by force if necessary.
And let me give you one
more example of that.
Fellow New Atheist Sam
Harris' book The End of Faith
about the violence and
irrationality of religion
dramatically illustrates
this double standard.
In the book, Harris condemns
the religious torture
of witches, but he
provides his own argument
for torturing terrorists.
And his book is charged
with the conviction
that the secular West cannot reason
with religious people, but
must deal with them by force.
So, he says, "Some
propositions are so dangerous
"that it may even be ethical
"to kill people for believing them.
"Certain beliefs place their
adherents beyond the reach
"of every peaceful means of persuasion,
"while inspiring them to commit acts
"of extraordinary violence against others.
"There is, in fact, no talking
"to some people," religious
people in other words.
"If they cannot be captured,
and they often cannot,
"otherwise tolerant
people may be justified
"in killing them in self-defense.
"This is what the United States
attempted in Afghanistan,
"and it is what we and
other Western powers
"are bound to attempt,
at an even greater cost
"to ourselves and innocents abroad,
"elsewhere in the Muslim world.
"We will continue to spill blood
"in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas."
All right, so his logic
here is impeccable.
Religious people hold these
beliefs that are irrational,
so you can't try to reason with them.
You can only deal with them by force.
So, the myth of religious violence
becomes a justification
for the use of violence.
In a chapter called
The Problem With Islam,
Harris writes, "In our
dialogue with the Muslim world,
"we are confronted by
people who hold beliefs
"for which there is no
rational justification
"and therefore cannot even be discussed,
"and yet these are the
very beliefs that underlie
"many of the demands they
are likely to make upon us.
"This is especially a problem," he says
"if such people gain
access to nuclear weapons.
"There is little possibility
of our having a cold war
"with an Islamist regime armed
"with long-range nuclear weapons.
"In such a situation,
the only thing likely
"to ensure our survival may be
"a nuclear first strike of our own.
"Needless to say, this would
be an unthinkable crime
"as it would kill tens of millions
"of innocent civilians in a single day,
"but it may be the only course
of action available to us,
"given what Islamists believe."
He goes on to say that "Muslims then would
"likely misinterpret this
act of 'self-defense'
"as a genocidal crusade,
"thus plunging the world
into nuclear holocaust.
"All of this is perfectly
insane, of course.
"I have just described
a plausible scenario
"in which much of the world's population
"could be annihilated on
account of religious ideas
"that belong on the
same shelf with Batman,
"the philosopher's stone, and unicorns."
In other words, if we
have to slaughter millions
through a nuclear first
strike, it's the fault
of the Muslims and their
crazy religious beliefs.
"Before we get to that
point," Harris continues,
"we must encourage civil
society in Islamic countries,
"but we cannot trust them
to vote it in," of course.
One more quote from Harris.
"It seems all but certain that some form
"of benign dictatorship
will generally be necessary
"to bridge the gap.
"But benignity is the key,
and if it cannot emerge
"from within a state, it
must be imposed from without.
"The means of such imposition
are necessarily crude,
"economic isolation, military
intervention," et cetera.
But, "While this may seem
"an exceedingly arrogant
doctrine to espouse,"
do you think "it appears
we have no alternatives."
So, Harris' book is a
particularly blunt version
of this type of justification,
but he's by no means isolated.
His book won the 2005 Pen Award
for Non-Fiction.
It was a New York Times best-seller.
It has been enthusiastically endorsed
by such academic superstars
as Richard Dawkins
and Alan Dershowitz, and Peter Singer.
Peter Singer, the same one who thinks
that you can't kill
non-rational animals for food,
but apparently non-rational
Muslims is a different matter.
And Harris' logic is little different
from the common assumption
in American foreign policy
that our liberal values are right and true
for every person in every society
and we will take military
action if necessary
to promote such values.
So, to conclude.
Here's my argument in summary.
There's no essential difference
between so-called religious and secular.
So, there's no good reason for thinking
that religious ideas and practices
are more inherently prone to violence
than so-called secular
ideas and practices.
And the idea that there is
something called religion
and that it is essentially
prone to violence
is an ideological justification
for the social arrangements
and which includes violence
in so-called secular orders.
