From Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow. 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1998), 770-774.

Violence

Violence is the use of physical force to injure or kill another being. It seems odd to conjoin religion to political murder, torture, and rape, but violence by its very nature resonates with religious energy. Dehusking religions of their theologies, ethical systems, vestments, and music leaves awe-fullness, God's terrifying wrath.

The primordial sacred is not only repellent, but it is also fascinating and wondrous. Its very horror is alluring, but this allure heightens its danger. The persons, objects, and events that occasion it must therefore be handled with utmost care, which is to say, religiously. They must be encumbered with ceremonies and set apart.

So it is with political violence, the instruments used to accomplish it, and those who deploy them. Like all sacred things, they are both accursed and intriguing. The booty of war, the Old Testament teaches, must pass through the fire before being redistributed. So too Yahweh's warriors: they are taboo. Like menstruating women or new mothers, they must be isolated for seven days and be cleansed before being readmitted into the community.

It is a mistake to imagine that this attitude is peculiar to Western civilization. The Hindu pantheon is replete with beguilingly violent deities. There is the erotically curvaceous, blood-lapping goddess Kali, adorned with a belt of human skulls; Shiva, the dancing lingam, otherwise known as Destroyer; the man-devouring Vishnu (Krishna) who announces, "I am death .l.l. who shatters worlds."

Furthermore, it is an error to view the union of religion with violence as a reflection of primitive psychology. Even in the most technologically advanced societies like our own, the soldier, his weapons, his actions, and victims are treated with a kind of reverence bordering on the cultic. When the first atom bomb illuminated the sky above the New Mexican desert in 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, an American physicist and government adviser who directed the development of the bomb, was not the only witness compelled to enframe the spectacle in religious poetry. One companion confessed to witnessing in the event the Second Coming of Christ. Another was reminded of a sixteenth-century painting by German artist Matthias Grunewald, The Ascension of Christ to Heaven.

How Religion Legitimizes Violence

Violence, then, is holy. But religions also routinely legitimize violence and contribute to it through their theologies, rituals, and organization. Religious beliefs also bear on the ways of violation, on the ethics of violence, the preferred manners by which killing, looting, and rape are to proceed. But religions are rarely the sole cause of violence. The strategic and economic milieu in which a faith operates must also be taken into consideration, as in three of the bloodiest encounters in European history: the Crusades (from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries), the witch burnings (from 1400 to 1700, during which up to one million people died, mostly women), and the Nazi Holocaust (which resulted in an estimated eight million deaths). Although Christian exclusivity, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, respectively, can be implicated in these affairs, European political-economics were equally important.

When religions legitimize collective murder and pillage, they do so by mystifying it. That is, they take responsibility for violence out of human hands and attribute it to supernatural forces or beings. In this way it comes to be viewed as inevitable, necessary, reasonable--above all, as good. Why did the Taiping peasants of prerevolutionary China revolt (1850-1864)? Because, explains Confucianism, the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn from the Manchu emperor. The judgment of T'ien (the Heavens) is not understood to have caused the revolt as such. Rather, the unrest proves that the Heavens do not look upon the emperor with favor, and the revolt thus is predictable and proper.

That part of theology concerned with religious justifications for violence (or for other problematic events like slavery) is known as theodicy and is particularly pertinent in Western cultures wherein the godhead is believed to be all good, all knowing, and all powerful. How, it can be asked, can such a deity permit human beings to violate each other? There are four standard answers to this question: the arguments from ignorance, heroism, justice, and hope.

Mankind has no right to question God's will. It is enough to know that God has His reasons for permitting calamity, and that they are not ours. As the Qur'an (2: 216) says, humans cannot understand the ways of Allah.

Sixteenth-century French church reformer John Calvin once stated that God loves the well-tried wrestler. This is the person who, like Jacob, successfully struggles against temptations such as wanting to avoid the physical risks of battle or yearning to surrender to rage on witnessing the pain and terror of combat. This is to say nothing of the opportunities warfare routinely provides soldiers to sate their sexual appetites and to rob. True faith is evidenced, so to say, not by avoiding such temptations--by fleeing to the sanctity of a monastery, for example. Instead, faith is proven by being in the world but not of it. The hero is able to swallow qualms about the horrors.

The historical books of the Old Testament are a military history. In the frenzy of the berserks known as Nazarites who, like Samson, can slay a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, Yahweh's presence to His people is truly felt and known. The same is true of the religions most indelibly imprinted with the Hebraic ethic, Islam and Christianity--in these confessions the faithful's rage at the world's injustice is God's. They are God's battle-ax and weapons of war.

The Old Testament war of Yahweh was not used to convert nonbelievers. Instead, it authorized the seizure of the land God promised Israel. Nevertheless, God's hatred of injustice is clearly evident in the Old Testament (for example, Psalm 7: 9-13 or Ezekiel 7: 7-9). So, too, is the notion of God using His children as the means to administer divine punishment. When these notions were overlaid with Zoroastrian beliefs that the cosmos consists of diametrically opposed principles, good and evil, the product was the Islamic theory of jihad (righteous struggle).

The Islamic world is bifurcated into opposed realms: Dar al-Islam (the territory wherein Allah's word prevails) and Dar al-Harb (the territory of the enemy, where men are sexually immodest, drink wine, and gamble). The jihad is an instrument to cleanse the earth of harbies. It recompenses evil-doers for their sins. The ancient Assassins (the secret order of Muslims who terrorized Christian Crusaders and other enemies by clandestine murder committed under the influence of hashish and from whom comes the modern term), the Wahhabis, the Almoravids, and the Almohads of the early twentieth century as well as today's Hamas terrorists, the so-called Islamic Jihad, and fundamentalist Muslim rebels in Afghanistan, Algeria, and Egypt: all imagined themselves tools of Allah, protectors of the just, upholders of Law.

Violence and the Millennium

The end of the first Christian millennium saw an unprecedented interest in apocalyptic imagery and drama. One consequence during the following centuries was a series of armed pilgrimages to purify the Holy Land of Jews and Muslims in preparation for Christ's imminent arrival. As the second millennium drew to a close the idea of the apocalypse again seized the public imagination.

With its promise that worldly fortunes are soon to be reversed, millennialism--the belief in the future thousand-year reign of Christ--is a theodicy ideally suited for victims. The problem is that few people indeed do not view themselves as victims. When coupled with a theodicy of justice, millennialism is one of history's most compelling justifications for violence.

The Puritans metaphorically fancied themselves as Israelites fleeing slavery at the hands of Egypt (English and Dutch authorities). Following their respective exoduses to America and South Africa, Puritan exiles founded New Jerusalems (the new church foretold in the Book of Revelation) organized after the ancient covenant between God and His children. Among the commandments incumbent on them was Yahweh's terrifying admonition to smite the Canaanites (in this case, the American Indians and Bantu peoples). In manifesting their biblically decreed destiny, in other words, one-time victims became executioners. Hope for one people--the Puritans--meant damnation for another.

Millennialists see the existing world as a charnel house of corruption. It is an arena for ethical transformation, for efforts undertaken to remake it in a manner consonant with their utopian dreams. They alone presume to know God's heart. In whatever form the Antichrist-of-the-moment discloses itself--as a Freemason, a Mormon, a Catholic, or a Jew; as a member of the Hidden Hand or of the Order; as Force X or as communism, to mention just a few--millennialists are girded for battle. (The Hidden Hand, the Order, and Force X are right-wing code words for the so-called satanic Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.)

In Christianity millennialism has played a role in movements of popular dissent. The Waldenses and the Albigenses (who flourished around 1100) and the Lollards and the Taborites (from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) all saw themselves as the biblically decreed chosen remnant at war with the Babylonish Church (Roman Catholicism), laboring to establish a regime of peace, love, and equality.

In calling themselves Israelites, the League of the Elect, or the Sons of God, the Puritans spoke poetically. Christian Identity, a paramilitary sect that flourishes in the contemporary American West, takes such language literally. The European peoples, says Christian Identity, are actual descendants of the one-time Lost Tribes of Israel. The Bible is theirs alone, God theirs alone, along with His promise that in the coming millennium Israel shall rule the earth. Other contemporary groups like the Army of God, the Phinneas Priesthood, and the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord all are enacting their understanding of the War of Armageddon. Their fantasies culminate in murder.

Ways of Violence

Islam, Christianity, and ancient Judaism all posit etherealized deities, compared to which the earthly world is fallen. It is not just evil, but disenchanted, profane. Hence, in all three religions inordinate devotion to the things of this world is considered idolatry. Notable among these things is politics, the pursuit of power. Although political ends may be holy--for example, inflicting God's vengeance or establishing the promised millennium--the means used to achieve them are not. For this reason politics in Western religious cultures, and particularly political violence, is not typically circumscribed by ritual. Warriors are permitted any tack or tool that promises to provide them the greatest destructive power at the least cost. Hence, although the Old Testament Book of Numbers, the first Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr's "Ten Rules to Keep by Heart" (630), or the Protestant military leader Gustavus Adolphus's "Swedish Discipline" (1640) all have regulations on the division of booty, the treatment of proteges, prebattle prayers, and camp behavior, ceremonial restrictions on fighting itself are absent.

To be sure, even in the Western world practical considerations may dictate that one act chivalrously toward opponents. But chivalry is not required by church, mosque, or synagogue. In the Old Testament Yahweh is entirely indifferent to how His champions subdue the enemy, as long as it is done effectively. The reader may recall that the conquest of the Promised Land is accomplished almost entirely by means of bald-faced treachery, the classic case being Gideon's defeat of the Midianites. His three-hundred-man contingent is handpicked for ferocity. For their part, jihadists are permitted to devastate enemy territory by smoke and fire, by surprise at day or night, or by pitched battle. They are even allowed to hold their own loyal subjects hostage.

