A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor 12/7/03 RELIGION AND VIOLENCE: A PROLEGOMENON It is the practice of all professions to use certain words that are not part of common parlance. Doctors speak of hematocrits and bilirubins, lawyers of torts and habeas corpus, accountants of accruals and amortization. In my world of professional religious leadership, we tend to use words like hermeneutics and exegesis, avatars and kenosis, eschatology and henotheism. Among my favorite words when I was a divinity student was the word prolegomenon, used at that time by numerous theologians in the titles of their books and articles. A prolegomenon is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "preliminary discourse or matter prefixed to book, etc., introduction." It was an era of introductions more than it was a time of definitive conclusions. I have felt that way about much of my own work in the 33 years since then, that I am really just introducing a theme more than I am fully comprehending it. That is certainly the way I feel about the subject matter of today's sermon, the relation between religion and violence. Why is it that religion seems to be part of the justification for and the origin of so much violence, the violence of domestic abuse and the violence of bar- room brawls and the large-scale violence of war? The importance of that question is suggested by a phrase Hans Kueng is fond of using: "There will be no peace in the world if there is not peace between the religions." Religions are not at peace with one another and never have been. Religion is often the source of violence or a factor that makes it worse. Jon Krakauer, whose recent book UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN deals with this theme of religious violence, has noted that "as a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane, there may be no more perfect force than religion." The link between religion and violence is ancient, intimate, and enduring. Dreams of a pitched battle between East and West were part of the myths of Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago. Gods and goddesses were an integral part of HomerÕs tale of the siege of Troy. God Yahweh instructs IsraelÕs first king, Saul, "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (I Samuel 15: 3) Zoroaster taught that the earth is a battlefield between good and evil powers. Jesus told his followers that he had come to bring not peace but the sword. Mohammed was a great warrior as well as a religious teacher and politician. Karen Armstrong, in her magnificent study of holy war, notes that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all "developed a pattern of holy war and violence." Heresy trials, forced conversions, the suppression of women, cruel punishments, and exile are among the violent acts the monotheistic faiths of the West have either initiated or supported in addition to their calls for and support of holy war. Charles Kimball, a student of religion and violence, asserts that "more wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history." Not just Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are included in that assessment. All religions are. One of the central stories of the Indian classic The Mahabharata is of Arjuna seeking and finding divine sanction for the battle he is to wage the next day. Hindus in India, fighting against the British Raj, did so under the inspiration of these words from the Bhagavad Gita: "The worship of the goddess (Kali) will not be consummated if you sacrifice your lives at the shrine of independence without shedding blood." The Sikh followers of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale accepted his teaching that they should prepare for war with Hindus and that "there is no need to get a license for arms." Japanese Buddhists, according to historian Martin Marty, may never have declared a holy war but "nonetheless proclaimed all Japanese wars holy." The American Unitarian Association demanded of its ministers and congregations full support of the First World War on pain of losing the support of the Association. Last year a woman in Nigeria was condemned to be stoned for adultery on religious grounds. A man in Saudi Arabia had his hands amputated for theft under religious law. Elizabeth Smart, 14 years of age, was kidnapped by Brian Mitchell because, his wife said, he "was on a religious mission." Bruce Lincoln, in his deeply reflective volume HOLY TERROR: THINKING ABOUT RELIGION AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, observes that "all religions sanction, even enjoin the use of violence under certain circumstances." Religion and violence are bound together intimately and apparently enduringly. Why? One reason is that life is violent. If religion is to be true to the way things are, sometimes the language of violence must be used. The violence of life is found in raging storms and avalanches, in the way stronger animals tear apart and devour smaller animals, the way