Martin Luther King was a great apostle of non-violence. Picture: AP
‘Deus Vult” which can be translated as “God wills it” or “God willing” was the phrase used by Pope Urban II to launch the First Crusade in 1095.
It was a response to a cry for help from Eastern Orthodox Christians who were suffering Muslim invasion and conquest. The bloodiness that came later in the Crusades and is used to this day as a whip to beat the Church often overlooks the cause which places Christendom as a defender of justice rather than aggressor.
That is not to say that Christians through history were not at times instigators of bloodshed but any examples that may be cited of people of religious belief fighting one another or others on religious grounds does not offer any basis whatsoever for claiming that violence is linked to religion rather than simply to human nature.
It is a claim without any foundation whatsoever and shows an astounding ignorance of both history and religion.
Human nature is one with violence in the way that nature is one with rapine. The tenets of the Christian faith direct us to not alone conquer the urge to violence but to make friends with our enemies.
The message of Christ, heralded as “the prince of peace”, is one of peace to the point of turning the other cheek. His teaching is anticipated in the Old Testament in images such as swords being turned into ploughshares and the wolf lying down with the lamb.
Through the scriptures, there is of course a recognition of the nature of humankind in a fallen world and again and again we have stories of strife and struggle, wars and holocausts.
The biblical call to justice, reconciliation and peace speaks to the violence in the heart of humankind. Violence is the context of the message of peace. Otherwise, it would not have been necessary.
It is very demonstrable from the pages of recent history that most violence comes from those who are without religious belief or hostile to the very idea. In the 20th century, the greatest violence was perpetrated by avowed atheists.
Millions died under the Stalinist regime in the endless wastes of the Gulag. In China, during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, 45m died. Hitler, whose religion was social Darwinism, said that Christianity was opposed to the natural law of selection and survival of the fittest: it was that philosophy that brought six long years of violence on the world in which millions perished.
Adolf Hitler
The Cold War between the Communist East and the Capitalist West, which came perilously close to a nuclear inferno in 1963 with the Cuban missile crisis, had nothing to do with religion.
Elsewhere in the world in the latter half of the 20th century ethnic conflicts, the worst of which occurred between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and the dirty wars of state repression and persecution in several South American countries, arose from clash of ideologies and interests and not from any religious cause.
To claim that there is some inherent link between religion and violence is more absurd than claiming a link between a particular nationality and violence, or a particular political ideology and violence.
It would be much easier to mount a case for a link between British people and violence given their colonial history and the fact that they appear as players in most of the great wars of history as well as generating a fair amount of home grown, bloody wars and battles too.
Something similar might be said of Germans or Americans US or Russians. Easiest of all, however, is to establish a link between violence and the ideological, institutional atheism of the 20th century.
It may be argued from the same pages of history that religion has led many people to actively promote peace in places of conflict.
Christians do not of course have any monopoly in this and one has only to think of Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu who was the great apostle of non-violence in the early 20th century.
A notable Christian example is the great Martin Luther King, the leader of the American civil rights campaign of the 1960s. The collapse of the Iron Curtin during the early 1990s through a series of “velvet revolutions” was in no small way helped by the peaceful, diplomatic exertions of another great religious figure, Pope John Paul II.
Yes, you can point to violence in the pages of the Bible. In fact when there was only one family in the narrative with only two sons, one of them Cain, murdered the other, Abel. That was not promoting violence: It was acknowledging its reality.
However, as the biblical narrative moves along down the generations the idea of reconciliation is gradually developed. A later family of brothers sell their father’s favourite, Joseph, into slavery but are forgiven by him many years later when their fortunes are reversed.
With the entry of Jesus into the history of Israel, an overwhelming emphasis is placed on peace and forgiveness. He tells Peter that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
And, can anything be more radically anti-violence than turning the other cheek to your assailant? It is a trope rather than a literal instruction but it makes the point. When Christians engage in violence and there is no denying that they do, it is not because of their faith but despite it.
Yes, there has been violence based on religious difference and yes and there have been religious wars but in the tapestry of human conflict they are very far from being the dominant strands.
In the context of Islamist terrorism, the religion of those involved is without doubt a large part of their motivation. Can they find justification in the pages of the Koran? It is disputed but it is certainly possible to find passages there that are equivocal in their denunciation of violence.
The same might be said for selected passages of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures but they must be read against the call to mercy and forgiveness which is the base doctrine of the Christian faith.
Nobody can dispute that Islamist violence, with its manic barbarity and disregard for any life — including the lives of their own adherents — is as horrific as any manifestation of violence the world has ever seen.
It does not offer a basis, however, for concluding religion of its nature tends to violence. The tendency is in human nature. The Christian faith — and perhaps others too — offer a remedy.
The remedy cannot be said to have failed where it has not been applied.
Margaret Hickey
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