The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1537

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Blackwell Companions to Religion

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

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

CHAPTER 1 Religion and Violence: Coming to Terms with Terms

The Category Formerly Known as Religion?

Religious and Secular Violence

What Is Violence?

Religion, Violence, and Power

CHAPTER 2 The Myth of Religious Violence

Why No One Seems to Know What Religion Is

Histories of Religion

Power and the Religious/Secular Distinction

Conclusion

Part II: Disciplinary Perspectives

CHAPTER 3 Religion and Violence: An Economic Approach

Introduction

The Religious Economies School: A Brief Introduction

Religion, Rationality, and Violence: The Example of Suicide Bombers.

Conclusion: Extending the Economic Perspective beyond Suicide Bombing

CHAPTER 4 Religion, Identity, and Violence: Some Theoretical Reflections

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

CHAPTER 5 Anthropological Reflections on Religion and Violence

Anthropological Definitions of Violence

Methodological Challenges for Studying Violence Anthropologically

Religion as Justification of Violence

Religion as Coping Strategy for Victims

Conclusion

CHAPTER 6 Spiritual Devotion and Self-Annihilation: An Evolutionary Perspective

Pleasure and Adaptation

Religion and Hedonic Control

Cultivating Higher Pleasure

The Group Based on Pleasure/Love

A Danger to Themselves

CHAPTER 7 The Sociology of Religious Violence

Understanding the Sociology of Religious Violence

The Nature of Religious Socialization

Cultural Clashes and Religious Violence

Religious Martyrdom

Conclusion

CHAPTER 8 Religion, Law, and Violence

Defining Religion, Violence, and Law

Religion as a Legal Tool or Weapon of the State

Religion as a Threat to the State

The Tangled Web and the Limits of Control

The International Dimension

Summary

CHAPTER 9 Mediating Religious Violence

Introduction

Representing Religious Violence

Recycling Religious Violence

Interpreting Religious Violence

Conclusions

CHAPTER 10 Gender in the Production of Religious and Secular Violence

Introduction: The Complexity of Violence

Religious and Secular Violence in Afghanistan and Iraq

Questions for Feminists

Look Both Ways

Conclusion

CHAPTER 11 Explaining Religious Violence: Retrospects and Prospects

Science and the Study of Religious Violence

Religious Studies and Violence

Post 9/11 Theories

Scarce Resource Theory

Religious Violence as a Myth

Summary and Prospects

Part III: Traditions and Movements, Concepts and Themes

CHAPTER 12 Christianity and Violence

Martyrdom: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”

Persecution: “Compel them to come in”

War: Deus volt! God wills it!

Conclusion

CHAPTER 13 Genesis 34 and the Legacies of Biblical Violence

The Bible between Heaven and Earth

Genesis 34 and Jewish Interpretation

Between Calvin and Voltaire

Modern Jewish Commentary

Zionism and Violence

CHAPTER 14 Islam and Violence

Introduction

Redefinition

Islam as More Violent?

Bloodstained Past

Muslim Violence as Terrorism

Barbarism and Modernity

CHAPTER 15 Religion and Violence in Hindu Traditions

Introduction

Pravtti and Nivtti: Contrasting Value Systems within a Shared Worldview

Reconciling Pravtti and Nivtti: Dharma and Moka as Distinct Goals of Life

Pravtti and Nivtti on the Question of Violence

Pravtti and Nivtti on the Question of Animal Sacrifice

The Question of War: Limiting the Sphere of Religiously Sanctioned Violence

The Paradox of Detached Action: Warfare in the Bhagavad Gt

The Gt’s Modern Legacy: Swm Viveknanda and Mahtma Gndh

Hindu Nationalism: Violence in the Defense of Dharma

Conclusion

CHAPTER 16 Buddhism and Symbolic Violence

Iconography

Mythology

Ritual Violence

Conclusion

CHAPTER 17 Religion, Violence, and Shint

Shint and the Japanese Imperial System

Nonaka’s Manifesto

Conclusion

CHAPTER 18 Confucian Ethical Action and the Boundaries of Peace and War

Appraising War from the Confucian Standpoint

The Punitive Paradigm

A Modern Example

Of War and Universalism

CHAPTER 19 Violence in Chinese Religious Culture

Preliminary Considerations

Indigenous Definitions

The Demonological Worldview

Enforcement of Contracts and Norms

Sacrifice

Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER 20 The Dialectic of Violence in Jainism

