Does Religion Cause Violence?

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Violence and Religion in the Modern World

Joel Hodge, Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Carly Osborn, Joel Hodge, Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Carly Osborn

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501333842
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofia
• Categoria: Filosofia delle religioni

One of the most pressing issues of our time is the outbreak of extremist violence and terrorism, done in the name of religion. This volume critically analyses the link made between religion and violence in contemporary theory and proposes that 'religion' does not have a special relation to violence in opposition to culture, ideology or nationalism. Rather, religion and violence must be understood with relation to fundamental anthropological and philosophical categories such as culture, desire, disaster and rivalry. Does Religion Cause Violence? explores contemporary instances of religious violence, such as Islamist terrorism and radicalization in its various political, economic, religious, military and technological dimensions, as well as the legitimacy and efficacy of modern cultural mechanisms to contain violence, such as nuclear deterrence. Including perspectives from experts in theology, philosophy, terrorism studies, and Islamic studies, this volume brings together the insights of René Girard, the premier theorist of violence in the 20th century, with the latest scholarship on religion and violence, particularly exploring the nature of extremist violence.

Part One

Does Religion Cause Violence?

1

Girard and the Myth of Religious Violence

William T. Cavanaugh

There is something ironic about an address to the Colloquium on Violence and Religion by the author of The Myth of Religious Violence.1 To an outsider it would appear that we are deeply at odds. Your learned society is dedicated to the exploration of the link between religion and violence, while I am dedicated to debunking that link. A few years ago, I was asked to contribute a chapter to The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence. I submitted an essay entitled “Why This Book Is a Very Bad Idea”: the editor changed my title. Some might suppose that I am here to tell you that the Colloquium on Violence and Religion is, likewise, a very bad idea, but that is not the case. In fact, I will argue that we are in fundamental agreement about what I call the “myth of religious violence.” I will explore the work of René Girard, around which the colloquium is organized, and argue that—far from supporting the myth of religious violence—the work of Girard, in fact, undermines it. It does so in two ways. First, there is an important sense in which the author of Violence and the Sacred undermines the religious/secular distinction upon which what I refer to as the myth of religious violence depends. Second, Girard critiques the scapegoating of religion by secularists. The myth of religious violence, as I define it, is a myth in the precise sense in which Girard uses the term: a story that encodes a méconnaissance or mis-knowing about how violence is actually cured. Rather than religion representing the cure for violence, as Girard would have it, the myth of religious violence proclaims a secular cure for the violence that religion uniquely embodies.

In the first part of this chapter, I will define what I mean by the myth of religious violence and briefly consider some misuses of Girard that support the myth. In the second part, I will give a very brief summary of my argument against the myth, showing how it depends on a transhistorical and transcultural distinction between the religious and the secular that is untenable. I will then show how Girard, too, undermines that distinction, despite some ambiguities in his use of the term “religion.” Finally, in the fourth part, I will explain more fully how the myth of religious violence functions as a myth in Girard’s sense.

Misuses of Girard

What I have labeled the “myth of religious violence” can be summarized in three steps:

1.There is a transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion that distinguishes it from essentially secular phenomena like reason, or politics and economics; religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are essentially different from secular phenomena like nationalism, consumerism, and Marxism.

2.Religion has more of a tendency to promote violence than secular phenomena have.

3.Therefore, religion should be marginalized from public power and secularism should be encouraged.

This myth is absolutely central to secular social orders. It is repeated daily by government officials, jurists, journalists, bloggers, and the proverbial common man or woman in the street. The actions of Islamist terrorists are widely held to confirm the myth, as if confirmation were even necessary. The myth is the basis for the marginalization of Christian and Muslim practices at the domestic level, and the basis for an aggressive foreign policy aimed at converting the Muslim world to Western-style secular social order.

Given Girard’s positing of a close bond between religion and violence, it is not surprising that some commentators have taken Girard as providing evidence for the myth. Mark Juergensmeyer, for example, has edited a volume in which various social scientists who write on the peculiar link between religion and violence interact with Girard’s work. Not all buy wholly into Girard’s theory, but most use various Girardian themes to illuminate various case studies of religious violence, trying to determine not if but why religion has a special propensity to encourage violence. According to Juergensmeyer, “Perhaps one of the reasons that Girard is regarded with such interest … is that he supplies a straightforward answer to a question that has vexed thoughtful observers of religion for centuries: why violence is so central to religion.”2

What counts as “religion” for that volume? The volume, Juergensmeyer writes, consists of examinations of religious violence caused by Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, and Buddhists, in conversation with Girard.3 Most of the chapters maintain a sharp distinction between religious and secular violence. David Rapoport’s contribution, for example, draws on Girard to give reasons why religion is peculiarly prone to violence, one of which is its ability to command loyalty. He acknowledges that “in the modern world the nation sometimes has surpassed religion as a focus of loyalties,” but instead of recognizing the nation as a font of secular violence, he claims that the fact that academics speak of the nation’s “civic religion” points to the “special significance of religion.”4 Another reason that religion is peculiarly linked to violence, according to Rapoport, is that it uses violent language. He illustrates this point by giving examples of explicitly secular movements that have appropriated religious language in the service of violence. He quotes the secularist Abraham Stern:

