Religion and Violence

I once mentioned to a colleague that, according to something I had read, if Christianity hadn't happened along, a Roman Emperor might have ended up converting to Judaism. Presumably, the rest of the Roman Empire would have followed. "Wow," he said. "The world would look really different if that had happened."

Only later did I ask myself, "Would it?" Would Judaism have changed the Roman Empire, and the history of the West, and of the world? Or, possibly, would the Roman Empire have changed Judaism? Would Tomas de Torquemada still have been Grand Inquisitor, but as a rabbi--or, perhaps, a Jewish monk--and would Bloody Mary have burned Jewish heretics at the stake?

I am reminded of these questions frequently nowadays when I read all the debate about whether Islam is an inherently violent religion. The claim that it is has become common, mostly in Tea Party circles (here, here and here, for instance), but also among right-of-center Jews and Catholics, and even the occasional left-wing atheist.

To me, this argument seems absurd on its face.  If Christianity is by its nature less violent than Islam, then one would expect this to be true at all different times and places.

Here's the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christians of the First Crusade in 1099:

Writing about the Temple Mount area alone Fulcher of Chartres, who was not an eyewitness... says: "In this temple 10,000 were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet coloured to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared".

And this was not an aberration; it went on for centuries. In 1209 there was the crusade against the Cathars of southern France: 

Prisoners were blinded, dragged behind horses, and used for target practice.... Arnaud-Amaury wrote to Pope Innocent III, "Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex."

In the sixteenth century there was the aforementioned Mary I of England, who executed 283 Protestants, mostly by burning. Her successor is not known today as "Bloody Elizabeth," but she executed hundreds of Catholics.

Obviously, Christianity is not violent like that today. But equally obviously, that is not because of anything intrinsic to its basic nature that makes it different from Islam.

The best test, though, would be if we could find a faith whose canon included no endorsement of violence whatsoever, and yet whose adherents were now behaving violently. Horrifyingly, there is such a case today:

“There are casualties and damage on both sides,” Mr. Thein Sein said on state television.

But according to accounts from the police officer, Lt. Col Kyaw Tint, and a villager who witnessed some of the fighting, the violence followed a disturbingly familiar pattern: sword-wielding Buddhist mobs rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods.

“All the people who were found dead were from the Muslim community,” Colonel Kyaw Tint said.

After flaring up last year in western Myanmar, anti-Muslim violence has spread to areas around the country this year, leaving dozens of people dead, almost all of them Muslims and some of them children. Buddhist nationalist groups have called for a boycott of Muslim shops, and radical Buddhist monks have stoked anti-Muslim feelings in sermons across the country.

That's right. Burmese Buddhist mobs are carrying out pogroms against Muslims. Violence is a virus, and the virus is no respecter of religious belief.

More From That Wacky Church

You've probably heard about the latest display of obtuseness from the Vatican. It seems the man designated as the "preacher of the papal household" remarked that, Passover and Holy Week coming together this year, he had been thinking about the Jews. He then read a letter from an anonymous Jewish friend:

I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.

I'll spare you detailed discussion of the more obvious points, such as the rather salient differences between being a victim of anti-Semitism and being accused of covering up child abuse, and note a few less obvious ones.

• Maybe it's different in Italian, but I have never heard of, and can hardly imagine, a Jew referring to Catholics as "all the faithful." As far as I know, only Catholics refer to Catholics this way, as in Voice of the Faithful, the Catholic lay group started to support victims of, you guessed it, clergy sexual abuse. I haven't heard any attacks against Catholic laymen in this scandal, have you? Attacks by Catholic laymen, yes. (And by the way, what are the less shameful aspects of anti-Semitism?)

• The good father's comments would have been more effective, I think, if he had shown some understanding of the historical ironies of his analogy. For example: "For the last thousand years, the Church has been complicit in the persecution of the Jews. Now we in the Church have begun to see what it is like to be, as a group, unfairly scorned and demonized." I'm still not convinced, but it's better, right? Of course, if top people in the Church were capable of an admission of error like that, they wouldn't be in this mess.

• Some academic could easily spend the rest of his life writing case studies from this scandal for an MBA course on organizations. You can probably think of some (comparing how Toyota and the Church handled threats to their reputations, for example). Here's one for a class on ethics: What do you do when ensuring the survival of the organization starts to conflict with its mission? This is, in all seriousness, a knotty problem when you're the One True Church. There's hardly any moral compromise that doesn't seem justified compared to a risk of badly damaging the organization. But maybe the Holocaust would be a better example.

