Is Ned Flanders a Violent Man?

It was not by chance that Australia was chosen as the venue of the Global Atheist Convention.

With the publication in late 2010 of The Australian Book of Atheism (edited by Warren Bonett), the signs are that local atheism is gathering quite a head of steam. As the book and the conference show, the emphasis in contemporary Australian atheism is less on philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God and more on the proposition that religion is always and everywhere detrimental to human flourishing. 

In a piece entitled “Religion and Violence”, one of the conference speakers, Dr Tamas Pataki of the University of Melbourne, argues that the link between violence and religion is “the manifestation of a necessary connection”. It is not merely the case, for Pataki, that religion and violence have been associated in history. There is something inherently in the religious mindset that predisposes it to violent behaviour.

This argument is not novel. One of Christianity’s most famous detractors was the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell. After he had to concede his position of philosophical pre-eminence to Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1920s, he dedicated himself to a series of largely forgettable and mostly lightweight pontifications masquerading under the heading of “ethics”. In a 1930 essay entitled “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation?” Russell wrote: 

I regard it [religion] as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race … As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage … they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress.

Recent history has apparently done nothing to overturn this Russellian disquiet. It is still a case powerfully put, and now more widely believed, that there is an inexorable link between religion—especially the great monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam—and the worst episodes of human violence. Religious faith is a phenomenon of human experience that drives us away from seeking rational agreements with peaceful outcomes and towards frequently violent exclusion of the other. 

At least, so runs the myth. Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg put it this way: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” 

It is the religious people in our world (it seems) who commit acts of appalling terror with no regard for their own lives or the lives of others. It is the religious people who call on the name of God to support their devastating wars. The Christianity of Bush, Blair and Howard—in the first two instances at least, an overt faith—is much associated in the public mind with the unpopular and morally dubious action in Iraq, just as the Islam of Osama bin Laden is linked to his terrorism. 

Clearly, many thinking Westerners, our local atheists like Pataki among them, regard religion as a malevolent force. And so, John Lennon’s “Imagine” has become the great secular hymn of the age, even sung these days at government-sponsored Christmas Carol events: 

Imagine no religion, it’s easy if you try …
Imagine all the people, living life in peace, yoo-hoo-oo …

The argument that there is a causal relationship between religion and large-scale violence is built in two stages. First, it is asserted that many (if not most) wars are driven by religious motivations, whether between the sects of a certain religion, as in Northern Ireland, or between the religions themselves (as in the Middle East). At least, religion has been and remains a convenient vehicle for cynical or greedy leaders to exploit if they wish to motivate people to violence on a large scale, whatever their particular ends might be. The presence of religious discourse as a justification for war and genocide is held to be nigh-on ubiquitous in human history. Leo Lefebure, author of Revelation, the Religions, and Violence (2000) writes:

The brutal facts of the history of religions impose the stark realization of the intertwining of religion and violence: violence, clothed in religious garb has repeatedly cast a spell over religion and culture, luring countless “decent” people … into its destructive dance.

Historically, the perceived link between religion and violence stems from a reaction to the divisive and bloody struggles for supremacy in Europe during the seventeenth century. The history of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) is undoubtedly complex. However, sectarian divisions between Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists were famously a factor in the swirl of alliances and counter-alliances that faced off across Europe. In England, power swung from the more radical Protestantism of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell to the crypto-Catholicism of the Restoration monarchy. By 1688, an uneasy truce between the factions of faith was achieved under William and Mary. 

John Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration was composed in this era of religious turmoil. His argument was for a religious freedom—not because religious faith is irrational, but because religious faith by nature cannot by coerced. Faith involves that part of the human person which force cannot touch. Mind you, Locke had his limits: atheists and papists were not to be tolerated within the nation. Atheists could not be trusted to behave morally, and papists were subject to a foreign power.

Locke and others have bequeathed to the tradition of Western thought a suspicion that religion and war are close companions. From this analysis of history is drawn the conclusion that there must be a necessary connection between religion and violence. Just as cigarette smoking and lung cancer are so strongly linked by statistics that it is reasonable to infer that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, so war and religion so often stand side by side that there must be some causal relationship between the two. 

What might that causal relationship be? The second stage of the religion-is-violent argument attempts to answer this question. Deep within the religious worldview (it is argued) is an exclusionary and violent mindset. Those with religious faith hold beliefs—and passionately—about ultimate reality that are by definition irrational. These beliefs are beyond the scrutiny that reason might bring to them. 

