Jumping the God Shark

Fields of Blood

Religion & the History of Violence

by Karen Armstrong

A REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS BOOK

Theology is, of course, mostly concerned with the distortion and obfuscation of truth. The simple ‘truths’ of religion cannot bear dispassionate scrutiny, so they have to be cloaked in layers of sophisticated misdirection to protect them from the light. Such is the purpose of theology.

But I read and write history, and it is hard to do this without encountering some theology along the way. When I was younger, I found these excursions enjoyable. Over time, though, my critical faculties grew keener and I became less willing to waste good reading and thinking time on nonsense.

Such is the perspective from which I read the introduction to Karen Armstrong’s book about religion and violence, Fields of Blood. I had meant to read the whole book, but found this impossible.

Armstrong, commendably, wastes no time introducing her thesis: it is presented in the very first paragraph of the introduction, in the shape of another writer’s observation that religion has been made a scapegoat for the human predisposition to violence.

Ah, so. A history book with a theological proposition – which is to say, an attempt to hide the hairy, smelly truths of human motive and action under petticoats of elaborate fabrication. Having stated her thesis, Armstrong next constructs a straw-man definition of religion ‘as seen in the West’ that no person of faith could possibly accept for an instant. This definition deserves to be quoted in full.

A coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions and rituals, centring on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities.

What rubbish. That's a description of the trees, not the wood, and a pretty bad one at that. But Armstrong tells us this is what ‘we in the West’ (I’m not from the West) think religion is, and then proceeds to tell us why we’re wrong.

Other cultures, she tells us, have different, more expansive definitions. As an example she gives us Debuisson’s description of the Sanskrit term dharma,: ‘a “total” concept, untranslatable, that covers law, justice, morals and social life.’

Oh what precious twaddle. Dharma is very easily translated as ‘applied moral philosophy’. But yes, of course, religion is Protean. It’s like money – one of those consensual illusions on which human society and culture are founded, but which elude definition. So? All this palaver with definitions is clearly a setup for sleights of hand to come, allowing the author to include and exclude facts and points of view as suits her case without alerting the reader. It was at this point that I realized there was no value in continuing with this book.

I thought I would at least finish the introduction, but three pages on I came to a digression on the chemistry of the brain in which Ms Armstrong makes a complete fool of herself, getting serotonin all wrong. I could see no reason to read further.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the thesis that religion is not to blame for the violence perpetrated in its name. No more is money the root of all evil. These things are conduits for the potential to do evil that exists, pent up, in all of us, but if we didn’t have them, we would simply find other ways to express it. It is ourselves, not our institutions, that are to blame.

But Armstrong’s approach to the proposition is simply untenable. It is not the study of history but the study of evolutionary psychology that will, perhaps, one day exonerate religion – as the common man understands it – from blame for all the atrocities perpetrated in its name.

I have enjoyed and been enlightened by Karen Armstrong’s work in the past, when she was in a more sceptical mode and had interesting things to say about, for instance, fundamentalism. That era is now long gone. She has become a book factory, reliably churning out another god-bothering tome every year, to the undoubted delight of her fans, her publishers and her bank manager, but with nothing of substance left to say. A sad if somewhat unusual case of the commercialization of religion.