“In the end it comes to this, that if you want to exorcize conflict then erase history and eliminate difference. But be well assured that any such policy will be the occasion of the most ferocious conflict.” 1
The godless ideologies of communism and fascism killed their scores of millions, and now they, in their turn, are dead. But godlessness is not dead in the postmodern West. Far from it. It has merely abandoned its own former metanarratives. The new version of secularism, though, is every bit as bossy as its communist and fascist predecessors; it has become what I have called elsewhere the 'metanarrative of antimetanarrativism' and the 'absolutising of relativism' 2 — not simply a denial of meaning, but a denial to which all must submit.
This assumption has by now become so all-pervasive among Westerners as to be almost platitudinous. The equation between ‘belief system’ and ‘violence’ is virtually taken for granted.
And religions are unavoidably a belief system. So they must, according to postmodern Westerners, be simply a prelude to violence. When jihadists enact appalling terrorist acts in our cities, and religious violence explodes around the world, Westerners of all kinds consider themselves confirmed in making such an analysis. But it is a profound mistake, even so.
Against this misreading, I contend four main arguments. In the first place, it is clearly demonstrable that the attempts to replace religion with secularism — whether old style or new style — have not stemmed or even eased the flow of blood in the world, but rather have increased it.
In the second place, given that reality — that religion is not so easily dispensed with — it becomes imperative to inquire what kinds of religious beliefs are more likely, or less, to promote violent conflict. And the historical record indicates that primitive Christianity, along with its echoes down the centuries and in the present, is indeed what its Founder intended when he said “Blessed are the peacemakers”. That is because, although Christianity is certainly a metanarrative that claims to be ‘the truth’ in a sense which postmodern Westerners have lately come to find unacceptable, it does not seek to impose itself, and so is not a program for running society-as-a-whole. Even if its followers are not necessarily pacifists, they will not fight for that religion. The problem with ‘meaning’ and ‘belief systems’, then, does not lie with the fact of their existence. Rather, it lies in the insistence upon universalizing them.
In the third place, the contemporary wars in which religion is implicated are, for the most part, fought for the cultures and cultural values from which a particular faith is, for whatever historical reasons, inextricable. Secular metanarratives — whether communism, fascism or even liberal, free-market democracy — do not escape this circumstance. For they are, in effect, secular religions, for which people will fight.
Fourthly, there is no possibility of abandoning all ideas of truth; even the attempt to abandon it has become, in the West, a new and crushingly oppressive ‘truth’ of ‘anti-truth’ that its protagonists are incessantly seeking to universalize. And that attempt at universalizing the repudiation of traditional cultures along with their associated religions is itself generating new, persistent, and ferocious forms of warfare.
The assertion of 'some horizontal right against some vertical legitimacy' 3, of course, is the factor that unites almost all Western meddling in non-Western space, from neoconservative pressure upon dictatorships that have fallen foul of Washington or London, to the tying of feminist values or birth control to aid programs or the activities of the western-payrolled United Nations and its offshoots.
Postmodern Western secularism, by contrast, is highly individualistic. Its extreme squeamishness about risking the lives of its own citizens stems, not from its more-than-half-forgotten Christian legacy about each person being created in the image of God (Western states, after all, kill many hundreds of thousands of unborn babies in the womb every year), but rather from the loss of belief in many of the things (honour, duty, confidence in an afterlife) and the serious erosion of others (family, patriotism) for which young men were traditionally prepared to risk death. This world being all there is, and life being one long party of consumer goodies, few have any strong sense of a cause worth either killing or dying for — not even the defence of the endless party. (Indeed, the fact that the U.S. is rather less prone to this particular weakness than are the other Western powers almost certainly owes something to the relative strength of religious belief among Americans, especially among the less affluent groups from whom most soldiers are recruited.)
Certain forms of religion are more prone than others to lead to war. And the strongest and most persistent connection between religion, on the one hand, and belligerence or non-belligerence, on the other, is the issue of whether or not a religion claims, or actually possesses, a ‘corner’ on some state polity and the population that lives within that polity. If it does, then it is a potential — even a likely — cause of conflict at some point. And this is as true of Hinduism as it is of Christianity, of Confucianism and Buddhism 4 as of Shinto, Judaism or Islam.
It should be remembered that much recent secularist rhetoric on this subject also involves a verbal trick. The term ‘fundamentalist’ was coined during the second decade of the twentieth century, to refer to a particular view of biblical inspiration. It later became debased by journalists to refer to any traditional Christian position, on any topic, of which the person speaking disapproved. As it became clear, nearer the century’s end, that there were believers in other faiths who wouldn’t simply roll over and die when faced with the secularist West’s new shibboleths, the epithet was transferred to them too. So it is now possible for a speaker to refer to ‘the dangers of fundamentalism’ generally, in a way that implies that inherently violent radical Islamists (‘Muslim fundamentalists’) are somehow to be evaluated in the same category as the Pentecostals round the corner to whose cultural values the speaker has taken a dislike. Those who use such rhetoric are in serious danger of giving the game away: that their target is not actually religious violence at all; it is religion.
Sense, though, is not much in evidence in the current campaign to emasculate traditional cultures and lock religion indoors in the cause of world peace. Apart from the obnoxiousness of this project, even viewed in the abstract, aggressive secularism is itself just one more metanarrative crying out for universalization — and therefore productive of violent conflict between its promoters and those who resist it.
Universal political doctrines — whether religious or secular, socialist or capitalist, austere or consumerist — end up establishing de facto empires, proclaiming “Beyond the confines of the empire there is no salvation”. This is as true of the new crusade for universalizing liberal democracy (or of its antithesis, the Islamic jihad) as it was for socialism during the twentieth century, or for nationalism and republicanism during the nineteenth century, or for Catholicism or Protestantism during the wars of religion. Whether the ‘salvation’ proposed is religious or secular makes no essential difference to the equation of peace and war.