meteors fall from the sky and destroy everything in their path when they land, the way the universe began with what is called a Big Bang. Near the close of the book of Job, the thundering voice of Yahweh speaks. He tells of the prey of the lion and of the raven. He talks of the ostrich who "deals cruelly with her young, as if they were not hers." He says of the horse that "he laughs at fearÉ(and) with fierceness and rage he swallows the ground." He reminds Job of the wild beasts and the turbulent rivers and of Leviathan who cannot be tamed. Life is a battle. It is a battle against nature, whose floods can destroy our crops, whose animals can poison us and crush us and claw us to death, whose heat and cold can make difficult even the simplest task and if severe enough kill us, whose diseases can lay us low, whose unanswered questions about the purpose of living can drive us mad. This sense of struggle in a violent world is deeply embedded in the Islamic term jihad. According to Seyed Hossein Nasr, jihad is a "holy war, of which the ÔlesserÕ is against external obstacles to the establishment and functioning of the divine order and the ÔgreaterÕ against the inward forces which prevent us from realizing God within the center of our being." Mohammed used "violent" language to describe jihad. "My brothers, Allah has said that if you want to begin a holy war, your first duty is to wage that war against the army of enemies that harm you from within." These enemies must be destroyed and cut away. Jihad is most profoundly a spiritual term, but the words used to describe it are militaristic, violent, so it should not be surprising that some Muslims use the term to describe their own wars against external foes. Osama bin Laden issued his first call to a holy war in 1992, renewed that call in 1996 and 1998, and once more in October, 2001.Mostly that call has been directed against Americans, first American soldiers but eventually against Americans of any kind. "By GodÕs leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey GodÕs command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and wherever he can." Other religions have similarly used the language of war and battle and violent confrontation to describe spiritual struggles. David, the most fierce and successful warrior in ancient Israel, was used as a model for the messiah in Jewish mythology. The final struggle in Christian mythology is the battle of Armageddon (Revelation 16:16) that will see the forces of good overwhelm the forces of evil in the final battle of history. The Presbyterian churches in which I grew up would sing lustily and often, "Stand up, stand up for Jesus, Ye soldiers of the cross; Lift high his royal banner, It must not suffer loss: From victory unto victory His army shall He lead, Till every foe is vanquished And Christ is Lord indeed." With equal vigor and frequency we sang of Soldiers of Christ Arising, of Fighting the Good Fight, of the Son of God Going Forth to War, and, most popularly, of Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War." The language of violence, descriptively true of life itself, is used as a way to describe our spiritual struggles. Accustomed to such forceful and sometimes brutal language, humanity in its various religious languages does not find it difficult to give religious sanction to wars and other acts of violence. A second thing to consider is the seriousness of religion and the seriousness of violence. Religion is the most serious of all human enterprises. It asks and it answers questions about the origin of our species and the cause of all life. It asks and it answers questions about the ultimate destiny of humanity and of all life. It asks and it answers questions about the purpose of human existence. Religion is not primarily about how we do live but about how we should live. It is about how we face death and what death does to our understanding of the meaning of our lives. It is about how we recover from defeat and disappointment. It is about how we grow in moral stature and how we integrate the disparate parts of our lives. Religion, which Paul Tillich understand as being about matters of ultimate concern, is about the most important questions in human life and how we answer them. Violence is a means by which we accomplish our ends, not the only means, of course, but one that is often used in reality and in possibility. If we want something badly enough, we commit violence in order to gain that thing. Or we may threaten to commit violence so that another will bend to our will. In any case, violence represents an extreme, an extreme at which the possibility exists that life itself will be harmed or destroyed, our life or the life of another. Some have understood violence as the energy without which nothing is accomplished. George Bernard Shaw notes in one of his plays that "Nothing is ever done in this world unless men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done." Violence like religion is serious business, the business of life and death. Small wonder that there should be a strong link between them. If we are prepared in order to get things done to shed the blood of others, or to risk the shedding of our own blood, then we must take life as being of great consequence. Otherwise, we would not care enough one way or the other about the course of events. We could surely get along with reasonable comfort without putting ourselves or others in harmÕs way. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures make this point. Violence in these Scriptures is often violence perpetrated by God or violence sanctioned by God or violence ignored by God. If violence is sometimes condemned, it is with equal force divinely blessed. What these texts tell us is that God is violent, that sometimes God appears to want us to be violent, that violence is a means of salvation. Jack Miles, who has written two brilliant books of interpretation of first the Hebrew Bible and then the Christian "epilogue" to it, argues from a literary standpoint that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a Man of War, a God who rescued his Chosen People by means of the destruction of the Egyptians, who swore eternal enmity against various peoples like the Amalekites, who ordered various leaders of the Israelites to destroy utterly their enemies, and then allowed various of these enemies to perpetrate enormous violence on his Chosen People because of their sins. One of the common understandings of the New Testament, although it is not MilesÕs view, is that it is the story of how God chose to pay the price necessary for saving the human race by becoming human and suffering and dying on the cross. The God, who would demand such an enormous sacrifice, even if it is God Himself who becomes the sacrifice, is still a God of violence, a God who demands death and suffering to satisfy the Divine Wrath at human sinfulness. Miles puts forward a literary notion of the God in the New Testament repenting of His violence in the Hebrew Bible and now demonstrating a better way, the path of non-violence. But often Christians have ignored that lesson, paying more attention to the violent assaults on Jews found in these books, to the sharp delineation of the Jesus followers into believers and non- believers, and in some places to apocalyptic visions of cosmic wars between good and evil. Religion and violence are literally deadly serious enterprises, linked by their seriousness and the high stakes for which each is playing the game of life. A third factor in the linkage of religion and violence is the tendency in religion to absolutism. Absolutism in religion means that one embraces the religion as though it were The Truth, not a truth, not a way of looking at or for truth, but The Truth. Implicitly or explicitly, religions tend to inspire such an attitude. Why else follow a religious path, why else believe a religious dogma, why else observe religious rituals unless one feels that in some way they point to deep truths about the human condition and the human possibility? It is an easy step that too many in every religion take to come to the conviction that this path and these dogmas and these rituals not only point to but are The Truth. Too many ignore Rosemary Radford RuetherÕs advice not to confuse language about the divine with the Divine Itself. The result is absolutism. One element involved in absolutism is an absence of doubt. Some absolutists may have doubts, but their doubts only make them cling all the more fiercely to their dogmas lest by allowing one change in their theological story the whole tale will collapse around them. Others genuinely have no doubts, no room to listen or to learn. For both types of absolutists, that which and those who do not agree with them are wrong, evil, blasphemous. Such wickedness must be eliminated from the world lest the Almighty be offended. A group called the Army of God believes that abortion is a violation of GodÕs law. A young man like Jonathan OÕToole, 19 years of age, is committed to this organization, one of whose principles is that killing those who perform abortions is "justifiable homicide." OÕToole says "Unborn babies are dying by the millions, and I feel compelled to help." Because OÕToole believes in the religious mythology of the Army of God and believes it absolutely, he is prepared to become a murderer. This is a possibility for those who live by absolute claims. Another element involved in absolutism is obedience. The followers of a particular leader give themselves over to whatever that leader says, believing the leader either is God or has a special relationship with God. Sometimes this can be merely foolish, like the followers of Sun Myung Moon who in the thousands married one another couple by couple in the same ceremony merely because Moon said to do so. More ominously, Asahara Shoko, the leader of the Aum Shimrikyo, a blend of Buddhism and Hinduism, demanding complete submission of his disciples, ordered the release of a deadly nerve gas in 16 Tokyo subway stations eight years ago. Twelve people died and more than 5,000 were injured. ShokoÕs followers believed that he had the Truth and that by obeying him, they were living in the Truth. That way can lie horrible violence. To those caught up in absolutism, the end justifies the means. There is no more dangerous principle than this one, because of the power of rationalization. It is too easy to justify horror because we can put words around the horror that seem to make it not only not wrong but very right. We are doing this dreadful thing: for the glory of God, to honor the name of Jesus, so that Allah will be praised, or whatever the language of the religion to which the perpetrator is attached. The end justifies the means. The Inquisition tortured and killed thousands of men and women because they were of the wrong gender, they were Jews, they misinterpreted the Scriptures. The end justifies the means. Nineteen young men forced four planes to crash into buildings and the ground on 9/11 because the "Islamic nation" had been subjected to "humiliation and disgrace" and Paradise awaited those willing to act to redress this grievance. The end justifies the means. Dr. Baruch Goldstein entered the Mosque of Ibrahim in Hebron and slaughtered 29 worshippers and wounded many more because God Yahweh had given this Land to the Jewish people 3500 years ago. The tendency to absolutism leads religious people into violence because of claims to knowing The Truth, because people wrapped up in absolutism are readily obedient to what a leader commands, and because absolutism fosters the practice of the end justifying the means. Life is violent. Religion is part of life. Religion and violence are both deadly serious enterprises. Religion tends to the absolute. These three elements of the link between religion and violence, a link that is ancient, intimate, and enduring, are but a prolegomenon, a first step, in understanding why religion uses and inspires violence. There is a bibliography attached to the printed version of these remarks to give assistance to those who wish to take a second step by that means. By whatever means seem best, my hope is that each of us will continue to work towards an understanding of this link and of ways that we can weaken it, May we all help to make religion a force for good, for justice, for peace, and less and less a force that gives sacred sanction to violence. Copyright 2003, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved RELIGION AND VIOLENCE: A PROLEGOMENON--- BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Karen Armstrong, HOLY WAR: THE CRUSADES AND THEIR IMPACT ON TODAYÕS WORLD, Doubleday, 1991 2. Pascal Boyer, RELIGION EXPLAINED: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, Basic Books, 2001 3. Tim Pat Coogan, MICHAEL COLLINS: THE MAN WHO MADE IRELAND, Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1992 4. CROSS CURRENTS, Summr, 2001, pages 146-272 5. Hent De Vries, RELIGION AND VIOLENCE: PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTVIES FROM KANT TO DERRIDA, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002 6. Chris Hedges, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, Public Affairs, 2002 7. Robert Jewett, THE CAPTAN AMERICAN COMPLEX: TH DILEMMA OF ZEALOUS NATIONALISM, The Westminster Press, 1973 8. Mark Jurgensmeyer, TERROR IN THE MIND OF GOPD: THE GLOBAL RISE OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE, University of California Press, 2000 9. Charles Kimball, WHEN RELIGION BECOMES EVIL, HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. 10. Leo D. Lefebure, REVELATION. THE RTELIGIONS, AND VIOLENCE, Orbis Books, 2000 11. Bruce Lincoln, HOLY TERRORS: THINKING ABOUT RELIGION AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, The University of Chicago Press, 2003 12. Gerd Luedemann, THE UNHOLY IN HOLY SCRIPTURE: THE DARK SIDE OF THE BIBLE, Translated and with an appendix by John Bowden, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997 13. Jack Miles, GOD: A BIOGRAPHY, Alfred A./Knopf, 1995 14. ÉÉÉÉ.., CHRIST: A CRISIS IN THE LIFE OF GOD, Alfred A.Knopf,2001 15. M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, ISLAM AND WORLDPEACE: EXPLANATIONS OF A SUFI, The fellowship Press, 1987 16. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, IDEALS AND REALITIES OF ISLAM, Beacon press, 1975. 17. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, IS RELIGION KILLING US?: VIOLENCE IN THE BIBLE AND THE QURAN, Trinity Press International, 2003 18. Jonathan Sacks, THE DIGNITY OF DIFFERENCE: HOW TO AVOID THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS, Continuum, 2002 19. Regina M. Schwartz, THE CURSE OF CAIN: THE VIOLENT LEGACY OF MONOTHEISM, The University of Chicago Press 20. Jessica Stern, TERROR IN THE NAME OF GOD: WHY RELIGIOUS MILITANTS KILL, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003 21. Walter Wink, ENGAGING THE POPWERS: DISCERNMENT AND RESISTANCE IN A WORLD OF DOMINATION, Foprtress Press, 1992 11