Religion, Morality, and Violence

Is Religion Violent? Faith and Its Pervertibility

The main problem I want to address here is related to a kind of prosaic paradox, which everybody knows: on one side religions are a way of explaining the genesis of violence – for example in terms of spiritual evasion, like in the case of Kierkegaard’s vision – and a way of escaping it but, at the same time, insofar as religions are carriers of moral views (and take part in their “secular” construction) they constitute a great part of those collective axiologies I illustrated in chapter four, which are possible triggers of punishment. Moral axiological systems are inclined to be the condition of possibility of conflicts that can lead to violent outcomes. Currently we are clearly faced with the so-called “reenchantment of the world”, which consists in a revival of the centrality of religion in politics and media, and consequently religion appears to be at the center of a great part of people’s worries and concerns worldwide. This reenchantment has also been magnified by Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. This obviously coincides with the rise of new conflicts and violence, both at the in-group (fanaticism, racism, xenophobia) and out-group levels (violent terrorist attacks and the consequent “preventive wars”). It seems that morality, more than spirituality, plays the main role in individual and group religiosity, providing stable forms of identity and axiological well-defined systems. The link between violence and the sacred has also been masterfully depicted by Girard in his well-known books: Girard clearly shows that, when dealing with the sacred, we cannot distinguish between proto-religions (for example in the case of primitives or ancient people) and the great monotheistic religions. Both share similar structures of the sacred, even if various differences, for example in the ways of perpetration of the derived sacrifices, must be acknowledged.