The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence

Andrew R. Murphy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405191319
• eBook ISBN: 9781444395730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Violence in Society
• Index: Social Sciences

The timely Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who provide a coherent state of the art overview of the complex relationships between religion and violence.

• This companion tackles one of the most important topics in the field of Religion in the twenty-first century, pulling together a unique collection of cutting-edge work
• A focused collection of high-quality scholarship provides readers with a state-of-the-art account of the latest work in this field
• The contributors are broad-ranging, international, and interdisciplinary, and include historians, political scientists, religious studies scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, scholars of women's and gender studies and communication

Part I: “Religion” and “Violence”: Defining Terms, Defining Relationships

1 Religion and Violence: Coming to Terms with Terms

John D. Carlson

2 The Myth of Religious Violence

William T. Cavanaugh

CHAPTER 1

Religion and Violence: Coming to Terms with Terms

John D. Carlson

One spring morning in 2007, as Virginia Tech University students were setting off to class, fellow student Seung-Hui Cho began a shooting spree that, before turning his gun on himself, claimed 32 lives. Efforts to interpret the massacre, the shooter’s motives, and the trauma’s aftermath were freighted with resonances and attributions that most would call religious. The story is lucidly analyzed by Grace Kao, then a religious studies professor at Virginia Tech, whose poignant account affirms that we cannot gain meaningful understanding of this violence by ignoring the facets that are tinged – if not saturated – with “religion” (Kao, forthcoming).

Numerous pundits presumed Cho’s outbreak was motivated by Islam, in spite of his Christian upbringing and the Christian allusions that littered his manifestos. Similar assumptions were made in 2002 when the public learned that the Washington DC Beltway sniper was a member of the Nation of Islam. Born John Allen Williams, he changed his last name to Muhammad one month after the attacks of September 11, 2001. For many, Cho and Muhammad were perpetrators of “religious violence.” It mattered little that they were both mentally ill. Kao shows, however, that the religious symbols that haunted Cho’s “testimonials” were fragmented within a highly disturbed psyche. Cho’s irrationality undermined – rather than validated – the claim that his violence was religiously motivated or framed. Neither he nor Muhammad bore the markings of American abolitionist John Brown, or Osama bin Laden, or others who make perspicuous religious arguments to justify their perverse violence. The study of religion and violence enables us to scrutinize such expectations about religion’s causal relation to violence.

But that is hardly the whole story, for various forms of religion were intimately bound up in the efforts to find meaning in the Virginia Tech killings. A few religious groups prophesied that Cho’s actions were divine retribution for America’s sins. More representatively, the community and nation collectively expressed sorrow through the consolation of various religious traditions and prominent modes of public religion. At the convocation ceremony a few weeks after the shooting, religion was on full display: from Qur’anic and biblical invocations to religious musings by public officials to an impromptu recitation of the Lord’s Prayer led by members of the audience. This episode reveals how multifaceted and contested the role of religion can be, particularly as associated with incidents of violence.

A spate of recent scholarly works seek to probe various intersections of religion and violence (Appleby 2000; Juergensmeyer 2003; Lincoln 2006; Selengut 2003). This is hardly a novelty of life in the twenty-first century, though. The meanings we pack into the categories “religion” and “violence” are as important to understanding human history and the human condition as they are to understanding American society in a post-9/11 world. Interestingly, at the same time, other scholars are questioning whether such categories offer useful insight at all. Thus, one conceptual prerequisite for a Companion to Religion and Violence entails a defense of the terms on which it relies. As an overture to the chapters that follow – by way of coming to terms with the key terms of debate – I take up the conceptual, ethical, and practical stakes of thinking carefully about religion and violence. Specifically, I argue that critically assessing the meaning of violence – a much neglected concern in recent religion scholarship – is at least as significant as defining religion.

The Category Formerly Known As Religion?

This volume emerges at a time when use of the “R-word” is more contested than ever. Religion turns out to be a rather peculiar term, fraught with paradox. It is at once pregnant with meaning yet, for some scholars, increasingly vague and meaningless. Elements in the media suggest that religion is everywhere around us, while scholars of religion deny that religion is anything but a social construction. For a phenomenon with such an unsubstantiated basis, religion remains a powerful concept. As we shall see, much ambiguity surrounding “religion” is tied to root concerns about power and violence.

Debates over the definition of religion go back to early antiquity. Cicero linked religion to reading (legere). The term relegere entailed either rereading or reading carefully or treating thoughtfully “all things pertaining to the gods.” Lactantius and other Christians who disputed this etymology instead invoked religare, meaning to bind together (i.e., as a ligament binds or connects). Augustine, too, adopted this account, having flirted with the idea that religion involved “recovering” (religere). But in all these cases, the common “re-” prefix underscores the divine reference point, whether recovering God, binding oneself back to God, rebinding oneself to others through deities, or reading again matters involving the divine. Christian theologians and scholars of religion both have perceived a deep split between Christian and non-Christian notions of religion. Augustine, for example, contrasted the “true religion” of Christianity with the “civil theology” of Rome. But in other cases, for example when Calvin invokes Cicero to describe the sensus divinatus in human beings, one can appreciate that religion is found in various forms among diverse peoples and cultures.

