3 When religion goes wrong: violence

In 1932, William Temple (1881–1944), Archbishop of York and later of Canterbury, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Glasgow on the theme of religion. His tone was uncompromising. A strong case could be made, he declared, for suggesting that religion had done more harm than good to humanity; that ‘bad religion’ was not only the most serious problem facing humanity in the modern world, but its chief enemy: ‘Religion itself, when developed to real maturity, knows quite well that the first object of its condemnation is bad Religion, which is a totally different thing from irreligion, and can be a very much worse thing.’¹

Undoubtedly religion can go wrong, and when it does it must be challenged and changed. The prophets of Israel and Jesus of Nazareth were, William Temple believed, reformers who called into question the religious conventions of their day. In a similar way we could regard the New Atheist critique of religion as helpfully indicating where reformation might be needed in our own time. But where most people see religion as something that can go wrong, the New Atheism seems to see it as something that is wrong. End of discussion: the only solution is to get rid of it.

Does religion poison everything?

The idea that ‘religion poisons everything’ has become deeply embedded within the New Atheism. Religion is the ‘root of all evil’ – intrinsically and necessarily dangerous. Sam Harris offers his own decidedly maverick and selective readings of central religious texts – such as the Bible and the Qur’an – to demonstrate that they possess an innate propensity to generate violence. Yet while this soundbite resonated deeply with the fears of some secular opinion-makers in Western culture immediately following the 9/11 suicide attacks by Islamic fanatics, it fails to engage fully and comprehensively with facts. Everyone agrees that some forms of religion are bad, mad and dangerous. But being discriminatory about religion suggests a level of maturity that being discriminatory against religion does not.

Perhaps for this reason, many New Atheists, when pressed firmly in open debate and confronted with the findings of the scholarly research literature, will grudgingly concede that there’s nothing intrinsically evil about belief in God. The problem, they believe, is that it can lead to fanaticism.

Clearly this is a legitimate concern, and we’ll explore it in detail a little later on. But first we need to return to the New Atheism’s failure to offer a firm definition of the term ‘religion’. Their lack of success turns out to be understandable, as we shall see.

‘Religion’: a false universal

The first point to make is simple: ‘religion’ is a false universal. Individual religions exist; religion as a universal category does not, however convenient it may be as a form of political or social shorthand. How did this misunderstanding come about? During the period of colonial expansion (roughly from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth), many Europeans came across worldviews that differed from their own, and chose to label them as religions. In fact lots of these were better regarded as philosophies of life, such as Confucianism, and some were explicitly non-theistic or atheistic. But because of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment belief in a universal notion called religion, all ended up being forced into the same mould.

It’s increasingly agreed that definitions of religion tend to reflect the agendas and bias of those who propose them (there is in fact still no definition of religion that commands scholarly assent).² Pluralism, in its more naive forms, holds that all religions represent equally valid responses to the same divine reality. The New Atheism, in its more naive forms, holds that all religions represent equally invalid and delusional responses to a fictional non-reality (or as Christopher Hitchens puts it, ‘all religions are versions of the same untruth’).³ But in reality the porous and imprecise concept of religion extends far beyond those who believe in God, embracing a wide range of beliefs and values.

Religion and spirituality

Since some religious traditions, such as Buddhism, have no notion of God, it’s perfectly possible to propose that ‘religiosity’ is rather different from ‘belief in God’. This critical distinction blunts the force of the atheist critique of religion considerably. It also explains why Sam Harris, who bristles with hostility towards religions that believe in God – such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam – goes soft on Eastern religions (and their Westernized variants). Harris’ position here, that religion is bad and spirituality is good, has generated considerable concern within the New Atheist community, some dropping dark and ominous hints of his ‘unsoundness’. Is Harris a true believer, or has he gone native and become a soft rationalist?

In a 2006 article in New Humanist, the Indian scholar Meera Nanda – a Hindu before her de-conversion – argued that Harris illustrated a disturbing trend in the New Atheism: a tendency towards credulity. Some atheists, she suggested, start believing in anything after they give up believing in God.⁴ Nanda notes that Harris ‘trots out the widely shared view that Abrahamic faiths encourage violence against man and nature, while eastern spirituality promotes peace and harmony with fellow creatures’. Might this, she wondered, reflect his own spiritual beliefs, which he exempted from his critique of other religious traditions?

