Religion and war: A synthesis

ABSTRACT

This chapter draws on the papers in this volume to help develop a global comparative perspective on religion and war. It proceeds by establishing two forms of religiosity: immanentism, versions of which may be found in every society; and transcendentalism, which captures what is distinctive about salvific, expansionary religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. This chapter does not suggest that either immanentism or transcendentalism enhance the likelihood of collective violence in themselves. It does, however, argue that these types of religiosity are distinctive in how they drive war, allow enemies to be identified, and rationalize or legitimize collective violence. Some of the paths by which societies may become more bellicose (prone to war) or martial (heavily shaped by a military ethos) are sketched out and certain elective affinities between imperial expansion and transcendentalist systems are proposed. The place of Confucianism in this interpretative schema is discussed towards the end. Many scales of comparison are considered throughout, especially whether the categories of ‘transcendentalism’, ‘monotheism’ or ‘Christianity’/‘Islam’ afford the most comparative insight in understanding patterns of violence.

KEYWORDS:

• War
• religion
• immanentism
• transcendentalism
• imperialism
• monotheism

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Azfar Moin, Harvey Whitehouse, Vic Lieberman, Jeroen Duindam, Philippe Buc, and all the contributors to this volume for their comments on drafts of this chapter I would like to thank Karin Jirik for her hard work in making the bibliography presentable, and Marshall Sahlins for discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are naturally many exceptions, notably Descola (2013), and Sahlins’ work on the Stranger-King phenomenon (Graeber and Sahlins 2017).

2 For a reassessment of the place of ‘civilizational’ analyses in anthropology (see Arnason and Hann 2018).

3 This is apparently open to criticism as a matter of fact insofar as European contemporaries did deploy an equivalent vocabulary (Benedict 2016). I shall also suggest that transcendentalist traditions more generally did allow for something like ‘religion’ to be extracted from and set against other spheres of life in emic terms.

4 When a virulent form of far-right terrorism then burst into the limelight it became much easier for commentators with these concerns to acknowledge that the circulation of ideology in the broadest sense – bundles of ideas, values, narratives, concepts – was critical in understanding such acts of appalling violence.

5 Or rather, transcendentalism with its ‘offensive’ qualities (see below) suitably neutered and its irenic qualities suitably enhanced for the sake of public amity. Indeed, what public comment tends to understand by ‘religion’ is essentially transcendentalism (and in polite public discussion, irenic transcendentalism). For a discussion of the ‘vast outpouring of work’ arguing that religion ‘is an antidote to violence and conflict’ (see Crosson 2020, 46–52, 250–251). Crosson’s work is an ethnographic exploration of Obeah in Trinidad, which his interlocutors widely associate with the capacity to cause harm, amongst other outcomes. This has awkward implications for attempts to bring it under ‘freedom of religion’ provisions that assume that true religion is peaceful. Obeah, like all immanentisms, fundamentally proceeds under the sign of power.

6 Hence Buc (2015, 6) refers to the patterns he will identify in Christian violence as having ‘sometimes great force, but never obligatory force’, and see the highly sensible discussion on page 9.

7 Buc makes a related point that the sixteenth-century confessional state in Europe can hardly be considered to have reached into and instrumentalized some pure religious field, when the rise of the state had long entailed the mobilization of religious mechanisms.

8 Also note Parry (1998).

9 The place of Hinduism and Confucianism is explored in Strathern (forthcoming).

10 It is defined by 15 characteristics in Strathern (2019).

11 One reason why transcendentalism fits the definition of religion provided by Benn a little less readily is that although the salvific urge may be funnelled through relations with non-human beings (as in monotheism), this may be much less the case in other versions, especially Theravada Buddhism. But see Strathern (2019, 5, ft 11) for reasons why Theravada Buddhism is less anomalous than it may seem in this regard.

12 In its monotheistic form, David Hume ([1757] 1889, Section X) described this inversion of values thus: ‘Where the deity is represented as infinitely superior to mankind, this belief, though altogether just, is apt, when joined with superstitious terrors, to sink the human mind to the lowest submission and abasement, and to represent the monkish virtues of mortification, penance, humility, and passive suffering, as the only qualities that are acceptable to him.’

13 Some interesting forms of proto-transcendentalism have developed in societies that were otherwise shaped by immanentist traditions. I am not aware of any convincing arguments to that effect for the Aztec or the Iroquois/Huron cases – though see note 32 for further reflection on the Aztec case. For a reading of Aztec culture in a deeply immanentist vein (see Maffie 2014).

