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A review by timoneill
The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict by William T. Cavanaugh
5.0
Cavanaugh's book sat on my "to read" pile for nearly four years, largely because - despite its good reviews - the title, the blurb and the author's background as a theologian all triggered this atheist reader's "apologist" alarm bells. The idea that religion is inherently prone to violence is so deeply rooted in our culture that a book which argued this was wrong seemed like it was inevitably going to be unconvincing.
But I was wrong. Cavanaugh makes a compelling and ultimately quite convincing case that this idea that religion especially and particularly inclines toward violence is actually without solid foundations.
Of course, he doesn't deny that religious people can be violent, that religion can and has inspired violence or that there is no such thing as violence and war based on religious ideology. Both history and current affairs give us plenty of examples of all these things. But Cavanaugh's arguments expose the flaws in the Enlightenment myth that religion is especially inclined toward violence more than other forms of belief or ideology, as well as the claim that the solution to this "problem" is the nation state restricting religion as much as possible to the private and the personal to save us from religion's terrible impulses.
By tracing the problems with defining what "religion" actually is in any coherent way, showing how "religion" is in fact a uniquely and particularly Western concept that doesn't map well onto the rest of the world and critiquing the common conceptions of religion in history, Cavanagh undermines the foundations of the Myth. His critique of the commonly held conception of the "Wars of Religion" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exposes that these were, in fact, more wars of new absolutist nation states jockeying for precedence than clashes between Catholics and Protestants. And the claim that the calming, secular and rational influence of those nation states was the "solution" to these wars is replaced by Cavanaugh by a strong case that the nation states of the period were actually the causes of these wars, not the benign forces that ended them.
This central section of the book has some keen insights, such as the exposition of the idea that the Reformation only took root in parts of Europe where it was backed by the local nation state power and did not take root when the nation state opposed it. Far from being some kind of spiritual rebellion from the bottom, it was largely imposed from the top and failed when the top didn't support it. Seen this way, it was part of a wider dynamic whereby the rising absolutist nation state either restricted Church power by hijacking and supporting the Reformers or did so by other means, and so resisted the Reformers because the state already had the Church largely under local control or political dominance. Ultimately, whether in Catholic or Protestant Europe, it was a process of the state co-opting and limiting church power.
The final section on the uses to which the state has put and continues to put the Myth for its own ends contains some serious critiques of modern political discourse. The way that Islam has been cast as the ultimate religious bogeyman in recent times is one clear example, leading to a justification of great and terrible (state) violence to "save" us from the spectre of Islam's particular religious threat. By the time we get to New Atheist luminaries Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris invoking war, torture and even nuclear strikes in the name of preventing the terrors that religion could bring to us (such as ... well, war, torture and even nuclear strikes) the paradoxes of the Myth are pretty clear.
This is not to say that many of the things that the Myth upholds - freedom of individual conscience, the right to not believe, tolerance of all faiths or the lack thereof or the separation of church and state - are not still worth maintaining and strengthening. But Cavanaugh goes a long way toward showing that much of the supposed historical foundations of these things are actually more spin than reality.
Good books make you rethink things and open up new questions. So this is a good book.
But I was wrong. Cavanaugh makes a compelling and ultimately quite convincing case that this idea that religion especially and particularly inclines toward violence is actually without solid foundations.
Of course, he doesn't deny that religious people can be violent, that religion can and has inspired violence or that there is no such thing as violence and war based on religious ideology. Both history and current affairs give us plenty of examples of all these things. But Cavanaugh's arguments expose the flaws in the Enlightenment myth that religion is especially inclined toward violence more than other forms of belief or ideology, as well as the claim that the solution to this "problem" is the nation state restricting religion as much as possible to the private and the personal to save us from religion's terrible impulses.
By tracing the problems with defining what "religion" actually is in any coherent way, showing how "religion" is in fact a uniquely and particularly Western concept that doesn't map well onto the rest of the world and critiquing the common conceptions of religion in history, Cavanagh undermines the foundations of the Myth. His critique of the commonly held conception of the "Wars of Religion" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exposes that these were, in fact, more wars of new absolutist nation states jockeying for precedence than clashes between Catholics and Protestants. And the claim that the calming, secular and rational influence of those nation states was the "solution" to these wars is replaced by Cavanaugh by a strong case that the nation states of the period were actually the causes of these wars, not the benign forces that ended them.
This central section of the book has some keen insights, such as the exposition of the idea that the Reformation only took root in parts of Europe where it was backed by the local nation state power and did not take root when the nation state opposed it. Far from being some kind of spiritual rebellion from the bottom, it was largely imposed from the top and failed when the top didn't support it. Seen this way, it was part of a wider dynamic whereby the rising absolutist nation state either restricted Church power by hijacking and supporting the Reformers or did so by other means, and so resisted the Reformers because the state already had the Church largely under local control or political dominance. Ultimately, whether in Catholic or Protestant Europe, it was a process of the state co-opting and limiting church power.
The final section on the uses to which the state has put and continues to put the Myth for its own ends contains some serious critiques of modern political discourse. The way that Islam has been cast as the ultimate religious bogeyman in recent times is one clear example, leading to a justification of great and terrible (state) violence to "save" us from the spectre of Islam's particular religious threat. By the time we get to New Atheist luminaries Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris invoking war, torture and even nuclear strikes in the name of preventing the terrors that religion could bring to us (such as ... well, war, torture and even nuclear strikes) the paradoxes of the Myth are pretty clear.
This is not to say that many of the things that the Myth upholds - freedom of individual conscience, the right to not believe, tolerance of all faiths or the lack thereof or the separation of church and state - are not still worth maintaining and strengthening. But Cavanaugh goes a long way toward showing that much of the supposed historical foundations of these things are actually more spin than reality.
Good books make you rethink things and open up new questions. So this is a good book.