Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Religion and Violence: A Bibliography (Last updated: October 12, 2006)
Compiled by Charles K. Bellinger

[This is an expanded version of a bibliography published in The Hedgehog Review 6/1 (2004): 111-119.]

The literature on religion and violence was already substantial before the Sept. 11 attacks, and it has swelled at an increased pace since then. I have not seen abundant evidence, however, that the serious reflections on violence expressed in these books has made a noticeable impact on the shape of higher education, on news media reporting, or on the thinking of government officials around the world. This is unfortunate.

Popular opinion doesn’t reflect on the complexity of violence. We assume that violence (that is, the violence done by others) is evil, but we don’t understand it and seem to have little interest in understanding it. The authors listed below are trying to change that situation in both respects. They invite us to develop an interest in reflecting on violence and offer substantive understandings of it from their own perspectives. I foresee a time in the future when their efforts will bear fruit as a “critical mass” of interest develops and overcomes the apathy of our current situation. At that point, the ideas contained in these books will begin to have a significant impact on higher education, the media, and governmental and military decision-making.

I will append to each subsection below a short list of Library of Congress Subject Headings that will enable the reader to explore the topic further. The numbers in parentheses indicate the number of books that have been assigned that subject heading that fit the following parameters as of December, 2005: English language, published from 1980 to 2005, held by at least 50 libraries (according to WorldCat).

Steven Weinberg, A deadly certitude - TLS, January 17, 2007

Given the battering that traditional religion has taken from the theory of evolution, it is fitting that the most energetic, eloquent and uncompromising modern adversaries of religion are biologists who helped us to understand evolution: first Francis Crick, and now Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, Dawkins caps a series of his books on biology and religion with a swingeing attack on every aspect of religion – not just traditional religion, but also the vaguer modern assortment of pieties that often appropriates its name. In the unkindest cut of all, Dawkins even argues that the persistence of belief in God is itself an outcome of natural selection – acting perhaps on our genes, as argued by Dean Hamer in The God Gene, but more certainly on our “memes”, the bundles of cultural beliefs and attitudes that in a Darwinian though non-biological way tend to be passed on from generation to generation. It is not that the meme helps the believer or the believer’s genes to survive; it is the meme itself that by its nature tends to survive.

For instance, the persistence of belief in a particular religion is naturally aided if that religion teaches that God punishes disbelief. Such a religion tends to survive if the threatened punishment is sufficiently awful. In contrast, a religion would have trouble keeping converts in line if it taught that infidels are subject after death to only a brief spell of mild discomfort, after which they join the faithful in eternal bliss. So it is natural that in traditional Christianity and Islam, disbelief became the ultimate crime, and Hell the ultimate torture chamber. No wonder the mathematician Paul Erdos always referred to God as the Supreme Fascist. Dawkins’s book focuses on Christianity and Islam, which traditionally emphasize the importance of belief, rather than on religions like Judaism, Hinduism or Shinto, which are tied to specific ethnic groups, and tend to stress observance more than faith.

Dawkins, like Erdos, dislikes God. He calls the God of the Old Testament “the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. As for the New Testament, he quotes with approval the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, that “The Christian God is a being of a terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust”. This is strong stuff, and Dawkins obviously intends to shock the reader, but his invective has a constructive purpose. By attacking the God of sacred Scripture, he is trying to weaken the authority of that God’s commands – commands whose interpretation has led humanity to a shameful history of inquisitions, crusades and jihads. Dawkins treats the reader to many brutal details, but we only have to look at today’s headlines to supply our own. For some reason, Dawkins does not comment on the God of the Koran, who would seem to provide equal opportunities for invective.

Steve Almond, A Very Osama Hanukkah | Jewcy.com, December 4, 2007

Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah. As it turns out, the traditional Hanukkah spiel about the oil-that-was-only-supposed-to-last-for-one-day-but-lo-and-behold-it-lasted-for-eight-wowza is mostly Talmudic PR. Contrary to popular myth, the holiday arose from the exact struggle Bin Laden is waging today: an armed rebellion against an imperial power, driven by religious fanaticism and suicidal self-assertion….Judah himself eventually dies, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon carry on the insurgency. Their methods could hardly seem more familiar:

They watched and suddenly saw a noisy crowd with baggage; the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet the bride’s party with tambourines and musicians and much equipment. The Jews rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded and after the survivors fled toward the mountain, all their spoils were taken. Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of music into lamentation.

Again, from where I’m sitting this sounds a lot like, well, terrorism….

As an assimilated and not-very-observant Jew, I grew up hearing almost exclusively about the miracle of the oil.

The only thing I knew about the Maccabees was that they were heroic defenders of the faith who had something to do with the Jewish Olympics. The modern holiday has been recast as a cheery Festival of Lights, a counterpart to the bright tinsel of Christmas. It’s the same impulse that leads Christians to repackage Easter as a vista of bunnies and candy eggs, rather than the commemoration of a brutal public murder.

But this kind of soft-pedaling distorts our history and distracts us from the true meaning of our holidays. Hanukkah really is about a violent insurgency. It’s about the lengths to which the oppressed will go to defend their beliefs. But it’s also about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side.

A Revisionist Historian Looks at Religious Toleration - New York Times, November 24, 2007

At this moment, there may be no more important story than the one Europeans and Americans proudly tell themselves about the rise of religious toleration. So please take note of Benjamin J. Kaplan’s argument that the story may be dangerously flawed.

Mr. Kaplan makes that argument in “Divided by Faith,” just published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The book’s subtitle is “Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.” The crucial word is “practice.” Compare it with “idea” in “How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West” (Princeton, 2003), a recent overview of the same history by Perez Zagorin.

