If it wasn’t already obvious, the Guardian has made clear its view that religion is at worst benign, but in general pretty good. This is clear not only from their continuous atheist-bashing and Dawkins-dissing, but also from their flogging of books that osculate the rump of faith. And they’ve gone overboard with Karen Armstrong’s latest book (Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence), not only giving it a glowing review (the reviewer was Ferdinand Mount), but also publishing a very long excerpt from it online (my printout in Word is 10 pages long).
Armstrong’s book, as well all know, is an attempt to show that religion has never been directly responsible for violence in history, especially wars. What happens, she says (and I’m taking this from the reviews, as I haven’t read the book yet), is that religion simply gets coopted under the umbrella of politics and culture, which are the real forces behind so-called “religious” violence. Religions, she says, always start out beneficent, but get corrupted when they’re used as instruments of state power. Ergo the violence.
As for the violence in the Middle East, Armstrong claims that it’s all the fault of the West, and not of Islam itself. This of course is the line that Armstrong has dined out on for years.
Well, if you want a précis of her book, go over to the Guardian and read her excerpt, called “The myth of religious violence.” I will reproduce only the last paragraph, which is a typical specimen of Armstrong Apologetics (my emphasis):
After a bumpy beginning, secularism has undoubtedly been valuable to the west, but we would be wrong to regard it as a universal law. It emerged as a particular and unique feature of the historical process in Europe; it was an evolutionary adaptation to a very specific set of circumstances. In a different environment, modernity may well take other forms. Many secular thinkers now regard “religion” as inherently belligerent and intolerant, and an irrational, backward and violent “other” to the peaceable and humane liberal state – an attitude with an unfortunate echo of the colonialist view of indigenous peoples as hopelessly “primitive”, mired in their benighted religious beliefs. There are consequences to our failure to understand that our secularism, and its understanding of the role of religion, is exceptional. When secularisation has been applied by force, it has provoked a fundamentalist reaction – and history shows that fundamentalist movements which come under attack invariably grow even more extreme. The fruits of this error are on display across the Middle East: when we look with horror upon the travesty of Isis, we would be wise to acknowledge that its barbaric violence may be, at least in part, the offspring of policies guided by our disdain.
Right: that’s why ISIS is killing Shiites right and left, as well as infidels. It’s all our fault. I wonder, though, since Armstrong says that ISIS’s violence is “at least in part” due to the West, what might be responsible for the other part? Could it be. . . religion? I doubt she’d agree. And I wonder what she means by “forced secularisation,” a term that can be stretched so far that it means nothing.
But I have neither the time nor energy to rebut this, nor do I really want to read her book to do so. So I will let Eric MacDonald (who hasn’t read her book either, but knows a lot more about religion and society than I) give his critique. Eric and I of course often cross swords on this site about scientism, but his comment on Armstrong’s book, which you can find at this link, seems quite sound to me.
I’ll quote just his last paragraph (as always, Eric is not sparing with the words!), but read the whole comment:
. . . Certainly, there were economic and political issues in Syria and Iraq that contributed to the rise of armed opposition to the established governments in the region. But Armstrong fails to notice that religion is not a peaceful subtext to these conflicts, and even attracts people who have no connexion with the economic or political issues involved. Thus they become primarily religious wars, in which the original economic and political problems are submerged by religious fanaticism. There is no way to separate the religious and the economic and political factors in the convenient way that Armstrong supposes, and then simply deny that the violence is in any way due to religion, especially when the primary justification given by the leaders of these conflicts is religious.
As I always say, “What would it take to make apologists like Armstrong admit that religion plays a substantial role in the violence?” Clearly it’s not the words of ISIS’s leaders and fighters, who Armstrong must perforce believe are either deluded about their motives or are lying to us—and why would they do that?
There’s no doubt that religion is waning in the West, and has already waned substantially in the UK. That’s why I continue to be surprised at the sympathy that Armstrong’s arguments garner in Britain. In that blessed plot people have left religion in droves, yet they still want to hear only good things about it.
I’m not quite sure why that is. Perhaps some of this rump-osculation comes from former believers who can’t stand to think that religion can be malign, and yet those same people have no trouble singling out the horrors of other ideologies, like Communism and Nazism, that, like religion, are based on irrational faith.
I still have not yet come to grips with why religion, uniquely among all human worldviews and belief systems, is the only one that gets a pass—the only one that you’re typed as “rude” for criticizing. If you’re a Democrat in the US, you’re not called “strident” for criticizing Republicans. Ditto with the liberals vs. conservaties in the UK. I welcome readers’ theories.
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Recommended reading: Sam Harris’s HuffPo column from 2011, “Losing our spines to save our necks.” One quote:
The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It’s not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam “really” is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world’s Muslims, is antithetical to civil society.
