cavanaugh - violence, religion, and the state

8/4/2019 Cavanaugh - Violence, Religion, And the State

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Violence, Religion, and the State

William Cavanaugh

Draft only not for citation

The first chapter of Martin Martys bookPolitics, Religion, and the Common Good

begins with a cautionary tale:

In the 1940s, what could incite otherwise law-abiding white Christian Americans to treat

a group of fellow white Christian citizens like this?

In Nebraska, one member of this group was castrated.

In Wyoming, another member was tarred and feathered.

In Maine, six members were reportedly beaten.

In Illinois, a caravan of group members was attacked.

In other states, sheriffs looked the other way as people assaulted group members.

The groups meeting places were also attacked. Members of the group were commonly arrested and then imprisoned without

being charged.1

Marty continues on to reveal that the group in question was the Jehovahs Witnesses whose

offense, in the eyes of their fellow citizens, was to circulate pamphlets such as one entitled

Reasons Why a True Follower of Jesus Christ Cannot Salute a Flag. In1940 the Supreme Court

had ruled that all American schoolchildren could be forced to salute the American flag. Marty

comments that with war raging in Europe, The country had to stand together.2

The Jehovahs

Witnesses refused to comply.

So here we have a nation on the brink of war, enforcing reverence to its flag, and

violently persecuting a non-violent group of people who believe that flag worship is idolatrous.

Surely the lesson Marty will draw from this story will be a warning against the violence of

zealous nationalism. Right?

No. Astonishingly, the punch line of the story is a warning about the dangers of religion

in public. Within three years the Supreme Court reversed itself. But, Marty says,during the three years before that reversal, it became obvious that religion, which can pose us

versus them or them versus what we think the state should be and do carries risks and

can be perceived by others as dangerous. Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public

arena. The world scene reveals many instances of terror and tragedy created by people acting in

the name of religion.3

As Marty uses it in this case, the term religion refers notto extending ones arm in a ritual

gesture and reciting a pledge of ones allegiance to a piece of cloth endowed with totemic powers.

The term religion applies only to the Jehovahs Witnesses refusal to do so. And yet the

violence againstthe Jehovahs Witnesses is exhibit A in Martys warning against the violent

tendencies of religion. It is a bit like blaming lynching on the fact that blacks are not like whites.

To be fair, Marty clearly disapproves of coercing people to salute the flag. And much ofMartys book is dedicated to showing that allowing religion a voice in public affairs is -- as the

title of the second chapter indicates -- Worth the Risk. Nevertheless, one senses that religion in

public is to be treated like a paroled convict in the workplace: he should be given a second chance

to be a productive citizen, but the letter openers should be kept in locked drawers.

Marty is by no means alone; there has developed an entire genre of books on religion and

violence, one conclusion of which is that religion should be allowed into the public realm only in

its most chastened forms.4

In the first section of my paper, I will show how the myth of religious

violence arbitrarily focuses on certain kinds of violence and ignores others, especially the


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violence of the nation-state. In the second section, I will argue that this myth serves a crucial

legitimating role for the nation-state, presenting the nation-state as that which rescues us from the

strife of civil society by reconciling us into one. The effect, however, is the creation of a new and

more violent religion, the civil religion of nationalism. In the third section, I suggest that the

church should refuse this imagination of one public space bounded by the nation-state, and

recover a sense of the church as a public in its own right.

I. Religion and violence

Religion-and-violence arguments tend to explain religions peculiar tendency towards

violence in one or more of three interrelated ways: religion is irrational, religion is absolutist, and

religion is divisive. Marty tends to appeal to the latter two, which are related. The absolutist

nature of religion can result in exclusive loyalties that divide the body politic. Marty quotes

Brian K. Smith on religions absolutism and adds his own commentary on religions divisiveness:Violence is authorized by religion because religion is inherently absolutist in the type of

authoritative claims it makes and in the all-encompassing nature of its demands on its followers,

wrote Brian K. Smith. Once a particular group considers itself as divinely chosen and draws sharp

boundaries between itself and others, the enemy has been clearly identified, and violence can

become actual.5

Marty expands on these ideas in a section entitled Religion Divides. He writes Those called to

be religious naturally form separate groups, movements, tribes, or nations.6

The sacred privilege

with which these groups feel endowed leads to negativity toward others. He warns of the dangers

in claiming special status for the United States, and cites Ronald Reagans vilification of the

Soviet Union as the evil empire. Clearly, then, Martys sympathies are not with those ardent

nationalists who would do violence to nonconformists. Indeed, the problem with religion seems

not to be that it breaks up a desirable uniformity, but that it works against a healthy pluralism:

Religion in its intense forms can grasp people who would otherwise have multiple commitments

and exact complete and exclusive expressions of their loyalty, even unto death.7

Religion

demands one overriding commitment, a potentially lethal subordination of the many to the one.

