William Cavanaugh, author of
Torture and Eucharist has a new book called
The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. I haven't read the book yet, but I have listened to many of his lectures that underscore the thesis of the book.
According to Cavanaugh, the story we are told is that religion is inherently given to violent expression and we need a strong, secular state to protect us from the violence that religious differences foster. We need such a strong, secular state because religious violence is always irrational, the result of zealotry and blindness, while the violence of the secular state is regrettable but necessary, always (ideally) based on the protection of individual freedoms. Religious lunatics won't listen, so we have to bomb our way to peace.
Cavanaugh, unsurprisingly, criticizes this story on many levels, starting with the arbitrary distinction between what constitutes "religious" violence and "secular" violence, a distinction which most nations throughout history and many today would not recognize. But even aside from foundationalist critiques, I think this story is quite capable to being attacked on its own grounds.
A common story most of us know about without knowing too much about is the Catholic church and Protestant church working together in the late 1500s and early 1600s to kill a third group, the Anabaptists. On the surface, this is a story of two warring churches, who often put one another to death, banding together in light of the extreme depravity of this third wave: the Anabaptists refused to take oaths and baptized only adults. Accordingly, on the surface, this story supports our common narrative. Even better, the Anabaptists get to play the part of secular martyr, because they were the only group of the three to believe in separation of church and state.
But that's really the crucial point. The Anabaptists were not being killed by the Protestant or Catholic churches as such, because churches "as such" simply did not exist. Anabaptists were being killed by princes of provinces, which were either Protestant or Catholic provinces. Is this religious violence or secular? No such distinctions can be made. But in the case of motivation, the distinction is clearer. Anabaptists were being killed not over exegetical or theological issues as such, but for treason.
Why were the Anabaptists treasonous? Because baptism was not only initiation into the church, but into citizenship. That is why the government kept track of baptismal records, which were often the only census records they maintained. (We deduce Shakespeare's birth date, for instance, by assuming he was born three days prior to his recorded baptism.) When they began baptizing adults, they were subverting citizenship. In the same vein, when they refused to take oaths (following the Sermon on the Mount), they accordingly refused to pledge allegiance to their states. Again, treasonous.
Between 1518 and 1625 somewhere around 5,000 Anabaptists were put to death. They were put to death by Protestants princes and Catholic princes.
Is religious violence fundamentally different from secular violence? Can such distinctions even be maintained?
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Comments (7)
"But in the case of motivation, the distinction is clearer. Anabaptists
were being killed not over exegetical or theological issues as such,
but for treason."
that may have been the reality for those in charge... but what of the average peasant soldier who knew nothing more than that they were doing what God wanted? you could say the same thing about the Crusades (plenty of secular reasons existed to go to war with the Arabs and return control of the Near East to Christendom), but in the end what fired up the Average Joe was theological conflict. if you can't justify violence, any kind of violence, without involving God, then it's religious.
but i should point this out...
"Because baptism was not only initiation into the church, but into citizenship."
"In the same vein, when they refused to take oaths (following the Sermon
on the Mount), they accordingly refused to pledge allegiance to their
states."
that's precisely why separation of Church and State should exist. regardless of how their theology meshed with secular practices, the Anabaptists were still being killed because of something they believed.
blah
I agree with the above, that these stories show how close the church and the state were in that period, leading religious differences and secular issues to come together and create a quasi-religious war. This is why I wholeheartedly believe in the separation of church and state in the US today - first of all, I don't want the government involved in my church. If there were EVER government regulations on when churches could meet, or which style of worship one could or couldn't use - I would be moving to another country. Secondly, I would rather not have my church affiliated with the government; I don't want people associating the things that the US government does with Christianity in general. (Think about Iran and the undeservedly nasty image that it has given to Muslims around the world.)
great post.
most of the world powers since the fall of the Roman Empire until modern times have considered themselves to be Christian nations. Even Hitler believed that he was doing God's work. The problem with the amalgamation of Church and State is not so much that the State will control the Church (although, this was a part of the thinking) because people will follow their Church whether or not the Government tells them they can. If this was the case, Christianity would not have survived Rome. The problem with the amalgamation of Church and State is that the lines blur between the 2, and eventually the priorities of the State become the priorities of the Church, and rarely vice versa. The Church ceases to follow God, but they follow their Country.
I like how Tony Campolo puts it, "We may live in the best Babylon in the world, but it is still Babylon, and we are called to come out of her."
I think the murder, torture and extermination of people by churches throughout history is well documented, but I am not an intellectual.
Religion and secular government often use one another to promote each other's agendas and gain power over people. It's a marriage of convenience. Anyone who runs for Mayor of New York City has to voice support for Israel as if Israel was one of the five boroughs. We hear many politicians claiming God is on the side of their party or more importantly, not on the side of the opposition party. We see patriotism entangled with God in almost every fervent nation. I'm guessing that everyone in the U.S. has seen the unlikely mixture of words on those bumper stickers that proclaim God, guns, and guts made America great. One can probably boil all the worlds' problems down to belief systems that put believers on pedestals by demonizing outsiders. It's the "it's ok when I do it but not ok when they do it" mentality.
When I was in jr. high school there were regular "rumbles" between our town and the neighboring town of Lindenhurst. Why were kids from Lindenhurst evil by default and why did kids from Lindenhurst consider us evil by default? You could walk on Albin Avenue, pass Our Lady of Grace Church, walk across the railroad tracks and never know by looking around that you entered Lindenhurst yet suddenly you were in the enemy territory of suburban adolescent warfare. Kids got beat up simply for wearing their high school jackets on the wrong turf. We've grown up and now the enemy lives in other parts of the country in places known as red states or blue states, or in other parts of the world. So in truth, we haven't really grown up.
One of the points of Cavanaugh's book is that, with the exception of the advent of the secular state in the modern west, one can't make a distinction between what's "religious" in a culture and what's "secular." Even in the modern state such a distinction is, as you said, arbitrary; it depends upon configurations of power in a given context. One of the implications of this, which is stated by Cavanaugh in "The Myth of Religious Violence," is because of the fact that in the past things like Christianity, and things like politics, and economics were so intertwined in western cultures, it's impossible to isolate one thing (i.e. "Christianity," or "monarchy," or "money" etc.) as THE cause of violence in which each of these factors was collusive. This means that it makes no more sense, concerning the persecution of the anabaptists, to pin this on politics alone then it does to pin it on religion alone; such a distinction would be unrecognizable to those living at the time.
The whole point of Cavanaugh's book seems to be first, to expose the function of the myth of religious violence in our culture as the key to legitimating so-called secular violence and second, to show that "religious" as a qualifier for "violence" is a distraction from dealing with violence itself (ie. violence continues while people squabble over whether or not it was "religious" or "secular").