A Response to Radner’s A Brutal Unity

Commentary on A Brutal Unity

by William Cavanaugh on May 12, 2014

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ is the typically unsavory spectacle of an academic defending himself. I apologize in advance for the unavoidable display of bruised ego, but I assume the reason I was invited to a session on Ephraim Radner’s A Brutal Unity was to respond to Radner’s indictment of my book The Myth of Religious Violence, and I hope the result will be what Peter Maurin used to call “clarification of thought” and not just self-defense.1

Unfortunately, limited space means I will have to skip over all the nice things I would like to say about Radner’s book, and about his work more generally. I learned much from A Brutal Unity; the careful parsing of what consensus and unity could mean, for example, is worth the hefty price of the book. Some of my strongest points of agreement with Radner come in the first chapter of the book—the one in which he takes me to task—when he insists Christians and Christianity cannot be excused from complicity in violence in early modern Europe, Rwanda, and elsewhere. What I don’t get is why he thinks this is a disagreement with me. In what follows, I will not be agreeing to disagree; I will be disagreeing to agree, at least with the thesis of the first chapter, that Christians and Christianity have been complicit in violence. Where our real disagreement comes is in how this realization ought to shape the church’s life in the liberal nation-state.

In the first chapter, Radner makes my work the foil for his argument that the church’s historical failures lead us to the conclusion that “Religion—and I will use the Christian Church and churches as the instance in this chapter—does in fact need the liberal state.”2 According to Radner, my argument “encourages religious groups like Christian churches to face away from their own responsibility for violence.”3 It does so, Radner thinks, by shifting the blame for violence away from religion and onto something else. Radner appears to think my argument is a defense of religion from the charge of violence.4

Radner lays out my argument in two contradictory ways, both of which are misreadings of the text. In the first way, he thinks I argue that so-called religious wars are not really religious but political: “It is erroneous, Cavanaugh argues, to call these conflicts ‘religious wars’ because their impulse was more fundamentally political, driven by territorial interests of various ruling individuals and groups.” To make this argument, Radner continues, I “must reduce ‘religious’ conviction to a sideshow in some other performance. The result is that, in history’s most horrendous moments and corridors . . . the world is ironically depicted by Cavanaugh as being at its most disenchanted, the product of political powers and self-interest without reference to faith, because fundamentally unattached to faith’s potential perversions.”5

I have no idea how Radner, alone among reviewers of the book, could have come to this conclusion about my argument. My book has been reviewed favorably by Rowan Williams, Charles Taylor, Cyril O’Regan, Lisa Cahill, Brad Gregory, and many other astute readers, and none has detected the argument that Radner thinks he finds in the text. As I state in the introduction to my chapter on the “Wars of Religion,” “I do not argue that these wars were not really about religion, but were really about politics or economics or culture. . . . To make such arguments is to assume that one can readily sort out what is ‘religion’ from what is ‘politics’ and so on in Reformation Europe. But these wars were themselves part of the process of creating those very distinctions.”6 As I sum up later in the same chapter, “I think we must conclude that any attempt to assign the cause of the wars in question to ‘religion’—as opposed to politics or other ‘secular’ causes—will get bogged down in hopeless anachronism. The same, of course, is true of attempts to pin the blame on political and economic causes as opposed to religion.”7 The idea, furthermore, that I see the wars in question as political and therefore “disenchanted” is quite simply the opposite of my actual argument. I appeal to John Bossy’s depiction of the migration of the holy from the church to the state and argue that “The state was increasingly sacralized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”8 This conclusion follows my argument in the first two chapters of my book about the malleability of the term “religion”: “if it is true, as we have seen in chapters one and two, that nationalism exhibits many of the characteristics of ‘religion’—including, most importantly for our purposes, the ability to organize killing energies—then what we have in fact is not a separation of religion from politics but rather the substitution of the religion of the state for the religion of the church.”9 The entire burden of my argument is to show that the enchantment that produces violence is just as likely to appear in so-called “secular” form—such as the putatively secular nation-state—than it does in the so-called “religions,” such as Christianity.

