Review of The Myth of Religious Violence

(Submitted for a school assignment, but something I'd been wanting to do anyway)

In his latest monograph, The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanaugh indulges once again in his favorite past-time of shattering cherished idols of liberal political thought, idols that serve as foundations for consensus within the current Western political order.  However, apparently zealous to avoid being marginalized by the academic establishment of the various fields he is engaging, Cavanaugh seems at pains to present his case with a scholarly rigour and thoroughness that marks a definite shift in style from his earlier, more essayistic works.  Valuable as this thoroughness may be, fans of Cavanaugh’s writing may find that it has the unfortunate side-effect of draining this work of some of the refreshing vigour, flair, and provocative edge that characterize his previous works.  

However, one may perhaps wonder whether the blunting of this provocative edge is not a rather good thing, given that the argument of the book already contains plenty of material to provoke.  In it, Cavanaugh violates basic assumptions not only of current political pundits and theorists, but also established canons of modern sociology, history, and religious studies.  In setting out to debunk as “myth” the enormously influential dictum that religion is particularly prone to cause violence, it is well that Cavanaugh proceeds with great care and patience.

The title of the work neatly summarizes the task that Cavanaugh sets for himself, for he is using the word “myth” not simply in its cheap polemical sense of “a load of hogwash,” but in its richest sense, which we might define as “a self-authenticating foundational narrative of a culture which serves to structure society in its image by legitimating certain configurations of power and delegitimating others, and by classifying phenomena of our present experience in terms of its narrative.”

  Thus, Cavanaugh is not merely interested in demonstrating that the myth is false, but in examining its origins, uses, and inner structure.  So Cavanaugh clarifies right at the outset that “this book, then, is not a defense of religion against the charge of violence” (5); that is to say, he is not interested in offering a fairly straightforward objection to the myth along the lines “Actually, religions are the sources of peacemaking more often than violence” or “Actually, the violence usually attributed to religion is the result of other, non-religious causes,” though, as we shall see, the latter claim is not entirely foreign to his project.  Rather, his goal is to question the very terms in which the myth is couched--specifically, the term “religion.”  He sets out to argue “that there is no such thing as a transhistorical or transcultural ‘religion’ that is essentially separate from politics” (9).  In other words, he lays down the challenge: to indict religion as a root cause of violence, one has first to be able to identify a distinct phenomenon called religion, to which violence can be meaningfully attributed; but this is impossible.  Having established this bold claim, he can then argue that the myth’s error on this fundamental point is not the product of an innocent misunderstanding, but “is itself a part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West” (9).  That is to say, the myth was able to arise and continue to hold sway despite its incoherence because the narrative it offers is useful and comforting to many aspects of modern society.  

Cavanaugh develops his first argument in three long chapters, entitled “The Anatomy of the Myth,” “The Invention of Religion,” and “The Creation Myth of the Wars of Religion.”  The second claim, though it appears in places throughout these chapters, is primarily fleshed out in the final chapter, “The Uses of the Myth.”  Let us take some time to examine the structure of both arguments in a bit more detail.

In the first chapter, Cavanaugh examines the arguments of nine major theorists of religion who have argued some version of the claim that religion causes violence, whether because “religion is absolutist” (John Hick, Charles Kimball, Richard Wentz), because “religion is divisive” (Martin Marty, Mark Juergensmeyer, David Rapoport), or because “religion is not rational” (Bhikhu Parekh, Scott Appleby, Charles Selengut).  The exercise becomes rather tedious, as the arguments and Cavanaugh’s criticisms of them begin to sound like a broken record.  In each case, the scholar in question fails to provide an adequate account of what defines a religion, as over against a mere secular phenomenon, and how to identify one set of phenomena as the cause of violence rather than the other.  Whenever these scholars seek to provide criteria that suitably define “religion,” these criteria seem not to apply to some traditional religions (e.g. Buddhism), while seeming clearly to apply to phenomena generally deemed “secular” (e.g., Marxism, nationalism).  Indeed, these scholars often find themselves invoking examples of nationalistic or Marxist violence as examples of “religious” violence, though elsewhere, the same scholars resolutely classify such phenomena as secular.  The reader may wonder if it is really necessary for Cavanaugh to rehearse the same claims and criticisms nine times, but, assuming Cavanaugh is accurately representing the views of these scholars, the exercise does have the effect of conveying just how empty and tiresome are the traditional justifications for the “religion causes violence” argument.  Cavanaugh concludes, “There is no reason to suppose that so-called secular ideologies such as nationalism, patriotism, capitalism, Marxism, and liberalism are any less prone to be absolutist, divisive, and irrational than belief in, for example, the biblical God” (55).

