Christianity & Violence: Justifying Killing in the Name of Religion (Book Notes: The Crusades)

Most Christian scripture speaks of peace and love rather than of war. Little that is attributed to Jesus really advocates violence; most advocates peace, love, and service to others. How, then, has Christianity managed to be so violent? Justifying violence and war hasn't been very hard, unfortunately.

In The Crusades: A History; Second Edition, Jonathan Riley-Smith writes:

For most of the last two thousand years Christian justifications of violence have rested on two premises. The first was that violence — defined crudely as as an act of physical force which threatens, deliberately or as a side-effect, homicide or injury to the human body — was not intrinsically evil. It was morally neutral until qualified by the intention of the perpetrator. If his intention was altruistic, like that of a surgeon who, even against wishes of his patient, amputated a limb — a measure which for most of history endangered the patient’s life — then the violence could be regarded as being positively good.

The second premise was that Christ’s wishes for mankind were associated with a political system or course of political events in this world. For the crusaders his intentions were embodied in a political conception, the Christian Republic, a single, universal, transcendental state ruled by him, whose agents on earth were popes, bishops, emperors and kings. A personal commitment to its defence was believed to be a moral imperative for those qualified to fight. Propagandists gave this theory expression in terms the faithful could understand: within the earthly extension to Christ’s universal empire the Holy Land was his royal domain or patrimony; Livonia (approx. Latvia) on the Baltic was the Blessed Virgin Mary’s private estate, a kind of queen mother’s dowery.

I don’t think that there are any religions where religious doctrines have not been brought in the service of justifying war and violence. I also don’t think that these religious doctrines were merely used as convenient “excuses” which people used for doing what they wanted to do in the first place. Perhaps this has been the case in some situations, but for the most part I think that people have genuinely and sincerely believed that war and violence were logical outcomes of their religions.

The fact that these religions also offer many statements on behalf of peace, love, and non-violence doesn’t change this. Religions offer contradictory statements on all issues, allowing people to find justification for just about any position within any religious tradition of sufficient complexity and age.

Religious belief systems are like any complex ideology or philosophy — which is to say that they don’t force only certain conclusions and no others. When it comes to non-religious belief systems, people have come to terms with this. They may not like it very much, but they accept that differences and disagreements are necessary. Religions, though, don’t typically allow for this and so we have people fighting over the One True Interpretation of religious tradition. This, ironically enough, merely serves to add to the violence.

 

Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.