Religion and Conflict

Chad M. Bauman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501751424
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian-Hindu relations, with particular attention to the 2007–2008 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, Anti-Christian Violence in India examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. Is "religious" conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of intergroup conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years?

Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, Anti-Christian Violence in India additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization and, in particular, the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps to provoke. With such theories in mind, Bauman explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians.

Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva, or "Hinduness, " explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. And so, with provocative and original analysis, Bauman questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns among some Hindus about the Western sociopolitical order with which they associate global Christianity.

CHAPTER 1

A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence

Social theorists dealing with the relationship of religion and conflict are animated by a number of organizing questions. The first and most central of these questions is whether religion causes violent conflict and, if so, whether it does so inherently and unavoidably, frequently but not inherently, or rarely and only in certain contingent circumstances. The second important question is whether conflicts that participants understand or frame in religious terms differ significantly from other forms of conflict. To put it another way, does it make analytical sense to treat “religious” conflict as sui generis, or is it merely a species of ethnic or intergroup conflict more broadly construed?¹ The third organizing question has to do with the appeal of violence. There are, of course, many instances of religious communities coming into conflict with one another without resorting to violence. Why, then, and under what circumstances might violence become an attractive or likely option for religious actors? The fourth and final animating question is a more contextual one: What explains the global increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years? In what follows, I provide an overview of these debates and situate my own approach within them. My approach is a broadly constructivist one I call socio-cosmological, following but slightly altering—for reasons indicated below—Mark Juergensmeyer’s “socio-theological” method.

Question 1: Does Religion Cause Violent Conflict?

The short answer to this fundamental question is no. Religious identities are no more inherently prone to conflict than any other identities. Most conflicts are, at root, about competition for economic, social, or political resources. However, those that seek or stand to benefit from conflict are liable to produce and frame it in the ways that best serve their purposes. In certain circumstances, constructing conflict as religious (as opposed to constructing it along ethnic, linguistic, or class lines) better serves those purposes, and indeed, religions provide resources (for example, group solidarity, dedication to a higher cause, justifications for violence) that can contribute to this construction. However, religions also circumscribe the extent and manner in which the pious can be manipulated and frequently provide resources for those opposed to violence. The construction of conflict as religious, then, and the participation of religious actors in it as such emerge not from the inherent nature of religion but rather only discursively, through complex processes of contestation.

These assertions require greater explanation. Broadly speaking, contemporary social theorists approach this question in one of three ways, providing answers often designated (as discussed briefly in the introduction) instrumentalist, essentialist, and constructivist. Instrumentalists emphasize and search for the material motivations of human behavior and tend to interpret religious conflict as an outgrowth or mere mask of conflict over material resources. At the other end of the spectrum lie those we might call essentialists, who take religion seriously and consider it an important causal factor in conflict, even suggesting sometimes that religion is inherently predisposed toward violence. The contrast between the instrumentalist and essentialist positions has been articulated in a variety of other terms signaling slightly different points of emphasis: microrational versus macrocultural, rationalist versus culturalist, strategic versus cultural, interest versus identity, materialist versus primordialist. The instrumentalist view has tended to predominate in political science, economics, and international relations, while the essentialist view has tended to predominate in the fields of sociology, history, religious studies, and anthropology.²

The views described by these contrasting pairs are rarely found in pure form, and there are many possible mediating positions. Among them, the best known and most thoroughly theorized is the position closest to my own: constructivism. Constructivists argue that while religion generally plays a rather small role, if any, in generating violence, it frequently plays a significant role in the framing, shaping, acceleration, perpetuation, or exacerbation of violence.³ Constructivists also emphasize the social construction of conflict—that is, the way that conflicts come to be understood and carried out in particular ways in particular times and places as a result of infinitely variable social and historical factors. Before articulating the constructivist position further, we must first briefly describe the instrumentalist and essentialist alternatives.

Instrumentalists tend to agree that humans, or at least their leaders, conduct themselves according to the rational pursuit of rationally chosen economic and political goals. While there are many possible versions of instrumentalism, most tend to share two emphases.⁴ The first draws substantially on certain interpretations of Marx to argue that the apparent religious aspect of conflict and violence is merely epiphenomenal. What truly drives conflict is contestation over material and political resources. Instrumentalists do not deny the resurgence of religion or the recent rise in religiously inflected violence. However, they tend to ascribe causality for this violence to factors like rising inequality, poverty, or social/political marginalization. As Amartya Sen puts it, “Given the coexistence of violence and poverty, it is not at all unnatural to ask whether poverty kills twice—first through economic privation, and second through political carnage.”⁵

The second emphasis of instrumentalists is on the tendency of powerful elites to manipulatively and cynically enlist the masses in the pursuit of elite economic and political goals (oftentimes even against the masses’ own material interests) by creating solidarity and motivating action through the instrumental use of religious images, ideas, and identities. This manipulation is possible and often successful because the marginalized and dispossessed frequently turn to religion in search of that which the prevailing political and economic order has denied them: solidarity, social support, personal confidence, and communal pride. Nevertheless, instrumentalists would deny that religion plays any significant or real role in the generation (as opposed to the framing or aggravation) of violent intergroup conflict.⁶

The instrumentalist position is appealing for a number of reasons. For example, it seems clear enough that economic factors play a role in religious conflict. Rarely do socially powerful or wealthy religious communities clash violently with one another. Such clashes far more regularly involve, on one side at least, impoverished and politically weak communities.⁷ Similarly, Gabriel Almond, Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan have persuasively argued that increased economic prospects tend to undermine support for the kinds of religious movements that regularly condone the use of violence.⁸

