Fields of Blood

E
very year in ancient
Israel the high priest brought two goats into the
Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In this way,
Moses explained, “the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.”
¹
In his classic study of religion and violence,
René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community.
²
In a similar way, I believe, modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.

In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists,
London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material, and ideological factors are involved, one of the chief being competition for scarce resources. Experts on political violence or
terrorism also insist that people commit
atrocities for a complex
range of reasons.
³
Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century onto the back of
“religion” and drive it out into the political wilderness.

Even those who admit that religion has not been responsible for all the violence and warfare of the human race still take its essential belligerence for granted. They claim that “
monotheism” is especially intolerant and that once people believe that “God” is on their side, compromise becomes impossible. They cite the
Crusades, the
Inquisition, and the
Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They also point to the recent spate of
terrorism committed in the name of religion to prove that
Islam is particularly aggressive. If I mention Buddhist
nonviolence, they retort that
Buddhism is a secular philosophy, not a religion. Here we come to the heart of the problem. Buddhism is certainly not a
religion
as this word has been understood in the West since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But our modern Western conception of “religion” is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians would have found it reductive and alien. In fact, it complicates any attempt to pronounce on religion’s propensity to violence.

To complicate things still further, for about fifty years now it has been clear in the academy that there is no universal way to define religion.
⁴
In the West we see “religion” as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions, and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all “secular” activities. But words in other languages that we translate as “religion” almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing. The Arabic
din
signifies an entire way of life. The
Sanskrit
dharma
is also “a ‘total’ concept, untranslatable, which covers law, justice, morals, and social life.”
⁵
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
firmly states: “No word in either
Greek or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious.’ ”
⁶
The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece,
Japan,
Egypt,
Mesopotamia,
Iran,
China, and
India.
⁷
Nor does the
Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the
Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.
⁸

The origins of the Latin
religio
are obscure. It was not “a great objective something” but had imprecise connotations of obligation and taboo; to say that a cultic observance, a family propriety, or keeping an oath was
religio
for you meant that it was incumbent on you to do it. The word acquired an important new meaning among early Christian theologians: an attitude of reverence toward God and the universe as a whole. For Saint Augustine (c. 354–430 CE),
religio
was neither a system of rituals and doctrines nor a historical institutionalized tradition but a personal encounter with the transcendence that we call God as well as the bond that unites us to the divine and to one another. In medieval Europe,
religio
came to refer to the monastic life and distinguished the monk from the “secular” priest, someone who lived and worked in the world (
saeculum
).
⁹

The only faith tradition that does fit the
modern Western notion of religion as something codified and private is Protestant
Christianity, which, like
religion
in this sense of the word, is also a product of the early modern period. At this time Europeans and Americans had begun to separate religion and politics, because they assumed, not altogether accurately, that the theological squabbles of the
Reformation had been entirely responsible for the
Thirty Years’ War. The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.
¹⁰
The philosophers and statesmen who pioneered this dogma believed that they were returning to a more satisfactory state of affairs that had existed before ambitious Catholic clerics had confused two utterly distinct realms. But in fact their secular ideology was as radical an innovation as the modern market economy that the West was concurrently devising. To non-Westerners, who had not been through this particular modernizing process, both these innovations would seem unnatural and even incomprehensible. The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never simply a question of the state “using” religion; the two were indivisible. Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail.