The vast majority of Christian moderates, it seems, are quite happy to ignore their faith's inescapable history of violence and intellectual corruption. Your unassuming churchgoer might not ignore it at all, but consider it for a moment before returning the universally robotic reply of, well, religion has always been used for violence. Excuse me? You'll forgive me if I seem bitingly cynical at this point, but I'm not exactly on thin ground to tell you that all Abramamic religions, including the charmlessly ingratiating one of Christ, provide in their religious texts incitements to murder, genocide, and violence in general. Surely, yet again, this isn't a surprise to anyone, especially not the lovely folk who frequent the world's churches each Sunday.
The Old Testament is a particularly thrilling read. Because it includes much of the silliness for which Christianity in particular is renowned, it's the chunk of the biblical canon which is most at risk when theists reach for their mental red pen. Incitements for genocide and violence, as well as the risk of having to actually live according to the silly (supposedly divine) injunctions on food and hygiene, may provide cause for some to pick and choose their favorite bits. You'll often find the intellectual defense for this selective approach to be that the Bible is a text which was written by numerous authors throughout the centuries, rehashed multiple times by multiple people. Nobody denies this, and the argument can work both ways. Even more reason, then, not to take it seriously.
Patrick Allitt, in his review of Philip Jenkins' Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, gives the following summary, brilliantly phrased, of the Bible's most disturbing passages:
The most painful passages come in the books of Joshua and Judges, which Jenkins describes as an “orgy of militarism, enslavement, and race war.” The Israelites, emerging from the desert after their escape from Egypt, attack Canaanite cities, whose people are described by the biblical narrator as very wicked. God commands the Israelites to exterminate the inhabitants—men, women, children, and animals alike, until nothing is left alive. Likewise in the Book of Samuel, King Saul eventually loses God’s favor not for his bloodthirstiness in war but for his restraint—he fails to annihilate his enemies. The prophet Samuel denounces him for sparing some of the Amalekites, takes up a sword, and personally hacks the captive King Agag to pieces. To make matters worse, says Jenkins, God sometimes deliberately “hardens the hearts” of other peoples, using them to chastise the sinful Hebrews. Then He raises up Judges, righteous Israelites, to smite and destroy them in turn. It’s almost as if He wanted the highest possible body count.Nobody can deny that the Bible may be full of metaphorical substance, and in fact the allegorical nature of the New Testament's parables and moral tales seems to confirm this contention — but surely the bible's author was being straight forward when it is said that the Amalekites ought to be destroyed. At least the god of the Old Testament as opposed to the New would reduce the need for questions like the one about bad things happening to good people. The ancient Greeks, in this sense, did indeed have it right: if there is a god or are gods, then he or she is certainly capricious, unloving, and liable to testiness at every turn. Christians are not alone in that they have been saddled with this heavy historical burden of violence and tyranny, as well as supposedly divine genocidal apologetics. It requires something of a logical contortion to get one's head around all of this, and how it can possibly believed. There's just one more (I'd never, ever say final) thing I'd like to quickly address:
Jenkins offers a useful thought experiment, asking readers to view these stories through the eyes of the Canaanites themselves. To them, the Israelites would seem as terrifying as the Janjaweed militia of Darfur in our own day, or as the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, whose leader, Joseph Kony, has justified the mass torture and killing of men, women, and children in God’s name.
What about the idea of extremists using religion for their own violent purposes? Sorry to sound glib, but they're not really using it at all. They're actually just doing what it tells them to. I'll leave the final word to Allitt:
Let me end with another paradox about which I would have liked to hear Jenkins’s thoughts. He encourages us to look at historical events from the vantage point of the weaker party, and he tells us that we need to reincorporate the genocidal passages into our understanding and worship. That got me thinking about another biblical genocide—Noah’s flood. We are all familiar with pictures of the animals lining up two-by-two and parading into the ark; these plucky survivors have become a staple subject for greeting-card artists, songwriters, cartoonists, even environmentalists. What we are not used to thinking about is the fact that God Himself in this story is committing genocide, killing everyone in the world except for the members of a single family. It’s a horrifying tale but one that our culture treats as colorful and uplifting, a prelude to the first rainbow. I’ve never heard a sermon on it as an act of divine rage and apocalyptic destruction. Perhaps that just confirms Jenkins’ general point that we should be a lot more self-aware and self-critical when we think about our religion and a lot slower to condemn the violent tendencies in the religions of others.Steven Weinberg quite rightly said, "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Would it be wrong of me to say 'Amen'?
(Image: "Noah's Ark, oil on canvas painting by Edward Hicks, 1846 Philadelphia Museum of Art. Source.)
