Posted: 3/28/08
Beliefs alone not to blame when
faith turns violent, scholars say
By Greg Warner
Associated Baptist Press
ATLANTA (ABP)—Every faith group has its extremists, but not all extremists turn violent. What makes the difference?
While most religious violence follows common patterns, faith seldom turns violent except in response to social oppression, say experts who study extremists.
“In most cases, it’s not a religious thing as much as frustration in an encounter with society at large,” said Graham Walker, a Baptist theology professor who studies religious violence in Asia. “But it takes just one imam, one leader, or pastor to trigger a group, one authoritative person who speaks for God and who can establish a (group’s) identity or paint a scapegoat. Then the rage within the (faith) community can be projected outside the community.”
When that happens, religious doctrine is distorted to rationalize violence, Walker and others agree. And no faith system is exempt from that danger.
“Religious extremist violence is a potential in all major religious faiths,” said Bruce Knauft, an anthropologist and director of Emory University’s Institute for Comparative and International Studies, which recently hosted a conference on extremism.
But religious-inspired violence is relatively uncommon, said Knauft. Instead, the worst violence is “secular and political forms of large-scale killing and brutality,” such as World Wars I and II, he said.
While 9/11 has come to symbolize religious violence for Americans, that attack is the exception that proves the rule, said Kurt Anders Richardson, a Baptist who teaches comparative religion at McMaster Divinity College in Toronto, Ontario.
“In the major faiths, there is not a single case where violence in God’s name is accepted,” said Richardson, who taught at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1987 to 1995.
Some Christians tend to see al-Qaida, the Islamic terror group responsible for 9/11, as typical of all hard-line Muslims, in the same way Osama bin Laden labels all 2,603 people killed in the World Trade Center as “infidels” and all Westerners as oppressors.
In reality, violent extremists of any faith have more in common with other violent groups than with the majority within their own faith, added Shlomo Fischer of Tel Aviv University, who presented a paper on violent Zionist groups during the Emory conference.
“Violent extremists” may be different from us in crucial ways,” he said. On the other hand, violent extremists are “not far removed” theologically from mainstream believers.
Extremists—whether Eric Rudolph, Muhammed Atta, or the Zionists who tried to blow up Islam’s Dome of the Rock shrine in 1981—see themselves as part of a “revolutionary vanguard” whose violent tactics are in the best interest of the public, Fischer said. “It’s rational within its own terms.”
“We’re not talking about people who are from the moon,” he said.
So what’s the difference between Jerry Falwell, the Religious Right leader who prayed for the death of pro-abortion Supreme Court justices, and Eric Rudolph, the fundamentalist Christian whose anti-abortion views drove him to bomb the 1996 Olympics, a Birming-ham abortion clinic and other targets, killing two and injuring dozens?
Charles Kimball, author of When Religion Becomes Evil, identifies five major warning signs of religion gone awry:
• Claims of absolute truth.
• Blind obedience.
• Belief that the end justifies the means.
• Declaring holy war.
• The pursuit of the “ideal” time.
Much of the violence associated with Christianity is linked to eschatology, or end-times theology, Kimball said.
But Walker, professor of theology at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, noted: “Christian fundamentalists are not more prone to violence than other faiths. It is possible in any faith community.” He cited fundamentalist Hindu rioters in India who have killed Muslims and the quasi-Buddhist sect Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic cult that committed the 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo’s subway that killed 12.
Religious violence is always a distortion of faith, the scholars agreed.
“Peace is a central feature of all of the world religions that have stood the test of time,” said Kimball, who recently was hired by Oklahoma University to direct its religious studies program. To warrant long-term devotion, he said, a religion “has to provide hope, guidance, serenity and a way to be at home in the world.”
“Some people think that Muslims wake up and think, ‘What am I willing to destroy today?’ But that’s not how most Muslims think,” said Kimball, an expert on Islam. “They’re not plotting anything.”
