grounding of the social structure, and thus the basis of political order. The head of state
was
the head of the religion. The king, ruler or pharaoh was either a god or a son of the gods or the chief intermediary with the gods. Civilisation had toundergo a revolution before it learned to separate the two. That was where Abrahamic monotheism came in, but that is a story for a later chapter.
—
We can now answer the question of the relationship between religion and violence, as well as that of the dual nature of human beings, capable of great good but also of great evil. We are good and bad because we are human, we are social animals and we live, survive and thrive in groups. Within groups we practise altruism. Between them we practise aggression. Religion enters the equation only because it is the most powerful force ever devised for the creation and maintenance of large-scale groups by solving the problem of trust between strangers.
Violence has nothing to do with religion as such. It has to do with identity and life in groups. Religion sustains groups more effectively than any other force. It suppresses violence within. It rises to the threat of violence from without. Most conflicts and wars have nothing to do with religion whatsoever. They are about power, territory and glory, things that are secular, even profane. But if religion can be enlisted, it will be.
If, then, violence has to do with identity, why not abolish identity? Why divide humanity into a Them and Us? Why not have just a common humanity? This, after all, was the utopian hope of prophets like Zechariah who imagined a time when ‘The Lord will become king over all the world. On that day the Lord will be one, and his name will be one’ (Zech. 14:9). A world without identities would be a world without war.
There have been three major attempts in history to realise this dream, and it is immensely important to understand why they failed. The first was Pauline Christianity. Paul famously said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female’ (NIV, Gal. 3:28). Historically, Christianity has been the most successful attempt in history to convert theworld to a single faith. Today a third of the population of the world is Christian. But nations continued to exist. So did non-monotheistic faiths. Another monotheism arose, Islam, with a similar aspiration to win the world to its understanding of the will of God. Within Christianity itself there was schism, first between West and East, then between Catholic and Protestant. Within Islam there were Sunni and Shia. The result was that war did not end. There were crusades, jihads, holy wars and civil strife. These led some people to believe that religion is not a way of curing violence but of intensifying it.
The second attempt was the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. After a devastating series of religious wars there was a genuine belief among European intellectuals that the divisions brought about by faith and dogma could be transcended by the universal truths of reason, philosophy and science. Kant produced a secular equivalent of the idea that we are all in the image of God. He said: treat others as ends, not only means. He also revived the prophetic dream of Isaiah, turning it into a secular programme for ‘perpetual peace’ (1795). Its most famous expression was Beethoven’s setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, with its vision of a time when
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
– ‘All men become brothers.’
This too did not last. The age of reason was succeeded by Romanticism and the return of the old gods of nation and race. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the
was
the head of the religion. The king, ruler or pharaoh was either a god or a son of the gods or the chief intermediary with the gods. Civilisation had toundergo a revolution before it learned to separate the two. That was where Abrahamic monotheism came in, but that is a story for a later chapter.
—
We can now answer the question of the relationship between religion and violence, as well as that of the dual nature of human beings, capable of great good but also of great evil. We are good and bad because we are human, we are social animals and we live, survive and thrive in groups. Within groups we practise altruism. Between them we practise aggression. Religion enters the equation only because it is the most powerful force ever devised for the creation and maintenance of large-scale groups by solving the problem of trust between strangers.
Violence has nothing to do with religion as such. It has to do with identity and life in groups. Religion sustains groups more effectively than any other force. It suppresses violence within. It rises to the threat of violence from without. Most conflicts and wars have nothing to do with religion whatsoever. They are about power, territory and glory, things that are secular, even profane. But if religion can be enlisted, it will be.
If, then, violence has to do with identity, why not abolish identity? Why divide humanity into a Them and Us? Why not have just a common humanity? This, after all, was the utopian hope of prophets like Zechariah who imagined a time when ‘The Lord will become king over all the world. On that day the Lord will be one, and his name will be one’ (Zech. 14:9). A world without identities would be a world without war.
There have been three major attempts in history to realise this dream, and it is immensely important to understand why they failed. The first was Pauline Christianity. Paul famously said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female’ (NIV, Gal. 3:28). Historically, Christianity has been the most successful attempt in history to convert theworld to a single faith. Today a third of the population of the world is Christian. But nations continued to exist. So did non-monotheistic faiths. Another monotheism arose, Islam, with a similar aspiration to win the world to its understanding of the will of God. Within Christianity itself there was schism, first between West and East, then between Catholic and Protestant. Within Islam there were Sunni and Shia. The result was that war did not end. There were crusades, jihads, holy wars and civil strife. These led some people to believe that religion is not a way of curing violence but of intensifying it.
The second attempt was the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. After a devastating series of religious wars there was a genuine belief among European intellectuals that the divisions brought about by faith and dogma could be transcended by the universal truths of reason, philosophy and science. Kant produced a secular equivalent of the idea that we are all in the image of God. He said: treat others as ends, not only means. He also revived the prophetic dream of Isaiah, turning it into a secular programme for ‘perpetual peace’ (1795). Its most famous expression was Beethoven’s setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, with its vision of a time when
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
– ‘All men become brothers.’
This too did not last. The age of reason was succeeded by Romanticism and the return of the old gods of nation and race. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the
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