Doctrinal Nonviolence

An Ontology for Understanding and Avoiding Violence

Surviving Violence

Many-sidedness, Perspectivalism, and Provisionality

A Dialectic Conversation between Violence and Nonviolence

Conclusion

CHAPTER 21 Just War and Jihad of the Sword

Just War and Jihad Thinking in Contemporary Context

Just War and Jihad as Historical Traditions: Their Beginnings, Their Classic Statements, Their Focal Concerns

Concluding Comparative Reflections

CHAPTER 22 Jihad and Martyrdom in Classical and Contemporary Islam

The Importance of Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic History

Shi`ite Jihad and Martyrdom

Jihad in Muslim History

Contemporary Radical Islam

Conclusions

CHAPTER 23 Sacred Terror: The Psychology of Contemporary Religious Terrorism

Terrorism as Multidimensional

Humiliation

The Apocalyptic Vision and the Demonization of Enemies

The Theocratic Impulse and the Rage for Purification

The Ritualization of Violence

Union with God

The Sanctification of Violence

Concluding: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism

CHAPTER 24 The Transformation of Failure and the Spiritualization of Violence

Introduction

Failure and Its Pragmatic Responses

Murder and Doctrinal Transformation

Elections, Rejection and the Turn to WMD

Marginalization, Absolutism, and Persecution Complexes

Punishment, the Denial of Innocence and the Righteousness of Violence

Violence, Performance, and the Transformation of Failure

Conclusions

CHAPTER 25 Sacrifice and Violence

Dominant Theoretical Approaches

Sacrifice

Issues surrounding Violence and Sacrifice

Concluding Thoughts

CHAPTER 26 History, Humiliation, and Religious Violence

Introduction: Never Again

Beyond Judaism

Religion, Violence, and Identity

Sacred Shame and Sacred Space

Conclusion

CHAPTER 27 Reconceptualizing Totalitarianism and Fascism

Political Religions

Considerations of Culture: Kertész and Modernity

Antipolitics

Conclusion

Part IV: Case Studies: Religion and Violence, Past and Present

CHAPTER 28 Enduring the Sacred Scars of Slavery

Introduction

Proslavery and Abolitionist Moral Defense

In Their Own Words

CHAPTER 29 South Asia: From Colonial Categories to a Crisis of Faith?

Introduction

The Historical Context

The Quest for Causation

Instrumentalism and Rational Violence

The Power of History

The Psyche of the Crowd

South Asia since 9/11

Conclusion

CHAPTER 30 Gender, Religion, and Violence during the Holocaust

Introduction

Prewar Responses

Wartime Responses

CHAPTER 31 Women in the stric Tradition: Colonialism, Law, and Violence

Definition of Key Terms

Women in the Early Colonial Agenda

Women’s Rights to Property and the Early Colonial Rulers in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

The Appropriation of Manusmti

The Tradition of Sati in Bengal and Colonial Discourses

Colonial Codes, Women’s Property, and the Issues of Sati

Concluding Statements

CHAPTER 32 Biblical Metaphors for Interventionism in the Spanish-American War

From Levite to Good Samaritan: Intervention as Neighborly Duty

A “Ransom for Humanity”: Intervention as Messianic Sacrifice

Conclusion

CHAPTER 33 Sudan: Religion and Conflict

Historical Background

Religion and Civil War in Sudan

CHAPTER 34 The Battle for Australia: Salvation and Conquest

Missions and Massacres

Culture and Salvation

Protectorate

Child Removals

Where Does Violence Begin and End?

CHAPTER 35 Fundamentalist Violence and Women: Iran, Afghanistan, and Algeria

Iran, Afghanistan, Algeria

Hegemonic, Heroic, and Hyper-Masculinities

Feminist Responses

Conclusion

CHAPTER 36 Anti-Jewish Violence in Late Imperial Russia

The Pogrom Phenomenon in Russian History: The Social, Political, and Religious Context

Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia: Three Case Studies

Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER 37 Religion, Pluralism, and Conflicts in the Pacific Islands

