Religion, Violence, and the Secular State

John C. Caiazza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351588737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Religion, Violence, and the Secular State assesses contemporary religious violence in the context of tensions between state secularism and religious ethics, and ultimately concludes that the West must reemphasize its own religious tradition in order to successfully combat the rise of a violent fundamentalism. The book presents an argument in three parts: first, an examination of the nature of religious violence; second, the effects of the present secularism of the American state on our ineffective ethical framework; and third, an advocacy for both the reasonableness of religious belief and the value of religiously based ethics (i.e., Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) as an influence within the modern state. The conclusion is that, with the arrival of violent Islam in the West, the presence of (traditional) religious influence in the United States needs to be reemphasized to combat religious terrorism. Islam represents a challenge to America and the West as a religious ideal that can only be successfully met by an energetic renewal of our own religious resources.

1
The Garden Image of Religion

This book begins with the image of a garden that will serve to illuminate the relationship between monotheistic faith, reason, and violence. A garden, to begin with a definition, is a preserve in which flowers, plants, and trees are set as a guarded and perhaps secret place, a place of beauty where wild things have been domesticated or eliminated, and where the people may come and delight in God’s visible nature and find rest and ease, and sense that they live in harmony with the aims of the universe itself. A garden requires constant tending, and above all walls or a hedge, so that wild and brutal and diseased elements of nature may not enter in and destroy the place of harmony and beauty. Also, a garden is the result of choices made of which flowers, trees, shrubs, small animals, and beneficent insects are selected and then arranged according to a pattern selected by the gardener that permits pathways between colorful and carefully tended arrangements. For religious believers, the garden can serve as an image of the kingdom of God on earth, and what is of concern is what monotheistic religious believers will find it necessary do in order to preserve this imagined garden against intrusion from worldly influences and to weed them out once discovered within the confines of the garden walls. In the end, however, the garden is a misplaced image, and possibly a destructive one.

The garden image has many connections with monotheistic belief. The drama of the One God’s interaction with mankind begins in the Garden of Eden, which is why perhaps the image of the garden has become a central image common to all monotheistic systems of belief. Attempts to recapture the reality of the peace and content, of labor that rewards and does not stultify, the sense of realized place, comity between the sexes, and the proper relationship of the human and the divine have been the pursuit of monotheistic believers ever since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the aboriginal Garden. The image is found in the Hebrew Bible, not only in Genesis but also in Isaiah and most poignantly in the Song of Songs where the lovers meet (4:12, 5:1, 6:2). The image of the garden has been used continually throughout Christian history, beginning with the garden at Gethsemane, which, however, was a place of anguished prayer rather than a place of divine contentment. But 1,800 years later, Roger Williams led his followers from Puritan Massachusetts to Rhode Island to establish explicitly what he called a “garden,” a garden of true believers.¹ In the Koran, Mecca can be thought of as a garden, a preserve of divine peace and just order, and a sign of promises fulfilled (Sura 18:32). But since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the damage has been done, and the interruption between divinity and humanity is so severe that the garden that was arranged by God, who is the divine Gardener, cannot be replicated by human means. The garden in the end must remain as the image of ultimate loss—like a lost loved one or failed business enterprise or a frustrated career choice or a fatal accident—events that took place far in the past but whose fatal consequences still determine the state of our being, a state from which mankind cannot find relief unless with divine assistance.

Attempts to replicate the Garden of Eden as a preserved society of true religious believers have always been problematic, because they are defensive in nature. The gardens planted in monasteries must be carefully tended and guarded, as must be the community of men or women that tends it. But here the garden is a refuge from the violence and malice of the world, literally. In the days of St. Benedict in the sixth century AD, the monastery and its garden was a defensive redoubt against roving bands of barbarians who would only steal and destroy and leave nothing behind but waste. The garden more generally is a special place where human reason can make whatever arrangements it will, not only in placement of the flora but in the economic use made of the garden, to provide food or to sell its produce for income. The monastic garden is therefore a practical matter, limited in its purpose and use according to the needs of the community that are discerned and executed by human reason. The problematic aspect of the garden image becomes apparent, however, when it is extended to a universal image of what monotheistic believers must attempt in the fulfillment of their religious duty. This difficulty presents itself in two ways: regarding what the religious community itself allows as standards of membership, and how the religious community envisions its mission to the world at large, that is, beyond the garden walls.