14 Equally, such societies may claim that a particular deity or oracle has demanded they go to war, but this is something different. In immanentist settings, the web of social relations out of which conflict arises includes metapersons as well mortals, after all. Metapersons are agents, allies or partners, just as human groups can be.

15 Assmann (2010, 18–20; Buc 2015, 16). The Aztecs incorporated the patron gods of defeated rivals in their Templo Mayor precinct. Pennock tells us that: ‘these were not seen as “foreign gods” so much as alternative incarnations of familiar deities, which were merely being rearranged to reflect shifting power relationships’.

16 Pennock (2022).

17 These are a widespread element in the repertoire of immanentist societies, but Whitehouse and McQuinn (2013) also find functional equivalents in traumatic initiation rituals deployed by modern militias, or indeed simply the experience of the terrors of combat. See also Whitehouse et al. (2014).

18 Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992) illustrates the reductive nature of some Western/Christian discourses of African religion (22–24), while also underlining the fundamentally immanentist features of what he refers to as ‘traditional religion’ (107–121), especially its overriding concern (contra symbolist readings) with the manipulation of relations with metapersons in order to generate this-worldly outcomes such as good health.

19 Such forms of communication were, however, open to a great deal of interpretation: ancestors and spirits spoke through dreams and stones, through entrails and storms, and it was always a matter of dialogue, as Reid underscores. The inherent flexibility of these forms of communication enhanced their responsiveness to societal needs and ambitions. It may be that this allowed for a certain pragmatism unavailable in certain scenarios where transcendentalism prevailed, but it does not at all entail the causal irrelevance of religious culture in general. See also Buc (2016a, 8).

20 According to Pennock, this is one feature that would not find a direct equivalence for the Aztecs.

21 Adorno (2007, 4): ‘the incandescent core of the Spanish American literary tradition is constituted by the writings that debated the right of the Spanish conquest in the Americas and the treatment of their native inhabitants’. Thanks to Natalie Cobo for drawing this to my attention.

22 Harvey Whitehouse (2018) acknowledges various ways in which forces such as nationalism and world religions might, in certain circumstances, create forms of ‘extended fusion’ (grounded in personal experience and therefore a more powerful force than mere identification). Nevertheless, he is sceptical of the role of ‘doctrines and ideologies religious or otherwise’ in motivating violent extremism, in favour of the importance of ‘a particularly intense love of the group.’ This does not deny, however, that cultural systems differ in the extent to which they can create extensive identities providing the basis for ‘intense love’.

23 This is to remain genuinely open: this approach holds promise as well as risk.

24 Indeed, certain forms of immanentism might need to be re-created to ensure more inclusive religio-political boundaries.

25 Cooper (2019, 241). Momigliano (1986) argued that monotheism was a disadvantage for political unity.

26 It must be emphasized that immanentist polities developed powerful and flexible means of incorporating (and subordinating) the metapersons of dominated peoples (see Strathern 2019, 117–132). This has quite different implications for the question of identity, however.

27 In one sense, there is merit in locating the ultimate origins of this in the revolutionary potential of all Axial Age philosophies (cf. also Viveiros de Castro and Danowski 2020).

28 ‘An imminent transformation of society through the agency of supernatural forces and beings such that it is lifted into a permanent, idealised, utopic state’ (Strathern 2019, 327). It is true that there are grounds for thinking that immanentist cultures could engender such movements – even if we see this most fully expressed in moments in which they had encountered a transcendentalist tradition. However, where an immanentist worldview predominated, the transition to a millennial utopia was effected through ritual activity; in transcendentalist settings it drew upon a broader ideological challenge to the status quo and was effected through the capacity of the group to incarnate ethical, epistemological and soteriological purity. By making the utopian state so palpably imminent, these movements generate unusual social power and potential for violence. Compare Buc (2016a, 7–8; 2021, 7–9), which sees the Crusades and other phenomena as eschatologically driven.

29 The Islamic world was geographically vaster than the European/American Christianity Buc (2015) considers, and so may be more heterogeneous. But it would still be possible to identify common patterns that set it apart from the non-Islamic world (see for e.g. Cook 2014, xvii, xviii). Buc (2020) compares some very diverse ‘Islamicate polities’ with Western Christianity.

