Many people say that religious violence turns them away from exploring religious faith.
When sacred language is used to justify killing, conquest, or domination, the damage runs deep. For many observers, the conclusion seems obvious: religion itself is the problem.
Adherents of faiths often respond with a quick rejoinder. Religion, they say, is not the real culprit. Human nature is.
Religion only becomes dangerous when it is exploited by leaders seeking power, or by movements seeking to mobilise religious passion for nationalistic or ideological ends.
In this explanation, faith itself is innocent; the problem lies in its misuse.
Indeed, history offers countless examples of religion being harnessed for harmful and exploitative purposes, for rallying loyalty, legitimising violence and portraying conflicts in cosmic terms of good and evil.
Political leaders understand this well. When faith becomes fused with nationalism or military ambition, it can be very useful for achieving their purposes: drawing on strong beliefs and passions and thus intensifying conflicts.
But this defence that it is only rogue, misused religion that is to blame for violence can also let religious communities, including churches, off the hook too easily.
To say that religion is merely being ‘‘misused’’ risks suggesting that the problem lies elsewhere, in the hands of cynical politicians or extremists who have distorted an otherwise ‘‘pure’’ message. However, history is not so tidy. One must be honest in noting that religious institutions themselves have often been deeply entangled in systems of power, violence and exclusion.
Christianity has not been immune from this pattern. Crusades were preached from pulpits.
Anti-Semitic pogroms punctuate Christian history. Colonial expansion was often clothed in missionary language.
Historically, churches have blessed wars, sanctified national myths and portrayed enemies as agents of evil. And churches continue to do so today.
If the church’s first instinct is always to shift blame elsewhere then this avoids the deeper work of moral reckoning.
The Christian tradition itself provides resources for this moral reckoning, for difficult but necessary truth telling. We call it confession. .
When people say that religious violence drives them away from religion, the Church’s first response should not be to defend itself. Rather, it should be to listen.
Listening to the pain behind those words. Listening to those who have experienced religion not as a source of healing but as a weapon used against them. Listening to the ways in which faith communities, intentionally or not, have participated in systems that marginalise or harm others.
At the centre of the Christian narrative, is a story of human beings (including the religious faithful and political leaders) conspiring and carrying out an extreme act of violence against an innocent victim: Jesus Christ.
Christian faith, therefore, is not an account of the moral superiority of the faithful but rather of the shared human propensity and capacity for violence and a God of forgiveness and grace who calls humanity towards a new way of being that rejects violence.
For those who have suffered under religiously justified violence, the pathway towards healing, justice and reconciliation requires more than vague statements on God’s love and kindness.
Those identifying as Christian cannot simply stand at a distance from the violence done in the name of their religion. They must ask how their own traditions, institutions and assumptions may have contributed to this violence.
The teachings of Jesus consistently resist the fusion of faith with domination or coercion. Jesus’ vision of God’s kingdom centres not on triumph but on humility, mercy and reconciliation.
The measure of one’s faithfulness is not the defence of religious identity but the love of neighbour, including the neighbour who is different, distant or even hostile.
Religions speak in the language of ultimate meaning and divine authority.
Their words can either restrain violence or inflame it.
To be witnesses to peace, religious communities must be willing to examine their own histories and practices with honesty and humility.
A faith that refuses self-examination risks becoming precisely what its critics fear: another force that sanctifies abusive power rather than confronting it.
- Graham Redding is Douglas Goodfellow Lecturer in Chaplaincy Studies, Theology programme, University of Otago.