This is the argument of The End of Faith (2005) by Sam Harris. It is a work written in the atheist tradition of Bertrand Russell and further proof that an otherwise clever man may write a book that is not as intelligent as he is. Harris, at that time a philosopher studying neuroscience, argues that religion is deeply irrational; and that it is responsible for the age of terror in which we live. It is no good you suburban moderate Christians arguing that you are categorically different from the suicide bomber: Harris won’t have any truck with that. The religious spirit in human culture is dangerous, whatever form it takes. Homer Simpson’s gentle and dorky Christian neighbour, Ned Flanders, is being inconsistent to his own faith in being so gentle and nerdy, because his faith is inherently intolerant, irrational and violent. Flanders is a killer in disguise.

A good example of how this link between religion and violence is drawn is belief in God itself: belief in God, a supreme, omniscient and benevolent being, is not thought to be rational in the sense that it can be demonstrated by logical proofs to be the case. And since such a belief is supposedly beyond discussion, there is no peaceful negotiation possible with it. The move in polite Western society to make such beliefs a matter of private choice would be possible in a polytheistic culture, since each person could allow that his or her god was not the God of all; but in a culture where monotheistic beliefs are predominant the privatisation of God is unlikely to please believers in the slightest, precisely because the God they believe in is not just their god, a tribal and local deity, but God, the Universal Creator. Harris recognises this, and, in particular, focuses his attention on the great monotheisms.

The genius of monotheism is that it offers for believers not a chaotic world of struggle and irreducible plurality in which demons and gods may lurk under every park bench, but a unitary and ordered world from which the creator is separate. Monotheism asserts that a singularity of being is at the heart of all reality. Life as a polytheist is fearful: full of omens and appeasements, uncertain of the victory of good over evil, or whether one might fall prey to the deity next door. Monotheism, on the other hand, allows that whatever one might discover in the world it is all the work of the one divinity; and so coheres as the work of the one Mind. Monotheistic worship characteristically disavows the use of created objects as a representation of the divinity lest they be confused. In this way, it was monotheism that provided the structures of thought for the scientific discoveries of the modern era. 

But that is also the felt problem: monotheism brooks no competitors. It names superstitious animism for what it is. It is not tolerant or accommodating; it cannot be syncretistic, not authentically. “Hear, O Israel, The Lord your God is God alone” was ancient Israel’s great motto, the daily recited Shema. Monotheisms cannot, by definition, allow for alternative deities. False worship is the greatest human fault, and the one from which all other aberrant human activities flow. The world is ordered according to a single will, and viewed best from a single vantage-point. 

This desire to protect the transcendent oneness of God leads to the exclusion, by violent means if necessary, of all that is felt to corrupt it. In this way, pure monotheism provides the religious resources for human belligerence on a global, rather than merely local, scale. War can become a religious duty, an act of purification or propitiation. Whatever the moral niceties espoused by religious teachers (“love your neighbour as yourself”), the oneness of God trumps them eventually. This results in fanatical armed struggle: jihad or crusade. In Christianity, the relatively irenic teachings of Jesus are obscured beneath a violent and vengeful theology propagated by a power-mad church. 

I believe it is possible to defend (at least) Christian monotheism from the charges of promoting violence laid against it from the secular quarter. As a Christian theologian, I can make no claim to speak on behalf of other monotheistic religious traditions, whose scholars are more than capable of answering for themselves. My approach will involve answering the two questions I have posed thus far, namely, Can a pattern of religious motivations be traced in close association with the worst excesses of human violence on a large scale, such as wars? And, Is there something inherent in monotheism as a pattern of thought that makes its adherents predisposed to violence? The first question is primarily a historical one; the second is a more a matter of religious psychology. 

It would be foolish to deny the association of religious discourse with war in human history. The Emperor Constantine allegedly converted to Christianity after painting crosses on the shields of his soldiers in a successful campaign. Islam was birthed from wars of resistance and then conquest. The Crusades of the Middle Ages were commanded by popes, and came with promises of a place in heaven. The genocide of the indigenous South American peoples was carried out with priests in attendance, who absolved the participants of guilt. Part of the rationalisation for violent action in these instances has been a resort to the language of religion. 

But should we single out religion here? Does it play a more significant role in war than other features of human culture? For example, desire for loot or land played a part in all of these conflicts. It has been necessary for combatants to justify their ugly behaviour in the religious sphere certainly; but could we not argue that the association of lucre with war is equally strong if not more so? Likewise, ethnic rivalries have been close to ubiquitous in war. Are not these tribalisms equally linked to violent behaviour? The co-opting of religious discourses for violent purposes does not prove that those discourses are inherently violent.

