Religion and Violence
Religion And Violence
Ryan Goodwin
According to the Pew Research Center 65% of Americans believe that religion plays a significant role in most wars and conflicts around the world. According to a poll by Newsweek in March 2007, Americans are split over whether religion plays too big a role (32%) or too small a role (31%) on American politics and policy decisions. The impression that people have that religion is the root of violence, chaos, and suffering throughout history is one of the reasons so many choose not to participate in religion at all, or believe in God. An atheist needs only to parade the various stock historical examples of the destructive force of religion in order to prove his point:
· Battles throughout the Old Testament, which many liberal scholars would label as nothing more than “ethnic cleansing” in today’s terminology. Entire races, cities, and tribes, including women and children, were eradicated in Israel’s bloody early history.
· Wars of the Maccabees and other Jewish revolts against Roman power in the centuries before and after the first century AD, all under the pretext of religion.
· The Crusades, a series of Middle Age wars over the Holy Land, specifically Jerusalem, may have resulted in the deaths of between 1 and 5 million Christians and Muslims, many civilian bystanders.
· The Inquisition, a legal system utilized by the Roman Catholic Church during the Medieval and early Modern eras to investigate and punish those who believed and practiced heresies. Church-sanctioned torture chambers were established in 1252. By the late fifteenth century, an inquisition in Spain resulted in the deadliest and most horrific of all inquisitions. Untold thousands were tortured to death over accusations of witchcraft, adultery, and heretical views.
· Even many of our modern wars have been supposedly fought because of religious convictions. Many atheists accuse our own government of Zionistic pursuits (Premillenial visions of “end times” events cannot unfold unless Israel is literally existing as a country) whenever a conflict in the Middle East arises.
· Abortion doctors murdered, gay students beaten, hate crimes of every sort because of religious intolerance – all fodder for the atheist who sees religion as the world’s great opiate, or as Daniel Dennett puts it, “A saccharin for the brain.”
“As always, New Atheists take any statistics that show the underbelly of religion and then push these numbers to the extremes. The role of religion in inciting global violence remains their numero uno reason why religion must be abolished. In their minds, should religion be allowed to continue, civilization as we know it will cease to exist” (The New Atheist Crusaders, Garrison, p. 66). In this lesson I want to confront some of accusations against religion and the role it plays in violent activities.
Violence Is a “Human” Thing, Not a “Religion” Thing
Those who deplore religion because it is the root cause of all the world’s most violent episodes forget that violence is not a product of religious activity, but human activity. That is, violence exists far outside the realm of religion, and violence is done on a daily basis that has no more meaning than lust, selfishness, desperation, or rage. Reza Aslan, author of No God But God, adds, “Religion doesn’t make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.” Ever since Cain slew his brother Abel in Genesis 4:8 people have been killing each other. Go to most any museum and see firsthand the long, despicable history of violence. We kill to get food when we are hungry. We kill for land, for a certain political system, for a lover (Proverbs 6:25ff), for our reputation or to save face (2 Samuel 11:14-17).
Not only that, but Atheism does not have a very clean record, either. History does not look favorably on most movements that have been devoid of God:
· Josef Stalin “was a passionate atheist who murdered untold numbers of Christian clergy, destroyed virtually every church in Russia, and forced Soviet students to study scientific atheism” (“Why Are Atheists So Angry?”, www.jewcy.com, November 21, 2006, Dennis Prager). In his reign of terror, an ideal opportunity for the world to see what a society would look like without the bonds of religion, he is estimated to have the blood of 13 million people on his hands.
· Mao, the Chinese dictator during that country’s “great” cultural revolution after the Second World War, had many millions killed for beliefs that were not sanctioned by his Communist Party.
· Another atheist and communist, Pol Pot, killed between 1.5 million and 1.7 million while reigning in Cambodia.
· Kim Il Sun of North Korea had more than 1.6 million killed, long before his son, famed atheist and dictator Kim Jong Il, started violating human rights laws.
· Add to that Brezhnev, Lenin, and Castro and the death toll directly from atheistic pursuits in the 20th century alone far surpasses the death toll from the entirety of the Catholic Church’s history, including the Crusades and the Inquisitions.
