I have learned much from this fascinating collection of short essays. Here we find on-the-ground engagements with violence in Gaza, Christian nationalism, mass shooters in the United States, tensions between Christians and Buddhists in Sri Lanka and between Muslims and Hindus in India, the spiritual practices of Muslim political prisoners in Egypt, and more. These essays for the most part exemplify the kind of academic work that my 2009 book hoped to encourage: careful empirical studies of violence and its accompanying ideologies and imaginaries, rather than broad indictments of “religion” and its supposedly singular relationship to violence.

As Mark Juergensmeyer writes in his introductory essay, there has been a proliferation of studies on “religion and violence” over the past few decades. Work on “religion and violence” or “religious violence” tends to puzzle over the supposed special link between violence and religion, while avoiding the difficulties involved in determining what “religion” is. Juergensmeyer is right that “the English word ‘religion’ can refer to all kinds of things,” but if, as he says, “it can simply mean the social identity of a particular ethnic group,” then the line between what is religion and what is not religion is unclear. Elsewhere, Juergensmeyer writes that “secular nationalism is ‘a religion,’” which rather throws the whole religious/secular distinction into question. Does the violence of secular nationalism then count as evidence of the violence of “religion”? Is it the case, as Christopher Hitchens argues, that atheist totalitarianism is essentially “religious,” such that the religious/secular distinction is really the distinction between things Hitchens doesn’t like and things he does?

According to Juergensmeyer, difficulties with saying what religion is, in addition to unique difficulties with assigning causation to religion, give scholars pause. “No scholar,” he writes in his contribution to this forum, would say that “religion causes violence.” If that phrase means that religion always causes violence, or religion is the sole cause of violence in any given context, then Juergensmeyer is correct. But there is in fact an entire scholarly industry making causal links between religion and violence. Here’s a small sampling. Martin Marty: “Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena” and “religion can be violent.” Charles Kimball: “More wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.” David Rapoport: “Perhaps circumstances and context frame the disposition towards violence. But some relevant element seems to be inherent in the nature of religion itself.” Bhikhu Parekh: “Religion. . . has a propensity towards violence.” Juergensmeyer himself has written that “religion seems to be connected with violence virtually everywhere.” 

In the introduction to this forum, Juergensmeyer backs away from causal language, preferring “religion-related violence” and claiming that “religion cannot do anything on its own.” This seems to be another version of a distinction he makes elsewhere between seeing religion as “the problem” and seeing it as “problematic”; religion does not cause violence but exacerbates it by ratcheting mundane disagreements up to a cosmic level. Either way, however, “religion” is charged with making things worse. Given this, I am not sure I understand the idea that “religion cannot do anything on its own.” Is this a version of the old materialist bias that dismissed religion as a mere epiphenomenon of more real material causes? Is religion a phenomenon out there in the world, but a peculiar sort of phenomenon strangely devoid of causal power? Or does it mean that religion is not just a “natural kind,” something one bumps into out there in the world? Is it rather the religious/secular distinction, a Western ideological construct, that does real work in the world, as Talal Asad and others claim? If this last is the case, and I think it is, then continuing to talk about sacrifice as a “defining element of religion” or “religion” as a problematic “factor” that gets “injected into” the production of violence is unhelpful.  

Instead of seeing “religion” as a word that “can refer to all kinds of things” and then puzzling over the connection between those things and violence, we need to interrogate the ideological uses of the religious/secular distinction. Does “religion and violence” discourse get at the root of violence, or does it point us toward certain kinds of violence while making it possible to ignore others?

It may be that the “religion and violence” industry is not itself without ideological uses. In scholarship, in domestic politics and foreign policy, in jurisprudence and more, there is a prevalent notion that “religion” has a greater propensity toward violence than what is not religion, that is, the “secular.” “Religion” is heterogenous and hard to define but nevertheless has some peculiar relationship to violence that “secular” things do not share. And so there are endless volumes and collections on “religion and violence” and “religious violence” and very little on “secular violence.” The idea that there might be a secularist bias at work here should not come as a surprise. My point is not that Christian or Shi’ite theology cannot or does not contribute to violence; they certainly can and do. But to take the case of Iran, the idea that “religion” has a peculiar relationship to violence allows us in the West to cast a convenient fog of amnesia over the secularist Shah’s brutal rule—which had full US support—and start the story in 1979 when the ayatollahs took over. The “religion and violence” industry, intentionally or not, reinforces self-congratulatory Western narratives of a peaceful secular order that has learned to tame religion versus those crazies over there who continue to “mix religion and politics.” Such narratives are not always innocent. Christopher Hitchens was not the only one who unapologetically cheered on the Iraq War as a “war for secularism.”

Instead of puzzling over what “religion” is and why it is so problematic, Asad and many others have taught us to examine how the religious/secular distinction gets constructed in any given context and what interests that construction serves. This has important implications for the study of violence. Rather than see Hindu nationalism as one more species of the genus “religious violence,” for example, it is more helpful to query why many Hindu nationalists refuse to call Hinduism a “religion.” They consider the category of “religion” to be a colonial imposition that attempted to privatize what it meant to be Indian. Hinduism, in their view, is not a mere religion, but encompasses the fullness of Indian culture, ritual, politics, social life, and so on, which is precisely why it deserves a privileged place in Indian society and governance.  

Where the question is raised about “religion and violence”—especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts—the question for scholars should not be “what work is religion doing here?” Instead, we must begin rather with the questions “what work is the religious/secular distinction doing here? In what ways is the religious/secular distinction a Western import, and is the distinction helpful or not for making sense of the violence that is happening on the ground?” Or further, “what work is the idea that religion promotes violence doing for us?” It may be that the study of religion and violence has grown exponentially in recent decades due not only to “the rise of strident religion-related political movements around the world,” in Juergensmeyer’s words, but also because Westerners need to find an explanation for anti-colonial violence other than as a response to our own colonial violence. The discourse of religious violence can serve to focus attention on, for example, Muslim theologies and deflect attention away from the history of US and British interventions in the Middle East.

Of course, if the subject is not “religion and violence” but rather “violence in these times,” as this forum’s subtitle puts it, then it might just be best to avoid the term “religion” altogether. The featured essays generally take this approach, steering clear of the term “religion” in favor of talking more specifically about groups of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, and so on.  Chatterjee and Mahadev reject tropes of primordial rivalry between Hindus and Muslims, or Buddhists and Christians, and show instead how postcolonial nationalist projects mobilize groups against one another. Quisay reverses the usual trope about Muslim activists and violence, exploring instead how a “neutral” or objective voice makes it possible for current and former prisoners to narrate brutal treatment in state prisons in different ways. There is no mention of “religion” in essays by Levitt and Osanloo. Levitt speaks about Jewishness without speaking about religion in general or about Judaism as a religious tradition. Osanloo does not mention “Islam” in the abstract, though the context of Iran implies the influence of Islamic theology. Haywood and McTighe blur the religious/secular distinction by talking about Women With A Vision as a “secular place with a divine mission” in opposition to the disenchanted world of the powers that be. Moin messes with the religious/secular distinction in a different way, holding up the Mughal-Mongol model of sacred kingship as neither religious nor secular. Van Geuns operates in an explicitly Durkheimian frame, in which “religion describes our means for coming to social life,” a frame that applies to all social life and thereby calls the distinction between religious and secular societies into question. The mass shootings Van Geuns examines are not “religious” except in a Durkheimian way that abandons the substantivist religious/secular distinction on which “religion and violence” arguments depend.

I consider the heterogeneity of approaches in this collection of essays to be a significant strength.  The authors present empirical accounts of encounters between different types of faith communities and different modes of political, economic, and social power. General statements about the defining elements of “religion” or “Islam” or “Christianity” are eschewed in favor of careful analyses of the ways that contextual uses of group identities, theologies, political power, and economic advantage combine to produce or resist violence. The subject of these essays is violence, not “religious violence,” and taken together they imply that dividing up violence into “religious” and “secular” forms is not very helpful for—and often hinders or mystifies—our understanding of violence.

I offer my thanks to the authors of these essays for their careful research and insightful engagement with violence in a variety of contexts. All are focused by an ethical concern to promote understanding among groups of people. One way of doing so, exemplified in these essays, is to hesitate before dividing violence into “religious” and “secular” categories.