Books: Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

Not for the Love of God

by NIGEL BIGGAR

The myth that religion is essentially and uniquely generative of division and violence passes for common sense among celebrity atheists and militant secularists. It undergirds their insistence that public space be purged of it, that bishops be expelled from the House of Lords, and that faith schools be closed down. Once the peace is no longer disturbed by warring claims to be the One True Faith, they suppose, secularist society can settle down to enjoy the fruits of modern rational tolerance. Quite how such prejudice manages to thrive among the well-educated, not to speak of university professors, is a puzzle. Perhaps they just do not read history. But if Karen Armstrong is correct, their anti-religious bigotry is the very mother of the religious violence they dread.

Fields of Blood offers a magisterial debunking of the secularist tale. It ranges from pre-history to the present, displaying a remarkable breadth of erudition — anthropological, sociological, historical, comparative religious, theological, philosophical, and political. Armstrong has read not only widely, but, judging by the 70 pages of footnotes, deeply too. Although she focuses on the three Abrahamic religions, since exclusive monotheism is usually made to play the main villain, she nevertheless devotes a chapter each to India and China.

One of her main theses is that religion has been universally ambivalent about violence. On the one hand, it espouses ideals of equality, community and peace; on the other hand, it has had to reckon with the "iron law" that civilisation, and in particular the development of the agrarian and industrial state, inevitably involves hierarchy, inequality, and violence. This was the dilemma that the Confucians wrestled with in China from the sixth century BC and Ashoka in India in the third century BC. The Hebrew Bible contains both fierce prophetic criticism of the centralised state and celebration of the national security afforded by the Davidic empire. Jesus was preoccupied with resisting Roman imperial misrule, while Christians such as Eusebius welcomed the identification of Christianity with the empire under Constantine. (Actually, the Gospel's Jesus seems to me much keener to distance himself from militant Jewish nationalism than from the Roman Empire.) And as the Koran contains a constant juxtaposition of ruthlessness and mercy, so the history of Islam oscillates between assimilation to state violence and ascetic withdrawal. The basic point is that religious tradition "is never a single, unchanging essence that impels people to act in a uniform way". It follows that the notion that religion in general, or monotheism in particular, is essentially and consistently violent is historical nonsense.

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Fields of Blood:
Religion and the History of Violence
By Karen Armstrong
Bodley Head, 512pp, £25

Read more: standpointmag.co.uk