Just after finishing Karen Armstrong’s new book, I happened to hear a discussion on television about the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East. “We have to hope that this disagreement stays on the political level, rather than becoming a religious dispute,” one of the experts said. “Political differences can be resolved. Religious ones cannot.”
“Fields of Blood” can be thought of as a long, wide-ranging and overall quite effective rebuttal to the outlook expressed in that comment. “In the West, the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident,” Armstrong says on the book’s first page. It follows that the main hope for peace is to keep faith and statecraft separate.
Armstrong, a onetime Roman Catholic nun and the author of several influential works on religion including “A History of God,” argues that this is an incorrect diagnosis leading to a flawed prescription. The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if you reduced its complexities and tangles to their essence, they would amount to these three points:
First, through most of human history, people have chosen to intertwine religion with all their other activities, including, notably, how they are governed. This was “not because ambitious churchmen had ‘mixed up’ two essentially distinct activities,” she says, “but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance.”
Second, this involvement with politics means that religions have often been tied up with violence: Crusaders, conquistadors, jihadists and many more. But — a point Armstrong cares about so much that she makes it dozens of times — the violence almost always originates with the state and spills over to religion, rather than vice versa. This, she says, is because any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, “was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence,” and because “violence and coercion . . . lay at the heart of social existence.” The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence — by police within their borders, by armies between them — was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.
Third, citizens thus face the duty of confronting and trying to control violence carried out in their name by the state, without blaming religion for it or imagining that the solution lies in a cleaner separation of church and state. This extends to understanding the roots of violence or terrorism directed against them: “As an inspiration for terrorism . . . nationalism has been far more productive than religion.” And religions face the dilemma of whether to accept the protection of a state, and the threat of violence that necessarily entails, or to live in hermetic isolation.
Armstrong develops this argument through the interacting evolutions of religion and government from Mesopotamian times onward. She has sections on the rise of Zoroastrianism in Persia, on the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans four millenniums ago in India, on the early formation of the Chinese state — and that is before her multichapter examination of the development of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. She then explores the best-known examples of violence involving each of these faiths, from the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century to the Islamic (and other) extremists of the 21st, including ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. In nearly all cases, she argues, violent impulses that originated elsewhere — with nationalism, struggles for territory, resentment at loss of power — may have presented themselves as “religious” disputes but really had little to do with faith.
I doubt many readers will be able to assess Armstrong’s handling of every bit of this vast saga. Certainly I cannot. But when she touches on areas I do know about, mainly involving the histories of the United States, Japan and China, she seems careful, fair and true. This naturally inclines me to trust her elsewhere.
Apart from its larger argument, the book is packed with little insights and discoveries. For instance, on the “especially psychotic” nature of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago: “From all accounts, the Crusaders seemed half-crazed,” she says. “For three years, they had had no normal dealings with the world around them, and prolonged terror and malnutrition made them susceptible to abnormal states of mind.” Armstrong makes the following observation about Jews in the time of Jesus, but it applies to the modern tragedy of Tibet and elsewhere: “Once colonized, a people often depends heavily on their religious practices, over which they still have some control and which recall a time when they had the dignity of freedom.” And through a connection too complex to explain fully here, she traces many of today’s bitter American faith-versus-science disputes on evolution, same-sex rights and climate change to world events a century ago. “Their horrified recoil from the violence of the First World War also led American fundamentalists to veto modern science,” since the science of killing had reached new heights in the Great War.
So convincing is Armstrong’s overall case that I wish she had not tried to make it airtight. Even in episodes that would seem to have some religious element, she is at pains to say that the origins must be seen as wholly political. The Muslim-Hindu violence that followed the end of the Raj and the partition between India and Pakistan? “Muslims and Hindus would both fall prey to the besetting sin of secular nationalism: its inability to tolerate minorities. And because their outlook was still permeated by spirituality, this nationalist bias distorted their traditional religious vision.” The massacre of Muslim Bosnians, by Orthodox Serbians, in the Bosnian war of the early 1990s? “Despite the widespread assumption in the West that . . . the violence was ineradicable because of its strong ‘religious’ element, this communal intolerance was relatively new” — and based, again she argues, on political disagreements. If the Taliban or Islamic State marauders cite their faith as justification for their killing, that is, Armstrong says, a sign not that they’ve spent too much time with the Quran, but too little — and have ignored (among teachings that are as internally contradictory as those of the Old and New Testaments) the many passages exhorting mercy and tolerance. The argument comes right to the edge of tautology in suggesting that if a religion seems to provoke violence, then it’s not properly a religion at all but rather a manifestation of state power.
But only to the edge. Armstrong demonstrates again and again that the great spasms of cruelty and killing through history have had little or no religious overlay. In modern times Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all atheists, and the power behind the Holocaust, Armstrong says, was an ethnic rather than a religious hatred. An overemphasis on religion’s damage can blind people to the nonholy terrors that their states inflict.
I generally end up judging books in two ways: by whether I can remember them and whether they change the way I think about the world. It’s too soon to know about the first test, but on the basis of the second I recommend “Fields of Blood.”
FIELDS OF BLOOD
Religion and the History of Violence
By Karen Armstrong
512 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
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