For Nanda, Harris is a covert religious believer, hiding behind a smokescreen of rationalism and science. ‘The mystical beliefs which Harris so approves of are every bit as unscientific, untestable and unverifiable as the religious belief he so aggressively attacks.’ Harris’ criticism of theistic religions is simply clearing the ground for reaffirming ‘his own Dzogchen Buddhist and Advaita Vedantic Hindu spirituality’.

Spirituality is the answer to Islam’s and Christianity’s superstitions and wars, he tells us. Spiritualism is not just good for your soul, it is good for your mind as well: it can make you ‘happy, peaceful and even wise’. ⁵

The distinction between religion and spirituality is actually rathermore complicated than Harris suggests, some scholars arguing that spirituality is basically an individual-centred, privatized religion.⁶ If that’s so, what exactly is the problem with religion? Surely it’s no longer that it is unscientific, untestable and unverifiable, but rather that religion is an institutional or social phenomenon whereas spirituality is an individual one. This scholarly analysis is ill-suited to Harris’ sloganeering style of argument, but it is of fundamental importance to any serious attempt to understand the issues.

Religions and world-views

A further distinction of importance, which the ‘New Atheism’ singularly fails to make, needs to be drawn between a religion and a world-view. Both religions (such as Christianity) and secular world-views (such as Marxism) demand allegiance from their followers. The most successful world-views actually incorporate religious elements, even if they are fundamentally secular in their outlook – as in the former Soviet Union’s use of quasi-religious rituals to mark essentially secular events.⁷

The historian Martin Marty, rightly noting the lack of any viable definition of religion, identifies five ‘features’ that he holds to be characteristic: religion focuses our ‘ultimate concern’; it builds community; it appeals to myth and symbol; it’s enforced through rights and ceremonies; and it demands certain behaviours from its adherents. All five features, he records, are also characteristic of political movements.⁸ It’s not unreasonable to say that, if religion is dangerous on this basis, then so is politics. As has often been pointed out (most recently by the Italian historian Emilio Gentile), politics easily morphs into religion when it sees itself as being of ultimate importance.⁹ There can be (and are) political fanatics, just as there can be (and are) religious fanatics. The problem is fanaticism, not religion itself. Indeed, the dark and aggressive tone of the New Atheist critique of religion suggests that fanaticism is not limited to those who defend religion.

The New Atheism, of course, argues that religious world-views offer motivations for violence that are not paralleled elsewhere: for Harris and Hitchens it’s obvious that religious beliefs lead directly to suicide bombings. But where is their evidence for this? Why don’t they engage with the many empirical studies of why people are driven to such action in the first place?¹⁰ Are they perhaps aware that the scholarly literature does not lead to their preferred conclusions? Dawkins is rightly cautious at this point in The God Delusion, suggesting that religion may only be one of the factors involved.

As Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, demonstrated in his definitive 2005 account of the motivations of such attacks,¹¹ based on surveys of every known case of suicide bombing since 1980, religious belief of any kind does not appear to be either a necessary or a sufficient condition to create suicide bombers. There’s ‘little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions’. Pape’s analysis of the evidence suggests rather that the fundamental motivation for suicide bombings appears to be political – namely the desire to force the withdrawal of foreign forces occupying land believed to belong to an oppressed people, who have seriously limited military resources at their disposal. His was an important study, which cast doubt on some of the fundamental assumptions of American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East and the Caucasus. It also has obvious implications for wider debates about the relation of religion and terror.

Another important study approaches this question from an anthropological perspective. Scott Atran of the University of Michigan suggests that the way to stop suicide bombings is not by ridiculing or suppressing religion but by empowering religious moderates.¹²

As religious-studies scholar Richard Wentz points out in Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion, the real issue here is absolutism¹³ (the ethical view that certain actions are absolutely right or wrong) – an opinion echoed by the sociologist Alberto Toscano in his recent analysis of the history of fanaticism.¹⁴ Toscano writes that religion is not the only thing to have created fanatics: politics and ideologies have done this in the past, and continue to do so. He shows how the tension between fanaticism and reasonableness is constructed by power groups, with vested interests in mind. His analysis of the ‘fanaticism’ of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment will make uncomfortable reading for those – such as Harris and Hitchens – who naively believe that the best hope for the human race is a return to the Enlightenment.