Radner notices my constructivist reading of the term “religion,” and so puts forth a second characterization of my argument, one that contradicts the first, but is equally mistaken. In this second telling, I do not simply downplay religious factors in favor of political factors leading to violence but claim instead that “if there was, in early modernity, no such thing as ‘religion’ outside of a culturally integrated social existence in which faith is bound up but not capable of distillation, then there was no such thing as ‘religious violence’ from which the state could have somehow saved us.”10

This second way of characterizing my argument is again a misunderstanding that I explicitly disavow in the actual text. As I state in the introduction to chapter 2, “The point of this exercise is not to dissolve the problem of religion and violence by saying that religion is a fuzzy concept, so there is no such thing as religion and therefore no such problem of religion and violence.”11 Again, at the end of the chapter: “So, do we conclude that there is no such thing as religion, no coherent concept of religion, and therefore we need not bother with the question of religion and violence? No. The point is not that there is ‘no such thing’ as religion. The concepts that we use do not simply refer to things out there in a one-to-one correspondence of words with things. In certain cultures, religion does exist, but as a product of human construction.”12

If my goal is not simply to excuse religion of violence by dissolving the category of religion, what is my purpose in showing that the category is a modern Western construction and not simply embedded in the nature of things? With regard to the early modern period, the point is that to blame religion as opposed to politics is anachronistic, because there was not yet any such distinction. The point is not that Christianity was not involved; of course it was. The point is one cannot finger a transhistorical, transcultural human impulse “religion” that—as opposed to more “secular” and mundane pursuits—was the main cause of the conflicts. The European wars of the early modern period were fought by Christians, and Radner is right that this outburst of brutality marks a signal failure of the church to be an instantiation of Christ’s peace. This is beyond dispute. As I state again in the chapter on the “Wars of Religion,”:

The point of this again is not that these wars were really about politics and not about religion, or that the state is to blame and the church is innocent of the violence. If the transfer of power from church to state contributed to the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that transfer generally took the form of the absorption of the church into the apparatus of the state. The church was of course deeply implicated in the violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The point is that the rise of the modern state was not the solution to the violence of “religion.”13

Radner thinks that eliminating religion as an independent cause of early modern war leaves me unable to account for the “motivating conceptual structures of meaning to legitimize it.”14 He cites renowned historian Brad Gregory’s work as arguing “against historians who would dampen the specifically religious meaning given to both the active murdering and passive victimization involved.”15 Gregory’s acclaimed book Salvation at Stake does indeed argue against those who would reduce the violence of early modern Europe to political or economic or social causes as opposed to religious ones.16 But in Gregory’s review of The Myth of Religious Violence, he calls the book a “tour de force” and writes “The book should become a classic.”17 I mention this not to merely brag but to show that Gregory understands, as Radner does not, that my argument and Gregory’s own do not contradict one another. Gregory writes that Cavanaugh “correctly notes the inseparability of religion from politics and society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hence, one cannot, for example, say that a Catholic Eucharistic procession was religious rather than political or social—unless one applies, anachronistically, a conception of religion that itself arose only as a rejection of the human realities it sought to refashion.”18 Radner seems to think I reject the analysis of early modern violence from a theological perspective,19 but I don’t at all deny there was a particular kind of violence bound up with, to stick with Gregory’s example, theological loci such as the Eucharist. What I deny is that such kinds of violence belong in a wholly different category—“religious violence”—than violence done in the name of the state, the nation, capitalism, and other supposedly “secular” causes. This is precisely because such causes are not “disenchanted” at all, but are rather prone to idolatry, the worship of false gods.

