Religion and Violence
By Roger Sandall
Previously in Quadrant, December 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
St Augustine's Press, 2000
By Roger Scruton
The Sacred and the Human
By Roger Scruton
The Crusades in Context
By Paul Stenhouse
The only reason anybody's talking about "religion and violence"
is because of one specific religion, Islam, and because of the confused and
inadequate response to the depredations of Islamic extremists by their
accommodating Western hosts.
Roger Scruton is one of our most thoughtful and eloquent cultural critics.
Whether it's the contrast between sentimental fantasising and disciplined
imagination, or the simultaneous rise of aesthetics and the decline of religion,
or the musical massaging of the Spice Girls' soundtracks, Scruton is not just
worth reading — his comments are among the best on offer.
But even distinguished thinkers have their flaws, and England's leading
conservative philosopher has his. To start with there's an organic theory of
culture that is plainly and poignantly autobiographical. For Scruton, membership
of a tribal group sharing the same religious convictions, and bound by the same
religious authority, is the foundation of a healthy and natural human existence.
Membership of a solidaristic tribal order is what life in a healthy culture
means; and while expounding this view Scruton draws parallels between the cults
described by Frazer in The Golden Bough and the Christian Eucharist.
Scruton says much that is wise and much else that is doubtless true. His account
of funeral rites and birth ceremonies would be happily accepted by most
anthropologists, while the combination of intelligence and literary grace lifts
his writing to a higher level than anthropology alone allows.
He tells us that the rites of passage that accompany initiation, marriage and
the awakening of the tribe from peace to war "are all experienced collectively,
as revelations of the tie of membership. That is how the agony of a death is
overcome by those who survive it: death is regarded as a transition to another
state within the community."
Communal life, tribal life, corporate life in the sense of the eternal
corporation of the unborn, the living, and the dead, are here eloquently evoked.
Yet the result of tying a defence of Christian civilisation to the political
ideal of tribal solidarity soon becomes painfully clear.
First, in the cause of "the anthropology of religion" the entire 2000-year
Christian epoch is assimilated to a hodge-podge of Attic temple cults and Roman
augury, of treacherous oracles and spiteful spirits — being instantly reduced to
the same nondescript level of significance.
Second, despite the lusty tribal enthusiasm it always excites, the ideal of
indivisible politico-religious unity in the name of "culture" has one huge
disadvantage: it makes the military sins of Caesar also the sins of the City of
God. Analytically, it becomes difficult to distinguish political from religious
action. Practically, it lumbers religion with all the culpabilities of the
state.
Then there's the little matter of violence. Rhetorical sentences like "religion
is not the cause of violence but the solution to it" are treated by Scruton as
if they require no unpacking. Yet even a poorly informed secularist intuitively
feels that “violence" inadequately describes the act of sacrifice, when subtle
nuances of motive and belief and ritual are essential to understanding what is
taking place.
Scruton does not exactly describe sacrifice as violent. Yet his respectful
discussion of Jean Girard's theory of scapegoating, his suggestion that the
death of Christ is a transcendental form of the religious killing of goats as
offerings by Middle Eastern tribes, his view that sacrifices of this kind "solve
the problem of violence" in human societies cumulatively produce a vast blur of
associations.
But what all religion might do and what all violence might be are fatal
distractions. It's futile to get drawn into public debates with professional
atheists about the meaning of abstract sociological notions looked at in the
unlimited perspective of the past 5000 years. The real question is what to do
about militant Islamism today.
In the sort of books produced by Hitchens and Dawkins the Crusades are the usual
point of departure for one-sided historical accounts coupling Christianity and
violence. Dawkins takes this so much for granted that he can't even be bothered
discussing the matter. Hitchens regards the opportunity as too good to pass up:
there’s nothing to choose between Christians and jihadis, and the modern
atrocities of the latter could be seen as a delayed but appropriate response to
"the bloodstained spectre of the Crusaders".
As Paul Stenhouse points out in a recent study, The Crusades in Context,
Hitchens' "bloodstained spectre" is absurdly seen as the result of unprovoked
Christian aggression.
In the story Paul Stenhouse tells, the 463 years between the death of Muhammed
in 632 AD, and the First Crusade in 1095, were extremely dangerous for Christian
Europe. Instead of peace there were unrelenting Islamic wars and incursions;
Muslim invasions of Spain, Italy, Sicily and Sardinia; raids, seizures, looting
of treasure, military occupations that lasted until Saracen forces were forcibly
dislodged, sackings of Christian cities including Rome, and desecrations of
Christian shrines. All this went on for 463 years before any Christian Crusade
in response to these murderous provocations took place.
Sixteen years after the death of Muhammed, in 648 AD, Cyprus was overrun. Rhodes
fell in 653, and by 698 AD the whole of North Africa was lost. In 711 Muslims
from Tangier crossed into Spain, set their sights on France, and by 720 AD
Narbonne had fallen. Bordeaux was stormed and its churches burnt in 732. Only
the resistance at Poitiers of Charles Martel in 732 saved Europe and arrested
the Muslim tide.
From 800 on, incursions into Italy began. In 846 a Saracen force landed in
Ostia, assaulted Rome, and sacked and desecrated the Basilicas of St Peter and
St Paul. In 859 they seized the whole of Sicily. After capturing a fortress near
Anzio, Muslim forces plundered the surrounding countryside for forty years. In
southern France at the end of the ninth century they held a base near Toulon
from which they ravaged both Provence and Northern Italy, and controlled the
passes over the Alps, robbing and murdering pilgrims on their way to Rome. Genoa
was attacked in 934 and taken in 935. In 1015 Sardinia was taken, occupied, and
held my Muslim forces until 1050.
In 1076 the Seljuk Turkish capture of Jerusalem finally exhausted the patience
of Islam's victims in Christian Europe. Only then were concerted moves begun to
drive back the infidel, launch the First Crusade, and retake Jerusalem.
It is now impossible, in Britain, to state plain truths about the nature of
Islam on the one hand and the contrasting nature of Christianity on the other.
Martin Amis's suggestion that no-one can any longer "say anything is better than
anything else" is to the point.
Where Islam spread by the sword, Christianity mainly spread by precept and
example and the peaceful proselytising of missionaries.
AR There is certainly a major asymmetry between Christianity and Islam here.
