Religion and Violence

2018-2019

Do religions incite violence, or can they help to end it? How are religious factors identified in conflict situations? How is violence in religious texts to be interpreted? The complex relationship between religion and violence warrants a range of theological and interdisciplinary responses.

In December 2018, CTI collaborated with the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University (CSR) to bring together a characteristically diverse group of scholars to discuss these important and timely issues. The event, which took place at Princeton University, was an opportunity for CTI members to present their research in a public forum and in conversation with respondents from CSR.

CTI Member Wolfgang Palaver of the University of Innsbruck opened the symposium with his lecture, “Transforming the Sacred into the Holy: René Girard’s Approach to Violence and Religion.”

While focused on René Girard’s seminal book, La violence et le sacré, Palaver’s wide-ranging discourse took in recent research on violence among primates and humans; types of violence associated with different forms of religion; and religiously motivated violence and contemporary terrorism. Palaver set the scene for subsequent sessions on specific aspects of sexual violence and on the uses and misuses of violence in sacred texts; the first chaired by CSR Associate Director Jenny Wiley Legath with Jessica Delgado of Princeton University as Respondent; the second, chaired by CTI Associate Director Joshua Mauldin with Seth Perry of Princeton University as Respondent.

As is often the case with events that mark the culmination of a period of intensive research and collaborative dialogue, little time was wasted by participants already familiar with each other’s work. Lisa Le Roux, Stellenbosch University Sociologist Lisa Le Roux of South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, philosopher Louise Du Toit, also of Stellenbosch, and theologian David Tombs, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, offered very different perspectives. All, however, acknowledged the pressing concerns of today.

“What we are doing here is driven by a sense of urgency,” said Le Roux, plunging straightway into a feminist perspective on women’s agency and complicity in violence and in patriarchal systems and beliefs that subjugate them. Addressing the portrayal of women as intrinsically non-violent and the paradox of religious women’s compliance with restrictive doctrines, she described ways in which gender constraints created to counter inequality can contribute to gender inequality, especially in religious contexts. A better understanding of women’s agency, she argued, would help those seeking to understand and transform women’s lives for the better—feminists, development workers, activists, researchers—to engage in ways that respect very different worldviews.

An element of time travel was evident here: entering the past to make sense of the present; interrogating existing scholarship and traditional readings for insights and new interpretations for contemporary solutions.

Du Toit went back to the 19th Century to a troubled border in Southern Africa to investigate the sexual dimension of colonialism. Church hearings into adultery and physical abuse in the case of John Balfour, the son of a first-generation Christian convert, expose clashing socio-sexual codes and ways in which European patriarchal heterosexuality was used as a Christianizing or “civilizing” tool that did much to displace pre-colonial social, political, and religious systems. The time journey was of more than historical interest. As Du Toit explained, it bears on contemporary South Africa, where extremely high levels of sexual violence draw state, government, and other official responses and where “the complicity of Christian tradition with sexual violence is increasingly obvious.”

Tombs plunged further back in time to Rome in the early days of Christianity for a disturbing examination of torture. His “Crucifixion, Impalement, and the Palatine Graffito,” referenced a crude sketch, discovered in 1857, on a wall that was once part of Rome’s Imperial Palace. Dating to around 200 CE, it shows a person, assumed to be a slave, looking up at a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. The inscription reads: “Alexamenos worships his God.” In this era, it was a common slur against Christians that they worshiped a donkey-headed god and the drawing is understood as a mocking reference to Christ. Tombs looked squarely at the evidence for sexual violence being part of crucifixion in those days and explored, with sensitivity, the possibility of Christ having endured such abuse. Although the evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive, further investigation and understanding of the graffito, Tombs suggests, “could deepen the contemporary conversation on sexual violence within the churches.”

In the day’s second session, the University of Groningen’s Professor Emeritus of Ancient Hebrew Literature Ed Noort and Hannah Strømmen of the University of Chichester addressed the challenges of violence in religious texts. As earlier, the problems of today were ever present.

“Every text needs interpretation. Every interpretation needs wisdom. Every wisdom needs careful negotiation between the timeless and time,” offered Noort, quoting Jonathan Sachs. Arguing that new translations are needed for the future, Noort warned that while texts in their contexts offer possibilities for understanding, texts stripped of their contexts can be misused to terrible effect.

The action of Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo on 22 July 2011 proved illustrative. Strømmen described the killing of 77 people with many more hospitalized, most under the age of 20. Seeing himself as a modern-day crusader, Breivik legitimized his acts in terms of violent and militaristic imagery in the Bible. Far-right rhetoric, particularly the idea of a Christian West against Islam, pervades his online manifesto.

Strømmen described a method for identifying and perhaps pre-empting such violence. Noting how particular notions of the Bible have gained traction in the West, she described how “biblical assemblages”—assortments of images, texts, stories, characters, and material realities that make up particular bibles rather than fixed bodies of texts—can be used to identify trends in discourse. By mapping these developments in mainstream and fringe cultures, it may be possible to “spot other biblical assemblages gaining speed.”

Solutions were discussed in the closing panel on Dialogue and Reconciliation, chaired by CSR Director Robert Wuthnow with CSR Visiting Fellow Tanya Zion-Waldoks of Bar-Ilan University as Respondent. Founding Director of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, Antti Pentikäinen spoke of a new generation of Sámi activists in Finland who are tackling the impacts of colonialism and intergenerational pain. Sámi, the last indigenous people in Europe, experienced forced conversion to Christianity and assimilation. With the Finnish government, Pentikäinen helped launch a transformative truth and reconciliation process with the Sámi that could serve as a model for the wider community.

Ephraim Meir, Levinas Guest Professor for Jewish Dialogue Studies and Interreligious Theology at the University of Hamburg and a specialist in modern and contemporary Jewish philosophy, described his work constructing an interreligious theology with dialogue as its object and method. The day’s event perfectly illustrated what CTI Director William Storrar describes as a constant challenge for CTI scholars: working “in the tension between the moral urgency to resolve pressing contemporary problems and the necessity for slow, patient work that sheds light on their origins and evolutions.”

At the end of the day, all agreed that new understandings must be more widely disseminated into the mainstream and mobilized toward solutions for contemporary problems. Zion-Waldoks summed up the general feeling: “Fascinating and generative; these thoughts will stay with me long after I’ve left this room.