The Pious and the Dead

Oh, that Catholic Church. They're at it again with Pius XII, for whom Pope Benedict has just cleared the way to beatification, and thence eventually to sainthood. They noted that this "is in no way to be read as a hostile act toward the Jewish people." Don't worry, I didn't read it that way, any more than I read Pius's inaction during the Holocaust as hostile. Indifferent, yes. Acquiescing to evil, yes. But I wouldn't say hostile.

According to the Times, a Vatican spokesman said the beatification process looks at Pius's "Christian life"  and not at the "historical impact of all his operative decisions." For "historical impact" read "the deaths of countless innocent people." And isn't the Christian life, let alone the saintly life, all about decisions?

At least no one is going to say of Pius that, hey, he was a victim too, as Benedict did when he described the Germans as being "used and abused" by the Nazis. The Church's pinnacle of vicarious victimhood was of course the canonization of Edith Stein, the converted nun who died at Auschwitz. Since many Catholics couldn't understand what all the uproar was about, let me say that I had no problem with canonizing Edith Stein. Spiritual qualities aside, she by all accounts was a remarkable woman (she was considered a more promising grad student than Martin Heidegger, which perhaps contributed to Heidegger's later support for Hitler).

No, what I object to is fast-tracking Edith Stein for sainthood by claiming that she was a martyr to the faith. That is, that she died because she was a Catholic-- and therefore the Church, too, was a victim of Hitler. I can't for the life of me see how that is true. If Stein had renounced her Catholicism, if she had spat on a crucifix and recited the Lord's Prayer backwards, would that have saved her life? Hardly. Edith Stein didn't die because she was a Catholic. She died because she was... that other thing.

The next time Jews need some moral outrage from the Church, I hope they have the good sense to be fetuses.

Mystery Solved

Neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz has just published a book about the question that has been bothering him for the last thirty years, "Why Are Jews Liberals?" Podhoretz's magazine, Commentary, has published a symposium honoring the book, in which six well-known American Jews discuss why everyone else doesn't get it. This has caused a blizzard in the blogosphere, which The New York Times summarizes here.

Of particular interest is the response of Robert Stacy McCain, a former editor at the Washington Times turned full-time right-wing pundit. On his blog (called "The Other McCain," lest you think that John is a true conservative) he praises Michael Medved's observation that Jews' distrust of right-wing evangelicals is a big factor, and denounces "Norman Lear and others" for their "demonization of the 'Religious Right'" that has so misled Jews. But he doesn't stop there. He continues:

"This effect is compounded by a factor which, whether or not Podhoretz discusses it in his book, I didn't notice mentioned by the symposiasts, namely the town-and-country divide in American politics. Although the trend to suburbanization has somewhat ameliorated this generalization, most American Jews are fundamentally urban in their orientation, while most American conservatives are fundamentally rural.

"Think of Reagan, riding horses and clearning brush at his ranch -- it is an image that appeals to the "country" side of the town-and-country divide, embodying as it does the antique ideal of the American frontier homesteader.

"This 'rugged individual' ideal, the self-sufficient property owner zealously guarding his freedom, is intrinsic to what American conservatism is all about, and it is an ideal quite alien to the urban lifestyle. The city-dweller is inherently dependent on public services. He doesn't draw his water from a well, doesn't go out with a chain-saw to supply firewood for the winter, doesn't augment the grocery budget by hunting deer or growing his vegetables....

"If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland, where their kids can grow up hunting, fishing and hot-rodding the backroads. A guy with a gun rack in the back window of his four-wheel drive truck may occasionally vote Democrat, but he's extremely unlikely to be an out-and-out liberal."

Well. Mystery solved. How many Jews can hear someone talk about how Jews live in cities, so they're not like us in the Heartland, without feeling queasy? Does anyone expect them to join a political grouping that says, if only you lived like us, you would think like us, but our thinking is alien to your lifestyle? If there were no religious Right, all we would need to explain Jews' liberalism is people like Robert Stacy McCain.

I'm not saying McCain's an anti-Semite; in fact, I doubt he is. And he's certainly correct, and insightful, about the urban-rural divide (which is why the Republican party is withering away). But the attitude of, "We're the real America, and you aren't as authentic as we are" is not one that most American Jews will accept.

Forget principle. Jews have always identified their self-interest with tolerance and equality, not with nativism. The former continues to be the hallmark of the left, the latter of the right. Incidentally, young people in general are notably more tolerant than older people (look at survey data on attitudes toward gays, for example), and were far more likely to vote Democratic in the last election.

The real mystery is why the likes of Podhoretz and Medved continue to be untroubled by these attitudes on the right. Perhaps they accept them. Perhaps it's time to put a new twist on that hoary old neoconservative epithet, the self-hating Jew.