Karen
Armstrong’s book Fields
of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Vintage
Canada, 2015, is
a timely study of the popular assumption that
religion is at the root of the bloody conflicts in
the world.
It
makes most sense to work with the end of
Armstrong’s book because her “Afterword,” gives a
summary of her thinking more or less
chapter-by-chapter. So I provide a summary of the
“Afterword” first. Then I add some reflections on
the book.
1.
Afterword – a Summary of the Book!
Religion
can be interpreted to require different things. In
the Hebrew Bible the Deuteronomists were against
foreigners while the Priestly school used the same
stories to seek reconciliation. Chinese Daoists,
legalists and military strategists drew on the
same ideas and meditative techniques for different
purposes. Luke and John both reflected on Jesus’
message of love. For Luke it reached to the
marginalized but for John it was for the faith
community. For centuries the story of Imam
Husain’s death kept the “Shii” out of political
life. Recently in Iran it inspired political
action against the Shah.
Until
recently religion permeated all aspects of life.
Every state ideology was religious. Empires had
divine missions. Only in the 1600s and 1700s was
religion pushed out of public life. Then the
secular state, first the US then France, created a
religious aura around itself – like the US
manifest destiny. John Locke thought separating
religion from the state was the key to peace, but
violence is embedded in human nature. The
Mahabharata lamented the warrior king doomed to a
lifetime of warfare. The
Chinese learnt quickly that a degree of force was
essential for civilized life. Ancient Israel tried
to avoid the agrarian state, but though they hated
the exploitation and cruelty the agrarian state
implied, the Israelites found they could not live
without it. Jesus preached a compassionate and
inclusive kingdom that defied the imperial ethos
of the time and was crucified. The Muslim ummah
began as an alternative to the jihili injustice of
Mecca, but it became an empire in order to keep
the peace. Modern military historians agree that
without a professional army, human society would
remain primitive or would degenerate into
ceaselessly warring hoards.
Before
the nation state, politics was seen in a religious
way. Constantine’s empire showed what happens when
a peaceable tradition becomes too close to the
government. Christian emperors enforced the pax
Christiana as ruthlessly as the pax Romana. The
Crusades were inspired by religious passion but
were also deeply political. The Inquisition was a
misguided attempt to get internal order after a
civil war in Spain. The Wars of Religion and the
Thirty Years War were infused by the quarrels of
the Protestant Reformation, but they were also the
tussle between the Holy Roman Empire and emerging
European nation states.
When
people fight they distance themselves and demonize
the adversary. Medieval Christians did this to
Jews, Muslims and Cathars, but behind this were
the stresses of early modernization. Casting off
the mantle of religion did not change this.
“Scientific” racism inspired the Armenian genocide
and Hitler’s death camps. The
secular nationalism imposed by the colonizers
distorted local religious traditions into
aggressive forms, for example in India.
The
sectarian hatreds within religious traditions have
been said to show an inherent intolerance in
religions. Yet there is almost always a political
dimension – like the heretics who reject the
systemic injustice of the agrarian state. Even the
debates about the nature of Christ in the Eastern
Church were equally political power struggles
among tyrant bishops. Heretics were persecuted
when the nation felt under attack: the
Deuteronomists, when Judah was threatened with
annihilation; the Inquisition, when Spain feared
Muslim attack; the September Massacres and the
Reign of Terror in revolutionary France, when
under threat of foreign invasion. Lord Acton
pointed out that the liberal nation state would
persecute minorities. In Iraq, Pakistan and
Lebanon, traditional Sunni/Shii animosity has been
fanned by nationalism and problems of the
postcolonial state. Muslims again feel threatened.
The new animosity towards minorities in the nation
state largely comes from political tensions from
Western imperialism (linked to Christianity) and
the problem of Palestine.
Religion
is not always aggressive. In India there was the
ideal of ahimsa,
non-violence. In medieval Europe there was the
Peace and Truce of God to stop knights terrorizing
the poor. Given the inherent violence of the
state, prophets and sages have only offered an
alternative – as did the Buddha, Ashoka, and the
Confusians. Shariah law was a pressure to limit
the Caliph. Others developed techniques for
reducing our normal human aggressiveness. Prophets
and psalmists insisted that a city could not be
holy unless it cared for the poor and
dispossessed. They all insisted on some version of
the Golden Rule.
One
of the most ubiquitous religious practices was the
cult of community. In the pre-modern world
religion was communal. Instead of separating from
the other as warriors did, the sages and prophets
helped people cultivate a relationship with and
responsibility for those who might not always be
congenial. They devised meditations that extend
benevolence to the ends of the earth, wish all
beings happiness, teach compatriots to revere the
holiness of each single person, and resolve to
find practical ways of assuaging the world’s
suffering. Jains developed the vision of a
community of all creatures. Muslims achieved the
“surrender to God” of Islam by taking
responsibility for one another and sharing what
they had with those in need. In Paul’s churches
rich and poor were to sit at the same table and
eat the same food. Cluniac monks made lay
Christians live together like monks during a
pilgrimage, rich and poor sharing the same
hardships. The Christian Eucharist (“communion”)
is a rite bonding a community.
