Many are puzzled by the religious aspect of violence. Consider the place we give to religion in our society. We divide our public and private lives into various compartments such as economics, politics, medical arts, sociology, psychology, and justice. Religion tends to be placed among these as merely another department of human activity. Religion, then, becomes singled out, or reified, as a catalyst for violence. Free thinkers, for example, desire to eliminate religion because they view it as only a prelude to violence. They point to the crusades, the inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the witch trials, and Waco, Texas, as prime examples of the destruction that arises from superstition and dogmatics. For that reason, they wish to separate religion, at the very least, from power, primarily the power of the state.
But is religion merely one compartment among others? To think this is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of religion; it is what we academics call a category mistake. Religion is not one section of human endeavor; rather it is the presupposition that underlies them all. At the most basic is that every individual and every society is built on values, concerns, hopes and expectations, providing meaning and direction to all that is done. Across the face of the earth there are numerous cultures each built on an orchestration of values and concerns. There we have it: the root of the word “culture” is “cult.” What the cult provides is a window to the sacred which each culture regards as the ultimate and itself as superior to all.
Perhaps the most basic statement of how the ultimate works to build society is found in Paul Tillich’s study, The Dynamics of Faith. He holds that faith is what concerns one ultimately; everyone has an ultimate concern. The shape of the ultimate concern is formed partly through individual longing and partly through the upbringing and influence of a culture. By means of myths, rituals, teachings, calendars of holy days, sacred times and spaces, symbols are created which in turn create reality or a sense of plausibility. As a culture shapes the lives of its youngsters it forms a milieu wherein the young inherit a world difficult to imagine otherwise. A friend of mine, a Roman Catholic priest, said, “Give us a child for the first five years of his or her life and s/he will be ours forever.” I find it hard to imagine that the same cannot be said about any significant religious culture around the world. Thus, one might say that religion does not describe the world (as fundamentalists might contend), rather religion creates a world.
From this point, it is not so difficult to understand how violence enters the picture. In the encounter of one culture with another the members of each sense that much is at stake.
Conflicts arise out of the fear that, if the values of a foreign culture penetrate our society, significant changes are certain to follow. Parents fear that their children may grow up to embrace different values that those that are dear to them and to their ancestors. Our kids might end up living in a different world because the basic work of religion is world construction. If this should become the case, the parents’ world is thereby called into question because it is not sufficiently potent to prevent that from happening. When faced with such a prospect the temptation to resort to violence is often attractive. The encounter of sacred with sacred usually does not favor the ignorant or the semiliterate and is often difficult even for those learned in their own tradition. Indeed, as we say in Religion 100, “he who knows only one religion knows none.”
Much discussed today is Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). He begins with the often-mentioned theme of the shrunken globe where many cultures are immediately present to one another through internet, public media, business, and travel. He defines a culture as a combination of religion and language. In the twentieth century up to 1979 the global conflicts were ideological involving Nazism and Communism. From 1979 onward into the twenty-first century, Huntington tells us, the global conflicts will involve culture against culture. The year 1979 marks the time of Iranian Revolution which was based entirely on religious issues.
A political scientist from Harvard, Huntington has done studies on cultural violence. He counted incidents of violence along cultural fault lines where 500 or more people are killed. The borders around Islamic societies where they divide Islam from non-Islamic cultures, he states, are three times more violent that anywhere else in the world. And the future holds more. When one considers the events of 9/11 it is increasingly clear that borders may be an antiquated concept since America has no border with any Islamic society yet has felt the sting of religious violence. Religious conflict and violence, however, are not confined to foreign lands; they are close to home also.
Religion and Conflict on the Great Plains
In Their Father’s God Ole Rölvaag tells the story of how two families in late-nineteenth-century South Dakota were victims of religious conflict. While this novel leads up to the door of physical violence, it does not cross the threshold, but that does not make the story any brighter. The struggle is between Norwegian Lutherans and Roman Catholic Irish. Much of what we have already said about the basis of conflict is present in this story. Even though his story is fictional, we know that Rolvaag’s material came from his in-laws who lived north of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and from many interviews he made about that time, the 1890s. A Lutheran, Rolvaag learned much about the Irish form of Roman Catholicism and, surprisingly, does not take sides.
The Catholic, Susie, and Lutheran, Peder, become romantically and sexually involved and inevitably have to get married. From the very first, problems begin to arise because of misunderstandings of each other’s backgrounds. Things certainly are not helped by their families’ suspicions of each other. “While love is blind, marriage is an eye-opener,” it is said.