30 Subsequent to drafting this, I found that much of what I say below in comparing Islam and Western Christianity is anticipated in Buc (2020), who observes (4) that ‘In both, there is a strong correlation between holy war and societal reform. In both, there are notions of just war and of proper behaviour at war. In both, there is a virtuality for radical, purgative violence. In both, holy war takes place in a God-willed temporality and involves a sacralized space. In both, finally, there exists a critique of holy war.’

31 The Introduction to Moin and Strathern (2022), refers to pollution avoidance as ‘purity’, and explains how this operated very differently in its immanentist and transcendentalist forms.

32 There is a scholarly approach that reads Aztec religion in terms of sin and expiation (Graulich 2000). However, much more convincing are those readings (Burkhart 1989; Sigal 2011) that underline the way in which typically immanentist preconceptions with chaos vs disorder (the due arrangement of space, time, matter) were then translated by Spanish writers and missionaries in terms of their own transcendentalist assumptions concerning good and evil, virtue and sin. On the generative and flux-borne dualisms of immanentism, compare the Andean societies analysed by Peter Gose (2022).

33 It is because ‘spiritual’ covers both an immanentist and a transcendentalist meaning, that it may be a source of confusion as an analytical term.

34 Reformist movements in general might take an irenicist form, if we consider monks, holy men and women, and communities inspired to live out radical non-violence as part of an ascetic ethos. Reformist movements targeting immanentism more frequently entailed violent collective action.

35 Buc (2016a, 2016b, 2019, 2020) refers to some important common ground between Japanese Buddhism and Christianity, noting, for example, that ‘there existed a minor potential in Japanese Buddhism for holy war, checked most of the time’ (2020, 9), and some important differences.

36 Buc (2020, 9), does note an invocation of Devadatta from twelfth-century Japan, deployed by Nara monks casting the struggle against Taira no Kiyomori in holy war terms.

37 There are some fascinating examples of Japanese Buddhist sects which formed exclusivist identities, the Jōdo Shinshū and Hokke-shū (Tsang 2007; Stone 2014; Buc 2016b, 2021; Strathern, forthcoming), but in general the lack of exclusivism in the Indic traditions is a major structural contrast with the Abrahamic.

38 One of the first deities to be identified as a Bodhisattva was a god of war, Hachiman, and histories of his head shrine at USA retell his efforts in quelling a rebellion by the Hayato people in the early eighth century. This was a ‘divine war’ led by warrior-priests (see Strathern 2020; Law 1994).

39 Marshall Sahlins (2022) offers an in-depth comparative exploration of immanentist ontology. Bowie (2011) refers to a ‘traditional world view that, looks out on a universe which is personal in several different senses. Physical forces are thought of as interwoven with the lives of persons. Things are not completely distinguished from persons and persons are not completely distinguished from their external environment.’

40 Another would simply be the extent to which a given people’s mode of existence has come to depend on organized violence. This would include the ‘kinetic empires’ studied by Pekka Hämäläinen (2013), based on his work on the Comanches in North America but extendable to other highly mobile peoples who depend on the strategic deployment of violence to predate and profit from settled peoples, whether Vikings or Mongols.

41 There also seems to be a Khaldunian logic to the evolution of the Tang. The Tang dynasty emerged, Lorge tells us, out of a dynamic attempt to unify China after centuries of instability, and which drew upon the energies of the steppe peoples in order to create a multi-ethnic military. Yet by the late eighth century, under this ‘fairly martial dynasty’, there had developed ‘significant civil opposition to the military during the Tang era, and that this was expressed in the debates concerning the establishment of the temple to Qi Taigong as the martial equivalent to the civil temple venerating Confucius’. It is true that the Tang had stronger links to existing Chinese civilizational patterns than Khaldun’s tribes did with the societies he had in mind.

42 Surely relevant to this will be Elias (1978–1982).

43 In divinized kingship, the ruler is pushed into contiguity or equivalence with the gods, their humanity is effaced, and they are thereby granted unusual powers to thwart or enhance the worldly wellbeing of their subjects. See for example, Pennock (2022, p. 2), on the Aztec tlatoani and cihuacoatl. Transcendentalism, on the other hand, gives rise to righteous kingship, whereby the king is sacralized as a guardian of a system of truth-ethics-salvation. In themselves they may be mortal and human; but their responsibility is theoretically immense. Here it is the amoral or immoral dimension to political rule that must be effaced. The ruler is thereby able to draw upon a powerful discourse of his or her own exquisite legitimacy – and yet must also contend with a clerisy (Church, ulema, sangha) retaining great moral authority (Strathern 2019, Ch. 3).

44 Buresi, in correspondence.