My dad bought me William Cavanaugh’s newest book for Christmas, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford, 2009). So far it’s great. In the first chapter he tediously, but nonetheless compellingly, deconstructs nine scholars’ religion-and-violence arguments. There are three kinds: 1) Religion is absolutist, 2) Religion is divisive, and 3) Religion is insufficiently rational. The problem, according to Cavanaugh, is not with the logic and cogency of the respective arguments, rather the arguments fall short because they fail to provide an adequate working definition of the term “religion,” which leads to either a) vague understandings of what religion is, or b) unjustifiably clear understandings of what counts as religion and what does not. He ends his first chapter with this insightful paragraph:
Suppose we apply an empirical test to the question of absolutism. Absolute itself is a vague term, but in the religion-and-violence arguments, it appears to indicate the tendency to take something so seriously that violence results. An empirically testable definition of absolute, then, might be “that for which one is willing to kill.” This test has the advantage of covering behavior and not simply what one claims to believe. Now, let us ask the following two questions: what percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith. What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? Whether we attempt to answer these questions by survey or by observing American Christians’ behavior in wartime, it seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state – Hobbes’s ‘mortal god’ – is subject to far more absolutists fervor than religion. For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most would take for granted the necessity of being willing to kill for their country, should the circumstances dictate.
We must conclude that there is no coherent way to isolate religious ideologies with a peculiar tendency toward violence from their tamer secular counterparts. People kill for all kinds of reasons. An adequate approach to the problem must begin with empirical investigations into the conditions under which beliefs and practices such as jihad, the invisible hand of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, and the role of the United States as worldwide liberator turn violent. The point is not simply that secular violence should be given equal attention to religious violence. The point is that the distinction between ecular and religious violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying, and it should be avoided altogether. (56)