It is probably safe to assume that anyone reading this has either heard or uttered some variation of the line about religion being the cause of more suffering and war than anything other human institution.
In her new book, Fields of Blood, Karen Armstrong sets out to debunk the "myth of religious violence", taking readers from pre-agrarian human society through the development of the major religions (and many minor offshoots) and bringing us up to the near present of violent jihad. Armstrong is a former Catholic nun who has been a religious historian for more than three decades. Her many books include Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time, Buddha and A History of God.
Hers is a complex undertaking, not least because our notion of religion in the West – a “system of obligatory beliefs, institutions and rituals, centring on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities” – is not a given. In other languages, Armstrong notes, anything that translates as “religion” tends to refer to something “larger, vaguer and more encompassing”, permeating all aspects of public and private life and imbuing the most mundane activities with an air of the sacred.
This meshing in certain cultures of religious thought and practice with political, social and cultural life means that the task of decanting religion from the contexts in which it has, at least until the modern period, been embedded, in order to discern its relationship to violence is, if not an impossible task, a somewhat paradoxical one. Armstrong's project nevertheless raises timely questions and challenges the tendency to reduce complex and multicausal phenomena to simplistic cause-and-effect relationships. (Even truly smart people, such as Richard Dawkins, when speaking of terrorism, say such things as "only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people".)
Armstrong’s arguments are essentially these: that within religions the struggle for peace has been just as significant as the holy war; that people can draw on the same pool of mythology and ideas, and embark on radically different courses of action; that it is chiefly when structural inequality prevails that religion becomes problematic; that wars are never fought for single ideological reasons; and that secularism, modernity and the rise of the nation state have at least as much to do with violence and warfare as religion does.
All of these are quite reasonable positions. What can make the book feel unsatisfactory as a work of historical analysis is the fact that Armstrong knows exactly what she believes about religion from the get-go, and presents a series of case studies from which she pulls the necessary evidence, tending to downplay that which doesn’t fit her thesis. (Yes, the Crusades were hideous, but they represented “a complete denial of the pacifist strain in Christianity” – this is certainly true, but it doesn’t really prove much.)
Freelance monotheist
Armstrong has described herself as a “freelance monotheist”, drawing nourishment from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In
Fields of Blood
she doesn’t address the issue of whether religion and faith should continue to be guiding forces in our lives in the 21st century, or whether, as many would argue, they are superstitions that once served a purpose but have outlived their usefulness and now serve primarily to keep us infantilised, morally and intellectually. But if religion can be, as Armstrong allows, a convenient and effective justification for persecution, bigotry and slaughter (religion’s continuing role in the subjugation and shaming of women is not even touched on here), and if religion is optional to our existence – that is, many people live full and moral lives without it – then it seems that a book like this must address the question of its validity, or at least acknowledge that the question itself is valid.
The other interesting issue is that of why we keep making war at all. Armstrong does discuss this, yet her very reasonable conclusions – essentially, that we make war because we’re wired to find peacetime a bit dull, because we battle over resources, and because “the dilemma of civilisation” is that it cannot exist without structural and military violence – don’t necessarily bring her closer to letting religion off the hook. Religion may or may not be a root cause, but it certainly lends itself readily as a justification. As she writes, despite the taboo on killing our own kind, we fight on, enveloping the effort in a mythology, “often a ‘religious’ mythology, that puts distance between us and the enemy. We develop narratives to convince ourselves that he is not really human but monstrous, the antithesis of order and goodness.”
Modernity, with its alienating capacities, has a lot to answer for, and nationalism has provoked its share of hatred and slaughter. Armstrong quotes the writer and journalist Chris Hedges on the contrast between the trivia and vapidity of our lives and the "enticing elixir" of war. Of the first World War she writes, "It is a telling indictment of the loneliness and segmentation of modern society that many of these soldiers never forgot the profound sense of community they experienced in the trenches." But war didn't start with modernity any more than it did with religion.
Armstrong’s book covers a lot of territory; it’s a whistle-stop tour through epochs and traditions, with the reader gradually learning to predict the lesson to be gleaned from each case study. There is a push, somewhat defensive in its tone, to shift the blame for violence from religion on to secularism and nationalism, the nation having become that for which one is prepared to die, “an embodiment of the divine, a supreme value”.
Armstrong notes that although this secular mythology may encourage “solidarity and loyalty within the confines of the nation”, it does not promulgate the universal concern for others that was an ideal of many spiritual traditions or encourage us to extend our sympathy to the ends of the earth, or to love the stranger in our midst, show compassion for our enemies or wish happiness for all beings.
Although Armstrong admits that these aims of religion were always an ideal rather than a practical reality, she reminds us that religion at least offered an alternative and an ongoing challenge to our baser instincts.
Fields of Blood is less an objective look at the relationship between religion and violence than it is a defence of religion – and I don't imagine Armstrong intended otherwise. As a reader, though, I kept wishing her conclusions were a little less foregone.
Molly McCloskey's latest book is the memoir Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, published by Penguin