Mission, Colonization, and Violence

The Impact of Religious Pluralism on the Pacific Island Societies

Religious Actors in Local Conflicts

The Methodist Church of Fiji and the Indigenous Cause

Christian Peacemakers and Martyrs in the Solomon Islands

Religion, Gender Identities, and “Ordinary” Violence in the Pacific Islands

Conclusion

CHAPTER 38 Ritual Violence and Violent Ritual in Chinese Popular Religion

Ritual Violence and Violent Religion

Defining Chinese Popular Religion

Community Temples and Festival Processions

Exorcism and the Logic of Ritual Violence

Forms and Uses of Ritual Violence

Conclusion

CHAPTER 39 The Politics of Protestant Violence: Abolitionists and Anti-Abortionists

The Ontology of Violence

John Brown and the Ontology of the Slave

Paul Hill and the Ontology of the Unborn

Pacifism and Ontological Violence

CHAPTER 40 Colonialism and Civil War: Religion and Violence in East Africa

The Violence of Colonialism in Eastern Uganda

Politics, Religion, and Insurgency

The Ambivalence of Peace

CHAPTER 41 Rethinking Religion and Violence in the Middle East

Religion, Orientalism, and the Secular Bias

Culturalist versus Structuralist Explanations

Religion and Suicide Bombing

Delineating Religion

Religion and Conflict Resolution

CHAPTER 42 Cromwell, Mather, and the Rhetoric of Puritan Violence

Two Vignettes: Puritanism, War, and Violence

Providential Violence in Ireland and New England

England, New England, and the New Israel

Conclusion: Puritans Redeeming Politics

Part V: Future Prospects: Beyond Violence?

CHAPTER 43 Liberation Theology and the Spiral of Violence

Introduction

Definitions

Liberation and Violence: A Brazilian History

Violence No. 1: Poverty

Violence No. 2: Revolt

Violence No. 3: The Response

Countering the Spiral

Theological Reflections

Conclusion

CHAPTER 44 Religion and Nonviolence in American History

Early Nonviolence Movements

American Nonviolence in the Nineteenth Century

From World War I to World War II

The Influence of Gandhi

The World War II Era

Dr King

Innovations of the Vietnam War Era

CHAPTER 45 Religious Peacebuilding

Peacebuilding: Facing Realities of Perverse Global Social Injustice

The Relevance of Religious Peacebuilding

Closing Remarks: Reasons to Support Religious Peacebuilding Studies

Index

Blackwell Companions to Religion

The Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly-commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field, and is presented in a style which is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward-thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience.

Recently Published

The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics

Edited by William Schweiker

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality

Edited by Arthur Holder

The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion

Edited by Robert A. Segal

The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’n

Edited by Andrew Rippin

The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought

Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’

The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture

Edited by John F. A. Sawyer

The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism

Edited by James J. Buckley, Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, and Trent Pomplun

The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity

Edited by Ken Parry

The Blackwell Companion to the Theologians

Edited by Ian S. Markham

The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature

Edited by Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, John Roberts, and Christopher Rowland

The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament

Edited by David E. Aune

The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology

Edited by David Fergusson

The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America

Edited by Philip Goff

The Blackwell Companion to Jesus

Edited by Delbert Burkett

The Blackwell Companion to Paul

Edited by Stephen Westerholm

The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence

Edited by Andrew R. Murphy

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Second Edition

Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered Office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Andrew R. Murphy to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Blackwell companion to religion and violence / edited by Andrew R. Murphy.

p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to religion ; 42)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-9131-9 (hardback)

 1. Violence--Religious aspects. I. Murphy, Andrew R., 1967-

 BL65.V55B56 2011

 205’.697–dc22

2011002516

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444397697; Wiley Online Library 9781444397710; ePub 9781444395730

Notes on Contributors

María Pilar Aquino is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego, and is a past Visiting Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author, editor and coeditor of many publications, including her signature book, Our Cry for Life: Feminist Theology from Latin America (1993), Reconciliation in a World of Conflicts, with Luis Carlos Susin (2003); Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World, with Maria José Rosado-Nunes (2007), and Religión y violencia sexual. Prácticas interculturales de teología feminista, with María del Carmen Servitje (2010).

Hector Avalos is Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, and the author of Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (2005).

Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz is Chair of the Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry, Director of the Institute for Religious Zionism, and Associate Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. She is the author of numerous books and articles and specializes in topics pertaining to the Holocaust, gender, memory, State of Israel, and commemoration. Among her books are Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (1998), The Bergson Boys and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy (2005), and Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Collective Israeli Memory (2010).

