Is Religion Violent?

The answer isn't so simple. Let's take a closer look.

Photo: Getty Images

Ok folks, we’re on the penultimate day of my thesis from Harvard Divinity School. (I am sure you’re as relieved as I am.) As I write this particular newsletter, I am surrounded by piles of books and boxes, preparing to vacate my Cambridge apartment by 10 o’clock tonight. I know not all of you are religious who read this, but I’m asking for your prayers (if you can spare them!) anyway.

To do a quick recap, I’ve been publishing a series of stories here since Tuesday that seek to illustrate key findings from my time at Divinity School. My aim with these pieces is to help us think in more complex ways about religion—how we experience it, talk about it, and how the media covers it. I opened this series with an introductory question: Do We Really Want to Give God Away? Then, I introduced us to the importance of challenging “normative” ideas in our culture, using “objectivity” in journalism as an example. And yesterday, I asked us to challenge two big, normative ideas that inform how we view religion: secularism and the conception of “the East vs. the West.”

Today, we’re using all this background to now challenge some of the commonly held beliefs or statements about religion that tend to dominate our culture—namely, the notion that religion is intrinsically violent. Tomorrow, I’ll be back with more on how violence actually works in our world, and what we can do to bring about peace. I hope you enjoy and, as always, thanks for your comments and your messages!

3. There are no real absolutes when it comes to religion. Commonly accepted cultural beliefs about religion need reexamining.

I was forced to confront a pretty compelling paradox when I arrived at Divinity School. Through my work in journalism and my exposure to many different communities of people, I was compelled to evolve my language and my viewpoints to better reflect a compassionate need for justice. This was challenging work, but there was nothing more rewarding. When I allowed my language and my views to change—informed by wanting to be a better friend, colleague, partner, community member for the people around me—I could feel my heart start to change, too. I wondered (in typical white, neoliberal fashion) why it was so hard for people to embrace complexity rather than conforming to binary ways of thought.

So imagine my surprise when, on the second week of classes at Harvard, I was called out by my professor. I had made a binary statement about religion, she said, which was not capturing a full and honest picture of the issue at hand. In asserting that Christianity was homophobic, I responded, I was being righteous and defiant of empire. Instead, by using overtly simplistic language to define an entire system of beliefs occupied by millions of people all over the world, she said, I was causing harm. How could this be? 

The Pitfalls of Absolutism

Religion—whether we like it or not, whether we envision ourselves as secular or not—informs how most of us view the complicated issues of our time, including race, gender, sexuality, and so forth. In acknowledging its complexity, we should also begin to understand that essentialist statements about religion will always fall short of accuracy. Many black-and-white statements about religion intend to call attention to a perceived injustice, and therefore carry the air of being sanctimonious in nature. If religion is bedfellows with power, we might assume, then critiquing it is a noble undertaking. In this view, what can end up happening—even under the auspices of good intention—is harm and erasure. 

In the spirit of owning my own holy shit, I want to dive into what I learned when I said, out loud in the classroom, that Christianity is bad for the LGBTQ+ community. We have loads of evidence in the public consciousness that would support my essentialist claim. For example: the Catholic Church still does not recognize gay marriage, and the Methodist Church recently chose to split in two over gay marriage rather than formally acknowledge it. The mounting political attacks on the transgender community have received support from many on the religious right, while “religious freedom” has been reframed by LGBTQ+ activist groups as a “religious right to discriminate,” since many claim their liberties are being violated by having to coexist with LGBTQ+ people. When you tally up the evidence (and surely, this is just a cursory list), the claim can seem compelling. 

Compelling though it may be, it’s not the whole story. For every example of anti-LGBTQ+ efforts in the Church, we could point to both big and small examples of decidedly pro-LGBTQ+ efforts among Christians. My own rebuke of this claim came when I was reporting on fashion’s role in the HIV/AIDS Crisis for Vogue in 2020. Initially, I was incensed to hear about the actions of Cardinal John O’Connor, the Catholic archbishop of New York, who wielded his power to stop the distribution of condoms in New York. The Cardinal’s stance famously prompted a “die-in” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by the activist group ACT UP, which led to protesters being arrested and brutalized by police. Everything I heard from the people I talked to for my piece only reaffirmed my resentment for the Church, and my belief that Christianity was intrinsically homophobic. 