At the end of the first chapter, we find ourselves wondering how it could be that the phenomenon “religion” proves so difficult to use or make sense of.  In the second chapter, Cavanaugh offers us a jarring answer: because there’s no such thing; the very concept is a comparatively recent invention.  Each of the scholars in chapter one, he says, have attempted to assume that we can discuss “religion” as a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon.  And yet it is neither, as he argues in two sections, refuting first the “transhistorical” claim and then the “transcultural.”  First, he shows that the concept as we now use it was neither known nor meaningfully applicable in earlier ages of the West, first appearing in something like its modern sense around the time of the Reformation.

  Second, he shows that it is not transcultural, offering some fascinating testimony of the confusions encountered by Europeans when they first came into contact with indigenous religions in Africa and Asia.  These did not seem to fit in any way the Western concept of “religion,” blurring together sacred and secular duties and commitments.  In both cases, he argues that the concept “religion” was not primarily descriptive, but rather constructive, of social reality: by claiming to have isolated a universal essence of “religion,” Western thinkers succeeded (to a limited extent) in shaping existing religions into something more closely resembling that essence.

Having noted in chapter two that most of the early modern thinkers who began to describe religion in these universal terms were political theorists, theorists interested in subordinating “religion” to the control of the nation-state, he turns in chapter three to uncover just what motivated these thinkers.  Men like Locke and Hobbes, he says, diagnosed a situation of uncontrollable religious violence in the century and a half following the Reformation, and made this their rationale for controlling religion by subordinating it to the State.  This diagnosis, he shows, remains enormously influential for the modern myth of religious violence, and its continued use to justify secular political intervention as the remedy.  The problem, though, is that this diagnosis was also a myth--the “Wars of Religion” were not wars of religion, wars fought between Protestant and Catholic for religious supremacy, as he demonstrates with no less than forty-five historical counterexamples to the traditional narrative.  This does not mean, he is careful to clarify, that they were “merely secular” conflicts; rather, the modern distinction between “secular” and “religious” phenomena simply did not apply then.  It was indeed, as his most intriguing argument claims, created by the “wars of religion,” since they were actually fought in order to consolidate state authority independent of the Church.  

In the final chapter, “The Uses of the Myth,” he seeks to reveal the dangerous consequences of this false narrative, and at the same time reveals to us his practical motivations in writing.  Cavanaugh believes that this myth, by categorizing certain phenomena as “religious” and therefore violent, serves to legitimate “secular” violence, and indeed, to invoke it as a necessary weapon against religious violence.  He explores two case studies in which this has unfolded: the use of the myth in American jurisprudence to justify a radical separation of church and state, which suppresses the public embodiment of any religions except the patriotism of the American civil religion; and its use in post-9/11 rhetoric across the political spectrum to justify violent suppression of Islamic fundamentalism and the forcible secularization of Islamic societies.  Some of the examples of the latter that he quotes, from mainstream writers like Christopher Hitchens and others, are downright chilling, and help to convince the reader of the urgency of the task of demythologization that Cavanaugh has undertaken.  

On the whole, it must be said that Cavanaugh has succeeded admirably at this task, despite the scale of the undertaking.  At times, the reader feels as if the disillusioning process is itself an illusion, as if Cavanaugh has merely pulled the wool over our eyes by some linguistic acrobatics, telling us that there’s no such thing as religion when we all know there surely must be.  But reconsideration always compels the conclusion that Cavanaugh has not indulged in any such cheap tricks, and does convincingly establish the main pillars of his argument.  

