Faith and the Stake: Heresy and Religious Totalitarianism

Abstract

For the New Atheists religion is naturally driven to persecute in order to enforce and defend its truth claims. History, they contend, bears witness again and again to its need to suppress heterodoxy and freethought through violence. This chapter considers such characterisations against the history of the medieval persecution of heresy, a commonly identified archetype of religious malevolence. Prominent theories are examined which suggest that heresy-hunting was born of complex conflicts between local religious cultures and the ‘revolutionary’ social and political changes of the high Middle Ages. Johnstone argues that, far from an endorsement, this history offers a direct challenge to New Atheist claims that religious violence is interpretable in terms of innate and perennial tendencies within the faithful.