When
God Goes To War
By Karen Armstrong
The Guardian
30 December, 2003
We
can be certain of one thing in 2004. Unless there is some unimaginable
breakthrough, we will see more religiously inspired terrorism. It often
seems that we might be better off without religion. A cursory consideration
of the crusades and persecutions of Christian history shows that religious
violence is not confined to the Islamic world. If the different faiths
really are committed to peace and goodwill, why do they inspire such
hatred, and why are their scriptures so aggressive?
Religion is the creation of human beings, who are biologically programmed
for aggression. We dream of peace but slaughter our own kind, and from
the very start our faith systems have reflected this tragic dualism.
In the earliest religions, most gods were militant, including Yahweh,
worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Humans were able to enjoy
security only by fighting other groups, so they assumed there was also
perpetual warfare in the divine world, in which the gods opposed the
forces of disorder.
The world religions
that developed during the first millennium BCE rejected this bellicose
theology and preached empathy, compassion, even non-violence. But they
all emerged in societies devastated by war, and this pervasive aggression
seeped into their new scriptures. Judaism, for example, was born out
of the wrenching experience of political annihilation, deportation and
exile - a trauma that left its mark on the Hebrew Bible.
Some of the biblical
writers responded to the violence in kind. Their God commands Moses
and Joshua to massacre all the native inhabitants of the Promised Land.
But others spoke of reconciliation and of respect for the stranger.
They reminded the people of Israel that God was not reflexively on their
side, and their own unjust and irresponsible behaviour had contributed
to the disaster.
Jesus told his followers
to love their enemies, but the New Testament was also affected by the
turbulence of Palestine during the first century: the resentment of
Roman occupation and escalating tension between Jews and Christians.
Later, the emperor Domitian's persecution inspired the vengeful fantasies
of the Book of Revelation.
The Koran also reflects
the brutal tribal warfare that afflicted Arabia during the early 7th
century. For five years, the Muslims were threatened with extermination
and had to fight for their lives. The Koran tells Muslims how they should
behave on the battlefield, but these militant passages always end with
exhortations to reconciliation. Eventually, Muhammad brought peace to
the peninsula by adopting an audacious policy of non-violence.
The scriptures all
bear scars of their violent begetting, so it is easy for extremists
to find texts that seem to give a seal of divine approval to hatred.
War affects all aspects of human behaviour, so when conflict becomes
chronic, it should be no surprise that religion is also infected. This
is certainly what happened at the time of the Crusades.
In a similar way,
the Christian right today has absorbed the endemic violence in American
society: they oppose reform of the gun laws, for example, and support
the death penalty. They never quote the Sermon on the Mount but base
their xenophobic and aggressive theology on Revelation. Osama bin Laden
is as just as selective in his use of scripture. Most of the Muslim
extremism that troubles us today is the product of societies that have
suffered prolonged, hopeless conflict: the Middle East, Palestine, Chechnya,
Afghanistan, Kashmir.
Religion, like any
human activity, can be abused. You can have bad religion, as you can
have bad cooking, bad art and bad sex. From the very beginning, religion
got sucked into conflicts that were originally secular. In the past,
however, prophets and sages recalled their co-religionists to the prime
duty of compassion.
Today, we need religious
people to be proactive in reforming their own traditions away from extremism.
It is not enough simply to condemn other people's violence. We need
bishops, rabbis and imams to search for the seeds of aggression in their
own scriptures, admit that their own faith has a history of hatred,
and revise bigoted, self-serving textbooks. We should also question
the efficacy of the current war against religious terror. By increasing
violence in troubled regions, we contribute to the conditions that have
always mobilised the faithful in their pernicious holy wars.
· Karen Armstrong
is the author of A History of God
[email protected]