Christianity and non-violence

Any discussion about religious violence must take into account the inconvenient fact that Christianity offers a transcendent rationale for the resistance of violence. Christians hold that the nature of God is made known in Jesus of Nazareth,¹⁵ so that the words and actions of Jesus reveal the character and will of God. For this reason, it’s important to note that Jesus demonstrated a commitment to non-violence in both his teachings and actions.¹⁶ He was the object, not the agent, of violence. Similarly, instead of meeting violence with violence, rage with rage, Christians are asked to ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘not to let the sun go down on their anger’. Now I have no doubt that lots of Christians fail to behave like this. But maybe that just shows that they are not very good Christians.

Christianity will always stand in constant need of reformation. Christian churches have used or condoned violence in the past and are rightly to be criticized for doing so. Christian institutions need repeatedly to call themselves back to reflect on the core ideas and values of Jesus. One inspiring example of a lived-out ethos of non-violence, grounded in the Christian faith, is that which undergirded Martin Luther King’s campaign for civil rights.

Another may be seen in the Amish Schoolhouse Killings of October 2006. A gunman broke into an Amish school in the village of Nickel Mines in the state of Pennsylvania and gunned down a group of schoolgirls. Five of the young girls died. The gunman shot himself at the scene, leaving a suicide note that declared that he was ‘filled with so much hate’ against God.

The Amish are a conservative Protestant religious group who repudiate any form of violence on account of their understanding of the absolute moral authority of the person and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Despite the brutal force used against the most vulnerable members of their community by a man with a grudge against God, the Amish community urged forgiveness. There would be no violence, no revenge – only the offering of forgiveness.¹⁷ The gunman’s widow spoke, gratefully and movingly, of how this provided the ‘healing’ that she and her three children ‘so desperately needed’. The cycle of violence was thus broken before it began.

This tragic story, shot through with nobility and dignity, is unquestionably a challenge to the churches to bring their ethics into line with those of their founder. But it’s an even greater challenge to the plausibility of the New Atheist critique of religion as intrinsically violent. Jesus of Nazareth just doesn’t fit that mould, and neither should Christianity.

Atheist violence against religion

It’s time to explore another theme, which is conveniently glossed over by the New Atheist manifestos: What about atheist violence against religion? As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland, I know only too well how religion can generate violence. But it is not alone in this. Any world-view based on an exclusivist metanarrative (a controlling story) has the potential to provoke hostility.

The history of the twentieth century has made us frighteningly aware of how political extremism can cause violence, and makes grim reading (unless you airbrush out the bits you don’t like or won’t accept). Never before in human history had so many people been massacred in the name of so many secular ideologies, metanarratives and visions of progress. Yet all of these reflected a post-religious secular ideology – whether it was the quasi-paganism of Nazism or the atheism of Stalinism. If the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is to be seen as the liberation of Western societies from the tyranny of religion and theocratic rule (a standard element of the New Atheist apologetic), the twentieth century has made clear that the violence and cruelty of God-fearing societies is more than adequately matched by that of their godless alternatives.

That’s one of the reasons why postmodernity is so critical of such metanarratives in the first place. Though the rejection of these controlling stories is itself deeply problematic, seeming to give rise to incoherence, writers such as Jean-François Lyotard argue that their propensity to generate oppression, exclusion and violence is so great that they are to be resisted as a matter of principle. I do concede that Christianity can generate violence; so too can Marxism and the New Atheism, the latter precisely because its metanarrative has been constructed to account for – and hence to argue for the elimination of – religious alternatives.

An anti-religious metanarrative was deeply embedded in the ideology of the Soviet Union, the world’s first officially atheistic state.¹⁸ Its founder, V. I. Lenin, always regarded the intellectual, cultural and physical elimination of religion as central to the socialist revolution, and had identified atheism as an essential element of his ideology long before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. In laying down how the revolutionary cause was to be advanced within Russia, he wrote, ‘Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.’¹⁹ In an attempt to win over the people through argument, Lenin suggested that it was necessary ‘to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists’.