Further, when regimes have consciously not availed themselves of religious discourse, have they been any less violent? The evidence of the twentieth century would seem to suggest not. Those governments that have been avowedly not religious, or even anti-religious—the obvious example being Soviet Russia—have been some of the bloodiest of any in history. Often their very aversion to religion has led to terrible excesses of violence. The attempt by Christopher Hitchens (and others) to classify the atheistic regimes such as Kim Jong-il’s North Korea as “religious” is as specious as his attempt to claim the humanitarianism of Rev Dr Martin Luther King for the atheist cause. 

A closer look at one crucial example of the religious association with war reveals that there is a more complex web of historical circumstances and causes. The Thirty Years War of 1618–48 was claimed as the classic example of pointless religious sectarian violence sweeping across the continent of Europe. The mythology of the secular state, as we have seen, tells this as the story of its own origins. 

In his 2010 book The Myth of Religious Violence the US theologian William Cavanaugh disputes this reading of the so-called “Wars of Religion”, showing that the wars were frequently between co-religionists. Cavanaugh argues that the myth of the religious wars was an invention of liberal thinkers in order to diminish the power of religion in the state. The myth, as Cavanaugh demonstrates, does not accord with the historical facts. For example, the Calvinist ruler Frederick V, thought to be one of the most dangerous zealots of the period, in his own court included people who adhered to various stripes of Christianity. He was happy to include Catholic princes in his alliances, and was even unembarrassed by an alliance with the Ottoman Turks. The common thread in this war was not religious hatred, but national identity. 

In fact, Western writers have been strangely blind to the way in which the liberal-democratic nation-state has promoted the cult of war and the myth of its own sanctity. Was it as a Christian or as a classic political liberal that George W. Bush said the following (in his second inaugural address in 2005)? 

There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

It is not Christianity or some other traditional religion that is being invoked as motive for war. It is the pursuit of the highest good of the democratic state that has here become a “force”. The implication—that the full force of the US military will be necessary to aid this unstoppable “force” of history—is unmistakable. At least Christopher Hitchens is honest when he writes:  

And I say to the Christians while I’m at it, “Go love your own enemies; by the way, don’t be loving mine” … I think the enemies of civilization should be beaten and killed and defeated, and I don’t make any apology for it. 

This is not to argue that military force is not in some circumstances justified. It is merely to point out that arguments used to bolster the use of violent action emerge from all quarters, not the least from the ideological framework of religion’s greatest contemporary detractors. 

The answer to the first question (“Can a pattern of religious motivations be traced in close association with the worst excesses of human violence on a large scale, such as wars?”) is not then at all straightforward. “Religious” motivations are sometimes but certainly not exclusively associated with large-scale violence. However, mere association does not indicate causation—especially when there are so many other factors in play. Any historical analysis of human conflict shows that motivations are rarely simple. Given that before the twentieth century almost all human civilisations of any kind have identified themselves religiously, it would be strange not to find religious rhetoric bound up in justifications for violent conflict. Yet the diminution of the use of traditionally religious rhetoric in conjunction with the state in Western liberal-democratic countries has not led to them being any more peaceful or less violent than before. Professor Darius Rejali’s meticulous documentation of the practice of torture by liberal democracies in his Democracy and Torture (2007) is a case in point. 

So we turn then to our second question: Is there something inherent in monotheism as a pattern of thought that makes its adherents predisposed to violence? 

Hitchens’s comment about Christians loving their enemies is rather telling at this point. It is a recognition that deep within Christianity at least is a teaching which runs directly counter to the thesis that the religious and particularly monotheistic mentality is geared towards violent behaviour. Christ’s teaching about love for enemies, the parable of the Good Samaritan and his invitation for his disciples to “turn the other cheek”—these do not sound like the rantings of a crusader or the self-justifications of a conquistador. Jesus pointedly refused to participate in a violent rebellion that would have made him king by force, as John’s gospel records; and when Peter drew his sword against Jesus’s captors in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus rebuked him. 

It is de rigueur to consider Jesus a kind of secular figure—a prototype of Lennon or Gandhi—whose teaching emerges quite apart from any religious self-consciousness he may have had. Yet this obscures the fundamental Jewishness of Jesus. Jesus was, so the Gospels record, a monotheist who insisted on the exclusive claims of the God of Israel. For him, love of God and love of neighbour—even an enemy—were inextricably linked. If we are to recognise Jesus as one of history’s greatest teachers of peace, then we cannot pretend that his monotheism was incidental to that teaching. 

But were the teachings of this first-century peacenik rapidly appropriated by the apostle Paul and by the institutional church for the development of an exclusive, intolerant and inevitably violent faith? As is true of most monotheisms, Christianity is a universalist faith. However, it does not see itself as the faith of a certain ethnic group or tribe but as being open to all, regardless of ethnicity. It proclaims a universal Lord of all, not the supremacy of a particular people. It is profoundly internationalist. It proclaims the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile at the foot of the cross of Christ, at which all may obtain forgiveness and salvation. 