Nevertheless, the instrumentalist position suffers from a number of important deficiencies. While it is laudable in its recognition that even violent actors can be rational and may be strategically pursuing their goals, it overemphasizes the rationality of human beings, who obviously do not always act in perfectly logical or rational ways.⁹ Moreover, to the extent that it emphasizes the exploitation of the masses by rational elites, the instrumentalist position tends to imply that what most characterizes the masses is their irrationality and easily and infinitely manipulated nature. This is a prejudicial position, indeed, though one that could perhaps be at least partially avoided if instrumentalists more regularly employed a broader definition of interests, one that included not only material but also what Max Weber called “ideal” or “value-rational”¹⁰ interests, like those proposed or found in religion and religious communities (e.g., pride, respect, belonging, meaning, purpose, community). In such a view, manipulative elites would not need to convince the masses to work against their own best interests, broadly construed. They would need instead to succeed at what would appear a somewhat easier task: convincing them to privilege their ideal interests above their material interests. Indeed, such an arrangement could help explain why low-caste Hindus on occasion support upper-caste-dominated Sangh organizations (despite the historical economic exploitation of lower-caste Hindus by upper-caste Hindus) in projects like the intimidation and harassment of low-caste Christians and Muslims that primarily serve to bolster and perpetuate upper-caste Hindu hegemony.

That said, it is also sometimes the case that the material interests of the elites and the masses align and that both might conspire together to articulate their interests in religious terms for mutual benefit. For example, as I argue in chapter 4, a significant cause of the Pana-Kandha (i.e., Christian–tribal Hindu) conflict in Kandhamal appears to have been economic competition and frustration. The Kandhas could of course have joined with the Panas along class lines (and across religious lines) to fight their exploitation by local upper-caste Hindus and other elite communities. The fact that they did the opposite—that is, join with those upper-caste and elite communities against the Pana Christians—may not manifest their susceptibility to manipulation so much as indicate that they found it more natural and easier to join forces with upper-caste and other elites than to ally with low-caste Christians, even if the degree of improvement they could expect would be significantly lower than in successful caste or class warfare. Explaining why they found the alliance they chose more natural and easier, however, requires attention to culture and history, as essentialists are prone.

Essentialist approaches to religious conflict tend to reject the instrumentalist view that religion plays no real role in its causation and to argue instead that religion does (or specific religions do) cause conflict and violence, as a result of (1) the nature of religion in general, (2) the nature of particular religions or particular religious ideas (e.g., jihad), or (3) the strength and depth of feeling religion generates and the significant role it plays in the creation of distinctive and putatively conflicting cultures (or “civilizations”). Respectively, we may denote these three positions asserting that religion causes violence structural essentialism, theological essentialism, and civilizational essentialism.

The best-known proponent of civilizational essentialism is Samuel Huntington, whose “clash of civilizations” thesis has been much debated in the quarter century since it was first published. Huntington’s view was that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, future conflicts were most likely to be “cultural” or “civilizational,” not “ideological” (as in the Cold War) or economic.¹¹ Civilizations are based on subjective self-identification as well as ostensibly “objective” elements like language, history, and religion.¹² Civilizational differences are “basic” or “fundamental,” and they are the “product of centuries of development” and “will not soon disappear” (which is why the view has sometimes been called “primordialist”).¹³ Unlike conflict over ideology or economics, the question in civilizational conflict is not “What side are you on?” but “What are you?” And, according to Huntington, “that is a given that cannot be changed.”¹⁴ The ostensible immutability of civilizational identity was importantly related, for Huntington, to what he considered (reflecting a Western religious bias) the indivisibility of the religious identities that so significantly informed them. For these reasons, civilizational essentialists like Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Gilles Kepel, Jeffrey Seul, Bassam Tibi, and others expect civilizations to conflict where they come into contact with one another.

The “clash of civilizations” thesis is considered outdated and untenable by most social scientists, including me. Nevertheless, there is certainly truth in the assertion that civilizational differences matter. What I find salient about these differences, however (in general and as they pertain to the thesis of this book), are not the particularities of custom, culture, and religion so much as the particular structures of power that different civilizations enable, embody, and promote. In my view, then, civilizations clash not—to use one of Huntington’s examples—because Western civilization is Christian while Hindu civilization is Hindu. Rather, to the extent that civilizations do clash, they do so because they promote competing power relations and privilege different kinds of people. To be more specific, the thesis developed in this book is that one of the reasons that supporters of the Sangh resist Christianity is because they see in it both explicit and more implicit support for secular modernity of the Western (and particularly American) variety, which threatens to restructure global politics in a way that disfavors India’s traditional elites and what the Sangh has constructed as the Hindu way of life, or Hindutva (which includes a sociopolitical system that competes with Western secular modernities). The important point of difference is not merely the competing religious or cultural values, though the conflict often gets framed that way. It is, rather, their competing structures of power and privilege. Once again, we see why it is important to keep both the material/political and the cultural in view.

Thinking of religious conflict in this way also helps account for why Christians and Muslims might find themselves allies as religious minorities in India despite being civilizational rivals in Huntington’s view of the global order. Whereas in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Christianity may be resisted for similar reasons as in India (that is, at least in part because of its association with Western secular modernities), in India, Muslims are drawn to Christians as allies precisely because of that association and because Western secular political formations favor minorities in a way that religious nationalisms like that of the Sangh do not.

Essentialist interpretations of religious violence are useful in certain ways. In contradistinction to instrumentalist approaches, all three forms of essentialism take culture seriously, taking their theoretical cues from Emile Durkheim’s emphasis on the social, Clifford Geertz’s attention...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. A Socio-cosmological Approach to Anti-Christian Violence
• 2. A Prehistory of Hindu-Christian Conflict
• 3. “Everyday” Anti-Christian Violence
• 4. “Darkness, Loneliness, Loud Noises, and Men”
• 5. The Social Construction of Kandhamal’s Violence
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index