Medieval Europe had an ethic of violence analogous to that of the Hindus when the church claimed authority over military affairs and ordained knights into service by means of a so-called eighth sacrament. After receiving the chrism from a priest, the knight was obliged to fight only on specific days, and then only with limited weaponry (crossbows and longbows being prohibited), as well as to respect the lives of noncombatants. To what degree these regulations were obeyed during the heat of battle is open to dispute. So, too, is the question of whether they derived from the doctrine of just war, which proposes that the means of violence must be balanced to the ends envisioned by fighting. And how did Christian pacifism affect the medieval art of war? One thing is certain, however. After the Reformation, military niceties of any sort were superseded by the science of mass destruction.

Martin Luther's beliefs were most influential in this transformation. Luther (1483-1546) maintained that the state should deal with matters of the world, period; the Church exclusively with those of the soul. "Holy war," he asserted, is an oxymoron. Juxtaposing the two words risks corrupting the Church with worldly cares while unnecessarily hamstringing the state in the pursuit of its own interests. After Luther, Protestant states were permanently liberated from the fetters of the church. One result was a series of revolutionary advances in military technology, including in the twentieth century the deployment of weaponry capable of exterminating all life. Equipped with this arsenal, Euro-America was positioned after 1500 to assume virtual hegemony over the planet.

Eastern Interpretations

Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism are familiar with the terrifying, alluring paradox of the holy. But contrary to being pictured as a being residing wholly apart from the world, the great mystery is experienced as intimately bound up with mundane everydayness. The Divine may be invisible to the lazy, inattentive, or ignorant, but it is directly accessible to those who assiduously follow the Path (dharma, -do, tao) appropriate to their social status.

In times of war, the ksthatriya (members of the Hindu military caste) were forbidden--on pain of accumulating karma (the law of consequence of action) and thus of being reincarnated into a lower caste--to use barbed, poison, or fire weapons. Nor could they attack anyone but bonafide combatants. Furthermore, combatants were fair game only if not in distress or in some other way distracted (for example, by prayers or eating). Ideally, the foe would be permitted to shoot first and never be struck below the navel. The ancient Hindu Laws of Manu say that it is better to die fighting righteously than to win by sinful means. Like all laws, of course, these too were broken, probably with impunity. But clearly they evince an ethic of violence alien to Western religious culture.

A comparable ethic is found in the Tso Chuan, the commentaries to The Spring and Autumn Annals of ancient China. The Confucian doctor of martial arts, Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War (c. 403-221 b.c.), systematized them into an orientation--victory through skill or cunning rather than force--that informs military strategy throughout the Far East down to our era. (Today, this strategy is employed with tactical and technical innovations borrowed from Euro-America.)

Confucianism is fundamentally pacifistic. Better to be a dog and live in peace, goes an ancient adage, than a man in anarchy. Although it understands the necessity of force to quell disorder, Confucianism honors bloodless victory above all: victory obtained without the use of naked blades. Winning one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill, says Sun Tzu--to subdue the enemy without fighting is.

True, Sun Tzu advocates espionage, trickery, and feints to decrease destructive power, not increase it. In any case, more important than fakery is the general's cultivation of his own virtue (prudence, temperance, piety, and propriety). By being virtuous, he inspires the morale of his soldiers and thus forces foes to recognize the futility of fighting. He also renders himself invulnerable to the very deceits Sun Tzu himself advocates.

More than this, the general must learn to dance with the enemy. Instead of confronting its fury by facing it head on, he should be like water, which in yielding to all things overcomes them in the end. This strategy means moving where the opponent is not and turning the enemy's own force and momentum against him. Mao Zedong (1893- 1976) would reiterate Sun Tzu's teachings. From this philosophy, teaches the sixth-century b.c. Tao te Ching (The Book of the Way and Its Power), comes the power of not contending. As France and the United States learned to their sorrow in Vietnam, this military wisdom is still practiced today in Asia.

During the period of enforced peace under the Tokugawa shoguns (1600 to 1867), Japanese Zen Buddhist monks refined the Confucian military ethic into bushido (the way of the warrior) and into the various combat arts familiar to modern readers: kendo (the way of the sword), kyudo (of the bow), and karate-do (of the hand). As in judo (the way of yielding [or wisdom]) and aikido (the way of harmony), reverently correct use of the means of violence paradoxically becomes a vehicle for illumination (satori), insight into That which Is. Violence itself is laden with the elemental sacred.

See also Anti-Semitism; Calvinism; Confucianism; Confucius; Crusades; Hinduism; Holocaust; Jihad; Lutheranism; Millennialism; Pacifism; Utopianism; War.

Author: James Aho

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