Given this analysis, it is hard to see why the antagonists in the opening scenario end up

where Marty puts them. The Jehovahs Witnesses are clearly guilty of religion because they

have claimed an exclusive loyalty to Jesus Christ. They have provoked the violence, even though

they suffered rather than committed it. What is not clear is why their persecutors are not also

guilty of religion for demanding an equally exacting complete and exclusive expression of

their loyalty, even unto death. Marty muddies the waters by including tribes and nations

among those separate groups formed by religion. Is American nationalism of the kind evinced by

Ronald Reagan a type of religion, or is the religious influence of Christianity to blame for

turning an essentially secular reality like the nation-state toward a religious exclusivity?

If we turn for help in answering this question to Martys own attempt to define religion,

the waters only get muddier. In the introduction to the book, Marty attempts to set some

parameters for his discussion of politics and religion. He begins his discussion of religion with

seventeen different definitions of religion, then comments that since Scholars will never agree

on the definition of religion,8

he will forgo a precise definition and instead to point to

phenomena that help describe what were talking about.9 The result is a list of five features of

religion that help point to and put boundaries around the term.10

The first feature (1) is that

Religion focuses our ultimate concern. Ultimate concern answers such question as What do

you most care about? For what would you be willing to die? If you would be willing to die for

the swastika, says Marty, that points toward your ultimate concern. Interest in astrology, he says,

could also qualify. Marty then shows how politics is involved with questions of ultimate concern.

Politics asks many questions than can either further or hinder ones understanding of ultimate

concern.11


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Marty proceeds the same way through the rest of the list of five features of religion. (2)

Religion builds community, and politics must be attentive to community-building issues such

as justice, equity and the general welfare. (3) Religion appeals to myth and symbol, and

Politics often mimics this appeal politicians and citizens alike respond to mythical stories, and

government often evokes many kinds of symbols; Marty mentions war memorials and debates

over flag burning. (4) Religion is enforced through rites and ceremonies, and

Politics also depends on rites and ceremonies, [e]ven in avowedly secular nations, Martyadds. And finally (5) Religion demands certain behaviors from its adherents, and Politics and

governments also demand certain behaviors. Citizens who transgress certain rules may be

accused of treason the political form of heresy.12

So Marty has identified a peculiar tendency toward violence in religion, as opposed to

other non-religious, or secular, phenomena. But when it comes to saying what religion is, he

begs off giving a definition, lists five features that help identify religion, then shows how all five

features also apply to politics. Politics, it turns out, has the same tendencies toward ultimacy,

creating boundaries, and making demands on its adherents that were at the source of religions

violence. Indeed, Marty has given us no way to distinguish politics from religion.

As dean of American historians of religion and perhaps the most prominent commentator

on religion in American life, Martin Marty is an appropriate test case, but he is by no means alone

in his confusion. Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyers several books on religion and violence aredevoid of any attempt to define religion. Timothy McVeigh appears on the cover of

Juergensmeyers Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence despite the

fact that McVeigh was a self-proclaimed agnostic. Richard Wentzs bookWhy People Do Bad

Things in the Name of Religion defines religion so broadly that it includes consumerism,

secular humanism, faith in technology, and football fanaticism. Wentz is forced to conclude,

rather lamely, Perhaps all of us do bad things in the name of (or as a representative of)

religion.13

In his bookWhen Religion Becomes Evil, Charles Kimball claims that more wars

have been waged and more people killed in the name of religion than by any other institutional

force in human history,14

but he begs off giving a definition of religion, claiming instead we all

know it when we see it.15

When an academic says such a thing, we should react as we would when a used car

salesman urges us to waive the warranty. We dont all know it when we see it. The inability todefine religion has been called almost an article of methodological dogma in the field of

religious studies.16

Jonathan Z. Smith writes Religion is solely the creation of the scholars

study Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.17

Timothy Fitzgerald

notes in his survey of religious studies scholarship that the term religion is used to refer to

such diverse institutions as totems, the principle of hierarchy, Christmas cakes, witchcraft,

unconditioned reality, the rights of man, the National Essence, Marxism and Freudianism, the tea

