John Gray heralds Karen Armstrong “one of our most perceptive and thoughtful writers on religion” in a review of her book Fields of Blood:
Armstrong performs an invaluable service by showing that religion is not the uniquely violent force demonized by secular thinkers. Yet neither is religion intrinsically peaceful—a benign spiritual quest compromised and perverted by its involvement with power. The potential for violence exists in faith-based movements of all kinds, secular as well as religious. Evangelical atheists splutter with fury when reminded that a war on religion was an integral part of some of the 20th century’s worst regimes. How can anyone accuse a movement devoted to reason and free inquiry of being implicated in totalitarian oppression? It is a feeble-minded and thoroughly silly response, reminiscent of that of witless believers who ask how a religion of love could possibly be held to account for the horrors of the Inquisition.
Conventional distinctions between religious and secular belief pass over the role that belief itself plays in our lives.
“We are meaning-seeking creatures,” Karen Armstrong writes wisely, “and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives.” We are unlike our animal kin in another way. Only human beings kill and die for the sake of beliefs about themselves and the nature of the world. Looking for sense in their lives, they attack others who find meaning in beliefs different from their own. The violence of faith cannot be exorcised by demonizing religion. It goes with being human.
In another positive review, David Shariatmadari draws on Armstrong’s writing to interpret the current conflict with ISIS:
Armstrong begins and ends her book with reflections on the scapegoat – the animal burdened with the sins of the community and sent out into the desert. She argues that we, in the secular, rational west, have become incapable of properly acknowledging our own ferocious violence. The madmen are the ones who believe in a man in the sky, who strap on suicide belts imagining that they will be rewarded with virgins in heaven – not we, who debate and legislate and only then slam hellfire missiles into wedding parties.
But what of Islamic State? Theology motivates its actions; that theology derives from the Qur’an. Surely this is religious violence. In a narrow sense, yes. However, it represents a grossly mutated version of a doctrine that survives in much of the world in its original form as a stabilising, communitarian practice. To extend the analogy of the virus: we know that environmental stress accelerates mutation in the natural world. The faith communities subjected to the most stress over the past two centuries are those of Middle Eastern and subcontinental Islam; as Armstrong sets out in grim detail, its members have endured colonisation, the expropriation of land, authoritarian rule and military occupation. Could these stressors come to be seen as the greater cause?
None of which is to excuse the revolting acts of Islamic State fanatics. In this arena, the tendency for attempts to explain and understand to be taken as acts of apology is deeply frustrating. But we must not turn our backs on history, which is the only way the arguments set out by the likes of Sam Harris and Tony Blair make sense. The urge to blame others is strong, and old, as the ritual of the scapegoat shows. The first step towards extirpating it is to acknowledge it. In her efforts to bring this about, Armstrong is doing us a great service.
Previous Dish on Armstrong’s book here and here.
(Video: Tom Sutcliffe interviews Armstrong)
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