It appears that Steve Bannon believes Islamic values are antithetical to almost everything that’s American and even that Islam today is essentially violent. At the same time, college students in my Introduction to Religion are certainly aware of the slogan that “Islam is peace.” Therefore it cannot be associated with disagreement and certainly not violence in any way. (One might just as easily quip that Christianity centers on “Jesus, the Prince of Peace,” and with that, we can be done with the history of violence in the name of Christ.)
To my mind, worst of all is the idea that “my religion” isn’t violent—and when it is, it’s not my religion. (And conversely, “your religion” is always violent.) Even the great Christian thinker Blaise Pascal realized that this is a phony rejoinder (the “No a True Scotsman” defense) and commented scathingly,
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Pascal
(If this topic doesn’t seem important question, can I remind you that this week Trump signed a revised travel ban, targeting Muslim-majority nations?)
Actually, none of these actually describes us what Muslims and Christians are doing today, or have done throughout the years. At the center of this controversy over religious violence lurks the human tendency toward oversimplifications, especially what is one of the most difficult realities to figure out: human nature... especially when fueled by religious devotion.
Is a true religion violent? Or, is a true religion anything but violent? The way we answer these two questions determines how we see religious violence in general and specifically when it’s related to Islam or Christianity. Despite Richard Dawkins beautiful rhetoric in The God Delusion about atheist politic leaders’( like Hitler) actually religious, secular governments in the past two centuries have been as violent as they come. Need I mention Pol Pot or Stalin? Violence and religion aren’t nearly as closely related as violence and humanity are.
We know that Muslims and Christians both commit violence—in case, we forget, various genocides, like Rwanda, were replete with scriptural quotations. (Watch Philip Jenkins on this topic.) We can’t evade this reality by asserting all religions say the same thing, nor by figuring that religion isn’t important anyway. Among university students and many secularists there’s either a deep desire to draw the best out of several religions or perhaps to see all religions as silly, and therefore not really worthy of such a fuss.
The “Coexist” sign I posted here has a point—a friend talked with those in my hometown Chico who had the bumper sticker on their cars, and few knew the religious symbolism in it nor had a commitment themselves to even one of the religions. Religious disputes might appear to many today like two rivaling factions of Olympic curling who are engaged in a knock-down disagreement over the rules of their sport. It simply sounds irrelevant. So why argue? But that approach doesn’t really move things forward because adherents to religions take their beliefs seriously—even to the point of fighting.
The things we can’t do is clearest to me: We can’t prevent Muslims from coming into the U.S. (whether covertly or not) because Islam isn’t the problem. We can’t eradicate religion as if that would solve the problem because human beings will be violent with or without religious devotion. We can’t take recourse in easy slogans like which religions have “peace” or “war” in their name or scriptures.
Slogans won’t do. The whole shebang is much messier and more human than all that. We need to sit down, really take in our differences, and stop calling each other names, even putatively positive ones that round off the hard edges of our convictions. Of course, we also need laws and law enforcement to prevent those who are planning violent actions and imprison those who do, whether from religious motives or not. Finally, it’s worth adding one more reason that preventing any religious group from entering our country won’t do. Because the problem lies deeper—at the core of human behavior and therefore among all religions or their secular alternatives.
In the end, we need to take religion seriously as a motivating force for human behavior. And thus the whole situation is entirely complex. Sometimes violent. Sometimes peaceful. And usually many other things as well.