Yet Lenin was reluctant to draw attention to the fact that an institutionalized atheism lay at the heart of his revolutionary programme, fearing its implications for the popular acceptance of his aims. ‘We do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme,’ he noted. Why not? Because he hoped to win religious people over through political means.

The Bolshevik Revolution gave Lenin the opportunity to implement his political and religious objectives. When religious belief conspicuously and obstinately failed to disappear as a result of social and political change, he eventually put in place measures designed to eradicate it through the ‘protracted use of violence’. One of the greatest tragedies of this dark era in human history was that those who sought to eliminate faith through violence and oppression believed that they were justified in doing so.²⁰ They were accountable to no higher authority than the state.

A key player in this atheist crusade was the League of Militant Atheists, a semi-official coalition of various political forces that operated within the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1947.²¹ With the slogan ‘The Struggle against Religion is a Struggle for Socialism’, the group set out to destroy the credibility of religion through social, cultural and intellectual manipulation. Its carefully orchestrated campaigns involved using newspapers, journals, lectures and films to persuade Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were irrational and destructive. Good Soviet citizens, they declared, ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic world-view.

Churches were closed or destroyed, often by dynamiting; priests were imprisoned, exiled or executed. On the eve of the Second World War there were only 6,376 clergy remaining in the Russian Orthodox Church, compared with the pre-revolutionary figure of 66,140. One dreadful day, 17 February 1938, saw the execution of 55 priests. In 1917 there were 39,530 churches in Russia; by 1940 only 950 remained functional.

The New Atheist response to this grim history is widely seen as unsatisfactory. It goes like this: maybe Stalin was a vicious atheist thug, but he was a vicious thug who just happened to be an atheist. Furthermore, what made him a vicious thug was his seminary training. Anyway, these atheist states weren’t really atheist at all! Christopher Hitchens argues that the Soviet Union was really a religious state, which explains why it was so immoral and violent. Communism became a religion – and that’s when things turned nasty.²²

The tenuous thought processes underlying Hitchens’ confident declarations here are rather difficult to discern, but they seem to run like this:

Major premise: religion is evil and violent.

Minor premise: the Soviet Union was evil and violent.

Conclusion: the Soviet Union was therefore religious.

We move from fiction (‘all religion is evil’) to pure fantasy (‘all evil is religious’), everything being forced into the ideological mould by Hitchens’ dogged belief in the intrinsic violence and evil of religion.²³ He does not engage with the substantial body of literature now available concerning the suppression of religion during the Soviet Union (especially from 1925 to 1947), or show any awareness of its implications for his somewhat problematic reading of history.

Yet Hitchens does not stand alone as an uncritical New Atheist observer of state atheism, such as that of the Soviet Union. Richard Dawkins insists that there’s ‘not the smallest evidence’ that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things,²⁴ and that he does ‘not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame’.²⁵ Sadly, this noble sentiment reflects his personal credulity rather than the reality of things. What he believes is irrelevant; the facts speak for themselves. From 1925 onwards the League of Militant Atheists urged the burning and dynamiting of huge numbers of churches, including some of great cultural importance. All were doomed to be swept out of the way as reminders of an earlier age of faith. Moscow would be a ‘multi-storey city of iron’ looking to the future, not the past.²⁶

Similar outrages can be found in the post-war history of the German Democratic Republic (better known as ‘East Germany’). The University Church of St Paul in Leipzig, an architectural masterpiece completed in 1240, was blown up in May 1968²⁷ to avoid the awkwardness of having to tolerate symbols of the divine in the new ‘Karl Marx Platz’. (This is now renamed the ‘Augustinerplatz’, following the collapse of this grim and miserable Marxist state in 1990, which embodied precisely the austere dogmatic atheism that some New Atheists seem to regard as an intellectual virtue.) Happily, the church was reconstructed in 2009 in response to public demand.

Dawkins gives every impression of being in denial about the darker side of atheism, making him a less than credible critic of religion. Just where in this analysis do we find the rigorous evidence-based thinking he commends and commands? Dawkins has a fervent, pious and unquestioning faith in the universal goodness of atheism that he refuses to subject to critical examination.