They were married by her priest and soon thereafter the tension builds as Peder’s mother fears that her son will become a Catholic. To do so would mean turning his back on all that is sacred. Viewed through Norwegian eyes the Irish world is a collection of mysterious symbols. Its ecclesiastical language is Latin, its priest wears a cassock, there are blessings for various occasions, and there are rosaries and crucifixes. Viewed through Irish eyes the Norwegian world is cold and dreary. They do not appreciate a good drink, they don’t dance, they are so individualistic they break into sects, they read the Bible and think they know all about religion, and their hymns are mournful, even cadaverous.
Much of the fear from both sides revolves around the new baby. Bad enough that he is red-headed like an Irishman, but his father fears that he will be raised in superstition. (The word “superstition” in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is defined as “someone else’s religion.” Such a definition is quite close to what we find in Rolvaag’s story.) The child’s grandmother is so fearful of the Catholic culture that she and a friend, alone one day, secretly baptize him in the Lutheran faith. Only on her deathbed does she reveal this act to Susie who is horrified by it despite the fact that she too has had her son privately baptized by the priest.
Much of what transpires between these two worlds is transacted through symbolism. The home of the Irish appears as messy and unkempt. To the Norwegians it is not a healthy abode and is the symbol of a faith that is cluttered with many objects and rituals that are not understood and may be misunderstood. The Norwegian home is uncluttered and spotless as though it was not the place where real life is lived. One can think that guilt is dispelled by relentless cleaning but it always seems to creep back in. Susie is never comfortable or quite herself in her mother-in-law’s house; it never becomes a home because her home is where her father and brother live. There the priest is welcome, not where her husband and his mother live.
Throughout this story fear, superstition, anger, heated argument, and humiliation surface on almost every page. The final scene involves her rosary. After an explosive argument Peder, in an iconoclastic outburst, snatches her rosary from the nightstand and grinds it to pieces under his heel. After that she leaves for home and there the story ends. In his mind Peder has killed an idol, and, presumably, his marriage along with it.
In the late 1920s when Rölvaag wrote this novel, these events were more common than today after the ecumenical movement has dispelled much of the ignorance of each other’s tradition and the fear that accompanied that ignorance. But it remains an allegory of what barriers exist between even Christian traditions with their various histories. We are to be thankful that the Protestant and Catholic differences have not, in America, risen to the levels of those in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
The Great Plains, however, have not been free of religious violence. Here the theme is apocalyptic violence and it, unlike the symbolic violence in Rölvaag, has left many torn bodies in its wake.
For example, just twenty-five years ago the state of North Dakota was the scene of a shootout that reverberated around the nation. This, of course, was the gunfight in Medina, which ended in the deaths of two U.S. marshals at the hands of Gordon Kahl and his cohorts. In the popular press, the event was mostly about tax-dodging, but the underlying script was apocalypticism. Apocalyptic is a term often used, but to be accurate, it must include specific salient features, briefly described below.
It begins in the heavens with a war between Satan and God where Satan attacks the abode of God. On his side Satan enlists the demons and, on earth, the wicked. God commands the angels and, on earth, the saints. As this cosmic battle unfolds, the earthly consequences are “wars and rumors of war,” earthquakes, social dislocations, such as depressions and persecutions or plagues. As these evils expand God finally puts a stop to it, which is the ultimate battle of Armageddon. When the saints, who are commanded to fight the holy war, are killed they become martyrs. A martyr does not lie in the grave, as everyone else, but his soul goes immediately to heaven. Apocalypticism also includes the themes of numerology (secret numbers), conspiracy, and the evils of human government (such as Rome being identified as the Whore of Babylon).
What makes apocalyptic such a devastating script for violence is that a warrior is either on the side of God or Satan, there is no in-between. Thus when a wicked person is killed it is not a tragedy or a murder, but a cleansing; it is done as an honor to God. In Revelation, Jesus is depicted as saying, “I would that you are either hot or cold, but if you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.” It should be noted that the controlling theme of this religious style is warfare. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam---the religions arising out of the Middle East---all have parts devoted to apocalyptic.
Given this sketch of the apocalyptic imagination, it is likely that the police are correct when they testify that Gordon Kahl shot first. When he was blocked on the road out of Medina, this script would also prompt him to believe that evil government men were out to destroy him. Several days later the Fargo Forum received a letter from Kahl (his wife verified the handwriting) explaining the events in apocalyptic terms supported by a number of quotations from the book of Revelation.
