#249: SECTS AND VIOLENCE.  I suppose it depends on how far back you want to go.  Of the seventeenth century writings of Sir Thomas Browne, I once wrote, “It was the time before scientific observation had eaten into the grounding assumptions of religious belief.”  Since then, those grounding assumptions have been bitten into good and hard. As the secularization of Western cultures has progressed, established religion, approached once with the cautious respect given to people in power, has come in for some sharp scolding, rather in the manner of young people turning on a crusty and interfering great-aunt who no longer controls the inheritance purse-strings.  The complaint is not confined to religion’s perceived fostering of superstition: Karen Armstrong writes, “In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident…I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that...religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.”  Richard Dawkins, a headliner in this field, has written that “only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.”  Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great: How Religions Poisons Everything was a huge bestseller.  Dawkins and Hitchens were serious and educated writers, and passionate debaters; they did much to alter the perception of the subject.        

      Karen Armstrong, whose writings on religion have always seemed to me marked not only by intelligence and lightly-worn scholarship but also by a kind of moral common sense, takes up this subject in her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Knopf, 2014). Her earlier book The Great Transformation was about the forms and arrivals of the world’s religious traditions; Fields of Blood is like that book seen from the Upside Down, discussing warfare, land-grabbing, massacres and all forms of “religiously articulated violence”.  Her suggestion is that our modern definition of religion is at base ahistorical and anomalous, failing to reference “something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing”: “In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life…It was never a question of the state ‘using’ religion; the two were indivisible.”  “The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China and India.”  As the division of sacred and secular deepened, she notes, the idea of the “nation-state” took on a religious stature, and she suggests that the contemporary secular states have not been any more successful than their predecessors in dealing with minorities, religious or ethnic or political.  It is her recognition of the results of this fracture that gives complexity to her examination of the subject.

       The body of the book gives the historical particulars behind her argument, moving from the earliest literatures—Gilgamesh, Homer, the Vedas, the Chinese schools and sages—and working up to our current welter of intifadas and jihads.  Behind all of it always is Armstrong’s impulse to explore, to make vivid, to give context and clarity over any impulse to hector or blame.  And she does not pretend to answers, certainly not easy answers.  By the end we see, as we see in all history, that cycle of aspiration and failure, of the need for self-protection giving way to the impulse to aggression, of hopes raised and dashed.  She writes, “We are flawed creatures with violent hearts that long for peace.”  That sense permeates the entire book, where we witness, again and again, the heights and ideals of religious thought giving way to the dishonors and desperate practicalities of living in a dangerous world.  Paradise and universal peace look to be a great distance off, and when she quotes from Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, she gives us  perhaps the last lesson of the book: “The final truth for man lies not in some remote and untarnished utopia but in the tension and struggle of applying its ideals to the recalcitrant and obstructive stuff of worldly sorrow.”

     How do you deal with, live within, the secular state?  Pico Iyer, in his great essay “On the Ropebridge,” describes a small monastery in Tibet, remote even by the standards of that country, not part of the four major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, and at the time of the essay’s writing, still existing a ways from the intrusions and dictates of Chinese rule.   The essay was published in 2005; I have wondered how the monastery has fared since then, with time’s damage being done to the Tibetan traditions, and the Big Brother web of modern communications having enabled the tightening of Chinese control (a “systematic pursuit” if ever there was one).  Barbara Crossette, in her book So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas (Knopf, 1996) writes movingly of Bhutan, and its efforts to retain a traditional culture in the face of the many temptations of Western advances and comforts, all the more visible since her writing with the arrival of the internet.  When I was growing up in Connecticut in the nineteen fifties people used to complain how radio and television had begun to eradicate local accents; what do you do when you see an entire culture slipping out from under you?

      This is particularly the theme of Gerard Russell’s book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (Basic Books, 2014).  He visits and describes religious sects that have survived—“somehow,” I wanted to say—from the infantine days of our larger and dominant faith groups.  Some of their survivals may be chalked up to extreme esotericism:  Mandaeans, for instance, at baptism received a sacred name, which they must repeat only to the closest family members.  Many of Russell’s obviously sympathetic inquiries are deflected with reticence, caginess, and conversational dodgeball.  Within the sects, there has been much restriction on marrying outside the faith: a marriage of a Zoroastrian woman to an outsider, we learn, “hurts and distresses Ahura Mazda.”  In the face of the dwindling numbers of adherents, Zoroastriansim has begun to accept converts for the first time in fourteen centuries.  With Russell as guide—or, really, fellow traveller and inquirer—we meet Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts, Kalasha—all of whom, in another context, we would list as endangered species. Centered mostly in Iraq, they fan out as far north as Georgia, as far east as Iran and Pakistan, the occasional family or group expatriated to England or the States.  It’s easy enough to envision the constraints of living within such communities: imagine being a skeptic, a feminist or an unapologetic LGBTQ person. (In Bhutan, imagine being a male who doesn’t want to wear knee socks.)  But there’s the rest of what you give up living in an insistently secular world as well: how many times an hour is there some new article on the spiritual thirsts of the modern world?  Russell’s book, like Armstrong’s, offers no solutions, no answers, just a vivid and moving look at these precariously placed communities, all poised with the larger modern world hovering over them.