Religion and Violence

I found H. Allen Orr’s review of Dawkins’ God Delusion in the New York Review of Books to be envigorating, not least because it seems to include many of the same arguments that I have been advancing in the various conversations about Dawkins and about the religious right in past months.

…Throughout The God Delusion, Dawkins reminds us of the horrors committed in the name of God, from outright war, through the persecution of minority sects, acts of terrorism, the closing of children’s minds, and the oppression of those having unorthodox sexual lives. No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion. So we all agree: religion can be bad.

But the critical question is: compared to what? And here Dawkins is less convincing because he fails to examine the question in a systematic way. Tests of religion’s consequences might involve a number of different comparisons: between religion’s good and bad effects, or between the behavior of believers and nonbelievers, and so on. While Dawkins touches on each, his modus operandi generally involves comparing religion as practiced —religion, that is, as it plays out in the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence— with atheism as theory. But fairness requires that we compare both religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward. And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.

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…it’s hard to believe that Stalin’s wholesale torture and murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao’s persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But Dawkins’s inability to see the difference in the severity of their sins— one of orders of magnitude—suggests an ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.

I’ve encountered the same ideological blindness in the discussions of the religious right. For many, it seems that the equation “religion == violence” (inherited from the Enlightenment) is so firmly engrained that no amount of counter-evidence can dislodge it — in fact, one interlocutor of mine went so far as to claim that Stalinism had certain religious elements to it, implying that “religion” was responsible even for the violence of the atheist Stalin.

Recognizing this rhetoric of “religious violence” gave me a new appreciation for the Radical Orthodox polemic against the secular “ontology of violence,” which amounts to simply a reversal of the current assumption that “secularism == peace.” There are of course all kinds of drawbacks to the Radical Orthodox position broadly considered, but there’s no reason why a recognition of the extreme violence of the secular experiment in the 20th Century needs to become an apologetic for the impossible “return to Christianity.”

Just as Christianity must disabuse itself of the illusion that underneath it all, it is still the same radical fringe movement founded by Jesus and Paul, so too must the modern “world come of age” face the fact that it has not turned out to be all it promised. It is amazing to me the ways that apologetics for secularism mimic apologetics for Christianity — both share the belief in the “authentic core” that can never be held responsible for the contingent and accidental failings of the movement. More broadly, one needs to recognize the ways in which the rhetoric of secularity and of Christianity have been inextricably tied together in the modern world. Fundamentalism, at least in its Christian form, would be impossible without modern empiricism, and the “Paul and philosophy” discussion is hardly anything new, having been with us since the days of Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes — all of whom, incidentally, saw Paul as characterized by persuasion (i.e., non-violence) rather than arbitrary assertion of authority.

How to say this kind of thing, though, without “sounding like” an apologist? To what extent am I responsible for people only hearing what I “sound like” rather than what I’m saying?