In the past fifty years, the study of religion and violence has grown exponentially. One reason for this is obvious: the rise of strident religion-related political movements around the world, many of which challenge conventional notions of secularism and the secular nation-state. But another reason has been the scholarly interest in the materiality of culture. Elaine Scarry’s groundbreaking book, The Body in Pain, is emblematic of a growing interest in the way that physical suffering alters perception and challenges our understanding of socially constructed realities. The essays in this Immanent Frame forum display the diversity of topics related to the subject of religion and violence and the rich discussions they evoke.

The focus on the topic of religion and violence has occasioned close scrutiny of what is meant both by religion and by violence. For decades, scholars in the study of religion have recognized that the term is a fairly recently created Western fiction. In 1963, the long-standing director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religion published The Meaning and End of Religion, a book in which he advocated that scholars abandon the use of the word. “Religion” was a contrivance, Wilfred Cantwell Smith averred, that held no existential meaning and had no ancient roots. He allowed for forms of religiosity that could be described adjectivally, such as religious rituals, religious beliefs, and so on, but there was no intrinsic essence to religion itself.

In the years since Smith’s book, there has been a great deal of discussion of the socio-political contexts in which the concepts of religion and its uneasy partner, secularism, originated. The works of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and Rajeev Bhargava are particularly notable in raising the level of these discussions. Twenty years ago, a working group of scholars convened by the Social Science Research Council held a multi-year project examining the notions of religion and secularism. The group, which included Asad, Taylor, Bhargava, and others, published their essays in Rethinking Secularism, a book edited by Craig Calhoun, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and myself, which concluded that the terms were shaped in the West in recent centuries by political and historical contexts in a dialectical tandem.

Still the terms persist in popular discourse. Even Smith capitulated to the use of the word “religion” when he supported the creation of an academic program in Harvard College in the Study of Religion, preferring that phrase to “religious studies,” which Smith thought might be misunderstood as saying that the studies themselves were religious. Other scholars use the term as well, though they usually qualify what they mean by using it.

Late Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah took a different approach. He argued that religion was something, or at least a shared perception, and not just a set of adjectives. In a magisterial book completed shortly before his death, Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah posited that the origin of religion as an element of human culture was in play. Like Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, Bellah thought that the earliest forms of culture were activities, such as dance and ritual. These were embryonic forms of alternative realities that in time became internalized as realms of imagination, alternative realities in the mind. From these acts of cultural creativity spring religion, an alternative reality with persuasive powers of its own. As a sociologist, however, Bellah would never reify the alternative reality of religion or lift it out of its social and cultural context. He regarded it as one of many alternative realities that interact with our daily worlds. This brings Bellah’s position in line with the dominant view of the scholarly community, which is that religion cannot do anything on its own but illumines and interacts with various aspects of human practice and performance.

Hence the English word “religion” can refer to all kinds of things. Smith preferred to speak of religion as composed of tradition and its internalized form, which is faith. Or it can be, as Bellah described it, the perception of an alternative reality. As social phenomena, religion can be the dogmas, sets of beliefs, or ideological positions thought to originate with or be provided by some divine power. It can also mean the organizational institutions that are based on those beliefs and help maintain them, or describe the holders of clerical positions within those organizations. But religion need not be confined to institutions; it can refer to a culture of habits, practices, and shared values as well as to traditions that have been maintained, some of them over many centuries. It can also simply mean the social identity of a particular ethnic group.

The ambiguity around the word “religion” makes the study of religion and violence problematic. Sometimes commentators and authors of popular books aver that “religion causes violence.” No scholar would say such a thing, not only because of the difficulty in defining religion, but because of the causative implication in the phrase, as if religion could do anything on its own.

Scholars who use the phrase “religious violence” do not mean that religion causes violence. When used adjectivally, as in “religious ritual” or “religious art,” the implication is not that there is something called religion that causes rituals or art, but that these cultural forms are colored or characterized by a relationship to a transcendent alternative reality.