ceremony, nature, ethics, and so on.18

When the term religion is used broadly, it includes so

many different phenomena as to be unhelpful in making distinctions; when the term is used more

narrowly, however, such distinctions as are made include some phenomena and exclude others

arbitrarily. Daniel Dubuisson argues that religion is an entirely Western phenomenon that has

been applied to non-Western practices, thus arbitrarily anointing what is Western as universally

valid.19

We could excuse Marty and the others perhaps by claiming that just because religion is a

concept with fuzzy edges, people still know how to use it in a meaningful way. Other concepts

culture, for example are notoriously difficult to define, but remain useful nevertheless. The

problem, however, is not simply that Martys use of religion is muddled. The problem is

precisely the opposite. When it comes to accusing religion of a tendency toward violence, Marty

and the other religion-and-violence theorists are unjustifiably clearabout what counts as religion

and what does not. The distinctions they make are arbitrary. Jehovahs Witnesses refuse to

salute the American flag because of religion; those who beat them for refusing to salute the flag


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do so from some other motive. American nationalism does not qualify as a religion, even though

it exhibits all five features of religion according to Martys own reckoning. As a result, the

violence of American nationalism slips by unnoticed as Marty warns of the dangers of zealots

like the Jehovahs Witnesses bringing religion into the public realm.

The religious character of nationalism has been noted at least since Tocqueville wrote

that American public opinion would become a sort of religion of which the majority would be

the prophets.20 Durkheims thesis that religion is the collectivitys worship of itself has oftenbeen applied to the nation-state. In a chapter entitled State Fetishism, anthropologist Michael

Taussig argues that Durkheims conclusions (if not his methodology) about the totemic character

of the social order are readily applied to the nation-state, especially in the states deep

investment in death.21

John T. Noonan observes, Empirically, the evidence suggests that

Durkheim is right: for a nation the nations interests are sacred and supreme.22

From Carlton

Hayes 1960 bookNationalism: A Religion to more recent work by Robert Bellah, Carolyn

Marvin, Talal Asad, and Peter van der Veer23

, nationalism has been treated as a form of religion.

Charles Kimball himself acknowledges that blind religious zealotry is similar to unfettered

nationalism24

while giving no indication as to how they are dissimilar. Nevertheless, he

arbitrarily excludes nationalism from his indictment of religion.

Political scientist David Rapoport attempts to distinguish between nationalism and

religion in the following terms:Perhaps circumstances and context frame the disposition towards violence. But some relevant

element seems to be inherent in the nature of religion itself. One such element is the capacity of

religion to inspire total loyalties or commitments, and in this respect, it is difficult to imagine

anything which surpasses the religious community. Religion has often had formidable rivals; in

the modern world the nation sometimes has surpassed religion as a focus of loyalties, though

significantly there is increasing propensity for academics to speak of civic religion when

discussing national symbols and rites. In any case, the ascendancy of the nation has occupied but

a brief moment in history so far, and in a limited portion of the world all of which only more

underscores the durability and special significance of religion.25

Here nationalism acts like a religion and is sometimes called a religion, but is not a religion.

Nevertheless, the violence of nationalism counts as evidence against religion. Rapoport assumes

that -- whereas the nation has a particular history -- religion is timeless and universal, eventhough, of course, he makes no attempt to prove this or define religion.

The argument that religion causes violence is often invoked to commend limits on the

role of Christianity, Islam, and other faiths in the public affairs of the nation. Christianity and

Islam are put in the category religion, nationalism and other phenomena are excluded, and then

we are warned about the absolutism inherent in religion. Of course secular phenomena such as

nationalism can get out of hand, the argument goes, but religion is more inherently absolutist

because it appeals to a God beyond mere human limitation. The problem with this argument is

that what counts as absolute is determined a priori, and is immune to empirical testing. If we

want to determine what people actually believe, we should take to heart Slavoj Zizeks

observation that belief is radically exterior and is embodied in the practical, effective

procedure of people.26

In actual practice people treat all sorts of things as absolutes. Suppose,

for example, that we defined the absolute in its most relevant sense for this discussion as thatfor which one would be willing to kill. Then suppose that we applied an empirical test to

determine whether American Christians would be more willing to kill for their Christianity or for

their country. Whether we conducted this test by survey or by observing Christians behavior

during wartime, the results would reveal far more absolutist fervor for the nation-state than for

the Christian faith. Most American Christians would find the idea of killing for Christ repugnant,

but would treat the possibility of killing for America as a necessary sacrifice.

