William Cavanaugh on idolatry and violence
But surely, the objection might go, nobody really thinks the flag or the nation or money or sports idols are their “gods”—those [the word “desecration,” for example] are just metaphors. However, the question is not simply one of belief, but of behavior. If a person claims to believe in the Christian God but never gets off the couch on Sunday morning and spends the rest of the week in the obsessive pursuit of profits in the bond market, then what is absolute in that person’s life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God. Matthew 6:24 personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes.Suppose we apply an empirical test to the question of absolutism. Absolute is itself a vague term, but in the religion-and-violence arguments, it appears to indicate the tendency to take something so seriously that violence results. An empirically testable definition of absolute, then, might be “that for which one is willing to kill.” This test has the advantage of covering behavior and not simply what one claims to believe. Now, let us ask the following two questions: what percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? Whether we attempt to answer these questions by survey or by observing American Christians’ behavior in wartime, it seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state—Hobbes’s “mortal god”—is subject to far more absolutist fervor than religion. For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most would take for granted the necessity of being willing to kill for their country, should circumstances dictate.
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 55-6.
William Cavanaugh (like Thomas Merton, John L. McKenzie, Dorothy Day, John Dear SJ, Martin Luther King & Walter Wink etc.) is helping some of us in the Catholic community to discover that most of our religious traditions and rituals surrounding war & violence spring from an ancient primitive and historically traceable ongoing belief in some kind of myth of redemptive violence, rather than from a careful reading of our sacred texts and the authentic sources of divine revelation.
While religion & violence are frequently found together, there is no essential link between the two, except in some twisted and monstrous violation acheived by the power brokers of society, who are generally more interested in personal popular secular fame and fortune than religious values and truth. Think of the gospel scenario with Jesus confronting Pontius Pilate who asks: “What is truth?”
Truth incarnate was standing there before him, vulnerable and transparently redemptive as a living witness to the will of God for justice and peace.
Modern techniques of textual & historical criticism and thoughtful reflection have helped our serious religious scholars in all the great religious traditions to discover the consistent truth that the human spirit expressed in a variety of religions favours peace and harmony and shows how the abuse of force and the defense of violence has more to do with adherence to what can be called the “domination system” than pure religious and spiritual teaching.
I hope that Cavanaugh and others who are pursuing this theme can help us to correct the false impression that violence is rooted in religion and that the two are synonomous or congruent forces in society. For the sake of the earth and the future all of humanity, we must put an end to the myth of redemptive violence and help to transform society to an authentic civilization of love.