Apocalyptic religions provide security and assurance of divine order to those who have come to see the world as dangerous and chaotic. Ironically, the sense of power provided by apocalyptic simultaneously creates an overwhelming sense of fear. The system expects evil from the outside; if it does not have an available enemy, it is necessary to construct one. This was the plan of David Koresh in Waco in 1993: he promised his followers that they would have enemies sent from Satan. Koresh collected an impressive cache of weapons, some of them military grade. When a UPS delivery addressed to the compound accidentally spilled a shipment of hand grenades, the federal authorities knew that it was time for action. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the compound, thereby proving that the enemies, promised in the Book of Revelation, were at the door. Four agents were killed outright; it is not known how many of Koresh’s followers died, but the situation degenerated into a fifty-day standoff. It is likely that the followers touched off the fire that killed Koresh and most of his company. Scholars knowledgeable in the writings of Revelation say they expected that outcome because it states in Revelation 8:5, “Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire form the altar and threw it on the earth….” Koresh had been constructing a theology based on the seven seals and this was the last of the seven. This was his version of an apocalyptic holy war.
The apocalyptic imagination leaps from context to context. Two years to the day of the tragic fire in Waco, Timothy McVeigh engineered the greatest act of terrorism perpetrated by an American against this nation in blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh based his violent act not on the book of Revelation directly, but on a 1978 novel by a former Nazi and white supremacist, William Luther Pierce, under the pseudonym, Andrew MacDonald. The book, The Turner Diaries, contains all the key elements of apocalyptic: martyrdom, holy war, conspiracy, and Armageddon. In it, the United States government is the victim of a Jewish conspiracy and is out to destroy the godly patriots who are claimed to be the real Christians. McVeigh was thoroughly convinced that such was the case; The Turner Diaries became in effect his bible. The monstrous blast in Oklahoma City, which killed more than 160 people, including both government workers and children, has its prototype in an episode in the Diaries. In the novel, a truck loaded with ammonium nitrate, common fertilizer, mixed with fuel oil (becoming an explosive commonly used on farms to excavate stock ponds) is driven into the basement of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., killing 700 people. McVeigh vowed holy revenge against the government and chose April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Waco fire as the date. In apocalyptic, anniversaries have religious significance in that they “make present” the original day of the original event.
Militant Islam
After 9/11 many Americans expressed genuine perplexity asking, “Why do they hate us?” That is the wrong question; rather, it should be, “Why do they fear us?” For centuries the Islamic civilization existed apart from contact with the larger world and was and is governed by Sharia, the law derived from the Qur’an. From the very beginning Islamic forces conquered territory after territory to place the world under their law. Outward from Mecca in the early seventh century, Islam spread northeast into Persia, north to Asia Minor, and west along the Mediterranean coast, up through Spain into the region of today’s France. All of this was accomplished in one century. At the battle of Tours in 732, Islamic aggression came to an end in Europe. Unlike the founder of Christianity, Muhammad was a military commander, and ruler as well as a prophet, who is said to have received the dictation of Allah which comprises the Qur’an.
Until the nineteenth century, Islam was able to concentrate its energies to developing itself without any interference from the west with the egregious exception of the Crusades. Because Europe was turned in on itself from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, mainly as a consequence of a feudal society, it was unable immediately to oppose Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries. From 1095 until after 1200 A.D., crusade after crusade was launched, all ending in failure of various degrees. In the Middle Ages, Islam had been the host to universities that superseded those in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries involving the study of science, medicine, law, literature, and architecture. With justification, Muslims looked down on other cultures regarding them as barbarian and ignorant of the Sharia. After the Protestant Reformation, Europe began to narrow the gap between the Middle East and the West, however, and by the 1800s had surpassed the Islamic lands in these areas of study including the addition of military technology and science. When Islamists saw that the tables had turned dramatically, it was too late to overtake the West.
In the 1950s we saw the first major reaction to the intrusion of the West into Islamic lands; it was the Islamic Brotherhood called into existence by Sayyid Qutb to summon Islam back to its roots. As he saw it, Islam was being attacked by the outside forces of communism, materialism, or democracy. Qutb even spent time in California and Colorado as a student and came face to face with the cultural forces he was certain would dissolve Islamic culture in a sea of sex and sensationalism. A generation later the Ayatollah Khomeini had similar fears about what the Shah would do to the Iranian soul with the help of America, the “Great Satan.” It is often said that if Islam had undergone an experience like the Christian Reformation it would have been more able to digest these rapid cultural changes. Since such was not the case, this meant war; it meant Jihad because it was feared that the world intended to obliterate Islam culturally, religiously, economically, and militarily.
