A negative review in the Telegraph of Karen Armstrong’s new book—Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence—has been balanced by a very positive review in the Spectator, “Religion does not poison everything—everything poisons religion.” The reviewer is Ferdinand Mount—Baronet Mount to you—who was editor of the Times Literary Supplement for 11 years.

As you know if you saw the first post about the Telegraph review (note: I haven’t yet read her book; this is my take on Mount’s review), Armstrong’s thesis is that religion is not responsible for violence: it’s that other stuff like politics and culture that corrupts religion, all forms of which begin as benevolent. Mount thoroughly agrees, and says that Armstrong has done a terrific job supporting her thesis. I’ll give a few quotes, though I’m quite wary of such a thesis:

It slips so easily off the tongue. In fact, it’s a modern mantra. ‘Religion causes all the wars.’ Karen Armstrong claims to have heard it tossed off by American psychiatrists, London taxi-drivers and pretty much everyone else. Yet it’s an odd thing to say. For a start, which wars are we talking about? Among the many causes advanced for the Great War, ranging from the train timetables on the continent to the Kaiser’s withered left arm, I have never heard religion mentioned. Same with the second world war. The worst genocides of the last century — Hitler’s murder of the Jews and Atatürk’s massacre of the Armenians (not to mention his expulsion and massacre of the Greeks in Asia Minor too) — were perpetrated by secular nationalists who hated the religion they were born into. The long British wars of the 18th and 19th centuries — the Napoleonic wars and the Seven Years’ War — were cheerfully fought by what Wellington called ‘the scum of the earth’ for land and empire, not for the faiths to which they only nominally belonged.

We have to go back to the 17th century and the Wars of Religion to find a plausible candidate.

But who ever said religion causes all the wars? Certainly no scholar that I know of, and that includes Dawkins and Pinker. I guess Armstrong is taking taxi drivers as experts, but I really do doubt that she’s heard that so often.

As for the genocides of the last century, Hitler’s was by far the worst, and, really, how can one say that that didn’t involve religion? Why were the Jews singled out? And, as we should know by now, the Nazis were not by any means “secular nationalists who hated the religion they were born into”. That’s just a distortion of the truth. Where on earth did Mount get such an idea?

What about the partition in India in 1947? There there was no colonialism involved in the killings at all: people of identical ethnicity, background, and geographic origin  killed each other based on whether they were Hindu or Muslim. On the trains heading for the Punjab, for instance, Hindu mobs would make male passengers expose their genitals, and kill them if they were circumcised (as Muslims are). Further, religion certainly exacerbated violence in Northern Ireland, and now all over the Middle East. But Mount manages to discount that, too. It wasn’t religion, after all, that inflamed the Muslims, but colonialism and jingoism that emanated from political sources, and colonialism by Israel and the West.  Here’s Mount on Armstrong’s thesis:

Armstrong is at her best in drawing out the historical elements which crystallise into great religions. Typically, she says, they emerge in conditions of social stress and oppressive state violence. The founder preaches that the callous and ceaseless slaughter can be checked only if we learn to see the Other as our fellow human being. Invariably, his golden rule is: all men are equal in the sight of God, do as you would be done by, love your enemies, turn the other cheek.

This message is common to Confucius, Zoroaster, Jesus, Guru Nanak the founder of the Sikhs, Gandhi and Nurse Cavell. Muhammad too is reported to have told his followers that ‘not one of you can be a believer unless he desires for his neighbours what he desires for himself’. There are many verses in the Koran which instruct Muslims not to retaliate but to forgive and forbear, and to respond to aggression with mercy, patience and courtesy.

But wait! What about the rest of the Qur’an—the majority of it that urges killing infidels and apostates? Mount has an answer for that one, too:

But of course there are other verses which don’t, famously the Sword Verse, which eggs on the faithful to slaughter idolaters. The sad truth is that religions are corrupted by success. The more popular they become, the closer they are drawn into the ambit of state power, the more their practice and doctrine have to be remodelled to suit their new overlords. Armstrong reflects gloomily:

“Every major faith tradition has tracked the political entity in which it arose; none has become a ‘world religion’ without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire and every tradition would have to develop an imperial ideology.”

So it’s not religion that does the bad stuff, it’s state power that does the bad stuff, and just uses religion in its cause. All religions start out peaceful (is that true of Islam?) and then are used as an excuse to kill the Other:

Christopher Hitchens had it the wrong way round in his subtitle to God is Not Great. It should have been, not ‘How Religion Poisons Everything’ but ‘How Everything Poisons Religion’. This is the misunderstanding which drives fanatical secularists to demand that faith be driven out of the public square and permanently banned from re-entry, like a drunk from the pub he always picks a fight in.