Nandini Bhattacharyya-Panda was formerly Senior Fellow at the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi and is now Project Fellow at Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute for Asian Studies, Kolkata. She is currently writing a book on two hill communities (Lepcha and Mangar) of Sikkim and Darjeeling. She is author of Appropriation and Invention of Tradition: The East India Company and Hindu Law in Early Colonial Bengal (2008), and has published a number of articles on colonialism and patriarchy in Bengal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Avron Boretz is Program Director, United Board (Hong Kong), and works with colleges and universities in Asia developing programs in interreligious understanding and peacebuilding. He is the author of Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society (2010).

John D. Carlson is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. He is coeditor of the forthcoming. From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America.

William T. Cavanaugh is Senior Research Professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University in Chicago. His recent book The Myth of Religious Violence (2009) has been translated into French and Spanish.

Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University. He has published several books on the religions of India, including Karma and Creativity (1986), Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (1993), Reconciling Yogas: Haribhadra’s Array of Views on Yoga (2003), and Yoga and the Luminous: Patanjali’s Spiritual Path to Freedom (2008). He has edited several books on religion and ecology, including Hinduism and Ecology (with Mary Evelyn Tucker, 2000), Jainism and Ecology (2002), and Yoga and Ecology (2009). He serves as editor for the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is the author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea (2004).

David Cook is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, specializing in early Islam, classical apocalyptic literature, contemporary radical Muslim literature and movements, the study of magic and popular religion and historical astronomy. His books include Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (2003), Understanding Jihad (2005), and Martyrdom in Islam (2007).

Thia Cooper is Associate Professor of Religion at Gustavus Adolphus College and author of Controversies in Political Theology: Development or Liberation? (2007).

Jonathan Ebel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Solider in the Great War (2010).

Aziz Esmail is a philosopher, with special interest in religion and literature as well as psychology and human development. He was for many years a lecturer in philosophy and religion at the University of Nairobi, and was twice visiting scholar with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. At present he serves on the Board of Governors of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. He has published in the areas of philosophy and psychiatry, as well as a poetic translation into English, under the title A Scent of Sandalwood, of medieval Indo-Islamic lyric poetry.

Bernard Faure is Kao Professor of Japanese Religion at Columbia University. His main publications include The Rhetoric of Immediacy (1991), Chan Insights and Oversights (1993), Visions of Power (1996), The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (1998), and The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity and Gender (2003). He has also recently published in French a book entitled Bouddhismes et violence (2008).

Yannick Fer is a sociologist and researcher with the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; his specialism is Polynesian Protestantism. He has published in particular Pentecôtisme en Polynésie française (2005) and (edited with G. Malogne-Fer) Anthropologie du christianisme en Océanie (2009).

Anthony Gill is Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and nonresident scholar at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He also hosts the weekly podcast series Research on Religion (www.researchonreligion.org) and is author of The Political Origins of Religious Liberty (2008) and Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (1998).

Ariel Glucklich is Professor of Theology at Georgetown University. He specializes in Indian religious law and rituals but has done extensive work in the psychology of religion, with a particular focus on self-destructive behavior and religious motivations. His books include The Sense of Adharma (1993), Sacred Pain (2001), and most recently, Dying for Heaven (2009).

David E. Guinn is a specialist in postconflict law and democracy development with the Center for International Development. He is the author of numerous works, including Negotiating the Sacred Peace (2006), Faith on Trial (2002), and the forthcoming Constantine’s Standard: Religion, Law, and a Faith to Die For.

Jeroen Gunning is Reader in Middle East Politics and Conflict Studies at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. His research focuses on the interplay between Islamist social movements, democratisation, religion and violence in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Hamas and Hizballah. He is author of Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (2007).

Elliott Horowitz teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and is coeditor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. A second edition of his Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence appeared in 2008.

Robert Imre is Deputy Director of the Centre for Institutional and Organisational Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is coauthor (with Brian Mooney and Ben Clarke) of Responding to Terrorism (2008).

Janet R. Jakobsen is Director of the Center for Research on Women, and Professor of Women’s Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Freedom (2003) and coeditor, with Elizabeth Castelli, of Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence (2004) and, with Ann Pellegrini, of Secularisms (2008).

James Turner Johnson is Professor of Religion at Rutgers University. His most recent books are Morality and Contemporary Warfare (1999) and The War to Oust Saddam Hussein (2005).