First, within itself, the notion that the religious community becomes a garden in which malice and violence and infection from worldly influences are excluded can be seen in the examples, among others, of Lubavitchers, Calvin’s experiment in Geneva, and among the Mormons. In these instances, the garden of believers determines whether an individual believer is included in or excluded from visible membership in the community according to his or her personal morals and strict devotion to the rules of behavior laid down by the community. There are, in effect, no sinful members of these communities, for to imbibe in alcohol, fornicate, wear hair uncovered or beard shaved, or speak with people outside the community places the individual outside the community, not merely as an erring member, but as one who needs to be rejected until he or she reforms and adjusts his or her behavior and only then is allowed back in. This exclusivity of membership is based on a highly defined standard of personal behavior, one that is beyond what is the standard of basic morality, for while obviously thieves, pornographers, obsessive liars, and murderers cannot be members, other standards, regarding dress, diet, and speech, for example, are also imposed. These extraordinary standards that go beyond common morality are a means of social cohesion that not only binds the members into a community but also excludes the rest of the world, and perceives it as an unremitting threat and danger.

The logic of the garden is not difficult to fathom, because it is based on the recognition of the absolute preeminence of the One God, that is, its logic is monotheistic, and surely for the religious gardeners there is no higher calling than to preserve the dignity of the Most High and maintain the fact of His presence in every aspect of our personal lives and in the community at large. It is at this point, where the logic of monotheism is extended from the carefully formed and tended garden to the community at large, that the image of the garden becomes a danger to the practice and understanding of monotheistic worship. While the religious gardeners will persistently say that anything less than total control of all nature is an insult to the majesty of the Most High, in practice the aspiring gardener must face the impossibility of extending the control available in a garden to the whole of nature with its untended fields and tangled forests, overgrown grasslands in which there is no distinction between weeds and flowers, where animals live their stunted lives in constant fear and hunger, where there is no distinction between domestic animals and savage raptors, and where there is no demarcation between where species live except for the survival of the fittest resulting in a great waste of animal and plant life. The alternatives are to attempt by sheer force to make the entire community into a gigantic garden or, more likely, to emphasize all the more the exclusiveness and turn up the internal controls of one’s own garden. We are familiar, certainly, with those religious gardens that have taken the latter alternative, the Mennonites, the Lubavitschers, the enclosed monasteries and walled in convents. And we now are becoming aware of those religious gardeners who, impossible as it may seem at first, aspire to make of entire nations and the whole world a garden, namely, Muslim fanatics whose chosen tools are, so to speak, the axe and the scythe with which they seek to cut down the offending wild forest and toxic weeds that, in their understanding, threaten to engulf the garden of Islam.

There are other examples, however, where the garden of monotheistic religion, as we are describing it, has been extended to the surrounding community at large and indeed prospectively to an entire nation, namely, American Mormonism and English Puritanism. The care with which Mormons tend to preserve the integrity of their religious community is well known, as is the historical fact of their desire to encapsulate their community in an area that extends well beyond that of a monastery wall or a neighborhood consisting of a few blocks in the city. This extension of the Mormon garden resulted immediately in armed conflict between themselves and surrounding communities: first in upstate New York, where the Mormons first arose; then in St. Louis, where they moved to after New York; and later in Utah, where the Mormon church is now centered. For again, the natural world tends to strongly reject the aims of religious gardeners, and so recourse to violence proactively as well as defensively appears to be a necessity. The history of Puritanism in England also shows how the desire of the religious gardeners for prompt and total recognition of the authority of the Most High results in conflict, in this case a civil war that engaged the entire nation, deposed its system of government and executed the King, and when once secured in England was relentlessly extended into the other nations of Great Britain, including most infamously, Ireland. In the case of English Puritanism, the garden became something we are more familiar with in political terms, for monotheism was reduced to an ideology and a motive force for totalitarian rule.