The point is not that people never do bad things in the name of Christianity, Islam, and

other institutions commonly labeled religion. The point is that there is no reason to suppose a


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priori that such faiths are any more inherently absolutist and violent than supposedly secular

ideologies, such as nationalism, free-market capitalism, liberalism, and so on. Secularization

theory is wrong not because religion has reappeared but because it has never gone away. Pace

Weber, modernity is not at all disenchanted; state and commodity fetishism reign.27

In the West,

the nation-state and the market have replaced the church as the primary organizers of sacred

meaning, and the world is, to put it mildly, not a more peaceful place.

Of course, there is no question that a particular strain of evangelical Christian messianisminforms American nationalism. The Christian imagery of much American nationalism cannot be

ignored or dismissed as being not really Christian. But what we also cannot do is to determine a

priori that Christianity, as a religion, must be the root problem for turning an essentially secular

and innocent institution like a liberal democratic state toward a virulent form of violence. I

think empirical investigation of contemporary society reveals not that the church wields undue

influence on the state, but that the church has been absorbed by the nation-state. It is to this

problem that I turn next.

II. E Pluribus Unum

If there is noprima facie reason for separating Christianity, Islam, and other faiths from

political expression, how should the Church view its public role? Many of those who advocate

what Marty calls the public Church view the state/civil society distinction as the key.Chastened by the experience of Christendom, the Church seeks not to take over the coercive

powers of the state once again, but to participate in the public political debate as one more free

association of civil society. I will briefly discuss the approaches of Martin Marty and John

Courtney Murray, one Protestant and one Catholic, to this question.

As Marty states it, the problem with religion is its tendency to take people whose

commitments are otherwise multiple and force them into exclusive and potentially lethal

expressions of loyalty to their faith. And yet Marty has no desire to banish religious bodies from

the public conversation. Indeed, Marty believes that the solution to the subordination of the many

to the one in religion is to encourage religious people to take part in an open and civil

conversation about the common good of the nation. As Marty says, a republic prospers when

many voices speak,28

and he argues that religion is an important voice for the vitality of the

public conversation. Martys solution to the dangers of religion is a tempering of an individualsparticular religious commitment by his or her commitment to the nation, a more inclusive,

universal reality of common life but diverse voices.

John Courtney Murray is the most influential American Catholic theorist on the solution

of the problem of the one and the many in the life of the nation. Like Marty, Murray advocates a

robust pluralism of different religious voices in the public conversation. According to Murray,

what distinguishes American liberalism from its Jacobin counterparts on the Continent is a

commitment to a limited government that allows pluralism to flourish. The unity asserted in the

American device E pluribus unum is a unity of limited order.29

For Murray, the state is not

the keeper of the common good, but merely that agency that maintains public order. The locus of

the common good is civil society, where a vigorous and civil conversation takes place amongst

the various conspiracies, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and secularist.

The one civil society contains within its own unity the communities that are divided amongthemselves; but it does not seek to reduce to its own unity the differences that divide them. In a

word, the pluralism remains as real as the unity. Neither may undertake to destroy the other. Each

subsists in its own order. And the two orders, the religious and the civil, remain distinct, however

much they are, and need to be, related.30

The religion clauses of the First Amendment are therefore not articles of faith but articles of

peace, not imposing a unity on the plurality, but merely maintaining peace among the many.31


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In theory we have achieved a happy balance between unity and plurality, between the

state and civil society. The problem is that pluralism remains a threat. Murray describes the

structure of war that underlies the pluralistic society; it is a crisis that is new in history.32

Murrays entire project is to articulate a public consensus that can replace this structure of war

with a peaceful pluralism of conspiracies locked in rational argument, not battle. Murray posits

the urgent need for an American consensus based on natural law thinking that can provide a

moral foundation for such a conversation to take place. Unfortunately, Murray ruefully admits,such a consensus once existed but is now dead. In response to Murrays call for rational debate

on the moral limits of warfare, Julian Hartt countered that America is not a community capable of

embodying the tradition of reasoned discourse on warfare. Murray respondsI am compelled regretfully to agree that he is right. Such is the fact. It may even be that the

American community, especially in its clerks, who are the custodians of the public philosophy,

is not the repository of the tradition of reason on any moral issue you would like to name. This

ancient tradition lives, if you will, within the Catholic community; but this community fails to

bring it into vital relation with the problems of foreign policy.33

Murray concludes, It would seem, therefore, that the moral footing has been eroded from

beneath the political principle of consent, which has now come to designate nothing more than

the technique of majority opinion as the guide of public action a technique as apt to producefatuity in policy and tyranny of rule as to produce wisdom and justice.34

In the absence not only of agreed upon ends but of any rational basis for arguing about

those ends, the unum dissolves into the structure of war that underlies the pluralistic society.

