Religion is the cause of most of the world’s wars. This is a common refrain and one that sets off the deep-thinking British author Karen Armstrong. Sets her off so much, in fact, that she recently published a concentrated 400-plus pages on why this idea of blaming religion for violence is facile and inadequate.
Armstrong was in Vancouver last week for a lecture and book launch for Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. The tome is the latest in a shelf of decidedly thinky books on religion and history by the former nun. These include A History of God, A Short History of Myth, and The Case for God. She is a much-awarded scholar and the force behind the Charter of Compassion, a project she began when she won the TED Prize in 2008, and which united people of all faiths to commit to demonstrating compassion.
Compassion may be her shtick, but she is remarkably bloodless in slaying what she sees as the intellectually bereft idea that religion can be blamed for most of the world’s ills.
“This is clearly nonsense,” she said in her lecture at the Queen Elizabeth Playhouse Nov. 17. In the longer scheme, she does not contend that religion is never an accelerant in the ceaseless violence the world has known but, she says, “It’s never the only, or even the major, cause.”
Most obviously, she points out, the two great conflagrations of the 20th century, the First and Second World Wars, were not wars of religion, but of secular nationalism and ideology.
Almost every conflict, she adds, is the product of a “cocktail” of factors, including economic, territorial, nationalistic and, yes, religious motives.
More importantly, she adds, by citing religion as a standalone cause, we fail in a basic understanding of other cultures. Only in Western societies since the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions do we distinguish between the realms of the secular and the religious. Before that time in the West there was — and to this day in most of the world there still is — simply nothing remotely similar to our contemporary idea of religion as a personal, private spiritual quest that should not interfere with other functions in society. Pretty much everywhere other than the here and now, every aspect of ordinary life has been part of “the ambit of the sacred,” she says.
But while the everyday is entangled with the holy in most cultures, this is not reason to blame religion for all bad human actions. The Christian Crusades and Muslim jihads have as much to do with the political as they do with the religious, and to untangle these motives would be like removing the gin from the cocktail.
The so-called wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries have been depicted as battles between Catholics and Protestants. But, Armstrong notes, this ignores the many instances when Catholics and Protestants fought in common cause. The motivations were often rivalries between princes and kings rather than theologies.
Even today, those who wrap themselves in Muslim rhetoric while perpetrating terror are frequently thugs or malcontents seeking some legitimacy in religion. Two of the jihadists who left Birmingham, England to fight for ISIS in Syria were found to have ordered two books from Amazon before they left: “Islam for Dummies” and “Quran for Dummies.” Palestinian nationalism has been imbued with religious pieties, but it began as a secular movement and its goal remains a primarily nationalist one. Again, as inappropriate as Armstrong’s metaphor is in the context of Muslim movements, it’s a cocktail.
If one wants to find examples that explicitly rebuff the idea that religion is violence-inducing (and its corollary that secularism would be an antidote), Armstrong cites the French revolution — the apogee of secular ascendancy — which saw 17,000 public beheadings in a single year, and the Young Turks in the First World War, avowed secularists who murdered well more than a million Armenians.
While modernity and reform of regimes founded on fundamentalist religion might be ideal, Armstrong argues that the failure of secularism and modernity in parts of the world (and the violent, fundamentalist reaction to its attempted introduction) has usually been a result of forcing modernity on a population too quickly. The modernizing regime of Iran in the 1930s wanted to introduce Western clothing as an outward symbol of progress and sent the military out to rip off Muslim veils with bayonettes. Efforts at secularization in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and ’60s saw adherents of the Muslim Brotherhood imprisoned, where they festered and radicalized. In these scenarios, modernism is not seen as the positive force that we in the West like to view it, but as something introduced by force in violation of existing natural patterns.
Asked in the question and answer session whether she acknowledges a dark side to religion, Armstrong fell back on older ideas of the interrelatedness of all human endeavours.
“Yes,” she said. “There’s a dark side to us. We are violent creatures.”
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