In the end, Armstrong (and Mount) morph into Robert Pape, whose analysis of suicide bombers and terrorism being motivated by things other than religion has been under attack, but is nevertheless still cited by many, including Mount:

All terrorism is now routinely attributed to religious intoxication. Richard Dawkins tells us that ‘only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people’. But Armstrong points out that suicide bombing was more or less invented by the Tamil Tigers, ‘a nationalist separatist group with no time for religion’. A Chicago University study of suicide attacks [by Robert Pape and his colleagues] worldwide over 25 years found ‘little connection between suicide and terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that matter’. Out of 38 suicide bombings in the Lebanon during the 1980s, 27 were perpetrated by secularists and socialists, three by Christians and only eight by Muslims.

For one critique of Pape, see Scott Atran, “The moral logic and growth of suicide terrorism” in the 2006 Washington Quarterly 29, pp. 127–147. Atran’s analysis leads to this conclusion (p. 128):

Whereas they once primarily consisted of organized campaigns by militarily weak forces aiming to end the perceived occupation of their homeland, as argued by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, suicide attacks today serve as banner actions for a thoroughly modern, global diaspora inspired by religion and claiming the role of vanguard for a massive, media-driven transnational political awakening. Living mostly in the diaspora and undeterred by the threat of retaliation against original home populations, jihadis, who are frequently middle-class, secularly well educated, but often “born-again” radical Islamists, including converts from Christianity, embrace apocalyptic visions for humanity’s violent salvation. In Muslim countries and across western Europe, bright and idealistic Muslim youth, even more than the marginalized and dispossessed, internalize the jihadi story, illustrated on satellite televi-sion and the Internet with the ubiquitous images of social injustice and poitical repression with which much of the Muslim world’s bulging immigrant and youth populations intimately identifies. From the suburbs of Paris to the jungles of Indonesia, I have interviewed culturally uprooted and politically restless youth who echo a stunningly simplified and decontextualized message of martyrdom for the sake of global jihad as life’s noblest cause. They are increasingly as willing and even eager to die as they are to kill.

Of course Mount doesn’t mention this. Perhaps he doesn’t know of it. If you’re going to quote Pape as gospel, though, as some readers have, you owe it to yourself to read Atran’s rebuttal. Pape’s data is not only old, but selective and biased. And if Atran is right, and we can believe what the suicide bombers tell us, then Mount has no right to conclude, as he does here:

Armstrong argues persuasively that it is under the cumulative pressure of invasion by outsiders and internal oppression that secular grievance morphs into jihad. To use an apt but unlovely term, invented I think by Dr Henry Kissinger, religion is ‘weaponised’ — how Dr Strangelove would adore the word. After years of Israeli blockade and creeping land grabs, Yasser Arafat’s entirely secular Palestine Liberation Organisation has segued into the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Israel herself, founded as a secular haven in the teeth of the rabbis, has become a holy land after half a century of Arab encirclement. Now young men all over the Middle East, many of them originally secular and ignorant of Islam, as were the majority of the 9/11 bombers, are being hyped up by selective quotation of holy writ to commit crimes as unspeakable as, well, Samson’s.

Does Mount not realize that from the very instant that Israel was founded as a nation, the Arabs were out to destroy it? Does he think that that kind of violence is “new,” and is based on recent Israeli blockades and creeping land grabs? Does he not know that Israel was attacked on all sides by Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq, the day after Israel was proclaimed a state in 1948? No, Arab hatred of the Jews, as enshrined in the Hamas charter and publicized daily in the state media, is pervasive and long-standing.

I suppose I’ll have to read Armstrong’s book, but of course she’s never wavered from her thesis religion is a force for good, and its perfidies are not only exaggerated by atheists, but are nonexistent. Things like sharia law, apparently, or the oppression of gays and women by both Catholics and Muslims (and the misogyny of orthodox Judaism), are not part of religion, but merely what happens to peaceful religion when it gets coopted by state power. And indeed, religion has surely been used as a weapon by the state to destroy its enemies, but surely that is not the whole story.

I suspect that Armstrong suffers from confirmation bias: I’ve read her books The Case for God, which I found almost incoherent, as well as Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time, which I found nearly as much a whitewash of Islam as Reza Aslan’s No god but God. Are there any data that would get Armstrong (and Mount) to admit that religion qua religion can make people do bad things? After all, I’ll readily admit that religion qua religion has inspired people to do good things, though I think on balance running your life on superstition is harmful and certainly irrational.

h/t: Barry