With regard not only to the early modern period but also the present day, Radner feels he “must respond pointedly,” against me, “that there is such a thing as religious violence: when people abuse, imprison, drive out, attack, maim, and kill others in the name of God.”20 Radner argues that my approach renders me unable to deal with the church’s complicity in violence in Rwanda. But I have never denied that people kill in the name of God or gods, nor am I so oblivious or mendacious to deny that “Christians act violently; many do so, claiming to do so as Christians, for the sake of their belief in God.”21 What I deny is that violence in the name of God or a god is of an essentially different and inherently more troublesome nature than violence in the name of supposedly more mundane realities, like kings or nations or flags or freedom or oil. I do not buy Radner’s contention that, “when Christians turn violent, their violence is of another order than the violence of the nations.”22 I make exhaustive arguments in the first two chapters of the book as to why attempts to claim that religious and secular violence are of fundamentally different orders fail, arguments Radner does not so much refute as ignore. He occasionally throws scare quotes around the word “religion,” but continues to use it as if it marks a self-evident category of which Christianity is a prime example, as if my extensively annotated genealogy of the concept has had no effect whatsoever.

With regard to the present day, the point of showing that the religious/secular divide is a constructed one, and not simply part of the way things are, is to put both “secular” and “religious” motivations for abusing, imprisoning, driving out, attacking, maiming, and killing others in the same analytical framework. As I write in the conclusion of the book, the point is “to level the playing field so that violence of all kinds is subject to the same scrutiny.”23 The myth of religious violence has drawn our attention to certain kinds of violence—labeled religious—and away from others—labeled secular. But the reality is that “People kill for all kinds of reasons. An adequate approach to the problem must begin with empirical investigations into the conditions under which beliefs and practices such as jihad, the invisible hand of the market, the sacrificial atonement of Christ, and the role of the United States as worldwide liberator turn violent.”24

Radner thinks my attempt to redirect our attention is an attempt to ignore Christian complicity with violence. He writes, “What Cavanaugh and contemporary antiliberal revisionists do not address, then, is the fact that the notion of religious tolerance over and against religious violence was later overthrown by the ongoing and spectacular failures of Christians especially in the midst of and in the face of violence in which they participated.”25 But my attempt to draw attention to the violence of the nation-state—especially, in the fourth chapter of my book, the United States—is an attempt to draw attention to what Christians actually kill for. The nation-state is not them, it is us, us Christians. The 80 percent of Americans who self-identify as Christians is mirrored in the almost 80 percent of US military personnel who self-identify as Christians. Any critique of the violence of the American military would have to take this obvious fact into consideration. As I write in chapter 1, “For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most would take for granted the necessity of being willing to kill for one’s country, should circumstances dictate.”26 I simply do not see how my argument can be construed as an attempt to ignore or excuse Christian complicity with violence. I am trying to call attention to what Christians today, here and now, actually kill for. It is telling that the examples of Christian violence to which Radner appeals—the European wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda—are remote in either time or space to the actual audience of his book and their context in North American liberal states. This is necessarily so because Christians in the North American context today don’t kill for anything but the liberal nation-state, with very few exceptions. It is of course reprehensible that Christians in early modern Europe or contemporary Rwanda should kill each other, and especially troublesome for the church when they should invoke theological reasons in so doing. But I am interested in what Christians are tempted to kill for here and now. Some Christians in the US use theological justifications for supporting war. More commonly, Christians support war for the same secularist reason that Americans as a whole support war: for “freedom,” a freedom that was born out of revulsion to the so-called “religious wars.” As I write in the introduction to my book, “In the West, revulsion to killing and dying in the name of one’s ‘religion’ is one of the principal means by which we become convinced that killing and dying in the name of the nation-state is laudable and proper.”27

