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Religion and the Legitimation of Violence
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11655 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
6,915 Words |
| Author
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William R. Garrett
William R. Garrett is professor of sociology at Saint
Michael's College, Colchester, Vermont. He is former president
of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. His latest
book is titled The Social Consequences of Religious Belief. |
Violent action undertaken in the name of religion is not a wholly new phenomenon in human affairs. Religiously legitimated wars, revolutions, pogroms, and crusades against a rival faith appear with uncanny frequency in the histories of both the Occident and the Orient. Mounting empirical evidence of the last two decade makes this conclusion incontestable: A rapidly increasing number of contemporary religionists are being inspired by the dogmas of their faith to beat their plowshares into swords.
Three salient features make the recent resurgence of radical religious violence so noteworthy: (1) its extraordinary virulence at precisely that time when many interpreters were reporting a trend in international relations toward a burgeoning secularity, along with a corresponding increase in the level of civility by which major religious communities were interrelated; (2) the tendency among many exponents of contemporary radical religion to embrace a stance aptly characterize by J.L. Talmon as "totalitarian democracy"; and (3) the momentous social consequences that radical religion of a totalitarian democratic cast is capable of unleashing on believers and nonbelievers alike in the post-modern world.
The Diverse Forms Of Contemporary Radical Religion
A definition of terms is called for at the outset. By radical religion, we mean that coterie of true believers who (1) subscribe to a fundamentalist or orthodox understanding of the basis tenants of their religion or sect; (2) relate those religious constructs to a set of social conditions which are variously defined as exploitive, repressive, or immoral so that (3) a substantive reformation of the social order is given warrant on sacred grounds. This definition casts as sufficiently wide net to encompass Catholic members of the IRA, Druse militia in Lebanon, Sunni and Shi'ite combatants in the Iraqi-Iranian war, Catholic supporters of Solidarity's struggle in Poland, liberation theologians and their followers n Latin America and elsewhere, as well as the more activist branches of the New Religious Right in the United States.
Radical religion is not cut from the same bolt of cloth everywhere, even when it appears in different societies under the aegis to the same denominational organization: Catholic radicalism in Poland, for example, is vastly different from the Catholic radicalism in Brazil. Contemporary radical religion can be divided into three basic types: (1) totalitarian right, (2) liberal democratic centrist, and (3) totalitarian
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