Similarly, scholars who speak of “religious violence” simply mean that things or cultural forms associated with religion are in some way related to violence. It is a shorthand for “religion-related violence.” That relationship is precisely what many scholars attempt to understand in their research. Invariably, this leads to a consideration of the social and historical milieu in which violent acts are committed, and of the ways that religious elements of culture are injected into conflict situations. Sometimes religious sanctions are used to shore up the legitimacy of those committing violent acts, sometimes religious images are part of the ideology of a movement, and sometimes religious identity is part of a cultural context.

The religious aspects of the Islamic State are an interesting case in point. Though it has often been referenced as a violent religious movement, “religion” in the sense of beliefs and ideology was limited to the small inner circle of the movement’s leadership. They imbibed apocalyptic images and beliefs from the past and fashioned a contemporary ideology of revenge against perceived foes, including Shi’a Muslims and their Western supporters, that would support their quest for political power. Most of the militants who joined the movement, however, were Sunni Arabs who saw the movement as a form of empowerment for their own ethnic community. They had little interest in the theological complexities of the ISIS ideology. The movement was religious, but in two quite different ways. In neither of these ways can religion be said to have caused the violence that ISIS perpetrated.

The diversity of meanings attached to religion is matched by that evoked by another problematic term: “violence.” The term usually conjures up images of physical violence, bodily harm and potential death. The images that are most striking are those associated with large-scale political violence — wars, genocide, terrorism, and the like. But there are forms of state violence apart from war that are enormously destructive, including pogroms and unjust incarceration. Even in political violence, religion is often a factor. Particular religious communities can be targeted for expulsion or destruction, and religious justifications can prop up the autocracy of the state. In every war, God seems to bless one side or another, and it is invariably the side of those claiming divine sanctions for their actions.

Religious images and ideas also are connected to interpersonal suffering and self-inflicted injury. When monks and nuns immolate themselves to protest injustices against their religious communities, they are described as martyrs. Martyrdom has an honored place in many religious traditions and contradicts the usual religious proscription against suicide. When I referred to certain Islamist activists as suicide bombers, the Hamas leader with whom I was speaking corrected me and assured me that they were “self martyrs.”[1]

There are other forms of violence besides physical violence, and these also often have a religious dimension. Extreme forms of social control and forced behavior can violate the integrity of the other. Mohandas Gandhi considered any kind of coercion a form of violence, and he believed coercion should be rejected as firmly as physical violence. Religious institutions and restrictions are often perpetrators of these less-tangible forms of violence, alas, enforcing coercion with self-righteousness.

Symbols of violence abound in virtually every religious tradition. From the swords of Sikhism and Islam to the execution device that is the cross Christians venerate, such images remind the faithful of violent and brutal death. The crucifixion of Christ, the martyrdom of Guru Arjun, and the killing of Ali ibn Abi Talib are central moments in the histories of Christianity, Sikhism, and Shi’a Islam, respectively. These events are woven into their legends and shape their rituals.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars frequently pointed to sacrifice as a defining element of religion. Almost every early religious tradition has sacrificial offerings, usually of animals, but some cases also evidence human sacrifice. As religious traditions evolved, the sacrificial ritual became more metaphorical. In Christianity, the sacrifice of Christ is represented in the ritual of the eucharist. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the bread and wine offered to the faithful undergoes an act of transubstantiation and becomes the actual body and blood of Christ. Part of the scholarly fascination with the images of sacrifice in religious traditions is that they appear to hold keys to understanding the nature of religion itself. From a Durkheimian perspective, sacrifice is part of the reciprocity between humans and the divine being — life is given in order for life to be received.

Other scholars agree that the seemingly ubiquitous obsession with violence and death in religious traditions, both symbolic and physical, points to basic elements of the religious imagination. Ernest Becker famously described this as the religious “denial of death.” Anthropologist Weston LeBarre, in analyzing the emergence of the Ghost Dance Religion among the Native American plains tribes who were under attack by the US cavalry, thought he had found the source of religion in the ritual response to impending doom. A more sophisticated version of this argument has been made by University of Chicago sociologist Martin Riesebrodt, in The Promise of Salvation.

The essays in this forum explore many of these themes in the relationship between religion and violence, however the terms may be defined. Because of the nuanced nature of the concepts, none of these analyses can be conclusive. But the essays that follow are ample indication of how enlightening the discussion of them can be.


[1] Author’s interview with the political head of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on March 1, 1998.