Jok Madut Jok was born and raised in Sudan and studied in Egypt and the United States. He is trained in the anthropology of health and holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Jok is a fellow of Rift Valley Institute and Professor in the Department of History at Loyola Marymount University in California. He has also worked in aid and development, first as a humanitarian aid worker and subsequently as a consultant for a number of aid agencies. He is the author of three books and numerous articles covering gender, sexuality and reproductive health, humanitarian aid, ethnography of political violence, gender-based violence, war and slavery, and the politics of identity in Sudan. His latest book is Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (2007).

Ben Jones lectures in the School of International Development, University of East Anglia. In 2009 he published Beyond the State in Rural Uganda, awarded the Elliott P. Skinner Prize by the American Anthropological Association.

James W. Jones is Professor of Religion and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, and Senior Research Fellow, Center on Terrorism, John Jay College. He is the author of 12 books, including Blood That Cries from the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism (2008) and Terror and Transformation: The Ambiguity of Religion (2002), and coeditor of The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History (2010), Fellow of the American Psychological Association, vice-president of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion.

Yasmin Khan is Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is author of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007).

Jeffery D. Long is Associate Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Vision for Hinduism: Beyond Hindu Nationalism (2007), Jainism: An Introduction (2009), and the forthcoming Historical Dictionary of Hinduism.

Marion Maddox is Director of the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She holds PhDs in theology (Flinders) and political philosophy (University of New South Wales). Her writings include God under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (2005).

Kathryn McClymond is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University. Her book Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (2008) received a Georgia Author of the Year Award. Her current project is Ritual Gone Wrong: What We Learn from Ritual Disruption.

Matthew McCullough is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Vanderbilt University. His dissertation addresses Christian nationalism during the Spanish-American War. He lives in Nashville, where he writes, teaches, and serves a local church.

Beverley Milton-Edwards is Professor in Politics in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast. Her recent books include Hamas (2010), The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2008), and Islam and Violence in the Modern Era (2006).

Jolyon Mitchell is Director of the Centre of Theology and Public Issues, University of Edinburgh, and a former BBC World Service producer and journalist. His publications include Media Violence and Christian Ethics (2007), The Religion and Film Reader (coedited, 2007), Mediating Religion (coedited, 2007), Visually Speaking (1999), and Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence (forthcoming 2011).

Valentine M. Moghadam is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Purdue University. The author of many publications, including a 1993 edited volume on gender and fundamentalisms in comparative perspective, she is currently studying women’s movements in the Middle East. The third edition of her book, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East will appear in 2013.

Andrew R. Murphy is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He is the author of Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (2009) and Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (2001). He edited The Political Writings of William Penn (2002) and (with David S. Gutterman) Religion, Politics, and American Identity: New Directions, New Controversies (2006).

Joel Olson is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He is the author of The Abolition of White Democracy (2004) and is currently writing a book on extremism in American politics.

Yolanda Pierce is Associate Professor of African American Religion and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of several publications, including Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative (2005).

Ellen Posman is Associate Professor of Religion at Baldwin-Wallace College with specializations in Asian religions, Judaism, and comparative religion. She is currently the coeditor of Spotlight on Teaching in Religious Studies, a publication of the American Academy of Religion.

Ian Reader is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, England. He is author of Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyô (2000) and Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku (2005), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on religion and violence.

Bettina E. Schmidt is a cultural anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Study of Religions at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She is the author of numerous publications including Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City (2008) and coeditor of Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (2001) and of Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2010).

Charles Selengut is Professor of Sociology at County College of Morris in Randolph, N.J. and Visiting Professor of the Sociology of Religion at Drew University in Madison, N.J. He is the author of many scholarly studies on religious fundamentalism and new religious movements. His books include Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence (2008) and Jewish-Muslim Encounters (2001)

Walter A. Skya teaches East Asian history in the Department of History at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is author of Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (2009).

Barend J. ter Haar teaches Chinese history at Leiden University. His recent publications are Telling Stories: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History (2006) and Het Hemels Mandaat: De geschiedenis van het Chinese keizerrijk (a revisionist history of China until 1911) (2009).

Robert Weinberg teaches history at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa (1993) and Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan, and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland (1998).

Don J. Wyatt is John M. McCardell, Jr Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College. His most recent books are Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period (2008) and The Blacks of Premodern China (2010).

