If it weren’t so saddening, I’d be greatly amused at those who, as a solution to religiously-based warfare and terrorism, promote the application of more religion. This goes along with the assertion that religion itself plays at best a tiny role in the barbarity of groups like ISIS.  Rabbi Sacks has said this in his new book, Miroslav Volf said it in a Washington Post column (see my post from yesterday), and now conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has joined the chorus.

In his Wednesday NYT piece, “Finding peace within the holy texts,” Brooks unloads a farrago of religious osculation, secularity blaming, and claims about what a “proper religion” is. What he’s trying to say isn’t quite clear, except that he’s trying to be nice to religion and to Rabbi Sacks, and to argue that somehow the cure for inter-religous strife is the application of Moar Religion—”properly understood” religion. To me this sounds supiciously like political homeopathy. (It’s worth nothing that Brooks appears to be a pious Christian.) I don’t want to go into depth about his piece, so I’ll just highlight a few of Brooks’s claims (in bold, with his words indented) and finish up with an analysis of the piece that Steve Pinker sent me.

The meaninglessness inflicting people, and the inability of secularism to dispel it, drives people to religious violence.

Humans also are meaning-seeking animals. We live, as Sacks writes, in a century that “has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.” The secular substitutes for religion — nationalism, racism and political ideology — have all led to disaster. So many flock to religion, sometimes — especially within Islam — to extremist forms.

I’m not sure he’s quite right about what constitute the secular substitutes for religion. . . .

Religion isn’t a cause of violence because not many wars are religious. 

Sacks emphasizes that it is not religion itself that causes violence. In their book Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod surveyed 1,800 conflicts and found that less than 10 percent had any religious component at all.

Even if Phillips and Axelrod’s analysis is correct, a figure of 10% of conflicts inspired by religion doesn’t mean that religion is exculpated from violence. As Pinker wrote me:

The atrocitologist Matthew White also gives an estimate of around 10% for both the number of multicides (wars and genocides) in history directly attributable to religion and for the number of deaths. However, he does agree with Anthony [Grayling] that religion figured prominently in many of the others, even if it’s not listed as the primary cause. Even one war that he excluded – America’s bloodiest war, the Civil War, with an unbelievable 650,000 deaths — had an important religious component, as both sides thought they were safeguarding the true religious mission of the US as a divinely inspired city on the hill.

And, of course, the main “war” we’re concerned with now is the war of extremist Islam against Western values, as well as Islam against all nonbelievers, including Sunnis versus Shiites. Only an apologist like Glenn Greenwald would argue that this has nothing to do with religion. The Sunni/Shia division, after all, didn’t derive from Western colonialism, and the groups are ethnically the same. They differ only in who they see as Muhammed’s rightful successors. (For more discussion of religion’s role in ISIS, see this piece at Quartz.)

Religion isn’t implicated in terrorism—it’s “groupishness”.

[Brooks says this right after claiming that only  10% of wars have a religious component.] Rather, religion fosters groupishness, and the downside of groupishness is conflict with people outside the group. Religion can lead to thick moral communities, but in extreme forms it can also lead to what Sacks calls pathological dualism, a mentality that divides the world between those who are unimpeachably good and those who are irredeemably bad.

The pathological dualist can’t reconcile his humiliated place in the world with his own moral superiority. He embraces a politicized religion — restoring the caliphate — and seeks to destroy those outside his group by apocalyptic force. This leads to acts of what Sacks calls altruistic evil, or acts of terror in which the self-sacrifice involved somehow is thought to confer the right to be merciless and unfathomably cruel.

This is a distinction without a difference. What, exactly, is the source of the feeling that you are “unimpeachably good” and others are “irredeemably bad”? What inspires the “moral communities”? Could it be religion? After all, religion’s toxic and tripartite combination of the claimed possession of absolute truth, the promulgation of a divinely-given moral code, and the promise of heaven and threat of hell for violating that code, are things we don’t see in other forms of groupishness, like sports or Sunday Assemblies.