The logic of the religious garden can become so simplified that the gardeners become as terrible as any of the wild things that live beyond its walls. And now we are confronted by religious gardeners whose ambition extends beyond one nation to settle an entire region of the planet behind a vast garden wall, to intimidate the wild things beyond its fences, and to force the inhabitants within to walk in a rigid pattern of straight and narrow paths. As in political ideology, the logic of the terrorist gardener is pure and impeccable, starting out with an absolute premise that anything less than total devotion to the Most High is an insult to Him and that the whole earth, the whole of nature we may say, should manifestly and without exception reflect His glory. So severe is this duty imposed by the monotheistic premise that as in the communist view outlined by Lenin, so-called bourgeois morality that prohibits murder and lying is discarded with contempt as merely an illogical limit to the completion of a divine mission. This seems to be the logic also of those who murder abortion doctors as well as the mufti who impose the deadlier aspects of Sharia law.

But if after all, the garden walls cannot hold when they are widened to enclose an entire community, what then of the logic of the religious garden? How then is the glory of the Most High to be upheld before men’s eyes? If the devotion to the glory of the Most High is not to be subverted by a devotion to the simplistic logic of the garden, then the gardeners are forced to go out beyond the garden walls, into the forest and among the weeds and wild things, to pronounce the word of the Lord. They will become entrepreneurs of the spirit, missionaries, preachers, witnesses, martyrs, even, to give evidence of the reality, the nature, and the love of the One God. The breaking down of the garden walls is sometimes necessary, not only for the sanctification of those who live beyond its walls but for the sanity of the people who live within. But again, what happens to mankind’s acknowledgment of the glory of the Most High if not reflected in a perfect religious garden?

The Roman Emperor, when faced with a lawsuit brought on behalf of a believer in Apollo who wanted a judgment against a blasphemer, replied that since Apollo was divine he could presumably take care of himself. Human efforts to bring about the divine will often go awry, the Emperor could have said, and can even result in a misrepresentation of divine will and divine order. What kind of god needs the active support of the civil law courts if he really is divine? So also with the One True God, the Most High, who desires mankind’s love but who does not require a human effort to replicate heavenly, spiritual order on the natural earth; often the attempt to do so results in the use of sheer force to bring imposed and frequently cruel order on the people enclosed within the garden walls. However, the power of God’s spirit has, since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, found other ways to infiltrate the wild nature of the world, not by cruel power but by manifestations of the activity of the divine spirit.

In the beginning of the Third Millennium, monotheistic religious belief will have to become a worldwide missionary endeavor rather than a wall-building enterprise. Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, is apparently losing its base in formerly Christian Europe, Christianity’s ancient walls, so to speak, having decayed perhaps beyond repair. Radical Islam’s attempt to extend its walls to the whole world is ongoing, but its eventual result is written in the very ferocity with which it is carried out. Radical Islam brings outright terror to those within its walls and fear to those who live without, but this strategy brings fear and loathing to Muslims even more than unbelievers, as the conflicts in Syria and Iraq currently demonstrate. Thus, even as the radical Islamists become more intense and desperate in their efforts, resistance to them is ratcheting up, bringing with it sanguinary conflict, assassination, reprisal killings, mutilation, and torture within Muslim communities; the gardeners are attacking each other with their spades, scythes, and pruning hooks. Such is the end of the religious garden brought to its logical extreme, the metaphor breaking down at this point along with the strategy of radical Islam as it forces the umma into anarchic, bloody violence.

Note

1Williams’s connection to garden imagery is reflected in several gardens and parks in Rhode Island, including a botanical garden and zoo.