That was, until I found Father Michael Carnevale. Father Michael was a Catholic priest in New York at the time of the AIDS Crisis, and he became beloved and celebrated by the community for his compassion and care to the many queer people who were either dying of or living with HIV/AIDS. Father Michael told me he was never interested in understanding the sick people before him as sinners. Instead, he understood Jesus’ story as an example that people who were ill and outcast needed love, care, and compassion. So he prayed over hospital beds, comforted the confused parents of frightened young men, and held the hands of the dying as he saw them approach the light. Father Michael helped me to understand that his actions were not extraordinary because he alone was brave—but that there were countless clergy members, nuns, and people of faith all across the city who were moved (in no small part, by God) to help alleviate the suffering around them. 

Indeed, Father Michael’s testimony reminded me of an important scene outside of the United States Supreme Court in 2019. The Court was hearing a landmark case about employment discrimination, and one of the lead plaintiffs was Aimee Stephens, a transgender woman who had been fired from her job at a funeral home after transitioning. Activists from the community had rallied in front of the court, cheering and dancing and making noise, hoping the justices could hear our support for Aimee. As we waited for the closing arguments, I witnessed about a hundred people march right into the DC streets, arms locked together. Leading the charge were three clergy members, their hands raised solemnly. As the police descended upon the protesters for disrupting traffic, it was the clergy who modeled peaceful resistance: they took a knee, awaited their restraints, and went into the officers’ vans. I saw one look up to the sky and close her eyes, her lips moving in what could only be prayer. Meanwhile, I stood safely on the sidewalk, observing it all in a kind of stunned silence. Religious people had committed an act of civil disobedience in the name of LGBTQ+ equality—and I was the one who was the bystander. 

There Are No “Good” or “Bad” Faiths

The more I enmeshed myself with queer people of faith, the more stories like these I heard. I previously understood faith only as a powerfully destructive force in the world, but I never took stock of all the ways it helped galvanize others or provided insight into our interconnected struggles. From here, I had what I now recognize as a false revelation: I started to believe that there was a “true” Christianity oriented towards justice for marginalized people, and a “false” Christianity wielded by white conservatives to gain political power. I didn’t realize that, in stepping away from one essentialist statement, I had walked headfirst into another.

To assert that there is a true, good Christianity is to make yet another universalist claim—one that only God can really verify. What’s more helpful is to understand that Christianity is a vast religion with multiple interpretations, all of which coexist and hold varying degrees of institutional and cultural power. For every Bible verse or piece of liberation theology I find personally validating, there is another interpretation or piece of scripture (many of them, frankly, very compelling) that is diametrically opposed to it. As someone who studies religion and talks about it in the public sphere, making a claim about “the true Christianity” would imply a personal devotional assertion and not a fact about religion. 

Is Religion Violent?

Another universalist claim that has captured both the public and the intellectual imagination is that religion is intrinsically violent. Scholars have written books defending this claim by interrogating religion’s role in some of the worst atrocities in human history—chief among them the European wars of religion. Others, like the political scientist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, have sought to debunk this claim (albeit, not in an entirely simplified way). “Religions do not cause violence,” she writes, quickly followed by, “nor do they cause peace.” 

One of the interesting byproducts of naming religion as the singular cause of violence is that we fail to hold other important powerful forces accountable. As William P. Cavanaugh puts it, “the myth of religious violence is inextricably bound up with the legitimation of the state and its use of violence.” In other words, if we lay the blame solely at religion’s feet, we’re letting politics, empire, and the private sector go unchecked for their roles in war, conquest, and other atrocities. The “religion causes violence” claim therefore ends up running parallel to the ills of secularism—the belief that the state can avoid irrational acts of violence once it is purified of religion, the notion that secular nations do not commit senseless acts of violence because they are not motivated by religion, and most alarmingly, that secular nations can be justified in their violence if they are fighting whomever they deem religious terrorists.

To say religion is violent or that religion causes violence is another universalist claim that needs challenging. It is, once again, only a part of the story that requires a fuller analysis of who wields power, how that power is wielded, and to what ends. 

TL;DR

Absolutist claims about religion never capture the full picture. Sometimes, they cause more damage by invisibilizing people within a religious tradition or perpetuating harmful stereotypes against them. And other times, solely blaming religion for issues (like political or cultural violence) lets other powerful actors—including the state and the private sector—off the hook. 

So far, these interventions have been about debunking or complicating pre-existing notions about religion that we might take for granted. The fact that there’s not a quick, short answer about how to redress these issues should signal something about the kind of work that’s ahead. The issue is not necessarily that these claims about religion are wrong—it’s that by telling only one side of the story, these claims can contribute to more harm in the world. If we misunderstand the complexities of power, we cannot hold those in power accountable.

I’ll see you tomorrow for the final installment.