Acknowledgments

The production of a volume such as this one – involving the contributions of more than 40 scholars – depends on many individuals’ hard work, good will, and attention to detail. My chief debt of gratitude, of course, goes to the contributors themselves, who showed both careful attention to deadlines and welcome patience with the inevitable delays that a project of such magnitude inevitably brings with it. Some of these contributors, the reader will note, are eminent scholars in their fields, while others are newly minted PhDs or in the relatively early stages in their careers. But all have borne with the bumps in the proverbial road with good cheer.

At Wiley-Blackwell, the Companion to Religion and Violence has been unfailingly supported from its inception by Rebecca Harkin, who commissioned the volume and kept careful tabs on it as it made its way through the publishing pipeline. (Our annual meetings at the American Academy of Religion conference helped to keep the book on schedule and to assure me that there was indeed light at the end of a long, religiously violent tunnel!) At various points, a number of other folks at Blackwell – Isobel Bainton, Lucy Boon, Sally Cooper, Bridget Jennings, and Sue Leigh – helped move a very large manuscript forward in a very short time. This combination of swift progress and careful attention to detail was helped too by the careful copyediting of Ann Bone.

This Companion was first envisioned while I was a member of the faculty in Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso University. If it possesses any interdisciplinary virtues, they are in large part due to my time at Christ College, where I spent every working day with a tightly knit group of colleagues who approached the scholarly study of religion from many different disciplinary backgrounds. Since coming to Rutgers in the fall of 2008, I have been fortunate to have supportive colleagues in both the Department of Political Science, my academic home, and the Department of Religion. As this volume was going to press, Jim Johnson of the Religion Department hosted a campus-wide forum on religion and violence and graciously invited me and another colleague to share some insights on the topic. To our collective surprise, several hundred people attended, a number that (even allowing for the awarding of extra credit by some faculty in the Religion Department!) illustrated, if illustration was really needed, just how timely a topic is taken up in these pages. That may be a sad statement about the world in which we live, but also – one hopes – about interest in subjecting the phenomena of religion and violence to scholarly analysis, in the attempt to envision a less violent future.

Andrew R. Murphy

New Brunswick, New Jersey

Introduction

Andrew R. Murphy

The relationship between religion and violence – however one defines either of those terms – forms a central part of the political discourse, as well as the lived reality, of modern times. In the summer of 2010, Americans from all corners of the nation passionately debated the propriety of a Muslim cultural center just blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks, a debate that revived all the painful memories associated with that event and fed ongoing arguments about whether Islam was a “violent religion” or a “religion of peace.” Daily headlines bring news of violent conflicts in hotspots around the world, many of which are fired by religious rhetoric, while a steady stream of publications by the “New Atheists” denounce the tendency of religions of all kinds toward violence, irrationality, and destruction, in the process spawning a counter-literature even more extensive than the work it arose to contest (Hitchens 2009; Dennett 2006; Harris 2005; McGrath 2010; Haught 2007; Dawkins 2008).

And yet so many important questions go unaddressed in these sensationalized headlines, the charges and countercharges of polarized political debate, and the provocative claims of the New Atheists and their critics. If religion and violence, and their (apparent) close connection are all around us, far more rare are accounts of these two phenomena that do more than scratch the surface or report the most egregious or provocative atrocities committed by believers of various sorts. What do we mean when we speak of “religion” and “violence”? Is all, or most, or even any, of the “religious violence” on display in the headlines really driven by religion, or is religion a convenient rhetorical tool invoked to justify violence sparked by other factors and serving other ends? After all, as part of the social landscape in the twenty-first century – much to the surprise or chagrin of those who envisioned its demise as secularization and modernization swept the globe – religion is just one of a number of phenomena that both shape and are shaped by human beings seeking meaning and value in their daily lives. And so we are led, from this consideration of religion and violence, to explore broader and more subtle interconnections between religion, ethnicity, nationalism, race, politics, gender, and economics; we are led into a more subtle and complex (and, quite frankly, a more interesting) reality.

The chapters that follow provide a guide of sorts to that more complex reality. This Companion to Religion and Violence does not, and does not attempt to, present a comprehensive treatment of every aspect of the religion–violence nexus. (It is hard to imagine any one volume doing so.) It does, however, offer a wide-ranging set of essays covering a variety of important topics, a varied set of perspectives on religion, violence, and the connection between the two, from an international and multidisciplinary roster of contributors. Many of the contributors have been researching and writing on these topics for decades, while others are at earlier phases of their careers. Each one brings his or her own particular expertise to the broader questions lying at the heart of this volume.