For traditionalist scholars of religion, some variation of the following account often serves as an adequate working definition in the trade: Religion entails the practices, rituals, beliefs, discourses, myths, symbols, creeds, experiences, traditions, and institutions by which individuals and communities conceive, revere, assign meaning to, and order their lives around some account of ultimate reality generally understood in relation to God, gods, or a transcendent dimension deemed sacred or holy. More succinctly, Scott Appleby defines religion as “the human response to a reality perceived as sacred” (2000: 8).¹ Bruce Lincoln introduces “maximalist” and “minimalist” qualifiers that distinguish, respectively, between forms of religion that are more explicit and those that are implicit or veiled by secular premises. What maximalist religion and minimalist religion share in common – what makes both religious – are the divine reference points to which various communities’ discourses, practices, identities and institutions are oriented (Lincoln 2006: 5–8).

One preliminary concern with the category of religion involves what we might call the membership problem. Which traditions, discourses, and belief systems belong to this club called religion? Some scholars debate whether the terms of membership are sufficiently broad to include Confucianism and certain forms of Buddhism. Many worry that religion has been defined too exclusively so as to privilege Christianity, monotheistic traditions, or belief-based systems (King 1999). But we also can err by liberalizing the admittance requirements too much. For, as William Cavanaugh puzzles in chapter 2, what insight is gained when virtually anything – Marxism, nationalism, or one’s undying love and loyalty for the Chicago Cubs – can be a religion? Though one may bind oneself to others in each of these examples, the etymological discussion above suggests that religion is about more than binding to any old thing.

Some may conclude that there simply is no such thing as religion.² Perhaps, then, we should no longer talk about religion as such, instead naming only specific traditions or groups – “things” belonging to the category formerly called religion. Of course, this approach has its own problems. How does one define Christianity in a way that is accurate and meaningful? Is it tenable to lump together practices, beliefs, discourses, experiences, and institutions as diverse as those of the early apostles, Egyptian Copts, medieval Crusaders, Calvinist Huguenots, contemporary Methodists and Mormons, old order Amish, modern-day fundamentalists, Korean Baptists, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, African-American Pentecostals, and countless other denominations? Indeed, in terms of certain practices and discourses, some of these groups may have more in common with members of other faith traditions than they do with one another. We might not know that, though, unless there was a broader category that invited such a comparison. Categories serve vital purposes. We think through them and the meanings we assign to them. Creatively applied, categories help us to organize human thought and experience. Misapplied, they engender conceptual mis-organization and prejudice.

There is an egalitarian way out of the category conundrum: One who claims a category or title gets to use it. Similarly, those who seek refuge outside this umbrella should be heard (e.g., “We practitioners of ‘X’ do not consider ourselves adherents of religion”). The crucial stipulation is that one who claims, assigns, or denies a category (e.g., religious, Christian,) must offer reasons, which, in turn, will be assayed by scholars, citizens, and other coreligionists. Religious categories about the sacred or transcendent can be useful, but they are neither sacred nor profane themselves and should not be treated as such. A category becomes defunct when it is no longer useful, and one sure way to hasten its demise is to insist upon fixed borders instead of more flexible contours that admit to contestation and negotiation.

So, if there is a spirited debate about whether Confucianism is a religion, then so be it. Does this mean that belief in anything can qualify as a religion? And if not a member of the religion club, then to what club do other beliefs belong? For what it is worth, no matter the suprarational hope sustaining the faith and allegiance of Cubs fans, I would not call it religious. Nor do I deem Marxism a religion. Given its founder’s view that religion is the “opiate of the masses,” that seems a stretch (though many Christians have been influenced by Marx). Political theorists usually classify Marxism as a political ideology. Here it is important to recall that comparisons across categories also can be useful, particularly when religious and political beliefs and affinities enjoy important similarities, including their understandings of power or support for or opposition to violence. Certainly, what is often called civil religion could straddle different religious and political categories. Wars waged for explicitly political (and putatively secular) reasons, often are filled with religious symbols and meanings, as recent scholars have shown (Ebel 2010; Stout 2006). Preserving a broad and fluid notion of religion will help the reader connect and reflect upon the diverse essays of this volume.