Pluralism is the liberal states greatest threat. Murray tries to deal with the problem by appealing

ever more strongly to a lost tradition of reason and the limited state. What Murray does not seem

to realize is that the American nation-state has found its solution to the problem of pluralism in

devotion to the nation itself. The nation-state is an imagined community founded on the great

dramatic myth of salvation from pluralism and division, especially religious division. The state

takes up and reconciles the antagonisms of civil society. The nation-state is made stronger by the

absence of shared ends. In the absence of shared ends, devotion to the nation-state as the end in

itself becomes ever more urgent. Pluralism will always be a crisis for the liberal state, and the

solution to the crisis of pluralism is to rally around the nation-state, the locus of a mystical

communion that rescues us from the conflicts of civil society.

I think this explains why the myth of religious violence remains so prevalent, despite the

fog that envelops it. We need the danger of religious violence kept before us in order to produce

unity. The nation-state reads history, as Walter Benjamin says, as aperpetualstate of

emergency.35

The nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum.

The myth of religious violence has a crucial legitimating function for the nation-state in the West.

Religion in the West serves as a kind of enemy in the mirror36

for the liberal nation-state.

Religion is feared for its binding effect, its subjugation of the many to the one, and yet this effect

is mirrored in the nation-states own attempts to create e pluribus unum, to solve the problem of

pluralism through the binding of the many to the sacred nation.

The fundamental incoherence of the nation-state is sublimated by devotion to the nation-

state itself, especially it is organization of killing energies. There is thus a necessary connection

between the two seemingly contradictory faces of the nation-state that Alasdair MacIntyre

identifies. On the one hand, the state is a clearinghouse for goods and services in which decisions

are made between competing interests based on power, not rational deliberation about shared

ends. MacIntyre goes beyond Murray in saying that the public discourse of the nation-state not

only does not but cannot be conducted on the basis of common norms of rational inquiry in the

Aristotelian-Thomist sense, in part because of the sheer size of the modern nation-state.

Decisions are based on money and power, not reason, so conflict especially between classes --

is endemic. On the other hand, the nation-state presents itself as a repository of sacred value that


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requires its citizens to be ready to kill and die on its behalf. The intense practice of unity and

singular commitment that nationalism requires and produces, is however, a dangerous sham. As

MacIntyre writeswhen the nation-state masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is bound

to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both. For the counterpart to the nation-state thus

misconceived as itself a community is a misconception of its citizens as constituting a Volk, a type

of collectivity whose bonds are simultaneously to extend to the entire body of citizens and yet tobe as binding as the ties of kinship and locality. In a modern, large-scale nation-state no such

collectivity is possible and the pretense that it is is always an ideological disguise for sinister

realities.37

The primary sinister reality that must be disguised is the violence inherent in the nation-

state itself. Carolyn Marvin argues that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United

States,38

and it is a religion that produces unity through blood sacrifice in war. It has been

pointed out many times that the country is most unified in times of war; in Randolph Bournes

memorable dictum, War is the health of the State.39

According to Marvin, this fact points to the

inherently religious nature of American nationalism, for religion as she defines it following, in

different ways, Durkheim and Girard -- is bound up with blood sacrifice to defuse crises of group

identity. It is crucial, however, that we deny the religious nature of nationalism. Why?Because what is obligatory for group members must be separated, as holy things are, from what is

contestable. To concede that nationalism is a religion is to expose it to challenge, to make it just

the same as sectarian religion. By explicitly denying that our national symbols and duties are

sacred, we shield them from competition with sectarian symbols. In so doing, we embrace the

ancient command not to speak the sacred, ineffable name of god. The god is inexpressible,

unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But that god may not be refused when it calls for

sacrifice.40

The argument that religion lends itself to violence enacts a religious Other from which

the liberal nation-state offers protection. It does so by a putative contrast between the tolerance

of liberal pluralism and the exclusive commitments demanded by religion. Far from a merely

internal group dynamic, this type of argument currently frames much of American foreign policy:

Muslims have not learned, as we in the West have, to free politics from the violence of religion.Their religious commitments impose uniformity in the public sphere. Regrettably, we must bomb

them into a peaceful pluralism. As we have seen, pluralism is a crisis for the liberal nation-state,

a crisis that is solved by absorbing the many into the one, by making of nationalism a new

religion. But as Marvin points out, nationalism only works as a religion because we deny that it

is one.

