Reviews of Karen Armstrong''s Fields of Blood [View all]

[struggle4progress]

Is Religion Inherently Violent?
EMMA GREEN
NOV 3, 2014

... When people make generalized arguments about the inherent violence of religion .. they're probably thinking of: the unapologetic, triumphalist bloodletting of the Crusades; the decades-long slaughter of the Thirty Years' War; and the dehumanizing murder sprees of contemporary jihad. And it is this kind of argument that motivated Karen Armstrong to write .. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence ...

... Any student of history could point out that conflicts from the campaigns of Genghis Khan to World War I had non-religious motivations. During the talks she has already given about the book, Armstrong told me in an interview, the first person to ask her a question always says something along these lines: No one actually believes that religion is the cause of all major wars in history.

But then for the rest of the talk, Armstrong said, audience members "are insisting that <religion> is the chief cause that is to blame." In her book, she writes that she has "heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics." Religion may not have caused all the wars in history, these people say, but it is inherently violent in a way that has undeniably shaped world history for the worse ...

Although the book is framed as a polemic response to what is essentially a straw-man question, Armstrong has isolated an interesting quality of contemporary discourse about religion: It's really, really vague ... Even posing the question at the center of Armstrong's book assumes that there's a unified thing called "religion" that has stayed constant over thousands of years of human life ...