Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong

Afterword
    W e have seen that, like the weather, religion “does lots of different things.” To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action. In the HebrewBible, the Deuteronomists and the Priestly authors all meditated on the same stories, but the Deuteronomists turned virulently against foreign peoples, while the Priestly authors sought reconciliation. Chinese Daoists, Legalists, and military strategists shared the same set of ideas and meditative disciplines but put them to entirely different uses.Saint Luke and theJohannine authors all reflected onJesus’s message of love, but Luke reached out to marginalized members of society, while the Johannines confined their love to their own group. Antony and theSyrian boskoi both set out to practice “freedom from care,” but Antony spent his life trying to empty his mind of anger and hatred, while the Syrian monks surrendered to the aggressive drives of the reptilian brain.Ibn Taymiyyah andRumi were both victims of theMongol invasions, but they used the teachings of Islam to come to entirely different conclusions. For centuries the story of ImamHusain’s tragic death inspiredShiis to withdraw from political life in principled protest against systemic injustice; more recently it has inspired them to take political action and say no to tyranny.
    Until the modern period, religion permeated all aspects of life, including politics and warfare, not because ambitious churchmen had “mixedup” two essentially distinct activities but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance. Every state ideology was religious. The kings of Europe who struggled to liberate themselves from papal control were not “secularists” but were revered as semidivine. Every successful empire has claimed that it had a divine mission; that its enemies were evil, misguided, or tyrannical; and that it would benefit humanity. And because these states and empires were all created and maintained by force, religion has been implicated in their violence. It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that religion was ejected from political life in the West. When, therefore, people claim that religion has been responsible for more war, oppression, and suffering than any other human institution, one has to ask, “More than what ?” Until the American andFrench Revolutions, there were no “secular” societies. So ingrained is our impulse to “sanctify” our political activities that no sooner had the French revolutionaries successfully marginalized theCatholic Church than they created a new national religion. In theUnited States, the first secular republic, the state has always had a religious aura, a manifest destiny, and a divinely sanctioned mission.
    John Locke believed that theseparation of church and state was the key to peace, but the nation-state has been far from war-averse. The problem lies not in the multifaceted activity that we call “religion” but in the violence embedded in our human nature and the nature of the state, which from the start required the forcible subjugation of at least 90 percent of the population. As Ashoka discovered, even if a ruler shrank from state aggression, it was impossible to disband the army. The Mahabharata lamented the dilemma of the warrior-king doomed to a life of warfare. The Chinese realized very early that a degree of force was essential to civilized life. Ancient Israel tried initially to escape the agrarian state, yetIsraelites soon discovered that much as they hated the exploitation and cruelty of urban civilization, they could not live without it; they too had to become “like all the nations.”Jesus preached an inclusive and compassionate kingdom that defied theimperial ethos, and he was crucified for his pains. The Muslim ummah began as an alternative to the jahili injustice of