From
early times prophets and sages helped people deal
with life’s tragedy and face up to the damage they
did to others: in Sumaria the Atrahasis.
Gilgamesh had to face up to the horror of death
caused by war. The prophets of Israel blasted
rulers about the suffering inflicted on the poor
and about their war crimes. The Aryans loved
warfare but their warriors always carried a taint.
The Chinese admitted military life was to be
separated from civilian life and they were aware
of the fact that even an idealistic state had at
its core an institution dedicated to killing,
lying and treachery.
Secularism
is an accepted part of identity in the West and it
brings some benefits like avoiding the negative
impact a government can have on a faith tradition.
But secularism brings its own violence and it has
sometimes damaged religion. Revolutionary France
was secularized by coercion, with bloodshed. In
America, faith was not stigmatized and it
flourished. But early modern thought did not
extend its human rights to American indigenous
peoples or African slaves. American
fundamentalists became xenophobic and fearful of
modernity. In the developing world, secularization
has been experienced as lethal. The horrors of
Nasser’s prisons polarized the liberal vision of
Sayyid Qutb into a paranoid vision. The Deobandis,
reacting to the British demolition of the Mogul
Empire, created a rigid form of Islam that later
produced the Taliban who added their own tribal
chauvinism and a wild aggression. Some religious
reaction to modernity has been positive: the two
Great Awakenings and the Muslim Brotherhood helped
people accept modern ideals and institutions.
Modern
religious violence is part of modern reality. The
world is shared and interconnected in many ways
including finance and media. So images of
suffering and devastation can be shared
immediately. The risks of nuclear annihilation and
environmental disaster are also shared. Somehow
the First World still sees itself in a privileged
category yet it is first world policies that have
created rage and frustration elsewhere. There is
some responsibility for the suffering in the
Muslim world that Bin Laden was able to exploit.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Now, as then: yes.
Armstrong
notes war is the result of not seeing the
relationships – relationships with the economic
and historical evolution, with fellow humans
elsewhere, and with nothingness, that is, death.
There need to be ideologies to help us deal with
the dilemmas of these times of massive inequality
and imbalance of power. A viable world requires
that we take responsibility for the pain of others
and listen to narratives that challenge our sense
of who we are. It requires the surrender,
selflessness and compassion that have been as much
a part of religions as have the crusades and
jihads. Religious and secularists have struggled
with nothingness and the extreme violence of their
time. Both have produced counterproductive
movements. Both have resorted to the suicide
attacks.
The
enormous global pain makes us uncomfortable and
depresses us and it is natural to harden our
hearts. But Armstrong says that if we don’t
reflect on the uncomfortable truths we lose part
of our humanity. Somehow we have to find ways to
build a global community, cultivate a sense of
reverence for all and take responsibility for the
suffering we see in the world. We are all –
religious or secular – responsible for the current
predicament of the world. And no state is free
from the taint of the warrior.
2.
Thinking about the Thinking in the Book
I
lack the knowledge to question much detail, but
some of the wider issues raise questions for me.
It is easy to agree that religious stories can be
used for different purposes. The bigger question
is who, or what religious structure, gets to “use”
the stories to support a regime at war? In the
history of the Jews, it was priestly groups who
produced writings that would be read and expounded
to the faithful. The Christians, alongside their
accounts of Jesus, kept some Hebrew Scripture
writings so that the same choice of message was
available for Christians.
There
is some clarity about the role played by various
named factions in the Muslim and Hindu traditions
in the modern era, some in India and Pakistan
where colonialism fueled divisions, and Muslim
factions in the Middle East. Otherwise, an
official faith tradition gets mixed into all
aspects of a society. The Christians evolved
Bishops as a leader associated with a Roman city.
In early days, it was the Bishops who used the
stories and developed their own traditions. The
religious debates in the East were in part power
and personality struggles among these Bishops. So
it would be fair to say that “religion” played a
role in the related conflicts in the Byzantine
Empire. Later on, Armstrong’s book tells about
Christian orders like Benedictines that drew on
Roman military training for discipline, and the
Franciscans that reached out to poor people. To
various extents, these orders diverged from the
official views of Pope or Bishop.
The
Bishop of Rome, the Pope, attracted a leadership
role likely at least in part because Rome was the
original seat of Roman imperial power. But also
because tradition says St. Peter, a singled-out
follower of Jesus, founded the church in Rome and
was martyred there. That special status continued
when the seat of Roman power moved to
Constantinople – Byzantium – and the Western
empire was lost to invading Germanic tribes. The
book usefully explains how the Bishops in the West
struggled to retain a Roman aristocratic status as
new rulers took over and adopted the Christian
faith. Bishops squabbled for power but the Pope
retained a form of leadership.
