Are Religion and Peace Compatible?

Are Religion and Peace Compatible?

by Gerald McDermott

This was the question I was asked to address at an inter-faith gathering. I was the lone Christian speaker on a panel that also featured a Muslim, a Buddhist, and a rabbi.

I started by saying this is the wrong question.

Yes, I told them, we've all heard the truism, "More blood has been spilled in the name of God than anything else." As the poet Sean O'Casey put it, "Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands." These statements inspire us to vow, "Never again! We will work to make sure religion is not responsible for violence yet again!"

But is it true, I asked, that religion has done more than anything else to inspire violence?

Not really, I replied. The fact of the matter is that while this may have been true before the 20th century, it no longer is, after the bloodiest century in human history. Now, we must say, after a sober look at the historical record, that irreligion has done far more to inspire killing than religion ever has. The French Revolution, long before the 20th century, initiated a sad pattern of irreligion persecuting faith.

In this case the persecution was in the name of the so-called Religion of Reason, and turned into a bloodbath. Between 2000 and 5000 priests who refused to swear before the altar of Freedom were executed, as well as dozens of nuns, and countless lay people. Many others died in prison. All told, 18,000 were executed on the guillotine, in the name of revolution dedicated to the extermination of Christian religion.

But this was a drop in the bucket compared to the atheistic totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. In 1999 a team of French scholars published the mammoth tome, The Black Book of Communism, from Harvard University Press, which was the first systematic compilation of the deaths resulting from various communist regimes in the twentieth century. Their research was possible only because of the opening up of archives in former totalitarian states after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.

These scholars found that atheistic regimes killed 25 million people in the former Soviet Union, 65 million souls in China, and 1.7 million human beings in Cambodia. They didn't even bother with the as-yet uncalculated hundreds of thousands of deaths from more recent atheistic regimes-North Korea, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah

These numbers, taken together, dwarf the extent of violence in all of history's religious wars and inquisitions and witch burnings put together. The numbers aren't even close.

So the question ought not to be whether religion and peace are compatible, but whether irreligion and peace can coexist.

And the questions ought not stop there. The next question should be not about religion generally but religions in particular.

Does it make any sense to talk about religion in general? The "great world religions" see the basic human problem differently and have very different solutions. Despite what we often hear, they are not all climbing the same mountain, but different mountains. They don't have the same goal.

For example, they don't even agree on whether there is a god. The Buddha, for example, was for all practical purposes an atheist. He said there were various gods and demons, but that none of them could help us get to where we needed to go. None was a Creator of any sort, or in short what we call God.

Philosophical Buddhists, and philosophical Hindus and Daoists all agree there is no god-that is, a personal Being--and certainly not one who created the world. They see nothing in the same way as do those religions that believe there is a personal god. And even those Hindus and Buddhists and Daoists who do believe in personal gods disagree on the chief god and how to reach that god.

So there is no one thing that all the religions have in common-even belief in a god or higher power-which would be required for us to believe there is such a thing as religion-in-general.

The real question, then, is which religion we are talking about when we talk about so-called religion and peace. For even within religions, there are huge differences. As Pope Benedict XVI said in his Regensburg address, there are destructive and diseased forms of religion, and other forms that are constructive and healing. We Christians must concede that there are diseased forms of Christianity, such as that which captured the holy city of Jerusalem during the Crusades and indulged in a bloodbath of both Muslims and eastern orthodox Christians.

But there was also Martin Luther King's Christianity that taught non-violent resistance to violence, in the name of Jesus Christ, and led middle-class white America to a reconsideration of race. And there was the Christianity of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador, who condemned terror and death squads, defending the rights of poor peasants against powerful landowners. For that he was shot through the heart while saying Mass on 24 March 1980.

When we speak of Islam, are we talking about Sufi Islam, which tends toward peace? Or Wahhabi Islam, which suggests that non-Muslims and certain other Muslims should be killed?

And what about Hinduism? Are we talking about the militant brand which denies religious freedom to Muslims and Christians, and sometimes kills them? Or that peaceful and constructive brand of Hinduism that Mahatma Gandhi developed?

A third question we need to ask is whether peace is always the best thing. I suspect that most black slaves in America in 1860 believed that continued peace between a free North and defiant South was a threat to their freedom. And that Jews being held in Hitler's concentration camps in 1944 would not have felt comforted by talk of a sudden peace which would have left Hitler's killing machinery intact.

Or that the thousands of Christians and others being tortured in North Korea today, and perhaps even millions of their oppressed and impoverished fellow citizens, believe that continued peace with Kim il-Sung is not the best thing for their own welfare.

In situations like these, those who call for peace at any price are regarded by victims of murderous regimes as complicit in the evil of those murderous regimes.

Don't get me wrong, I said to this mixed group. I am not saying that peace is bad, and that religion should not make peace. What I am saying is that at certain times and places, when egregious evil has the upper hand, peace is not always the greatest good.

I concluded with five summary assertions:

1. When thinking about religion and peace, we need more critical thinking and fewer simplistic platitudes.

2. We should realize that irreligion can be just as dangerous as religion, and that hostility to religion in fact has been more destructive in history than religion itself.

3. We should ask not about religion in general and peace in general, but rather about which religion and which brand of each major world religion.

4. We should also be asking about which kind of peace. For the wrong kind of peace can sometimes encourage radical evil.

5. As a Christian, I believe that God has planted within each of us a desire for truth, beauty and goodness. But there is also within us an evil self-obsession that is never extinguished. That is why religion is often a mixture of good and bad. It is also why we should distinguish between those religions which recognize that capacity for evil (and so do not kill God's prophets) and those which don't. The religions that acknowledge their own tendency to be corrupted are also those that want to restrict secular government from getting too much power-power that is often used to destroy true peace.

Most of the speakers and the audience that night did not like my suggestions that some religions foment war, and that peace is not always the best thing. Most seemed to agree with the rabbi, who was of a modernist Reform bent. She said she "emphatically" disagreed with my contention that religion-in-general doesn't exist, and insisted that evil comes not from religion but from politics. The Buddhist spoke of world peace that would result from Buddhist principles.

When I objected to the general consensus that conversion should always be ruled out of inter-religious dialogue, and proposed that non-coercive religious persuasion should be permitted, most in the audience and on the panel erupted in anger.

Only the Muslim, who was a Sufi, agreed that evangelism should be allowed. One person in the audience reported, to the enthusiastic agreement of most, that only Christianity tries to convert others. I was the only one to disagree, explaining that Islam and many other religions also proselytize.

This inter-religious gathering was like many others I have joined. They demonstrate remarkable inter-religious ignorance, and sometimes they help dispel a bit of that ignorance. But mostly they illustrate what few seem to realize today, that the world religions point to different gods and teach very different things.


---Gerald McDermott is Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion at Roanoke College. His most recent books are The Baker Pocket Guide to World Religions (Baker Books) and Understanding Jonathan Edwards (Oxford University Press, Nov. 2008).

source: http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8976