However, it is easy to get the nagging sensation that, as new as this all sounds, we’ve heard it all before.  And so we have, perhaps.  It turns out that Cavanaugh’s project is a fairly standard postmodernist one, in the venerable Foucauldian tradition of the “genealogy.”  All the familiar elements are there: the assertion that a diversity of historical forms underlie concepts we now take for granted; the insistence on the incommensurability of phenomena in different cultures and the claim that our homogenization of them is an act of cultural imperialism; the subjection of a fact we take for grantedto a historical narrative to demonstrate that it was contingently constructed; and the “unmasking” of power grabs that underlie supposedly neutral knowledge claims.  There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, of course (unless you hate all things postmodern).  Indeed, perhaps Cavanaugh is implicitly critiquing postmodernism for having uncritically adopted the myth of religious violence from modernism, rather than deconstructing it, and is doing so by beating them at their own game.  But it would be comforting to see Cavanaugh show a bit more self-consciousness regarding his methodology and be up front about the nature of his project.

One also wonders if there is a bit of a contradiction between Cavanaugh’s argument and the practical political use to which he puts it.  On the one hand, we are told that there is no universal essence of religion, which can enable us to clearly determine what counts as a religion or to attribute common elements to diverse religious traditions.  On the other hand, his argument seems to move from proving that the Christian religion was not in fact the cause of violence in the “Wars of Religion’ to arguing that the Islamic religion should not be blamed for violence in our own day.  If religions do not share a common essence, why shouldn’t Islam be inherently violent after all, even if other religions are not?  Admittedly, Cavanaugh’s blind spot here is not so glaring as this might make it sound; his argument is rather more sophisticated and complex than that.  Nonetheless, it does feel as if the particular practical application he attempts to make is imported from elsewhere, rather than flowing decisively out of his argument.  The cynic might say that he has chosen this application merely because it was likely to win the favor of a certain liberal audience that otherwise would be hostile to his demythologizing project.  After all, despite the resolutely counter-cultural pose that he strikes, he seems to throw a lot of bones to prevailing liberal sentiment in the course of the book, particularly in the section regarding the exportation of the concept “religion” to other cultures.  Here he adopts the typical righteous indignation toward colonialism, together with a fashionable disdain for missionaries as exploiters of the natives.  Is he accepting one anti-religion myth while debunking another?

Despite these minor misgivings, I can heartily commend this book as a bold and scholarly contribution to political theology and the sociology of religion, and a valuable exposé of careless cultural assumptions that we all share.   

New Cavanaugh book

I finally got ahold of Cavanaugh's new book, The Myth of Religious Violence, and am just getting started on it. It looks likely to be a be a nugget of brilliance, just like Cavanaugh's previous works, and I hope to blog about it as I go along. In this book he completely undermines the increasingly standard attack on Christianity along the lines that "religion causes violence," but this apologetic is only a by-product of a much grander project. His argument strikes at the heart of modernity and the nation-state, by arguing not that religion is innocent of these charges but in fact that the whole notion of religion as an isolable transcultural phenomenon is a modern myth; historically, religion was part and parcel of a larger cultural/economic/political milieu, and in fact, it still is today. By ignoring that fact, we have been able to pretend that nationalism, capitalism, et al. are not religious, and so violence for these causes is "rational" unlike "irrational" religious violence. Crucial to this argument is the case that Cavanaugh has been making for years about the rise of the state and the "Wars of Religion"; namely, that these were not so much wars of religion, but wars in which "religion" was created as a apolitical category, and the loyalties that formerly belonged to the Church were translated to the newly-fabricated State.

A sample sentence from the introduction that sums up Cavanaugh's project eloquently: "The gradual transfer of loyalty from international church to national state was not the end of violence in Europe, but a migration of the holy from church to state in the establishment of the ideal of dying and killing for one's country."