2
General Comments on Religious and Political Violence, With Special Reference to Islam

Today’s news, seen on flat screens, online, and in hard copy, is filled with one primary fact, wars in the Middle East and terror attacks throughout the world. That primary fact, of which the individual cases are expressions or manifestations, is of Islamic-inspired violence, violence as individual acts of terror, or violence as warfare among states in the Middle East. Lest we feel guilt in characterizing Islam as inherently violent in this way, the Western mind immediately goes to the historical record to reference the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Crusades in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries; and the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the twentieth, whose effects are ongoing to this day. In the current context, the identification of religious belief with violence is seemingly inescapable, brought to the point of concluding that religious belief, especially monotheistic belief, is inherently irrational, which is the cause of the violence. Unable to square, the argument goes, the declarations of religious doctrine with reality, the psychology of the individual religious believer must create a false reality, one of paranoia that encourages the felt need for violent reaction. Religious believers in the intensity of their belief perceive that enemies are everywhere; their reaction is unrestrained acts of violence. In this way, religion can be seen by its critics as the primary cause of war, hatred, and bigotry in human history, a point of view expressed without qualification lately by Sam Harris, among others.¹

Voltaire famously commented that religion was responsible for more bloodshed than any other cause, yet while that claim was plausible after the Thirty Years’ War and the other bloody conflicts brought about by the Reformation, religious warfare must now be relegated to second place after a century characterized by two world wars, revolutions, a cold war, and many internecine conflicts. Yet the contemporary scene has shifted back to religious identification with violence and aggression, for it is true that “after 9/11, everything has changed.”

The Use of Violence Is Often Not Irrational

Assertions that religious belief is inherently irrational come from rationalistic philosophers for whom religious belief constitutes a closed system of thought, and from political theorists who conflate religious with political conviction. These two explanations of the presumably innate tendency of religious faith to violence are influential and deserve analysis and evaluation, which will be given in this section and the next.

The rationalism of such philosophers as Dewey, Russell, Popper, and their followers explains that mankind fears death and finds living in the world threatening and unsettling, and that in order to prevent such fear and anxiety from being overwhelming, mankind erects systems of faith and makes commitments to them that then provide an unshakable basis for life without fear of death or unsettlement: God as a “mighty fortress.”² But, these critics argue, the propositions of religious faith are highly untenable on their face, promising such things as eternal life beyond the grave, a judgment with punishment for evildoers (a relief and balm for the realization that much evil goes unpunished and injustice seems to prevail as a constant in life), reparation for sin, and justification for the believer, not to mention those aspects of God that are certainly nonsensical on their face because they are both contradictory and beyond the faintest reach of the human capacity to know. That God is eternal, omniscient, forgiving, and judgmental, that He is all good yet permits such manifest evils, that His nature is unknowable and yet that He is compassionate and holy, that His ways are unsearchable and yet His existence is revealed by the patterns of nature are propositions alleged to be true by religious faith, even though they tend to be self-contradictory, and the terms of such statements are well beyond our capacity to understand by normal human experience and logical thought.

By contrast, the rationalist critics claim, the great advantage of critical systems of thought, including in particular modern science, is that they are self-correcting, and their propositions are explicitly designed to be falsifiable or provable according to certain prescribed protocols. In this manner, the human individual lives fully in the world, contending, learning, experiencing the fullness of life unafraid and unguarded by myths and faith propositions that cloud the mind with unfulfillable promises. Religious faith is thought to be a barrier to rough reality that poses a false reality, which is under constant threat of exposure, as if the repetition of many prayers could ward off evil and uncertainty. It is in this inability of religious faith to do what it promises that lies the primary motive of religious violence, so the claim goes. Unable to maintain its propositions in the face of critical analysis and scientific evidence, unable to effectively ward off the evils of the day, including oppression, immorality, illness, and death, religious belief is always on the verge of implosion, and so the religious believer must maintain a constant vigilance over his or her own faith to see that it does not collapse from within. Such threats and weaknesses once internalized are expressed outwardly in aggression, and when beyond the bounds of psychological control, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Religion, Violence, and the Secular State
• 1 The Garden Image of Religion
• 2 General Comments on Religious and Political Violence, With Special Reference to Islam
• 3 Radical Simplification and the Fate of Violent Islam
• 4 Contours of the Secular State
• 5 Theories of Secular Ethics: A Comment and a Brief Survey
• 6 Techno-Secularism Is the Ethics of the Secular State
• 7 The Logic of Propositions and Religious Belief
• 8 Religious Ethics in the Modern State
• Conclusions
• Index