The Companion is organized into five sections. Part I, “ ‘Religion’ and ‘Violence’: Defining Terms, Defining Relationships,” begins the volume with two chapters exploring the difficulties of definition and conceptualization raised by these two key terms. John D. Carlson and William T. Cavanaugh consider a variety of ways in which scholars have defined these two terms, and probe the various ways in which they might (or might not) be related to each other. These provocative opening chapters set the stage for the many different approaches to religion and violence that follow in subsequent sections of the Companion.

Part II, “Disciplinary Perspectives,” turns to the contributions of a range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines to the study of religion and violence. Contributors bring the insights of economics and rational choice, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, law, visual media, and gender studies approaches to bear on issues central to this Companion. Each understands religion and violence somewhat differently, and each offers unique insights into the multifaceted relationship between the two. When we look at these issues as refracted through such widely varied disciplinary lenses, we see that a multidisciplinary approach is necessary if we are to appreciate the complexity of the issues before us. Somewhere in the interaction among the varied approaches offered by the chapters in Part II lies a rich and nuanced understanding of religion and violence, both historically and in our own times.

But of course most religious believers encounter neither their faith traditions nor violence through academic lenses, but rather through lived experience and ritual, through sacred scripture and collective memory. The chapters in Part III, “Traditions and Movements, Concepts and Themes,” take up some of these phenomena and analyze their relationship to violent words or deeds. Some authors probe the internal dynamics of religious traditions and movements; others cast a broader eye on the historical development and evolution of the tradition under consideration. And since religious traditions and movements often communicate fundamental categories of meaning, value, and identity through key concepts or themes, other contributors to Part III take up a variety of such terms – jihad, just war, martyrdom, terrorism, sacrifice, and humiliation. Many of these terms are age-old, but have taken on new and important meanings in the post–September 11 world, evoking a range of relationships between religious believers and violence endured or inflicted on others.

Of course there is no way for one volume to cover all, or even most, examples of the intersections of religion and violence. In-depth studies of concrete historical examples, however, can often illustrate and clarify the theoretical, conceptual, and disciplinary insights offered in the Companion’s previous sections. Part IV, “Case Studies: Religion and Violence, Past and Present,” offers a range of studies that illustrate the many different ways in which religion and violence have been intertwined across time, place, and culture. From American slavery to pogroms in Russia; from British India to gender and the Holocaust; from Puritanism to Chinese popular religion; from South Asia to Africa and the Middle East: the contributors to Part IV reflect on the connections between religion and violence over time, and in a wide variety of settings.

And finally, Part V, “Future Prospects: Beyond Violence?” offers just a few examples of the ways in which religious actors have attempted to point the way beyond violence in the attempt to imagine new ways of dealing with conflict. Although this Companion’s emphasis has been on the complex relationship between religion and violence, the mirror image – whether we call it peace, or simply nonviolence – has always exercised a great deal of influence over the religious imagination as well. The potential for liberation theology or religiously motivated peacemaking efforts to build bridges between peoples and cultures suggests that, often, those very traditions that have exacerbated violent discord in the past at the same time hold out the potential for overcoming such destructiveness in the future. Indeed, the very scriptures that have often urged individuals on to acts of violence contain equally poignant longings for a world free from such strife. And the history of American religion suggests a strong countertrend to the all-too-frequent association of religion with violence: a nonviolent tradition deeply grounded in the American experience.

Before concluding this Introduction, two final caveats.

First, I have not insisted that the contributors to this volume adopt a uniform definition of religion, and thus readers will note that various chapters use the term in various ways. It is undeniable, of course, that (as the first two chapters in the Companion make abundantly clear) definitional issues are highly charged and important in terms of understanding just what we mean by “religion” and “violence” (let alone the relationship, if any, between them). But each contributor comes to the phenomena under consideration from his or her own particular disciplinary background or professional position, and I have allowed them to define and use terms as they find most useful for the sort of exploration they want to offer.