There is, though, another more potent objection that some critics of “religion” – religious studies scholars especially – have lodged. As Jonathan Z. Smith avers, “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization” (1982: xi). For some scholars, the discovery or “invention” of religion is tied intimately to the history of European expansion and colonialism and to the religious studies discipline that emerged in tandem (Asad 1993; Cavanaugh 2009; Masuzawa 2005). Failure to recognize how religion is socially constructed allows essentialists to portray religion as universal across human communities in time and space and to impose such a framework upon “Others.” Such essentialism reinforces expectations of whatever it is people believe religion’s “true nature” to be: in secular societies, “good religion” is private, nonviolent, and subject to reason; “bad religion” is public, violent, and irrational.

In the post–September 11 world, constructions of religion can be easy to form, dangerous to hold, and difficult to break down. Consider the dramatic cover on the November 3, 2007 issue of The Economist, which included a special report devoted to “the new wars of religion.” A hand descends from grey clouds, index finger extended, suggesting a menacing – presumably monotheistic – deity delivering orders to his (not her) followers below. The image represents religion’s explosive potential, for clasped within the heavenly grip is a hand grenade, pin still in place. The image of the divine hand and grenade emblematically depicts religion as a tangible object or “thing” with a highly discernible violent essence. The viewer gets the sense that this essence has changed little over time, as portrayed by the modern grenade clutched by a hand seemingly lifted right from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1511). This image illustrates the kind of essence against which the category critics of religion warn, while simultaneously reinforcing the views of new atheists and ardent secularists who contend that religion is inherently violent (Harris 2000; Hitchens 2007).

Even scholars who merely claim that religion’s ties to violence must be understood can reinforce constructions of religious violence found in popular culture no matter how sophisticated their academic treatments. There are, to be sure, simultaneous countervailing claims. The idea that “true” religion is peaceful and nonviolent has been affirmed by many apologists, including George W. Bush in the days after September 11, 2001, and Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize address. (One struggles to find comparable magazine covers that reinforce this essentialist view of religion.) More importantly, any single representation risks displacing the many other complex, multivalent pieces made up of innumerable actors, movements, texts, discourses, and institutions – and which, together, form no overarching montage or composite of “authentic religion.”

Scholars who are critics of the category of religion often worry that conceiving religion in essentialist terms ignores not only that religion is just a social construction but also risks overlooking the ill purposes to which such categories and constructions are put. Specifically, when religion’s complicity with violence becomes essentialized, “the secular” is assumed to be an agent of peace. Specifically, the nation-state’s grounding in secular reason is used to justify and legitimate its violence against the illegitimate violence of irrational religion. But even as the artifices of religion and secular are deconstructed, new categories emerge and, with them, new essentialisms. Taming our instincts to categorize and essentialize turns out to be no easy task – even for strong critics of categories. Ironically, it is the effort to deconstruct categories such as religion and religious violence that eventually manifests the limitations of such deconstructive methodologies.

Religious and Secular Violence

Bruce Lincoln’s comparative study of religion examines not simply different religious traditions and their relations to violence but the different forms those religions can take. Discussing commonalities in the videos of Osama bin Laden and national addresses of George W. Bush following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Lincoln distinguishes between maximalist accounts that make use of explicitly religious tropes and discourses (such as those bin Laden deploys) and minimalist accounts that appeal to secular assumptions about religion, the state, and violence. For Lincoln, what is distinctive about Bush’s minimalism is the way in which his words, spoken as a secular political official, belied his own hidden but religiously maximalist commitments. According to Lincoln, President Bush “double-coded” his rhetoric with religious references that would fall on the deaf ears of those with secular orientations but would ring through sonorously to certain Christian audiences. “The conversion of secular political speech into religious discourse invests otherwise merely human events with transcendent significance,” Lincoln affirms. “By the end, America’s adversaries have been redefined as enemies of God, and current events have been constituted as confirmation of Scripture” (2006: 32). The upshot of Lincoln’s analysis is made clear in his pluralized choice of title, Holy Terrors.

One can debate Lincoln’s exegesis of bin Laden’s and Bush’s words and whether they amount to comparable defenses of terror. But even if one departs from his conclusions (as I do), his methodology, nonetheless, proffers a form of critical inquiry about religion that extends to the state’s use of coercive force and secular efforts to defend it. What is intriguing about Lincoln’s approach is the way religion serves as both a common analytic denominator as well as a comprehensive category. Lincoln’s minimalist-maximalist distinction preserves a focus on distinctive features of critical religious inquiry, reminding readers of the transcendent backdrops on which various actors – and the communities they seek to reach and bind together – rely.

Critics who are skeptical about “religious violence,” however, train their sights more directly onto the secular. They question the excessive attention applied to religious violence at the expense of secular violence, which leads to the false essentialization of religion as violence-prone and the secular as peaceful. Simple reco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Religion
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: “Religion” and “Violence”: Defining Terms, Defining Relationships
• Part II: Disciplinary Perspectives
• Part III: Traditions and Movements, Concepts and Themes
• Part IV: Case Studies: Religion and Violence, Past and Present
• Part V: Future Prospects: Beyond Violence?
• Index