And why, exactly, does what Brooks say above support his notion that “religion itself doesn’t cause violence”? It seems to me that, especially by invoking the return of the Caliphate, he’s just proven what he denies. Further, “self-sacrifice” is intimately connected with martyrdom and Paradise for jihadists.

Finally, the cure for religious strife is to read the texts “properly”.  (My bolding in what’s below.)

Secular thought or moral relativism are unlikely to offer any effective rebuttal. Among religious people, mental shifts will be found by reinterpreting the holy texts themselves. There has to be a Theology of the Other: a complex biblical understanding of how to see God’s face in strangers. That’s what Sacks sets out to do.

. . . Read simplistically, the Bible’s sibling rivalries [Brooks cites Isaac and Ishamel] seem merely like stories of victory or defeat — Isaac over Ishmael. But all three Abrahamic religions have sophisticated, multilayered interpretive traditions that undercut fundamentalist readings.

. . . The reconciliation between love and justice is not simple, but for believers the texts, read properly, point the way. Sacks’s great contribution is to point out that the answer to religious violence is probably going to be found within religion itself, among those who understand that religion gains influence when it renounces power.

The big question, of course, is this: who is the arbiter of what is a “proper” reading of scripture? Apparently both Rabbi Sacks and David Brooks think that they are. But others, of course, disagree: even among Christians there is huge divergence about how to interpret scripture, and, as we all know, that often involves making things up. Scripture is easily malleable, and can be effortless stretched into the Procrustean bed of your own beliefs.

But the question at issue is not how to interpret the Bible, but how to intepret the Qur’an. Some, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz, argue that a more benign interpretation of that book is essential to curb extremist Islam. Maybe they’re right, too, but given the propensity of Muslims to read the Qur’an literally, that will be a long slog. Here, for instance, are some results from the recent Pew Poll on worldwide Muslim belief. Unfortunately, the data on adherence to the Qur’an was taken only from sub-Saharan Africa, but I’ve no doubt that the figures would be even higher for the Middle East:

Given this, can you really reinterpret “Smite the infidels” as “Don’t smite the infidels!”??

In email discussion of this column with a few people, Steve Pinker offered up his take on this column, which I reproduce with his permission. Note too the allusion in point 4 to his next book, which will come out in 2017.

A few observations on Brooks [by Pinker]:

1. It’s a bizarre boast that only 10% of history’s wars have been religious. Given the claimed aspirations of religion, shouldn’t the appropriate percentage be 0? The claim shows a common logical confusion among religious apologists between the observation that religion causes violence and the claim that religion is the only thing that causes violence.

2. The equally bizarre boast that religion is ascendant because religious people have more unprotected sex than nonreligious people may not be projectable into the future. Birthrates can change quickly, for obscure reasons. The US used to be an outlier among Western democracies in its high birthrate, presumably related to its religiosity, but that is becoming less true: its birthrate is falling, not to Western European levels yet, but it could happen. Even more amazingly, the Islamic birthrate has recently crashed, far more than what one would predict given rises in economic development (see here).

3. “The secular substitutes for religion…have all led to disaster. … Secular thought [is] unlikely to offer any effective rebuttal.”
So secular thought has doubled human lifespan, wiped out smallpox and cattle plague, decimated dozens of other horrible diseases, reduced extreme poverty worldwide from 85% to 10%, increased basic education from 17% to 82%, and wiped out human sacrifice, cannibalism, chattel slavery, heretic-burning, torture-executions, harems, and soon, interstate war. Bo-ring!

4. Speaking of which, Brooks and Sacks may have a point that liberal, enlightenment secular humanism has been poor at advertising its own successes. In the 1950s and 1960s there was considerable idealistic energy behind international liberal movements such as the UN, Peace Corps, disease eradication projects, etc., which got sapped by a number of developments, not least cynicism by intellectuals on the left and right. Nowadays the Gates, Clinton, Carter, and other Foundations are capturing some, but not enough, of this enthusiasm. We do need a PR campaign to trumpet these astonishing successes. That will be a theme of my next book.