Second, as mentioned earlier, let me reiterate that no single volume can cover such an enormous terrain comprehensively, and that therefore there will inevitably be topics that readers will wish had been explored in the chapters to follow. As editor of this volume, I am keenly aware that certain topics lack the attention they deserve; and, conversely, that other topics may appear to receive unnecessarily excessive attention. Many contributors, for example, use the case of Islam, or Islamist movements, or terrorism (often associated, fairly or not, with certain strands of Islam) as examples to probe the purported connections between religion and violence. It is true, of course, that the debate about Islam and violence is one that threatens to oversimplify, to denigrate, and to exclude; and it would be a poor reading of the intent of this Companion to contribute to such sentiments. At the same time, if a volume of this sort is to be timely and relevant, it must direct itself toward the rhetoric that is actually at play in the world around it. Additionally, readers will note that many of the Companion’s chapters take up the issue of “Islam and violence” in order to further complicate or contest broad narratives that link the two in some sort of essential way.

All in all, then, the chapters in this Companion to Religion and Violence take up an enormously complex constellation of phenomena from a diverse and wide-ranging set of disciplinary backgrounds. While certainly not the last word on any of the topics under consideration, the Companion to Religion and Violence aims to provide readers with a broad overview of these vexed issues and a set of conceptual and interpretive tools for approaching the phenomena, and to lay the foundation for further investigations in years to come.

References

Dawkins, Richard (2008). The God Delusion. New York: Mariner Books.

Dennett, Daniel (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking.

Harris, Sam (2005). The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: Norton.

Haught, John F. (2007). God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Louisville: Westminster John Knox.

Hitchens, Christopher (2009). God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve.

McGrath, Alister (2010). The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press.

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 recollection of the horrors committed under Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot’s reigns would confirm this point. Overcorrecting, though, invites new forms of essentialism that undercut conceptual coherence about what we label “violence” and that overlook important empirical realities. Consider, for example, Janet Jakobsen’s claim, “The secular is not less violent than the religious; in fact, it is more so” (2004: 53). Jakobsen does not arrive at this conclusion hastily, noting that religious actors readily appeal to their traditions to justify violence. She also observes how religion and the secular bleed together: “religion and secularism are intertwined, and they are intertwined specifically at the point of legitimating violence. The violence of the modern state, including that of the U.S. government in particular, is religious as well as secular” (2004: 65). It is difficult to disentangle the blurred interpenetrations of religion and secularism, sufficiently at least to arrive at the conclusion that the secular is more violent than religion. Jakobsen, nonetheless, observes: “there is plenty of evidence to show that the [secular] modern state is the origin of, rather than the solution to, most of the contemporary world’s violence” (2004: 63). As evidence, she compares the tally of destruction and loss of life between religiously inspired terrorist acts and secular governments’ efforts to counter terrorists. She bypasses discussions of motive, intentionality, and moral limits, noting simply that because the violence purveyed by the secular state ostensibly is put to the cause of peace, “ ‘our’ [US] violence literally becomes less violent” (2004: 61). Jakobsen thus shifts the preponderant negative valence from religion to the secular. The categories retain currency; their responsibility for violence simply needs reconfiguring. By homing in on government’s unique capacity for destruction, she essentializes another category – the secular state – even as she criticizes secular governments that essentialize religion’s violent propensities.3

Debates about religion’s definition, propensity for violence, and relationship to the secular converge and come to a head in William Cavanaugh’s revealing work The Myth of Religious Violence (and his essay in this Companion). Cavanaugh goes to great length to deconstruct the reigning categories. “The point is not simply that secular violence should be given equal attention to religious violence. The point is that the very distinction between secular and religious violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying” (2009: 8–9). Why? Because the distinction between religion and secular is artificial and was “established through violence, not by argument” (2009: 7).

Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority. … [T]he attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West … The idea that religion has a tendency to cause violence – and is therefore to be removed from public power – is one type of this essentialist construction of religion.

(2009: 59)

Cavanaugh chronicles the warped origins of these binary secular/religious configurations. By charting the history of the secular modern nation-state, colonialism, and the parallel development of the academic study of religion, one can observe the dangers when those with great power essentialize religion and create a secular alternative that serves their purposes and legitimates their interests. The state’s self-proclaimed monopoly on force has permitted extensive violence against religious actors and “Others” who reject binary distinctions between the secular and the religious, public and private, reason and faith. Cavanaugh cites as a contemporary example the US-led war on terror against the Muslim Other.