Now, I don't, by any means, wish
to deny the virtues of liberalism
or excuse the vices of other
kinds of social orders.
Here's what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to level the playing field
so that we do in fact examine the violence
that can be generated by jihad
or the sacrificial atonement of Christ.
But, we also look at the violence
that can be generated by things like
the invisible hand of the market,
or the idea of America
as universal policemen
or savior, and so on.
The ideologies of free
markets, free elections.
So, put simply, my argument is that people
kill for all sorts of things.
Things like money and flags and oil,
and freedom, that function
as gods in peoples' lives.
So, I wanna challenge the
religious/secular dichotomy
that causes us to turn a blind eye
to liberal forms of
imperialism and violence.
And really, the myth of religious violence
is in so far as it creates the villains
against which our social
order defines itself.
It's really not that much different
from previous forms of imperialism
that assumed that the savages over there
need to be made to look more like us
by military means if necessary.
So, I don't wanna either
vilify Western-style liberalism
nor justify theocracy, but rather help us
to see that these are
not the only two choices
that are out there, right?
We have to stop trying to assume
that Muslims need to choose
between Canada or Iran.
There are other possibilities.
So, violence feeds on
the need for enemies,
the need to separate us from them,
and these binary ways
of dividing the world
make the world understandable for us,
but unlivable for many people.
So, doing away with the
myth of religious violence
is one way of resisting such binaries.
And, perhaps, thereby turning
some enemies into friends.
Thank you.
(applause)
So, we've got time for
questions, conversation.
I'd like to hear what y'all think.
Yeah.
It doesn't matter.
If you're killing somebody in the name
of an atheist ideology, like Marxism,
which assumes that you
need to overthrow religion
because it's the opium of the people.
Then, it seems to me
like you've got a kind
of fanaticism in the service
of an atheist ideology
that really isn't there by any different
than a fanaticism in the
service of a theist ideology.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good way
of leveling the playing field.
We need to be self-critical,
and not kind of vilify secularists,
on the other hand, and make them out.
I guess the reason I'm concentrating on
the idea that religion causes violence
is because it's so much
more common, right?
I was asked to write a chapter
for the Blackwell Companion
to Religion and Violence
and the chapter I handed in was called
Why This Volume is a Very Bad Idea.
And the editor changed the title
of my talk, but the basic point is that
there's gonna be a Blackwell Companion
to Religion and Violence and there's never
gonna be a Blackwell Companion
to Secularism and Violence, right?
It's just a part of the ideology
that undergirds our social order,
and so we need to examine it.
But, I think you're right.
I mean, there's no point
either in vilifying secularism.
On the other hand, I think we need to be
a little more careful.
I mean, Pope Benedict XVI
did not vilify secularism.
I mean, if you look at the second half
of Deus Caritas Est, it's
basically a whole defense
of secular social orders in the sense
of secularism as in the
separation of church and state.
The Catholic Church has made its peace
with the separation of church and state,
at least since Vatican II now.
And Benedict XVI is
completely onboard with that.
He attacks relativism and the
kind of militant secularism
that tries to stamp out
religion and that sort of thing.
But, he's not anti-secular
forms of social order.
But, I think your point is, I think it's
I think we do need to be self-critical
and not kind of turn this into an exercise
of kind of blaming somebody
else on the other side.
I mean, in general, anytime
you make a statement
like religion causes violence,
or secularism causes violence,
or Islam causes violence, you've already
uttered something that's
probably stupid, right?
I mean, because you've taken, you know,
Islam which is a belief system
that encompasses over a billion people,
and you've kind of labeled
it as it there's one thing,
you know, and ISIS represents it.
I mean, there's an interesting book called
What Muslims Really Think which is based
on surveys of 50,000 Muslims
from all over the world,
and they found that only 7% of them
would justify the 9/11 attacks.
And yet, when we think
about these matters,
we assume that, you know, the Muslim world
is all just crazy, out
to get us and so on.
So, anyway thank you for that comment.
Other questions, comments?
Yeah.
I think what you just said
there is probably exactly right.
Right, and we need to
approach these matters
with pragmatism as opposed
to sloganeering, right?