In his account, Mr. Zagorin, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester, moves swiftly from St. Augustine’s case for the persecution of heretics to the Protestant Reformers, who challenged the Roman Catholic monopoly on doctrinal authority but not the belief in using coercion to defend true teaching. Finally, Mr. Zagorin marches through his pages a regiment of champions of religious toleration.

They begin with the admirable Sebastian Castellio. Castellio protested the execution in John Calvin’s Geneva of Michael Servetus, the anti-Trinitarian theologian who had run afoul of both the Catholic Inquisition and Protestant officialdom. Dutch and English defenders of toleration next pass in review until, on the cusp of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the story culminates with the philosophers John Locke and Pierre Bayle.

A brief coda brings in Voltaire, James Madison, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Roman Catholic Church’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Liberty.

This is a familiar kind of triumphal history. It pits the forces of progress, i.e., those who share our modern values, against the forces of resistance, i.e., those who don’t. Whatever the struggle, each step mounts another rung on a single ladder leading, by natural stages, to ourselves.

Mr. Kaplan, a professor of Dutch history at University College London and the University of Amsterdam, does not set out to refute this account but to shift the focus, from elite thinkers and theories to popular beliefs and behavior.

His first achievement is to convey the communal nature of early modern religion. Every town and village was a microcosm of the body of Christianity. Civic rituals were not separate from sacred ones. Daily, weekly and seasonal time had a religious dimension. Communal welfare depended on divine wrath or favor, which might bring on flood, famine or bountiful harvest. Tolerating heretical deviations was a high-stakes business.

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson could write in 1781. A century earlier, such individualism was unthinkable to most Europeans. Indulging heresy, as Mr. Kaplan points out, threatened not only to pick their pockets but also to endanger their souls.

Contrary to the once-popular notion that religious toleration rose steadily from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and on to the Enlightenment, Mr. Kaplan maintains that religious toleration declined from around 1550 to 1750.

This was the age of frightful religious wars, as rulers yoked religion to dynastic ambitions. But religious wars did not usually mean neighbor against neighbor. Religious violence among neighbors tended to be sporadic, often ignited when one religious group engaged in public rituals that a rival group felt contaminated communal space.

Divine politics | Salon, September 24, 2007

Westerners now talk blithely about the need for a “reformation” in Islam, apparently oblivious to how bloody and traumatic the Christian Reformation actually was. Lilla finds this situation perilous. As long as we refuse to acknowledge the madness of the religious wars and persecutions of the 16th century, he argues, we remain in danger of loosening our grip on “the Great Separation” (of church and state) that resulted from it. By not understanding how easily any politics infused with any religion can drift in the direction of fanaticism and terror, we put ourselves at risk of drifting that way ourselves.

Chien, The New Atheism, Znet, September 10, 2007

“This is atheism’s moment.” That according to David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books LLC, which recently signed Christopher Hitchens to edit a book of atheist readings for publication this fall. The book will come on the heels of Hitchens’ God is Not Great, the latest in a string of books critical of religion that have become modest bestsellers in recent years. As of June 2007 there were 296,000 copies in print of Hitchens’ book; 500,000 of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion; and 185,000 of Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris’ previous book The End of Faith was on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-three weeks in 2004.

How could this happen in a country where upward of 80% majorities assert belief in God, Christ, and miracles? According to some booksellers, wanting to “know thine enemy” is partly why books have been selling even in the Bible Belt. But another dynamic may also be at work. Dawkins suggests that what John Stuart Mill wrote in the nineteenth century remains true today: “The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.” But in a highly religious culture, declaring oneself an atheist can be as difficult as open homosexuality was fifty years ago. Today, after the Gay Pride movement, 55% of Gallup respondents declare willingness to vote for a homosexual candidate: a lower percentage than those who would vote for a Catholic, African-American, woman, Mormon, or septuagenarian, but higher than the 45% who would vote for an atheist . Dawkins and others hope to help inspire an Atheist Pride movement, building a critical mass that would encourage closet non-believers to come out.

Chien, Religion and Violence, ZNet, December 23, 2006

When Pope Benedict XVI quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor attributing to Mohammed a command “to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” Muslim and non-Muslim critics alike were quick to point out that the implied criticism of Islam applied equally to Christianity. The Crusades and the Inquisition stand out as obvious examples. It was appropriate to mention the Pope’s own faith, but one could also cite, say, the murderous violence against Muslims by Hindu nationalists in Guajarat, the terrorism of the Stern Gang and other Jewish extremists inspired by visions of the biblical Israel, or Zen Buddhist complicity in twentieth-century Japanese war crimes. From a bird’s-eye level of history at least, it’s easy to undermine the notion that there is any link between Islam and violence that isn’t shared by other major religions.

But it’s not as easy to say just what that link is.

“CNN Comes Under Unprecedented Attack - Forward.com, September 6, 2007

The three-episode special, “God’s Warriors,” by CNN’s chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, is being characterized by Jewish groups as equating Jewish extremists in West Bank settlements with Muslim jihadists.

Religion and Violence by James Hitchcock, March 6, 2002
Religious believers are accustomed to being accused as perpetrators of intolerance and violence, and there is enough truth to such charges to take them to heart. At the same time it should be recognized that what is called religious strife is usually only partly that. The “religious wars” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were at least as much about politics, with, for example, Catholic France supporting German Protestants in order to weaken the Catholic German emperor. Today it would be extremely simplistic to think that religion is all that fuels the strife in Northern Ireland or the Near East.

Gods Warriors - Special Reports from CNN.com

Cultures & Conflits : Le quasi-contrat du combat suicidaire
Le quasi-contrat du combat suicidaire
Cultures & Conflits n°63 (atuomne 2006) pp. 25-46
Louis-Jean Duclos

This review article contains a number of typos as published. But they are by and large easily recognized as such.

Munson, Religion and Violence, Religion, 2005