Because of its military beginnings and also because of it apocalyptic tradition, war has held a central place in Islamic thought. Most Western people know about jihad, but not much about it. Muslims make the distinction between the greater and the lesser jihad. The greater jihad is actually the struggle for selfhood by combating the evil part of one’s soul, removing impediments to following Allah’s will or standing in the way to surrender (“Islam” means surrender.) On the other hand, the lesser jihad involves actual warfare in defense of Islam and Islamic territories.
Those brought up in a Christian culture find it strange that a religion should place war and conquest in such a central place particularly when Islam comes from the same milieu as Judaism and Christianity. The syllogism goes thus: Christianity is a religion; Christianity focuses on love and peace; Islam is a religion, therefore, Islam is primarily about peace. Contemporary Christians find it hard to believe that the church could ever have been involved with the bloody spectacle of the Crusades and, therefore, speak about them apologetically.
It is informative to see the similarities between Christian apocalyptic religious violence and militant Islam. They both focus on enemies from the outside, have a theology of martyrdom, hold a view of holy war, and see their opponents as worthy only of “cleansing.” Death has an appeal for both: apocalyptic versions of Christianity look beyond this world to the world to come after death, and Islam finds martyrdom a virtue to be rewarded by reaching heaven instantly to be greeted by seventy virgins and wine that does not intoxicate, and there is more than one can drink.
There are differences: Christianity exists within the boundaries of various nation-states. For Islam there is the concept of the umma, the mystical brotherhood of every Muslim. National borders are not real for these Muslims since they believe them to be merely manmade; eventually the whole globe will come under rule of the Sharia. Those who resist that rule are enemies of Islam and are worthy of death. For them, there are two divisions of humanity, the Dar-al-Islam (the house of Islam, under the Sharia) and the Dar-al-Harb (the world not under the Sharia, the house of war, and the abode of the enemies of Islam.) For militant Islamists the subjection of the Dar-al-Harb is the duty of jihad, incumbent on every Islamic able-bodied male.
Grim stuff, if one finds oneself as the object of jihad. The question arises, though, as to how many Muslims living in the Middle East concur with this violent scenario; where are the moderates, those who might not take this teaching in its literal sense? Nobody knows, for sociologists have not had the opportunity to practice their trade in these Islamic societies. We can be sure there are some, but if the Wahhabi sect had its way, there would be no moderates. If one were to be vocal about ecumenical ideas, his life would be in danger.
Academics debate whether Islam is doing its natural thing by waging war on the West, or whether it has been “hijacked” by militants. Maybe future historians will decide for one side or the other, but it is not presently clear which of the two sides is the case. Nevertheless, this much can be said – one would, for example, not consider hijacking Hinduism because there is no tradition of warfare in it. Whether Islam was hijacked may be irrelevant simply because the militants saw in the Qur’an a number of verses that counsel warfare against the enemies of Islam.
When the questions of violence in the Middle East arise, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is usually the first to receive attention. There is a debate over that situation: on the one side many contend that all Islamic violence would disappear if that problem were to be solved, usually to the disadvantage of Israel. On the other, there is a mass of evidence that suggests the Palestinian issue is a symptom of a much deeper complex of issues which we have outlined above. For Osama Bin Laden, Israel was not nearly as often the complaint as was the situation of American troops based on the soil of Muhammad’s home territory, even though the government of Saudi Arabia invited American troops there in the 1991 Gulf War. Apocalyptic Islam is constantly conscious about territories that are or have been under the Sharia at any time in history. In addition to losing their homes and businesses, it is certain that the issue of territoriality plays a role in how Palestinians understand their relationship to Israel.
President Bush often speaks of the war on terrorism, but that is not how militant Islam would characterize it. We should listen carefully to what the militants say because they are quite serious: they are engaged in holy war, every bit as important as the crusades. They understand the present world situation as a war on Islam, a war that they do not intend to lose no matter how long it takes to be victorious. They really do believe that Allah commands it and will eventually bring them victory. If Huntington is correct, violence in the future is inevitable because the clashes in the twenty-first century are not between ideologies but come instead from religions at war with each other.
John Helgeland is a professor of history at NDSU. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He currently serves on the NDSU Bush Ethics Committee. John also has received the Blue Key Distinguished Educator Award.
1 comment:
Verry Interesting!
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