With
respect to the crusades, the Emperor of Byzantium
called the then Pope in the West for help against
incursions into his empire. Armstrong tells how
the church in the East became tied to the
Byzantine Empire. Some even saw the Empire as a
beginning of God’s reign. She rightly suggests
this would have been anathema for Jesus who viewed
a distinct inclusive and egalitarian realm
emerging within the Roman Empire.
Indeed,
Jesus’ notion of an alternative community to that
under Roman rule was not unique among religious
leaders. Mohammad reacted to those ruling Mecca
with an alternative community. The Muslim
community began with a confederation but morphed
into an empire. Other religious leaders like
Confucius and the Buddha essentially created an
alternative community to that of the empire that
surrounded them. The larger religions began as an
alternative – and as Armstrong notes – there was
an emphasis on community and caring for others.
Armstrong
says there was no such thing as religion until the
Protestant era. Yet it seems picky not to regard
these alternative communities or traditions as
“religions.” Certainly, in this “alternative way”
sense, it seems that there is not too much war to
blame on them. When such a religious tradition had
to adapt to exist alongside an empire or a
warlord, inevitably adjustments had to be made and
the leading stories were adjusted to satisfy the
pressures from the empire – as it was in the
Sumarian beginnings of empire.
I was
surprised to learn that that it was a church
leader in the West, a Pope, who eventually
launched the crusades. True, the invitation came
from an Emperor in the East. True, it was in part
out of solidarity with Christians in the East. I
found it equally surprising that the Pope and
Bishops in the West had developed military units.
Again, that grew out of the traditional religious
concern for the poor – the poor needed protection
from roaming plundering knights. However, in the
recovered lands in the Middle East, the Knights
Templars, created by the Pope, were an important
fighting force. (Interestingly, the Templars were
later disbanded by pressure from a European
Christian King whose power was growing.) It seems
that the church in the West was pretty directly
involved in the wars of the crusades.
A
different thought here. I sense Armstrong has less
sympathy for the Protestant communities that she
implies consider “religion” as an entirely
personal matter. But surely that was not generally
so. Calvin’s Geneva and Knox’s Edinburgh were
religious communities in every sense - as under
the Roman Catholic tradition. Even the sense of a
wider community linked them to a world
Protestantism. I suggest that the highly
personalized individual religion is a 20th century
feature. Moreover, the increasing secularization
throughout the Protestant era likely made those in
these faith communities behave closer to the
alternative community model. Also, in a
secularizing state it became increasingly
impractical for those religious “alternative
communities” to look after the whole wider
community – all the poor, all the sick etc. - as
the commitment to equality required. So by the
20th century the Protestant church communities
were calling on the state to do for all what they
themselves were able to do charitably for only the
few that they could reach. There is still public
promotion of justice and equality by church
communities.
Next,
Armstrong seems to accept as a given that there
must be war and oppression. Yet she concedes that
from the beginning the faith traditions have tried
to reject that. I conclude that on the one hand,
the end of war is a desirable human goal. I
conclude on the other hand, that Armstrong is
warning that strong doses of realism are required
in efforts to end war. Humankind has always
thought that war should be ended, but has not yet
developed ways to reliably do that. Armstrong
gives lots of lessons on what went wrong!
Humankind
should never abandon the struggle to find ways to
limit war and end war. Bring on the anti-landmine
treaties and their verification mechanisms! Also,
note what Armstrong’s book shows in passing:
wisely run multi-faith communities are better. The
Muslim and Persian Empires that tolerated the
various faith communities alongside each other and
supported places for the faith traditions and for
faith instruction were more welcomed among the
people than the Byzantine Empire that promoted one
faith.
Finally,
as Armstrong’s thinking indicates, a universalism
in the various religions can only help because it
undermines the co-option of one of the larger
religions by any particular nation state or group
of people. Thus, if I am to promote in my
alternative community new ways of resisting war, I
cannot rely on a view of affairs molded in Canada.
I must explore the views of others in my faith
tradition in different contexts. In doing so I
must maintain an integrity that somehow questions
and challenges but at the same time remains humble
enough to listen and change. Then I become part of
a new international religious alternative
community alongside the various nation states and
I can promote with the others that new
international alternative community. More.
Provided
I do not promote the particularities of my beliefs
and the myths of my faith tradition, if I am
working in the traditional areas of the faith
traditions – such as inclusivity, justice,
equality and peace – and perhaps the fate of
planet earth – it is likely that the religious
alternative community in which I find myself will
be bigger than my own initial faith tradition.
Maybe a larger body of “religious” can better seek
and promote the end of war for humanity despite
the nation states.