Religious violence

Not to be confused with Religious persecution.

Religious violence covers phenomena in which religion is either the target or perpetrator of violent behavior. All the religions of the world contain narratives, symbols, and metaphors of violence and war and also nonviolence and peacemaking. Religious violence is violence that is motivated by, or in reaction to, religious precepts, texts, or the doctrines of a target or an attacker. It includes violence against religious institutions, people, objects, or events. Religious violence includes both acts which are committed by religious groups and acts which are committed against religious groups.

The term “religious violence” has proven difficult to define. Violence is a very broad concept, because it is used against both human and non-human entities. Furthermore, violence can range from bloodshed and physical harm to violation of personal freedoms, passionate conduct or language, or emotional outbursts like fury or passion. Adding to the difficulty, religion is a complex and modern Western concept, one whose definition still has no scholarly consensus.

Religious violence, like all forms of violence, is a cultural process which is context-dependent and highly complex. Thus, oversimplifications of religion and violence often lead to misguided understandings of the causes for acts of violence, as well as oversight of their rarity. Violence is perpetrated for a wide variety of ideological reasons, and religion is generally only one of many contributing social and political factors that may foment it. For example, studies of supposed cases of religious violence often conclude that the violence was driven more by ethnic animosities than by religious worldviews. Historical circumstances in conflicts often are not linear, but socially and politically complex. Due to the complex nature of conflict, it is often difficult to discern whether religion is a significant cause of violence from all other factors. Yet instances of violence unrelated to religion are common in history.

Indeed, the link between religious belief and behavior is not linear. Decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research have all concluded that behaviors do not directly follow from religious beliefs and values because people's religious ideas tend to be fragmented, loosely connected, and context-dependent, just like other domains of culture and life.

History of the concept of religion

Main article: Definition of religion

Ancient sacred texts like the Bible and the Quran did not have a concept of religion in their original languages, nor did their authors or the cultures to which they belonged. Likewise, there is no precise equivalent of "religion" in ancient Hebrew and Judaism does not draw clear distinctions between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities.

The social construct "religion" is a modern Western concept not used before the 1500s when the compartmentalized concept of religion arose, where religious entities are considered separate from worldly ones. Furthermore, parallel concepts are not found in many cultures, and there is no equivalent term for "religion" in many languages. The modern concept of religion as an abstraction that entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines is a recent invention in the English language. Such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation, as well as more prevalent colonization and globalization in the age of exploration which involved contact with numerous foreign and indigenous cultures and non-European languages. For example, in Asia, it was Europeans who first applied the terms "Buddhism", "Hinduism", "Taoism", and "Confucianism" in the 19th century.

Thus, scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition of religion, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition and others rejecting the term entirely. Still others argue that, regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures.

Definition of violence

Violence is a complicated concept which broadly carries descriptive and evaluative components that range from harming non-human entities to human self-harm. Religious scholar Ralph Tanner cites the definition of violence in the Oxford English Dictionary as "far beyond [the infliction of] pain and the shedding of blood". He argues that, although violence clearly encompasses injury to persons or property, it also includes, "the forcible interference in personal freedom, violent or passionate conduct or language [and] finally passion or fury".

Similarly, a study of the Crusades' impacts on the Muslim world concludes:

The word "violence" can be defined to extend far beyond pain and shedding blood. It carries the meaning of physical force, violent language, fury, and, more importantly, forcible interference.

Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim expands on this, writing:

For many people, ... only physical violence truly qualifies as violence. But, certainly, violence is more than killing people, unless one includes all those words and actions that kill people slowly. The effect of limitation to a "killing fields" perspective is the widespread neglect of many other forms of violence. We must insist that violence also refers to that which is psychologically destructive, that which demeans, damages, or depersonalizes others. In view of these considerations, violence may be defined as follows: any action, verbal or nonverbal, oral or written, physical or psychical, active or passive, public or private, individual or institutional/societal, human or divine, in whatever degree of intensity, that abuses, violates, injures, or kills. Some of the most pervasive and most dangerous forms of violence are those that are often hidden from view (against women and children, especially); just beneath the surface in many of our homes, churches, and communities is abuse enough to freeze the blood. Moreover, many forms of systemic violence often slip past our attention because they are so much a part of the infrastructure of life (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism).

Non-physical abuse in religious settings is described as religious abuse.