The Blame Game: Karen Armstrong Talks About ‘Fields of Blood’
December 26, 2014 2:19 pm
The religious scholar Karen Armstrong spent seven years in a convent. She once told The Times she was “a lousy nun.” Since she turned her attention to writing about religion, her books include “A History of God,” “Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time” and “The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions.”
Her new book, “Fields of Blood,” argues that religion doesn’t deserve much of the blame it receives for inciting violence throughout history. In The New York Times Book Review, James Fallows said the book was “packed with little insights and discoveries.” He wrote: “Armstrong demonstrates again and again that the great spasms of cruelty and killing through history have had little or no religious overlay.” In a recent email interview, Ms. Armstrong, who lives in England, discussed what inspired the book, her reaction to the events of 9/11, religion’s past and present relationship to politics and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Q. You’ve written books about many different aspects of religion. Was there something in particular that inspired you to write about religion and violence?
A. Ever since 9/11, I have been asked to comment on the religiously motivated atrocities that regularly punctuate our news. Time and again, I have been informed categorically that religion is chronically prone to violence and has even been the cause of all the major wars in history — an odd remark, since the two World Wars were clearly fought for secular nationalism rather than religion. Yet the belligerence of religion is often regarded as a self-evident fact and seems central to our Western secular consciousness. I used to believe this myself, but over the years my study of world faith has convinced me that we need urgently to reassess this received idea and gain a more accurate perception of our predicament in this dangerously polarized world.
Q. You write early on that the Western conception of the term “religion” is “idiosyncratic and eccentric.” What do you mean by that? And how does it influence the rest of your argument?
A. Our Western notion of religion as a private quest, a codified set of beliefs and practices that was essentially separate from all other activities, was a radical innovation. No other culture has anything like it and many people in non-Western countries still find it strange and perverse. Before about 1700 religion permeated the whole of life so thoroughly that taking “religion” out of “politics” would be like trying to extract gin from a cocktail. So throughout my book I argue that it is impossible to claim that religion has historically been responsible for more violence than any other institution, because before the modern period there were no “secular” pursuits.
Q. If Greeks, Romans and others did not separate religion from secular life — if they were indistinguishable in many ways — why can’t religion be just as easily blamed (or credited) as politics for developments in ancient history?
A. It certainly can. Because religion and politics were inseparable, it was inevitably implicated in the warfare and coercion that characterizes any state. I am not saying that religion is never to blame, but simply that it has never been the sole nor even the chief cause of either state or terrorist violence. Other factors — political, economic, social, personal — have always been involved and these must also be taken into account. This is still true today: if we want to change hearts and minds, we must discover what is actually in them and not simply what we think might be there.
Q. You’ve been outspoken about the comedian Bill Maher, the writer Sam Harris and other prominent people who are opposed to religion in general and have criticized present-day Islam. Do you think there is justification for criticizing a faith’s direction or some of its public declarations? Or is it always a political problem at bottom?
A. We have a duty to speak out clearly wherever we encounter injustice, cruelty or corruption — be it religious or secular — but we should do so dispassionately, accurately and fairly. (I know very little about Bill Maher; the story did not get much coverage in the U.K. But the incident was explained roughly to me during an interview.) If we speak in order to wound, we will make matters worse: in my research I have found that when a fundamentalist group is attacked, it invariably becomes more extreme. My problem with some current critics of Islam is that their criticism is neither accurate, fair, nor well-informed. I am sure they do not intend this, but in the 1930s and ’40s in Europe, we learned how dangerous and ultimately destructive this kind of discourse could be.
Q. You write that the Crusades were “certainly inspired by religious conviction,” though other factors were involved. Is this the clearest historical case of religion-inspired violence?
A. Interestingly, after the First Crusade, piety tended to be submerged by more material interests, and by the 13th century a Crusade’s political impact in Europe was often more important than its outcome in the Holy Land. Contemporaries believed that the “Wars of Religion” of the 16th and 17th centuries had been the most devastating wars ever fought for faith, since they had been wholly inspired by the theological quarrels of the Reformation. Yet Catholics and Protestants frequently fought on the same side; these were also political wars that determined the configuration of modern Europe.
Q. You also write that the Crusades were influenced by “a distorted Christian mythology.” What would you say to critics who might argue that it’s stacking the deck in an argument like this to decide when a religion’s beliefs are being “distorted” and when they’re not?
A. True, there are multiple forms of any tradition, be it secular or religious: it is never possible to speak of an “essential” Christianity or Islam. Yet some interpretations are more authentic than others: the Crusaders conveniently forgot that Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. Such failures do not invalidate an entire tradition, however. The theory of natural human rights was a triumphant achievement, despite the fact that its early advocates — Thomas More, Alberico Gentili and John Locke — refused to extend these rights to the indigenous peoples of the New World.
Q. At what point in history were religious life and secular life most clearly beginning to separate, and since that time do you think it’s become any easier to figure out the role of each in violence and other social phenomena?
A. Religious and secular life became officially distinct during the 18th century, first in the United States and then in revolutionary France. In the Muslim world, where secularism was a foreign import, it was imposed during the 19th and 20th centuries so rapidly, and all too often cruelly, that in many quarters it has been discredited. In the Middle East, it is still difficult to disentangle religion from politics: in the ideology of Hamas, for example, Islamic themes meld seamlessly with secular nationalism and Third World ideology.
Q. How do you untangle the religious aspects, if you see any, of the mass atrocities of the 20th century, including the Holocaust?
A. In some ways the nation has become a supreme value: it is no longer acceptable to die for religion but admirable to die for your country. In the nation-state, ethnicity, culture and language can become sacralized and the Holocaust was the most terrible example of the besetting sin of nationalism, its intolerance of minorities who do not fit the national profile. A dark revelation of what happens when the sense of the inviolable sanctity of every single person is lost. In conventional religion, the cultivation of transcendence — God, Dao, Brahman or Nirvana — helped people to appreciate human finitude. But if a human ideology, such as communism, becomes the supreme value there is nothing to prevent the wholesale violence of the Gulag.
Q. Did 9/11 do anything to change your thinking about religion and violence, in any direction?
A. The horror of 9/11 was utterly inconceivable. Yet, paradoxically, on that terrible day I kept saying to myself: “So this was what I was afraid of.” I had recently published a book on fundamentalism, which concluded that these religious movements represented “a widespread disappointment, alienation, anxiety, and rage that no government can safely ignore.” I was also aware that we (and here I speak as a British person) were implicated as a result of our colonial policies. This was not just their problem; we were also involved. So there was no change in my thinking; rather a somber confirmation and a dread, which is still with me today, of what may yet be in store.
Q. What signs of hope do you see in a world that often seems violently riven by differences between peoples, including but not limited to religion?
A. In many ways, the 20th century was a terrible century, but there were giants who gave voice effectively to the compassionate ideal which has been just as potent a force in the history of religion as any crusade or jihad: Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Bad as it is, the world would be in much worse shape today without them. Not many of them were saints; like most of us, they had flaws, but their lives remind us of what one person can do to overcome seemingly insuperable barriers of hatred.
Source: The New York Times