But, as in other faiths, peaceful intent can be distorted. “In Islam, there is always a responsibility to defend yourself when attacked,” Kimball continued. “In the hands of a bin Laden and others, this is an open license to do anything.”
“The two religious traditions that have the most to be ashamed of are Christians and Muslims,” he said, noting they are also both monotheistic and “missionary,” and the largest and most global religions.
“By numbers of persons killed,” added Emory’s Knauft, “Christianity has very likely been the greatest perpetrator of violent religious extremism during the past 1,000 years, including the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty-Years War, and the wars of French Reformation. Like current violent religious extremism, these deaths were linked with political disputes and rivalries.”
Christianity’s violent past is not lost on Muslim audiences. Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, an American ally, called the 20th century’s World Wars Christian-on-Christian violence, noting both German and Allied armies were full of chaplains who prayed for victory.
Despite the prominent role of religion in the world’s violence, Knauft said in an e-mail interview, it must be kept in perspective. “During the last 150 years at least, the tally of those killed by secular political causes—and in massive response to extremist political violence—far drawfs the number killed in religious extremism.”
While almost 3,000 people were killed in the Islamic-inspired attacks of 9/11, Iraqi deaths attributed to the American-led invasion are estimated between 200,000 and 1.2 million.
“Most extremist religious violence has occurred in tandem with political antagonism and the perception of social injustice from those who are powerful,” Knauft said. “This pertains to Sikhs in India, Christians in eastern Indonesia, and perhaps even Bud-dhists in Tibet, as well as Pales-tinian Muslims and many of those in Iraq.”
“There often is a nexus between religion and power,” added Kimball. “When the two get in-terwoven, religion is used to justify pow-er.”
When religion comes into political power, said Richardson, the McMas-ter theologian, even a nonviolent faith “can be complicit with extremism” by providing the rationale and opportunity for merging religious and political might.
Despite the tensions between religion and politics, most of the scholars did not predict a worldwide wave of violence in the future.
Christianity tends to be peaceful in the developing countries of the Southern Hemishere, where it is expected to grow fastest, Knauft said.
“Violent confrontations between Christians and Muslims in Africa and Asia are mostly confined to limited areas were land and political disputes, and ethnic differences, have a long history of sowing discord, such as northern Nigeria and eastern Indonesia,” he added. “Violent polarization between Islam and Christianity is not inevitable or even likely, except where state discrimination, disenfranchisement and disempowerment render people few options of counteraction or resistance except through religious extremism.”
“The vast majority of educated and politically responsible Muslims in the world want stable governments, peaceful co-existence among religions, and control of all forms of religious extremism,” Richardson said.
Some Westerners fear “a global Islam,” Richardson said, but the only Muslims who envision such an empire are in the least developed countries. “They imagine people on horseback and camelback getting this done. What are we really afraid of here?”
The threat of an “expansionist Islamic nation” is unrealistic, he said.
But the greater threat, said Knauft and others, is that the military superiority of the United States, the sole superpower, would “increase resentment and frustration of disempowered peoples.”
Still, the wild card in the violence equation, most scholars said, is the possibility that terrorists would acquire a nuclear weapon or other weapons of mass destruction. “Today,” Kimball said, “the world is so much more interconnected that a small group of people can affect the whole world.”
So what can be done to reduce the risk of extremist religious violence?
More and more people are becoming aware, said Mercer’s Walker, that the solution is “to reduce the sources of anger and frustration” in less powerful countries and regions. Work for “sustainable economic development,” he advised.
And Kimball suggested America export one of its best inventions—separation of church and state. “In our world, we have to have freedom of religion, freedom from religion, and respect for diversity,” he said. “America has some experience that can help the world. The rest of the world desperately needs that kind of modeling.”
Viewing other faiths as enemies has “terrible consequences,” Fischer added. He advised seeking common ground with potential adversaries.
“I don’t think of myself in a worldwide war with Islam. And I don’t think it would be right for Christians to view themselves as in a worldwide war with Islam.”
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