This is where the real disagreement between Radner and me lay. We do not disagree about the complicity of Christians and Christianity in violence. We disagree on the extent to which Christians need to throw our grateful support behind the nation-states in which we find ourselves. For Radner, “it is appropriate to see the rise of the ‘state’ in a modern sense as but the particular definition of a more general peace-building political sovereignty whose origins and quite robust analogues are deeply rooted in Christian experience.”28 The “right answer” to “preventing or resisting violence,” according to Radner, is “that churches must reorient their practice more fully, not less so, to the needs of a stable and accountable liberal democracy.”29 Radner fears my “concerns over the liberal state’s attitudes to religion and Christianity in particular will join with an outright rejection of the liberal state’s intrinsic value.”30 Christians must face the hard task of full participation in pluralistic democracy, which is “the necessary means by which, as it were, churches will save their souls in the face of their own violent complicities. And any call away from the facing of this task is a dangerous distraction.”31

Here we are getting close to some real disagreements between Radner and me, but it must first be said that Radner overstates the case I make in The Myth of Religious Violence. The argument is certainly a call for Christians to take a more skeptical view of their own participation in, and support for, the military adventures of secular nation-states, especially the United States. The argument is not, however, a wholesale dismissal of liberalism or democracy. As I write at the end of chapter 3,

To say that the foundational myth of the wars of religion is false is not to say that liberal principles are therefore false; the separation of church and state is, to my mind, important to uphold for several reasons, some of them theological. It is to say, however, that the triumphalist narrative that sees the liberal state as the solution to the violence of religion needs to be abandoned. . . . The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.32

The negative task of loosening our lethal allegiance to the nation-state and its enormous military and security apparatus is the sole, direct aim of my book.

Were I to give a more positive and theological account of the church’s political engagement, as I have done elsewhere, I would begin by differentiating terms like “state,” “liberalism,” and “democracy,” terms that tend to be conflated in Radner’s critique. To be fair, I have not always differentiated them carefully in my own writings. What I have tried to articulate, however, is a type of political presence of the church that is, like Radner, grateful the church has been separated—often against its misguided will—from coercive power, but deeply dissatisfied with the power that now claims a God-like monopoly on violence. I have written in favor of pluralistic democracy,33 but the problem with the contemporary nation-state is that it is neither sufficiently democratic nor pluralistic. The mythos of the nation and the reach of the state have created a unitary and homogenized space that is not truly pluralistic, and democracy has been reduced to a caricature. In Sheldon Wolin’s words, “The citizen is shrunk to the voter: periodically courted, warned, and confused but otherwise kept at a distance from actual decision-making and allowed to emerge only ephemerally in a cameo appearance according to a script composed by the opinion takers/makers.”34 My vision of the church’s participation in politics would look more like Wolin’s “fugitive democracy” or Alasdair MacIntyre’s vision of small communities of discernment than the patriotic embrace of the nation-state with its bloated war machine, enhanced interrogation techniques, NSA surveillance, and the rest.

I suspect there is much here on which Ephraim Radner and I could have a serious conversation, agreeing and disagreeing on many different aspects of the church’s role as witness. Radner comments “Cavanaugh’s overriding worries are proving well founded, as the liberal state itself betrays its founding principles for the sake of a self-consciously ‘godless’ ideology that increasingly itself engages the rhetoric of violence.”35 For my part, I am deeply appreciative of Radner’s emphasis on the need for the church to repent. Indeed, I have drawn on Radner’s work elsewhere to argue that the basis of the church’s aversion to violence of all kinds is not a sense that we are pure, but rather that we are simply not good enough to use violence rightly.36

With regard to the notion that I encourage churches to face away from responsibility for violence, I think Radner has simply misread my argument. Our true disagreement, and the place for a more interesting dialogue, concerns the extent to which the church needs the liberal nation-state. I think I am willing to agree the marginalization of the church from public power is a potentially restorative punishment for the church’s unfaithfulness. I tend, however, to see the liberal nation-state I live in as just another form of empire that the church must endure and creatively engage, rather than a peace-building fruit of the gospel.

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William Cavanaugh is Senior Research Professor at DePaul University in Chicago. He holds an MA in Theology and Religious Studies from Cambridge University and a PhD in Religion from Duke University. Cavanaugh is the author of Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict.

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