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G’day everyone, Dave Deane here, and our question for the week is: Is religion the leading cause of violence?
Physicist Victor Stenger famously declared that “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings”.
The late Christopher Hitchens titled his best-seller, “God is not great: how religion poisons everything”.
And in a controversial interview Sam Harris has said: “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology.”
What can be said in response to these blunt and provocative statements? Is religion predominant, or even unique, in embodying the tendency to violence?
Well, let me preface what I’m about to say by conceding the point. Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs have long invoked violence in the name of their religions. For millennia religious traditions have either fallen victim to or sanctioned violence. But we needn’t look in the blood of bygone years, because you and I know this all too well from the last couple of decades. Al-Qaeda on September 11; the global jihad waged by ISIS; Boko Haram in Africa; the persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar – take your pick. I don’t think anyone of us needs convincing that religious violence is a real thing.
Now I say all of that because I think it is important that we first recognise how all the violent stuff that has happened and is happening around the world shapes our understanding of religion. Any serious discussion of the relationship between religion and violence has to appreciate that there is a growing awareness of religion and religious violence. In fact, according to a 2018 PEW study, more than a quarter of the countries around the world have experienced a spike in religiously motivated violence. And I think it also has to appreciate that, at least following September 11, there has been new anti-religious brigade that’s just written off the intellectual credibility of religion altogether because of these violent atrocities.
But with that said, we need to get more specific with the terms of this question. “Is religion the leading cause of violence?”
Well, First, what do we mean by “cause”? Now I’m not just being rhetorical here. A LOT of philosophical ink has been spilled on the question of causality. One favoured idea behind the idea of “cause” was proposed by David Hume in the 18th century. He suggested that a cause is the phenomena explaining the occurrence of an event by some antecedent event. So ‘if it wasn’t for X we wouldn’t have Y’. If it wasn’t for the sun [X] I wouldn’t be sunburnt at the beach [Y]. But more often than not, the ‘X’ in question involves more than just one factor. For example, there could be factors for why I’m sunburnt, such as my deliberate choice to not wear sunscreen, or to go out at that time of day, or not wear a shirt and so on. And this is where the difficulty of causality comes in, because where do we draw the lines to isolate a particular cause as ‘the’ cause of a certain effect?
In other words, how exactly do we isolate ‘religion’ as ‘THE’ cause of a particular violent act? Take, for example, the Arab-Israeli conflict: you could analyse that conflict from the standpoint of religious disputes or you could study it from the standpoint of territorial disputes. Indeed, many of ISIS’ ‘holy duties’ and ‘Caliphates’ against Western nations were straightforward political grievances about land and politics. You see, “religion” is a notoriously difficult concept to define; scholars just don’t agree on the definition and I’m not sure if they ever will. You would think that ‘belief in God or gods’ would seem a strong candidate but that would exclude certain forms of Buddhism and Confucianism which have no belief in God, and yet they fit the bill of what we would call a ‘religion’.
The point is, the invocation for religious explanations for violent atrocities has a tendency to distort and obscure other ideological even mundane factors that led to bloodshed. We could continue to list off examples, but just take one more: The Thirty Years war of the 15th century, a bloodbath in Europe that saw over 8 million people die, is held up as the kind of archetypal ‘religious war’. But as Peter Wilson points out in his book A History of the Thirty Years’ War the issues at play had much more to do with personal ambitions and politics than anything else. Religion was a factor, but it certainly wasn’t the dominate cause of the conflict.
So that’s the first point to say when looking at this question. “Is religion the leading cause of violence?” Well, there’s a lot of complexity and flexibility of interpretation regarding causes of violence and even the meaning of “religion” itself. And that, in the very least, should caution us against sweeping generalities like Christopher Hitchens when he says: “religion poisons everything”.
Again, just to clarify: I’m not to saying that religion hasn’t being a leading cause for particular acts of violence. It clearly has been in episodes of terrorism, such as various Christian crusades, inquisitions, ISIS massacres and so on. All I’m saying is that it’s easy to pin the tail of religious violence on the donkey of God, but when you start to investigate some of these historical conflicts you begin to see that there was, more often than not, a lot MORE going on than just religious differences.
And this leads to a second point, namely that when we consider the multivariable causes of violence we see that there are, in fact, many more instances in history where religion played no significant role at all.
In their monumental 3 volume study, “Encyclopedia of Wars” (2008), Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documented that:
Again, it is difficult to be precise with statistics like these for reasons already noted in the first point about the causes of violence. But in the least, this index of wars shows that in the history of humanity religion has played a significantly minor role compared to other non-religious factors.
So to be quite frank, the scales just aren’t balanced on this issue. Religion has been more or less been absent from some of the most ghastly outbreaks of violence in history, and we needn’t look very far to see that. Totalitarians like Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong were not only non-religious, they were anti-religious. Now, there’s a minority of religious critics today who find great difficulty accepting this. For example, Sam Harris has argued on numerous occasions that because Stalin or Mao had a grand ideological vision they were more religious than not: “although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion.” (Harris, 2004, p. 79). But it’s just mistaken to say because somebody has a grand ideological vision that they are therefore religious. Harris’ avoidance strategy just highlights the confusion around the meaning of the word this word “religion” and his anti-religious bias just lacks precision to be coherent. In fact, more than that, I’d say that it also highlights a disingenuous neglect for the role IRRELIGION plays in causing violence. I mean, to argue that Stalin’s ardent conviction that religion is false and regressive was unrelated to his systematic eradication of human beings is… absurd.
Again, to clarify: I’m NOT saying that irreligion necessarily leads to violence anymore than I am saying religion necessarily leads to violence. My point is that BOTH can lead to violence because both HAVE led to violence.
And this leads to a Third point, namely that the cause of violence is seeded in the human heart. If both religion and irreligion have played significant roles in causing violence, then than tells us that there is something else beneath them both. That is the human heart. Violence is only in the world because it is first a passion in the human heart, whether that’s for power, glory, riches, territory, whatever…
And it’s here that I think the answer Jesus gives in the Bible really just dismantles this objection that religion is the leading cause of violence, at least for the Christian worldview. You see, Christianity claims that its teachings derive from divine revelation, and a religion charged with bringing God’s truth to the world faces the monumental question of how to deal with people who refuse to accept it. And this is where the relational heart of Christianity stands out. When Roman guards came to arrest Jesus, one of Jesus’ disciples swung his sword at the head of one of the guards and cut off his ear. He brought the sword against those who rejected Jesus. But what did Jesus say? He said “Peter! Put away your sword, those who live by the sword die by the sword” (Matt. 26:52).
Jesus never used the sword to silence the enemy, so when a Christian kills in the name of being a Christ-one, they are not acting accordance with the ethics of Christianity… they are, in a word, blaspheming because that is literally what the word blasphemy means: “to carry or utilise God’s name for illegitimate purposes”. And this is fascinating to me because it means that where one person may invoke the name of God to justify a gross act of violence, they can be equally met by another appealing to God’s Word which teaches against it! You see, the Bible not only warns us about false prophets who bring a false message in the name of God, it goes even further warning that we don’t assume that role ourselves!
So all of that to say, if the cause of violence is the human heart then the answer to violence is not found in a clever philosophy, or political system, or with newer technology or better education. The answer to violence is a transformation of the human heart. And I don’t know of any religious or irreligious worldview that speaks into this issue with such clarity as the Christian worldview. In the violence of the cross the battle for the human heart was won so that anyone who calls upon the name of Jesus will be saved. “in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Cor. 5:17).