Although Martin Wright notes that, since the end of World War I, frantic efforts have been made to demarcate the distinction between peace and war, and to define precisely what might constitute an act of war, 'in practice the borderline has become more smudged than at any time since the Wars of Religion.' 5 And, we might add, for the same reason: doctrinal war, resulting from political utopianism, makes any ‘peace’ a mere tactical truce. It matters little, in terms of the consequences for peace or war, whether the protagonists proclaim that 'The survival of liberty in our land ... depends on the success of liberty in other lands' 6 ; or promote the ‘Clinton doctrine’ of ‘humanitarian [military] interventions’; or divide the world into the dar ul Islam (house of Islam) and dar ul harb (house of war), or exhort 'working men of all countries' towards “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”. Supporters of any 'armed doctrine' unavoidably intend, as Burke put it in respect of the French Revolutionaries, either 'to force mankind into an adoption of their system, or [else] to live in perpetual enmity' with them until they do so, making 'a schism with the whole universe' in the meantime.7
The consumerist West has indeed made 'a schism with the whole universe'. Its own protestations notwithstanding, it is a force for belligerence in the contemporary world. It has, in effect, undertaken a relentless war to 'erase history and eliminate difference'. Having succeeded at home, it is now in the process of extending its crusade (I choose my words advisedly) abroad, utilizing its massive dominance of the global economy, global media and communications, political and even military structures. When this accumulation of power is brought to bear against traditional belief systems, especially religions, along with the cultures that both enshrine them and are enshrined by them, the resultant explosion of violence is unsurprising.
Take a look around. Inside the West, religion is locked relentlessly indoors. Increasingly, its adherents are given no place to hide even there, as their children must be yielded up for compulsory socialization in secular schools; careers are made subject, formally or informally, to opinion-tests so as to exclude traditionalists; social, state and even legal support are withdrawn from marriage in one Western country after another. In Europe, enforcement of the new anti-morality is a precondition for a state to join the EU.
And outside the West economic, political, financial and cultural muscle are used by Western powers to secularize; aid programs and international organizations are used to promote birth control, abortion and easy divorce; advertising by multinationals promotes sexualized clothing. The consequent eruptions of anger are ‘wars for religion’.
But whose religion? At whose door must the blame be laid? The traditional religions and cultures of the earth? Or the ‘religion’ of repudiation and secularism that deconstructs the social, economic and familial structures of those cultures, as surely and incessantly as it deconstructed its own Western-Christian heritage?
Secularist Western consumer society has generally sought to portray itself as peace-loving. Yet the view that secular Western populations are essentially peaceful, and peaceful because secular, correlates not at all with the view from the non-West. There, Western secularism is perceived as both threatening and aggressive. Indeed, by its incessant and relentless expansionism, it is the cultural, moral and philosophical nihilism of Western consumerism that is generating warfare all around the globe. 'Erasing history' and 'eliminating difference' — Martin’s phrases — is precisely the project upon which Western secularism is actually embarked, both at home and abroad. And, as Martin has warned, it is indeed 'the occasion of the most ferocious conflict'.
Both sides of the political spectrum in the West have generally insisted that the secular consumer society is an essentially peaceful project which, if it could be universalized, would be a panacea for warfare. Though conservatives and liberals have often differed sharply over the West’s own uses of force, the tendency is nevertheless to see Western military adventures as either in fact (neoconservatives) or else in principle (liberals) merely defensive — a corrective to ‘fundamentalist’ violence or terror emanating from outside the safe prosperity of the West. The invasion of Iraq proved polarizing inside America and Britain; but military actions in Kosovo in 1999 and, immediately post-9/11, in Afghanistan were far less so.
Religion certainly is one of several important causes of war, both in the past and the present. But we need to recognize that its alternatives have proved uniformly catastrophic as a remedy for war. Old-style, state-embracing, polity-defining religion — most eye-catchingly in its Muslim form — vies for the soul of the world with the inheritor of Enlightenment, secular, political utopianism. A victory for either side would be a disaster for humanity, yet the struggle between them is making life ever more intolerable, dangerous and violent. Only real tolerance — the tolerance of different kinds of polity around the world, and of the cultural space that makes them possible — can save us from further descent into madness. And to that end, Christians — who know from Scripture and from their own painful, error-ridden past that their faith is not a basis for governing society-as-a-whole but a private choice and a transcendent calling — have far, far more to contribute than most.8
Meic Pearse is assistant professor of history at Houghton College in New York. He is the author of books on church history and social justice. Prof. Pearse's book, Tribal Gods: Is religion the principal cause of war? (American IVP) is due out at the end of this year.
Notes:
1. D.Martin, Does Christianity Cause War? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.19.
2. M.T.Pearse, Why the Rest Hates the West (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), p.169.
3. M.Wright, Power Politics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), cited in L.Freedman ed., War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.92-93.
4. Buddhism, of course, has a reputation for pacifism. Yet Buddhist Sinhalese fight to defend the ethnic and cultural identity of Sri Lanka against what they perceive as Hindu incursions. The Tibetan kingdom of the Dalai Lama was defended mostly by its extreme isolation — but it still possessed an army.
5. M.Wright, Power Politics, p.93.
6. G.W.Bush, 2nd inaugural address, Jan. 2005; K.Marx and F.Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), pp.120-121.
7. E.Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace in Select Works of Edmund Burke, E.J.Payne ed., (3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874-1878), 3.1.114-115.
8. These points are the principal subject matter of my Why the Rest Hates the West, esp. chs.1 and 2.