The Slovenian atheist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is among a group of largely non-believing European thinkers who have lately recognised the way in which Christianity allows for a unity with differentiation—something that the multiculturalist and secular European Union is seeking to replicate with very mixed results. In his cheeky book The Fragile Absolute Žižek writes:

Christianity introduced into this global balanced cosmic Order a principle that is totally foreign to it, a principle which, measured by the standards of pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality … I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my special place within the global social order. 

The genius of the Christian gospel was the way in which it made space for diversity and multiplicity without thereby descending into anarchy. For Žižek, it is precisely this vision that modern technocratic democracies need to recapture if they really would seek a peaceful world even if, for him, traditional Christian belief is no longer tenable. 

The apostle Paul’s gospel was a declaration of the supreme power of the risen Lord Jesus. But this ruler’s rule, according to Paul, was symbolised by his death as a victim of the emperor’s regime. And how were the followers of Christ to represent this ruler? By themselves standing to die, if necessary, in the arenas of Rome. This kingdom, “not of this world” as its leader described it, was extended not by marching legionaries but by the ordinary citizens and slaves who believed it with all they had. Christian martyrdom was not the basis for a call for vengeance, however. On the contrary, it was patterned after the death of Jesus, who prayed for his executioners from the cross: “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” The martyrs of the early church likewise did not call down curses on their killers but rather prayed for them.

Christianity’s version of monotheism is famously described by the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity designates a unity among a diversity. Fundamental to all things—namely, in God—there is plurality that coheres in profound unity. The shape of this monotheism is not entirely singular and exclusive of the other. On the contrary: the three persons of the Trinity are described in Christian theology as other-person centred. Now of course the doctrine of the Trinity is felt by some to be the ultimate piece of theological gobbledegook. I am not debating its accuracy as a description of God here, but noting first that it is characteristic of all orthodox Christianity and second that it is a form of monotheism that escapes the charge of the kind of totalitarian exclusivism usually levelled against monotheism by its cultured despisers. In Christianity, radical transcendence is balanced by the nearness of God to human beings in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Over the past two millennia, Christians have commanded and committed terrible atrocities. But this is not because of something inherent in the kind of monotheism that Christianity teaches. On the contrary, the Christian form of monotheism could be characterised as a kind of inclusive universalism; and as such it extends across borders and ethnicities. The Christian conception of the divine image of God in human beings was the parent of the notion of universal human rights. The Christian God seeks vengeance but only on behalf of the innocent victim; and his enacting of his justice is in the first instance a remarkable act of loving mercy. 

I have not tried to deny that religiously-motivated violence exists; nor would I seek to ignore it or excuse it. What I have tried to show is that violence in human communities and between them comes from many directions and has many complex causes. Those who try to depict religion as inherently violent and destructive take our attention away from the more secular causes of human violence. As William Cavanaugh puts it, “the religious–secular dichotomy operating with the religion-causes-violence argument focuses our attention toward some kinds of violence (those labelled religious) and away from others (those labelled secular)”. For example, to focus on the coercive activities of Christian missionaries in nineteenth-century Australia and not see the violent rapacity of more secular thought-systems such as capitalism, imperialism and social Darwinism requires the deliberate closing of at least one eye. 

The “religion-causes-violence” argument is, then, dangerously imbalanced. Its wide acceptance leads us to the kind of moral myopia shown by Hitchens in his continued advocacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the use of cluster bombs on people he doesn’t much like. It has become a cliché that bolsters secular self-righteousness and obscures from us the possibility that the supposedly unimpeachable language of human rights, freedom and equality may be and indeed has been appropriated for disgraceful ends—just as religious language has. Focusing the blame on religious causes obscures the way in which secular democratic states have tended to grant themselves a licence to mint truth and reason and co-opt them for their own frequently violent ends.

By banishing all religious discourse from the public square and consigning them all indifferently to the trash-heap of irrationality, secularism has made it impossible for itself to discriminate between aberrant and destructive forms of religious thought and those forms of religious thought that are more congenial to peaceful human flourishing and the promotion of a just social order. The concept of “religion” is not fine-grained enough. By classifying Osama bin Laden with Ned Flanders, the secularist actually ensures the continuation of extremism—for where else has Ned to go? 

Dr Michael P. Jensen, the author of Martyrdom and Identity: The Self on Trial (Continuum, 2010), teaches theology at Moore Theological College in Sydney.