“But what about God-sanctioned killing in the Old Testament?”
It is hard to ignore the Old Testament and its bloody account of the early history of God’s chosen people. Jericho (Joshua 6:21), 12,000 at Ai (Joshua 8:25), the Amorites (God actually held the sun still for a day to facilitate the fighting in Joshua 10), the gory, violent adventures of judges like Ehud, Gideon, and Samson, the total annihilation of the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15 – and the list could go on and on. Many atheists and skeptics point to these as impossible stories to reconcile with a God who we claim is merciful, kind, and loving to all His creation. “I don’t want to believe in a God who would kill babies” is the stock complaint. What people fail to realize, however, is that in spite of the recurrence of such violence in the narrative history of Israel, there are some things to consider:
· Much of this military history takes place in short spurts because of specific situations that needed to be resolved (the wars of Joshua may have lasted as little as 5 years), and then separated by vast spans of peace. Israel’s history covers a span of around 500 years from Joshua to Bablyonian captivity. How many totally secular wars have occurred in the last 500 years of our history? The point is that although the OT seems to be page after page of bloodshed, one gets the wrong impression from the story of the Israelites if he fails to see that this is a “condensed version”. 240 years of our own country’s history would seem bloody beyond reason if it was put onto only a few pages.
· We also need to be careful where our sympathies are being directed. So many atheists decry the Bible for its depiction of total warfare, yet they fail to realize the severity of the sins committed by many of these kingdoms. Instead of feeling sorry for the Amalekites, we should see that their history is colored with child sacrifice, bloodthirsty conquest, and immorality beyond comparison. The Philistines, the Egyptians, the Moabites, and many others were all decadent, abusive, slovenly, violent, backward-thinking cultures.
· When God asked the Israelites to eliminate these cultures from the earth it was exactly because of their immoral and destructive influence (Deuteronomy 20:17-18). Does not even an atheist believe that war is a necessary tool in dealing with rogue nations that disregard human rights? So why is God a villain for annihilating that which is detestable?
Is Christianity a Religion of Peace?
It is very easy to point at excesses and abuses by church-like institutions and proclaim “religion” is the problem. But is the bloody history of the Catholic Church our history? Do militants in the woods represent what Christianity is all about? Is it really acceptable to use fringe groups and extremists as representatives of the whole of Christendom? In spite of what human institutions have done in the past to mar Christ’s reputation, our Lord was a purist when it came to non-violence. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist him who is evil; but whoever slaps you on your cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you, and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. And whoever shall force you to go one mile, go with him two… And I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:38ff). Clearly Jesus is not saying that we should be the doormats of the world, since He did defend Himself (John 18:23), turn tables over and whip people for excesses and abuses (John 2:13-17), but He taught His disciples that it would be their words and their faith that would defeat their enemies, not bombs, guns, swords, or fire. Even when warfare is mentioned in the New Testament as a prescriptive activity, it is always used allegorically:
· In John 18:36, Jesus says that His kingdom is not of this world. If it were a worldly kingdom, then physical warfare would have been both necessary and useful. But to a people who are defined by their other-worldly citizenship (Philippians 3:20), physical violence simply has no purpose.
· Paul describes our warfare as spiritual in nature in 2 Corinthians 10:3ff. “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but are divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God…”
· Even though we are “soldiers of Christ”, in Ephesians 6:10-17 Paul is careful to note, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood.” It is against spiritual forces, ideas, sins, temptations that we are fighting.
· All of the previously mentioned examples of religion being used as a pretense for violence all have something in common: it is not Christianity in its true form at work. Did God want Muslims converted over their dead bodies? Did God want heresy rooted out in pools of blood? Does God today want His message spread across the world via bombs?
· Atheists forget that many other factors came in to play in the various historical acts of violence in the name of God. Were the crusades as much about glorifying God as they were about grabbing land and wealth? Perhaps it is not religion itself that causes war, but greed, lust, and anger, all human conditions that cannot be cured by atheism – for God alone has the answer to our sins (Colossians 3:5-11).