Unfortunately, we're in the election cycle
and, you know, binaries get
all the attention, right?
You know, the political candidates
that create enemies and
demonize other people.
That's what's getting
the attention these days.
But, pragmatism, I
think, is exactly right.
You know, there's not
two kinds of government
and you have to choose between them.
There are dozens, hundreds of
different kinds of government.
And in the Middle East, especially,
I think we should be careful not to try
to kind of cram other kinds of societies
into a Western-style democracy,
or Western-style kind of liberal society
that works for us in some ways,
but may not work for them.
And in the same way, I think we need
to be pragmatic about
within our own context.
I don't think that you need to kind of,
like one of the other court cases
that I talked about in my book
is a case Aguilar v. Felton
in, when was it, 2002 I think maybe.
But, the Supreme Court struck down
the possibility of kids getting,
kids in New York City
getting remedial education on
things like math and so on,
on a parochial school campus
because they were afraid that while kids
were seeing, you know,
working on their math,
they might see a crucifix in a classroom
or something like that.
And the myth of religious violence
was used to ban this.
And the Supreme Court
justices who dissented
said, "This is absurd," right?
And they're right.
That kind of paranoia, I think
we can be a lot more flexible
than we are, yeah.
Thanks, other questions,
comments, discussion?
Yeah, good question.
I tend to be really
suspicious of those kinds
of universal tales that everybody
is goin' the same direction.
And oh, look, it just
happens to be the direction
that we already ended up in, right?
You know, I just read, I was in Nigeria
in December and was discussing this book
by a scholar which basically argues.
He says that African nations
need to look like Denmark.
That's where they're going.
And that's basically the
only path to development
is eventually to try to get
to where Denmark is now.
And, you know, people in
Africa, they're thinkin'
Denmark, what the hell?
I've, you know, I've
never been to Denmark.
Who are these Danish people?
And so and telling us that
we need to look them, right?
It wasn't a Dane who was writing this.
It was a British scholar.
But, I tend to, I think,
those kinds of theories
that there's only one path to development
and modernization, they tend to serve
the people that are making
those kinds of claims.
It tends to privilege
our sort of social order.
And I think, gee whiz, it's a big,
I mean look around the
Catholics in Cultures website
and you'll see, it's
a big world out there.
And there's all kinds of people that we.
I mean, part of the problem
with a university education
is that it teaches us to think that we
are universal subjects, right?
We take you from you little town
in western Massachusetts
and where you learned these
parochial sort of ideas
and we bring you to the
university which is universal
and we teach you to have an opinion
about places that you don't
know crap about, right?
You know, you read a book on one place
and now suddenly, you're holding forth
over a beer about what ought to be done
about, you know, Kosovo or Uganda
or places you never heard
of until a few weeks ago.
We do a great disservice.
You know, when your commencement speaker
tells you, "Go out and change the world."
You know, give him a Bronx cheer
because, I mean, the world has had enough
of well-meaning middle class Americans
trying to change it, right?
I mean, what we need is a little bit
more humility, in other words.
The kind of idea that we don't know
what's best for everybody in the world.
It's a big world out
there and there are a lot
people think differently than us,
and that oughta be OK.
This is why nobody's ever gonna invite me
to give a commencement speech, by the way.
(laughter)
One of the many reasons, probably.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, oh sure.
I mean, ISIS are bad people.
I mean, these are scary people
who have weird ideas that are wrong.
You know, I mean, we just need to come out
and say that, that
that's, and that of course
that's a concern.
Yeah, I mean, I tried
to gesture towards that.
I mean, I've got one kind of subject
that I'm dealing with, but
I tried to gesture towards
that right at the beginning.
And say that look, I'm
not one of those people
who's gonna say, "Oh, religion doesn't
really cause violence."
Or that ISIS is not really Muslim,
and that sort of thing.
I'm not one of those people at all.
I mean, there's some scary,
I mean, what I'm trying to get at though
is the idea that there's good theology
and there's bad theology, right?
Whereas, some people are just gonna
think theology is bad, right?
And as a theologian, I kind of think,
well, you know, yeah,
there's good theology
and there's bad theology.
