COLUMN: Religion and violence

    If there was no religion there would be much less violence. Those of you reading have undoubtedly heard this claim against religion. You may be among those who believe this claim, and rightly so. The bloody crusades of the middle ages were driven by the Christian church, terrorists cause destruction in the name of their God and denominations such as the Westboro Baptist Church seem to use rhetoric and faith as a weapon in religious discourse – if you can refer to their utterances as such.

    I would venture to say that religion must be looked at as a sum of both its negative and positive qualities, rather than simply focusing on the former, which the new atheist movement seems to have fallen in the habit of doing.

    There is no doubting that horrible things have been done by people claiming to be religious. Such acts have been committed in the name of religion at times. However, when we investigate these claims we find that there is more to a story than we were previously aware. Take the Crusades for example. These gruesome events have been painted by some as the product of an oppressive church who sought to retake the Holy Land due to superstitious reasons and massacre Muslim “infidels” in the process. Thus the Church gained its reputation as an oppressive and domineering force, and at times it has acted as such. However, one investigating the Crusades finds that the conflict arose from a shift in power from one Islamic group to another. Under Saracen control of Jerusalem, Christian pilgrims were allowed to come and go without harm. This peaceful interaction lasted for four centuries until Turks seized power in 1065 C.E. and massacred approximately 3,000 Christians Europe responded with military force and the infamous Crusades began.

    The objective of outlining the above example is to demonstrate a point. People often focus on either the positive or negative aspects of a group or an event. We focus on the carnage of such conflicts without even acknowledging how wonderful it was that Muslims and Christians were able to peacefully interact for centuries. In our modern day both Muslims and Christians are often mashed into over-generalized groups. The extreme Religious (Christian) Right, in their hypocrisy, paints Islam as an evil religion of violence, focusing on those who commit violence in the name of their distorted faith rather than focusing on the vast majority of Muslims who live a happy and secure, in other words normal, existence just like the rest of us. It fails to acknowledge the Islam of Muhammad, which respected Jews and Christians as followers of the same god, and allowed violence toward only those who took up arms against the military.

    Christianity is also unfairly generalized as the religion with a continuing history of violence and oppression. The justification of slavery by the Catholic Church is highlighted, but not religious individuals such as Roberto de las Casas who sought to end oppression and slavery, or Martin Luther King Jr. who based his struggle for civil rights on his religious faith.

    Anyone familiar with the teachings of Jesus Christ will find not a man preaching the hellfire and damnation of more fundamental Christianity, but the man who said “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7). Like this example of Christianity, it often takes little effort to determine whether or not a religion is in accordance with the ideologies it claims to follow.

    Violence is not a characteristic of religion, but a characteristic of passionate human beings who are not always capable of making rational decisions. It would exist whether religion did or not. The most violent conflicts in human history have been waged by non-religious dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, whose combined atrocities claimed the lives of hundreds of millions. People will always find something to fight over in both the presence and absence of religion.

    Religion is not without fault because people are not without fault. As long as religions remain institutions comprised of human beings they will lack a spotless record. Religion is only as good as the sum of its parts. Those parts happen to be both good and bad, and if we are to be fair we must draw attention to both.   

Cam Davis is a senior studying political science and religious studies. He can be reached at cam.davis@aggiemail.usu.edu.