Taking the murder out of religion -Aug 5, 2005

If it is true that the first casualty of war is truth, it is also evident that an early victim of terrorism is perspective. So it is with the desperate search for reasons and causes following the bombings in Britain’s capital on 7 and 21 July 2005.

On one side of an ill-shaped ‘debate’ sits the Labour government and its Conservative foreign policy allies, steadfastly denying that ill-fated Western actions in Iraq and the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands have anything to do with feeding the murky pool of violent insurgence that engulfs places like Tel Aviv, Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, Taba, Nuweiba, Madrid, London and now Sharm.

Mr Blair’s argument is that the killings sponsored by al Qaida predate the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the post-9/11 assault on Afghanistan by some 26 recorded incidents.

The prime minister is statistically correct, but ignores the impact of the earlier Gulf war and a whole history of Western engagement with the Middle East (ranging from covert collusion with Ba’athism and Wahhabism to overt support for Israeli rejectionists) which has contributed to the present mess.

On the other side stand elements of the anti-war and pro-Palestinian lobbies that seem naively to think that extreme militant Islamists (more accurately called Qutbees, after Bin Laden’s mentor Sayyid Qutb, tortured and martyred by Nasser) are just a deformed offshoot of the struggle to end occupation.

But the view that withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan will alone heal the wounds which push activists into the arms of those who sponsor suicide attacks underestimates the wider goals of an ideology founded on the re-establishment of an expansionist caliphate – one which would certainly rule out the bipartisan solution in Israel-Palestine favoured by Western liberals.

A comparably bipolar, reductionist approach also infects discussion of the undeniably religious character of the problem. Over the past few weeks I have had conversations with those who think that violent extremism is a wholly surprising irruption within an otherwise peaceful Islam, those who blame US Christian fundamentalism wholesale, and those who take the view that religion per se is an indiscriminate well of poison.

Confronted with inexplicable horror, human beings are naturally tempted to search for an underlying controllable agency and a series of buttons we can push to put things right. But deep down, repressed amidst the fear and anger, we have to face the fact that nothing as complex as the roots of political violence can be attributed to one cause or resolved by one mechanism.

Similarly, the pathology that aggravates individuals or groups towards seeing death and martyrdom as a ‘solution’ cannot simply be laid at their portals alone and left there. It arises from deep wells within all human cultures, not least in their portrayal and practice of violence as cleansing.

The idea that sacrifice appeases wrath, that disorder restores order, that killing casts out evil, that war brings peace and that the gods themselves create through violence is one that is, as theologian Walter Wink points out, as old as civilisation itself.

In his book The Powers That Be: Theology For A New Millennium (Galilee, 1999) Wink summarises ‘the myth of redemptive violence’ in terms of one of its earlier archetypes: a Babylonian creation story (circa 1250 BCE), where a new world emerges from the cadaver of a freshly slaughtered woman.

He points out that the allegedly purifying and generative power of vengeance is universal, inasmuch as it is as central to Hollywood’s vision of the world as it is to the ancients. This is not irrelevant to the great popularity of the Rambo-fiction in rabidly anti-Western circles right now. We are all closer than we think.

At a considerably more profound level, anthropologist and literary critic Rene Girard has traced, through a whole series of important books, the origins of culture in the idea of ‘a founding murder’. He has then drawn our attention to the role of religion in both legitimating and managing violence through cultic sacrificial systems.

Without ignoring their violence, Girard also says that key elements of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament constitute strong counter-narratives to the otherwise overwhelming assumption of salvation through divinely sanctioned killing.

As one contributor to the new book Consuming Passion (James Alison) points out, “[t]hat God is completely without violence, that God is love” is the truest revelation of “the self-giving death of Jesus”. This is an event which has frequently been interpreted in ways distorted by Christian complicity in violence, and then transferred onto God in an unrecognised way.

Religious conviction, in other words, always contains both the seeds of destruction and the seeds of life. No-one reading the Bible or the Qu’ran without eyes veiled by piety or ideology can easily avoid recognising that.

On the other hand, faith (whether that of Osama Bin Laden or George W. Bush) is not the only source and sanction of the practices of ‘cleansing violence’. Modern secular thought derived from Locke and Machiavelli (with their theories of fortune and ‘the state of nature’) also cemented it into the fabric of what is now seen as realpolitik.

To turn the challenge of terrorism into either a simplistic anti-religion rhetoric or a selective absolution of certain belief systems (religious or otherwise) helps no-one.

But from the perspective of the Christian message understood by that small part of the Church which sees non-violence as integral to the Gospel, “the problem” exemplified by wars of cleansing and bombs of revenge goes far deeper than security measures, foreign policy shifts and public education against extremism – important though these may be.

It goes further even than the necessary cleansing of theology and scriptural interpretation from the poison of violence justified. What it calls for is a reversal of human and communal practices which not only dethrones the gods of terror (whatever label they wear) but seeks in their place the reign of peace.

In St Matthew’s Gospel (12.43-45) there is a famous story about an evil spirit swept from a dwelling. The house is then cleaned and left empty. But far from the excising of evil being sufficient, the resulting power vacuum simply creates the conditions for its multiplication. The underlying conditions have not changed, because no sovereign good has finally replaced the forces of malignity.

The narrative is, in many ways, a parable of events that took place in 70 CE, when, the historians tell us, frenzied (“demonized”) resistance to unjust Roman occupation tragically resulted in the national destruction of the Jewish people.

This story has been replicated throughout human history. It is not that violence makes no significant gains (the removal of Saddam Hussein matters a lot, for instance), but that it provides no real solutions. The resurgence of anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia in Europe (let alone the 8,000 Muslims who died at Srebrenica) are testimony to the fact that the spirit of fascism was not wholly buried with Hitler.

The responsibility of Christians in an era of war and terror is not, however, rendered morally or politically easy by the conviction that Jesus models and embodies a radical alternative to the domination secured by violence.

For a start, the churches (notably the ones attended by Bush and Blair) mostly do not believe this any more than those of other faith or no faith. We all read our texts, traditions and narratives through the myth of redemptive violence, rather than the other way round.

This makes theological reformation vital – the development of powerful, tradition-based arguments against those elements of the same tradition which have been used to justify killing in the name of God. That is clearly an inter-faith priority, too.

Just as vital is the foreswearing of religion as a means of social and political domination – be it in the form of Christendom, Zionism or a new Caliphate. Faith is redemptive when it seeks to give example and offer transformation. It is poisonous when it turns its vocation into the quest for power through imposition and hegemony.

That is why our current problems of war and terror, rooted in myths of cleansing violence, are not just issues of isolated religious and political extremism. They are symptoms of a deeper malaise in the global body politic, the human condition, and the religious spirit.

It is murder that religion must be redeemed from. And ironically it may only be the image of a God embodied in the awful reality of a dead human victim that is powerful enough to effect that conversion.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) is co-director of Ekklesia. His background is in journalism, adult education, politics and theology, and his weblog is: http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com