If you're intrigued, but don't to read the whole thing, you can check out this lecture (text format; audio link is dead) that he gave a couple years ago on this topic.
When I first listened to this lecture, I was struck by how naively conservative Christians had embraced the rhetoric of denouncing the irrational, violent nature of the Islamic religion, and the need for it to be subjugated by the state. Don't we realize that we're shooting ourselves in the foot? Of course, Islam has had, and often still does have, violent tendencies (though these should be resisted with the gospel of peace, not the swords of the nations), but when we blithely buy into the notion that this religion is inherently irrational and violent, we unknowingly bolster the notion that all religions are inherently irrational and violent, including our own, and that a secular state is the only way of overcoming this violence. It has been remarkable how easily writers like Christopher Hitchens have extrapolated from the supposedly ubiquitous violence of fundamentalist Islam to the violence of all religions. And, as we learn here from Cavanaugh, conservative Christians have little right to complain when the myth is turned on them, since they embraced it so enthusiastically in the case of Islam.

Butt-kicking Cavanaugh

While I was cleaning up the domicile this evening, in preparation for my dearly beloved's return to this side of the Atlantic tomorrow evening, I decided to go back to the good ol' days and listen to Cavanaugh's lecture on "Torture and the Eucharist" which I used to listen to every couple months, it seemed. It was quite as amazing as I remembered, and I must post the link here, and urge all and sundry to go listen to it.

The final words of the lecture:

The world did not change on 9/11. The world changed on 12/25—when the Word of God became incarnate in human history, when he was tortured to death by the powers of this world, and when he rose to give us new life—it was then that everything changed. Christ made friends of us who are enemies of God, and thus made us capable of loving enemies as ourselves.

Cavanaugh Kicks Serious (American) Butt

This past week, I dug up a couple of amazing Cavanaugh lectures that he delivered at the University of Melbourne a couple years back. In terms of theory, there's nothing really new that wasn't in Torture and Eucharist or Theopolitical Imagination, but he makes explicit the applications of that theory to America and the War on Terror--it's quite provocative and sometimes downright chilling. Plus, he's a pretty darn good speaker. (I love the name of the first link):
http://sexyreligion.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/audio-torture-and-the-eucharist-by-william-cavanaugh/

http://harangue.lecture.unimelb.edu.au/ilectures/ilectures.lasso?ut=634&id=26498.

Cavanaugh Chapter 5 (at last)

Ok, so, I'm finally posting some Cavanaugh. This is going to be a monumental task, so I'm starting with the most important chapter, Chapter 5. This is just the first installment, of what will hopefully be many such posts, just from chapter five.
This is basically a walking through the chapter, mostly by means of key quotes (the bold headings are Cavanaugh's). (Note: I'm going to have to go back through here soon and italicize all the italicized words)

Eucharist is the church’s “counter-politics” to the politics of torture
The Eucharist makes real the presence of Christ in the Church; resists the disappearance of the Body.
“Where torture is an anti-liturgy for the realization of the state’s power on the bodies of others, Eucharist is the liturgical realization of Christ’s suffering and redemptive body in the bodies of His followers. Torture creates fearful and isolated bodies, bodies docile to the purposes of the regime; the Eucharist effects the body of Christ, a body marked by resistance to worldly power. Torture creates victims; Eucharist creates witnesses, martyrs. Isolation is overcome in the Eucharist by the building of a communal body which resists the state’s attempts to disappear it.”

“Whereas New Christendom ecclesiology would cordon off the Kingdom of God into a space outside of time, in the Eucharist the Kingdom irrupts into time and ‘confuses’ the spiritual and the temporal. The Eucharist thus realizes a body which is neither purely ‘mystical’ nor simply analogous to the modern state: the true body of Christ.”

“In the Eucharist the church is always called to become what it eschatologically is. The Eucharist does make the church ex opere operato, but the effects are not always visible due to human sin. Christians are called to conform their parctic to the Eucharistic imagination. . . . the Eucharistic imagination is a vision of what is really real, the Kingdom of God, as it disrupts the imagination of violence.”

