In defense of the scapegoat – A review of “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” by Karen Armstrong

In the course of my (largely disparate) reading over the past couple of years I have read a couple of books that could be described as ranging from being skeptical of organized religion’s influence on society to being basically anti-religion. These books range from “god is not great: how religion poisons everything” by the late Christopher Hitchens; “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins; and “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris. A common thread running through many of these books and those  of others in the field is that religion and religious faith has being a net negative in the world and that some of the darkest and lowest acts of man have not occurred in spite of adherence to some faith tradition but have largely occurred because of it. This viewpoint is definitely not lacking in justification: human history is replete with examples of instances where people were driven to commit the most horrifying violent crimes because they felt some divine impulse to commit such acts. Given this background, I was quite pleased when I come across this book by the noted author and former nun, Karen Armstrong that sought to advance an argument against this potentially simplistic view of religion’s impact on the history of violence.


If I took away a central argument from this book, it will be that i) humans have had violent interactions with members of their society for all of our history; ii) for most of history, religious activities and beliefs formed the principal organizing template for most societies and provided the main (/only) opportunity for people to give meaning to their lives; (iii) as a result all human activities, including violent ones, were layered with spiritual significance; and (iv) as a result of this religious significance, religion came to be somewhat unfairly viewed as the reason for these acts of violence when they would have happened anyway. The author’s argument is quite persuasive. For most of human history, people in most human societies would have been completely puzzled by phrases such as “religious life” or “separation of church and state” – people had one life and it was deeply religious in nature. Religion pervaded everything: agriculture (praying for rain and a good harvest); government (remember the “divine right of kings”); healthcare (remember all the stories about the healing of the sick in the bible?); family (only the church could sanction marriages); warfare and conquest (remember the divinely-ordained conquering of Canaan in biblical times and Pope Alexander’s splitting of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in the 15^th century). The list goes on and on, but the general point to be made is the ubiquity of religious symbols and significance in the pre-Enlightenment world. The author gives detailed examples of these historical trends in the areas most impacted by some of the world’s most prominent faith traditions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism etc.) and the central roles these faith traditions played in the evolution of the societies in which they were dominant.  

In addition to the display of an encyclopedic understanding of the evolutions of the world’s major religions and societies, the author also advanced two important concepts that I found novel and compelling. The first is the necessary and foundational role of “structural violence” in creating the agrarian state: the precursor to modern states. The second concept is the redefinition of the sacred as something (an idea, a belief etc.) that people are willing to die for.

The author argues that in making a transition from hunter-gatherer societies, human beings had to embrace systematic and structural violence. Life was very simple and limited in hunter-gatherer societies: the rhythm of life was determined by the sporadic availability of wild plants and fruits for gathering and animals for hunting. The adults of each family gathered and hunted the food required at a given time. Everyone was involved in getting food and there was no surplus to speak of. In such a society wholly devoted to subsistence there could be no scientific, religious or aesthetic advancements. However, for civilization to advance a new class of thinking elite (priests, philosophers, architects etc.) had to develop and these people who are essentially “idlers”, in a strict agrarian sense, had to be maintained somehow. The only sure way to ensure this was to compel the peasant to do extra work in order to generate the surplus needed to maintain the elite. Since many humans are rational and will gladly stop working once their needs are met, “structural violence” became necessary to keep peasants in-line and busy generating the surplus required to keep the thinking elite fat and happy. Religion came in very handy as the hand maiden of this structural violence and from this unholy marriage came the birth of human progress.

While I found the idea of structural violence to be very interesting, I thought the related idea of defining the sacred as anything people are willing to die for to be the more novel of the two concepts. Redefining the sacred in this way allows a reader to see religion-inspired conflicts as only a subset of conflicts sparked by belief in sacred ideas and to identify secular sacred ideals as another big inspiration and motivator for conflict and bloodshed.

A good example of a time and place where secular ideals attained sacred status was in post-revolutionary France. The armies of Napoleonic France fought with as much fervor and fanaticism as any religiously inspired army led into battle by crucifix-bearing clergy. A flavor of the sacred nature that the Napoleonic armies attached to the ideals of their cause can be gleaned from the lyrics to the army’s main battle anthem, the Chant du Depart. The chorus of the song (below) could easily have come from a religious song and it shows that the believers in the revolution had essentially elevated the ideals of the republic to something akin to a sacred cult and for this cult the soldiers would gladly lay down their lives.
 

La République nous appellee	The Republic is calling us
Sachons vaincre ou sachons périr	Let's know how to vanquish or let's know how to perish
Un Français doit vivre pour elle	A Frenchman must live for her [the Republic]
Pour elle un Français doit mourir	For her [the Republic] a Frenchman must die

 Overall, I thought this was a very engaging and informative book that has led me to see the history of religion’s impact of society in a whole new light.