Like my father who taught me to read in Torah

I will teach my pupils; stand to arms, kneel and shoot

Because there is a religion of redemption—a religion of the war of liberation

Who ever accepts it—be blessed: whoever denies it—be cursed.5

Instead of concluding that secular violence can be just as virulent as religious violence, or that there is no essential difference between secular and religious, as Stern himself seems to acknowledge, Rapoport uses secular violence as evidence of the violence of religion. As with nationalism, secular terrorism acts like a religion and might even be called a religion, but it is not religious, even though it counts as evidence of religion’s violent tendencies.

Bruce Lawrence’s contribution to the volume is interesting and different because Lawrence contends that Islam is not an independent variable in Muslim societies like Indonesia6 and that it is in fact “the nation state which has implemented violence at a new level.”7 Juergensmeyer takes Lawrence’s argument to be that in Indonesia violence is political, not religious. “In Lawrence’s view, Girard’s theory, which initially emerged from the analysis of classical literary images, is not so much wrong in its own terms as irrelevant to the modern social situation.”8 In Girard’s own response to the volume, however, he—writing with Mark Anspach—commends the way that Lawrence resists demonizing Islam, commenting that, “Generally speaking, the object in focusing on sacrifice is not to stigmatize the ‘other’ for primitive savagery, but to uncover the continuity among many distinct varieties of violence, including those our own societies practice.”9 By “our own societies” Girard means “secular” Western ones. In contrast to Girard’s attempt here to blur the line between religious and secular violence, Juergensmeyer, Rapoport, and others in the volume need that distinction to hold firm so that the indictment against the peculiar tendency of religion to encourage violence can hold.

Why the myth of religious violence is false

There is no question that Christianity, Islam, and other sets of beliefs and practices that are usually labeled “religions” can and do foment violence under certain circumstances. Arguments that Crusaders were not really Christians or ISIS fighters are not really Muslims might faithfully reflect normative Christian or Muslim beliefs, but descriptively they are specious, a form of special pleading.10 In other words, it is important for Christians to claim that the Crusaders misunderstood Christ and for Muslims to claim that ISIS has misconstrued Islam, but neither group can thereby excuse Christians and Muslims from complicity in violence. I also do not argue that the cause of such violence is really political or economic and not really religious. To argue this way assumes a sharp distinction between, for example, the religious and the political, which is precisely what I call into question. The myth of religious violence does not only say that religion foments violence, but that religion foments more violence than what is not religion, the secular. The myth of religious violence, therefore, depends entirely on the cogency of the religious/secular distinction as a basic way of dividing up human activities in all times and places. It is precisely this distinction that I call into question.

Imagine a line with religions on one side and secular ideologies and practices on the other. On the religious side stand what are usually considered religions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, and so on. On the secular side are politics, economics, the social, and...

Indice dei contenuti

• Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Does Religion Cause Violence?
• 1 Girard and the Myth of Religious Violence William T. Cavanaugh
• 2 The Complex Relationship between Violence and Religion: A Response to William T. Cavanaugh’s “Girard and the Myth of Religious Violence” Petra Steinmair-Pösel
• 3 Why is God Part of Human Violence? The Idolatrous Nature of Modern Religious Extremism Joel Hodge
• 4 Love Your Enemies: God’s New World Order Anthony J. Kelly, CSsR
• Part 2 Violence and Deterrence in the Modern World
• 5 “The War to End All Wars”: Mimetic Theory and “Mounting to the Extremes” in a Time of Disaster Sandor Goodhart
• 6 The Sacred is Back—But as Simulacrum Jean-Pierre Dupuy
• 7 Forms of the Sacred and the Texture of Hope Sarah Bachelard
• 8 The End of Politics? Chris Fleming
• 9 Rites of Expulsion: Violence against Heretics in Early Modern Catholic France Carly Osborn
• Part 3 Islamic Terrorism: A Case Study of Contemporary “Religious Violence”
• 10 Islam and Violence: Debunking the Myths Asma Afsaruddin
• 11 Violence, Religion, and the Sacred: In Dialogue with Asma Afsaruddin’s “Islam and Violence: Debunking the Myths” Paul Dumouchel
• 12 Religion, Radicalization, and Violent Extremism? Julian Droogan and Lise Waldek
• 13 Religious Extremism, Terrorism, and Islam: A Mimetic Perspective Wolfgang Palaver
• 14 The Jihadist Current and the West: Politics, Theology, and the Clash of Conceptuality Jonathan Cole
• Appendix: René Girard at a Glance Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
• Glossary of Key Girardian Terms Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright