Table Of ContentThe Myth of Religious Violence
The Myth of Religious Violence
Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Confl ict
w illia m t. c avanaugh
1
2009
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cavanaugh, William T.
The myth of religious violence: secular ideology and the roots of modern confl
ict / William T. Cavanaugh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19538504-5
1. Violence—Religious aspects. 2. Religion and politics—Western countries.
3. Religion—Philosophy—Political aspects—Western countries. I. Title.
BL65.V55C39 2009
201’.76332—dc22 2008053815
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
For Eamon
Acknowledgments
I began this book as a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International
Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Special thanks to Scott Mainwaring,
Chris Welna, and Tim Scully for their kind hospitality while I was in residence
there.
Several colleagues and friends have read parts of the manuscript at various
stages of completion and provided astute comments or made useful bibliographic
suggestions. Thanks to Tom Berg, Mike Budde, David Cunningham, Tim
Fitzgerald, Fred Gedicks, Brad Gregory, Stanley Hauerwas, Mike Hollerich,
Russell McCutcheon, Tom Rochon, John Roth, and Scott Thomas for their
generous help.
I presented parts of the argument of this book in lectures to various audiences at
universities far and wide, and I have benefi ted enormously from their comments
and critiques. Thanks are due to Michael Bartley at Oklahoma State, Michael
Minch at Utah Valley University, James Sweeney at Cambridge, Michael Budde
at DePaul, Peter Casarella at Catholic University, Fred Lawrence at Boston
College, Ben King at Harvard, Mark O’Connor of the Dom Helder Camara
lecture series in Australia, Jonas Ideström of the Church of Sweden, Arne
Rasmussen at Umeå University, Chris Keller at the Film, Faith, and Justice
Forum in Seattle, and Linell Cady and Matt Correa at Arizona State for inviting
me to speak. I would also like to express gratitude to the many other people at
these venues who gave me gracious hospitality and facilitated my visits in other
ways.
Thanks to Ry Parrish-Siggelkow at St. Thomas, who provided crucial help in
editing the manuscript in its fi nal phase.
Finally, thanks to my wife, Tracy Rowan, and our sons for giving me a happy
place to come home to when I got tired of religion and violence. This book is
dedicated to my son Eamon, my little tiger.
Contents
Introduction, 3
1. The Anatomy of the Myth, 15
2. The Invention of Religion, 57
3. The Creation Myth of the Wars of Religion, 123
4. The Uses of the Myth, 181
Notes, 231
Index, 277
The Myth of Religious Violence
Introduction
The idea that religion has a tendency to promote violence is part of the
conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our
institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of churches to efforts to
promote liberal democracy in the Middle East. What I call the “myth of religious
violence” is the idea that religion is a transhistorical and transcultural feature of
human life, essentially distinct from “secular” features such as politics and
economics, which has a peculiarly dangerous inclination to promote violence.
Religion must therefore be tamed by restricting its access to public power. The
secular nation-state then appears as natural, corresponding to a universal and
timeless truth about the inherent dangers of religion.
In this book, I challenge this piece of conventional wisdom, not simply by
arguing that ideologies and institutions labeled “secular” can be just as violent as
those labeled “religious,” but by examining how the twin categories of religious
and secular are constructed in the fi rst place. A growing body of scholarly work
explores how the category “religion” has been invented in the modern West and
in colonial contexts according to specifi c confi gurations of political power. In
this book, I draw on this scholarship to examine how timeless and transcultural
categories of religion and the secular are used in arguments that religion causes
violence. I argue that there is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of
religion and that essentialist attempts to separate religious violence from secular
violence are incoherent. What counts as religious or secular in any given context
is a function of different confi gurations of power. The question then becomes
why such essentialist constructions are so common. I argue that, in what are
called “Western” societies, the attempt to create a transhistorical and
transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the
foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state. The myth of religious
violence helps to construct and marginalize a religious Other, prone to
fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-making, secular subject. This
myth can be and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalization of
certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the
nation-state’s monopoly on its citizens’ willingness to sacrifi ce and kill. In
foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social
orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of villain. They have not yet
learned to remove the dangerous infl uence of religion from political life. Their
violence is therefore irrational and fanatical. Our violence, being secular, is