And you know, and if you're looking for,
there is a group of 100, what is it,
like 150, 120 Muslim clerics that wrote
an open letter to
al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS.
You can find it on the web
in a bunch of different languages.
But, an open letter refuting what ISIS
is doing point-by-point
from the Quran, right?
Including talking about the way
they're interpreting the Quran,
as being kind of cherry picking.
They actually, in the English translation,
I don't know what it is in Arabic,
but they actually use
the word cherry picking
from the Quran and so on.
So, I mean and that, I think,
is what needs to be done
instead of these kind of
slogans about Islam or whatever.
We just need to get
down to the nitty gritty
and say, "This is crappy
theology right here
"and here's why."
Right, and Christians need to
be doin' the same thing, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, interesting question.
If you're going to get to
a bolder stronger statement
like cause, generally the
stronger the statement,
the more focused
the research field needs to be, right?
And what I mean by that is rather
than making statements like
"Islam causes violence,"
what we probably wanna get towards
is saying, certain forms
of Wahhabist
Saudi theology that has been
promoted by the Saudi regime
through these different kind of madrasas
around the Muslim world,
they can lend themselves
to the promotion of violence in ways
that we can demonstrate, right?
And so, the more you can kind of narrow in
on a particular place
and time like that, you know.
And it's easy to do the
same thing in Christianity
or other things.
You know, inquisition in Spain.
That's probably not as bad
as the British and Dutch
have propaganda machine has made it sound,
but still, it was not good, right?
Let's look at that and
see what's going on there.
But, in order to be scientific
and not just ideological,
I think that's exactly what we need to do.
Close empirical studies
of the circumstances
under which ideologies of
all kinds cause violence.
Right now, there are
tremendous academic resources
being pointed at Islam and Christianity
and things like that.
And there's just not a whole lot going on
in terms of secular violence.
It just gets a pass, right?
Like there's just not gonna be
a Blackwell Companion to
Secularism and Violence
and that's kind of what
we need to be looking at.
Does that answer your question?
OK, thank you, yeah.
You had a question.
Yeah, interesting, interesting.
I don't know if everybody heard that,
but that's a really interesting comment.
The idea that besides religion,
race is another one of those
kind of Western constructions
that gets used to, you
know, categorize people
in a certain sort of way as dangerous.
And this comes not only out
of the colonial experience,
but it's still very much alive now, yeah.
Yeah, thanks for that comment.
That's really interesting, yeah.
Other comments or questions?
Yeah.
So, the question is, yeah,
it's an interesting question.
The question is we've been
talking about violence
in terms, mostly of
killing, and what about
other kinds of violence
like silencing people?
I concentrate on killing because
most of the literature
on religion and violence
concentrates on killing.
And so, I'm just kind of, I don't provide
a definition of violence in the book,
and some people have
criticized me for that,
but I just say I'm just
going with the definition
of violence that people who make
these arguments are using.
And so, that's why I'm not gonna,
getting into that thing.
So, I mean, certainly what we would want
to do in a case like Galileo is look
at the actual evidence and condemn
what needs condemning.
I mean, clearly this was wrong.
Pope John Paul II apologized
for what the church did to Galileo.
What's interesting about
the Galileo case though
is that it's presented as
science versus religion.
Science versus theology.
And in fact, what it is,
I think, is good theology
versus bad theology.
Galileo was not only a better scientist,
he was a better theologian
than his opponents,
and he understood how to read the Bible
in such a way that science
and theology doesn't conflict.
And that's the story that I think
it would be helpful to say.
So, which the lessons that you draw
from a case like Galileo,
I don't think are lessons
about religion or lessons
about theology as such.
And I've just been kind
of trying to kind of
show how complicated this
whole question of religion is.
But, rather you make a judgement
about stupid ecclesiastical authority
in this case, right?
And saying that they just made,
they were bad theologians and Galileo
was the good theologian.
And eventually, not
only Galileo's science,
but Galileo's theology eventually wins out
and you get these much more flexible ways
of reading the scriptures.
So again, kind of as
specific as you can get,
I think the better.
- [Voiceover] Thank you very much.
- OK, thanks.
(applause)
Thanks, I appreciate it.