Secular ideals and violence

An important point made by some New Atheists is that religion – or, if we’re to avoid exaggeration, certain forms of religion – can possess a capacity to transcendentalize normal human conflicts and disagreements, thus transforming them into cosmic battles of good and evil in which the authority and will of a transcendent reality is implicated. Religious conflicts are thus argued to have an intensity lacking in their secular counterparts.

Yet when a society rejects the idea of God, it tends to transcendentalize secular alternatives, such as the ideals of liberty or equality. As the Italian political theorist Emilio Gentile rightly points out, world-views arise that, though secular in their outlooks, nevertheless take the form of ‘a more or less developed system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that create an aura of sacredness around an entity belonging to this world and turn it into a cult and an object of worship and devotion’.²⁸ The result is inevitable – a tendency towards intolerance and violence when such secular ‘objects of worship and devotion’ are challenged or threatened.

A good example of this development can be seen in the ‘Reign of Terror’ of 1794 following the onset of the French Revolution (motto: ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’), which arose directly out of the secular political ideologies of that age. This shocking episode saw doctrinaire disputes between the Jacobins and Girondins claim thousands of lives through mass executions of ‘enemies of the revolution’ in one year.²⁹ Maximilien Robespierre, reasoning that terror was virtuous because it attempted to maintain the Revolution and the Republic, declared that ‘Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, inexorable justice; it flows from virtue.’³⁰ In other words it’s a rational as opposed to a religious form of violence (I often wonder if Sam Harris has been inspired by this historical example in his puzzling and troubling defence of rational violence). Safeguarding the Revolution and Republic justified whatever means were necessary to this end. Robespierre himself eventually fell victim to the same rational terror he’d unleashed and defended. Having fallen out of favour, he was sent to the guillotine in 1794.

All ideals – divine, transcendent, human or invented – are capable of being abused. They can easily become the end that justifies the means needed to achieve them – including the elimination of people and ideas that are held to be dangerous to their survival or success. New Atheists tend to be a little vague about this, but they certainly seem to encourage the idea that once we get rid of religion we get rid of some nasty violence. There’s just no evidence for this. Two points need to be made in response.

First, the vicious ‘wars of religion’ of the seventeenth century were replaced by the equally vicious but infinitely more destructive ideological and nationalistic wars of the twentieth. The erosion of religion as a social force in Western Europe did not lead to the peaceful coexistence imagined by the more idealistic rationalists of the Enlightenment. The First World War, as is often pointed out, had no religious dimension.

And second, human beings are very good at inventing ways of distinguishing themselves from other groups of human beings and allowing these differences to generate conflict. Religion is one such difference. But there are lots of others: gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language and football. Get rid of religion, and conflict and violence will simply find other occasions for their emergence and other grounds for their justification.

Moving on

Where do these reflections take us? I believe we must make a plea for realism and get away from the superficiality of recent public debates in which carefully nuanced and evidence-based scholarly analyses of the nature of religion – and its impact on society and human wellbeing – seem to have been swept to one side in a cultural war driven by headlines and soundbites.

Secular humanism appeals to the best of humanity in defining itself. So why should it not also examine the best in religion in defending itself? Of course religion can go wrong; but so can just about anything. For example, science has been grossly abused – witness the forms of ‘social Darwinism’ that emerged in Nazi Germany, now widely condemned as an abomination yet seen as progressive by many social liberals at the time. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that this is bad science, and not to judge science by its bastardizations. Both science and religion can spawn monsters, but they need not do so, nor should either be judged by its pathological forms.

The New Atheism has simply failed to make its case that religion is necessarily and uniformly evil, mad or destructive. Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens offer anti-religious narratives of such embarrassing selectivity that they make even some New Atheists cringe with discomfort. As Terry Eagleton remarked of the pastiche of material assembled in Dawkins’ The God Delusion: ‘Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.’³¹

I’m all for religion being corrected and reformed, but I do think the New Atheism might show a similar willingness to subject itself to self-searching intellectual and moral criticisms, and be a little more honest about its own problems.

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