1: The Mystical and the True
The Church, with the coming of modernity, can no longer be seen as political institution of its own, but as consisting more in the invisible communion with believers.
Henri de Lubac pointed out that a dichotomy was created between the external institutional church and the invisible interior church. “In the term ‘mystical body,’ the adjective had swamped the noun.”

For this dichotomy,
“The church does not constitute a social body. Its visibility and unity rather consists in the external bonds of sharing the same profession of faith, the same rites, the same church laws, and above all the same allegiance to the Pope’s guidance.”

Beginning in the twelfth century, there begins to be an inversion of corpus mysticum and corpus verum. Corpus mysticum is now applied to the Church, corpus verum to the elements of the Eucharist.

“In the older understanding, according to de Lubac, the sacramental body and the church body are closely linked, and there is a ‘gap’ between this pair and the history body. The Eucharist and the church, both of which are understood by the term communio, are together the contemporary performance of the historical body, the unique historical event of Jesus. Christians are the real body of Christ, and the Eucharist is where the church mystically comes to be. The church and the Eucharist form the liturgical pair of visible community (corpus verum) and invisible action or mystery (corpus mysticum) which together re-present and re-member Christ’s historical body. The gap is a temporal one. The link between past event and the present church is formed by the invisible action of the sacrament. The ‘mystical,’ then, is that which ‘insures the unity between two times’ and brings the Christ event into present historical time in the church body, the corpus verum.”

In the inversion, “The Eucharistic host has become corpus verum, and has now taken on a ‘thingly realism,’ a visible and available sign in the here and now which produces reverence and awe. Eucharist is increasingly described in terms not of action but of object, such that the scholastic concentration is on the miracle produced in the elements, and not on the edification of the church by the presence of Christ in the sacrament. At the same time, the church is identified as corpus mysticum, whose essence is hidden. The visibility of the church in the communal performance of the sacrament is replaced by the visibility of the Eucharistic object. Signified and signifier have exhanged places, such that the sacramental body is the visible signifier of the hidden signified, which is the social body of Christ. . . . The real life of the church is relegated to the ‘mystical,’ the hidden, that which will only be realized outside of time in the eschaton. Rather than linking the present with Jesus’ first – and, we should add, second –coming, the mystical is now cordoned off from historical space and time. At this point in Christian history the temporal is beginning to be construed not as the time between the times, but as an increasingly autonomous space which is distinct from a spiritual space.”

Cavanaugh pauses here to clarify that this is not intended to undermine the doctrine of transubstantiation, only to guard against misguided emphases. He clarifies that de Lubac “thought that the best way to emphasize ‘eucharistic realism’ was precisely through an ‘ecclesial realism’ which sees Christ’s real presence in the elements as dynamic, working toward the edification of the church. What concerned de Lubac about the inversion of verum and mysticum was its tendency to reduce the Eucharist to a mere spectacle for the laity. The growth of the cult of the host itself in the later medieval period…was not necessarily an advance for Eucharistic practice. As Sarah Beckwith puts it, ‘the emphasis was increasingly on watching Christ’s body rather than being incorporated in it.’ ”

This discussion is of particular relevance for Protestants. And indeed, Cavanaugh goes on to critique the late medieval practice of the Eucharist (which Protestantism was a reaction to) in terms that are no less applicable to the modern Protestant practice:
“Laypeople were increasingly left to silent contemplation of the awesome spectacle, and this corresponded with a diminishing of the communal nature of the Eucharist and an individualizing of Eucharistic piety. Dom Gregory Dix describes this period in these terms: ‘The old corporate worship of the eucharist is declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind. And it is the latter which is beginning to seem to him more important than the corporate act.’ . . . The individual Christian relates not to other Christians but directly to Christ as to the center of the circle, instead of incorporation with one’s fellow Christians into the body of Christ, which has a head, but no center.”