III. From one city to two

As attractive as it is, the Marty/Murray vision of a robust civil society informing a limited

state is empirically false. State and civil society have been largely fused into one mutually

reinforcing set of institutions and symbols. Figures as diverse as Francis Fukuyama on the right

and Cornel West on the left have banded together into the Council on Civil Society to try to

address what Michael Hardt calls the withering of civil society, that is, the absorption of theassociations of civil society into the unity of the nation-state project. In the Churchs case, one

symptom of this absorption is the transferal of loyalty from the Church to state authority. In the

recent run up to the Iraq War, most American Christians were content to support President Bushs

determination to invade Iraq, despite the emphatic and repeated opposition to the war by the Pope

and the governing bodies of virtually every major Christian denomination. When the Church is

viewed as particular as one of many in civil society and the nation-state is viewed as universal

-- as the larger unifying reality then it is inevitable that the one will absorb the many, in the

putative interests of harmony and peace. Indeed, war becomes a means of furthering the


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integration of the many into the one; we must all stand together when faced with an enemy. The

issue here is not whether or not advocates of public theology would support the Iraq War: some

did, some didnt. The point is whether or not their conceptualization of the Churchs public role

is adequate to enable the Church to enact viable alternatives to the violence of the nation-state.

The central problem, I believe, is the reduction of politics to one city, with the Church

playing a contributing role. The problem goes back as far as Gelasius at the end of the fifth

century. The Gelasian doctrine of one city with two powers though still far from the modernunitary state -- was already a significant departure from Augustines image of two cities with two

loves. The image of one city means that the Church must either rule or be ruled. Lost is the

eschatological complexity that the ekklesia introduces. Here, amidst the earthly city, is the

opening up of a heavenly city that is neitherpolis noroikos, neither state nor merely one more

voluntary association of civil society.

In Augustine there is no merely spatial carving up of a given city into spheres of

influence. The city of God is not so much a space as a performance, a set of practices. It is not

simply identifiable with the visible Church, although as Christs body, the Church is ontologically

related to the City of God.41

Likewise, the earthly city is not identified with the empire or the

nation or the government but is a particular tragic performance of lust for domination. Both cities

make use of the same temporal goods, but use them for different ends.42

The city of God has to

do with ordering matters that are considered public. The city of God is not part of a largerwhole, but is a public in its own right. Indeed, the city of God is the only true public thing

according to Augustine, as pagan Roman rule had failed to be a res publica by refusing to enact

justice and serve God.43

There is also no sense in Augustine that the earth is divided up by nature into different

earthly cities or nations, each with its own government. As Augustine reads the story of Babel,

the world was divided into separate peoples as a consequence of sin, and coercive government is

the result of the Fall.44

For Augustine, both the division of people into nations and coercive

government are essentially tragic realities, not part of Gods original intention for creation but a

means of keeping sin in check by sin. As such, the earthly city is a temporary reality; because

Christ has triumphed over sin, the earthly city is passing away, receding into the city of God.

Christ is the one who gathers the many into himself.45

The city of God, then, is the universal

reality, while the earthly city is partial and particular. The city of God, while it sojourns onearth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all

languages,46

thus reversing the effects of the Fall. In doing so, far from rescinding and

abolishing these diversities it even preserves and adapts them.47

It is not my present intention to critique Augustines comments on the use that the city of

God makes of the coercive powers of the earthly city.48

What is important for my present

purpose is the way that Augustines image of the two cities breaks the modern monolithic

conception of a single public space, bounded by the nation-state, in which the Church must

somehow find a place. For Augustine, neither city is a space with clearly defined boundaries, but

both are sets of practices or dramatic performances, one tragic, the other comic, broadly speaking.

I offer the image of performance in the spirit of Oliver ODonovans emphasis that political

authority is primarily about acts, not institutions.49

The Church is not faced with one city, one

public sphere which it must rule, flee, or offer suggestions to. The task of the Church is tointerrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption, to build the city of

God, beside which the earthly city appears to be not a city at all.

Let me illustrate this idea with Richard Strauss opera Ariadne auf Naxos.

The action is set in the house of the richest man in Vienna, who is busy throwing a feast for

numerous guests. The host is a man of indiscriminate taste. He has scheduled dinner to be

followed by two performances, one a tragic opera seria based on the Ariadne legend, and the

other a comedy featuring harlequins, nymphs, and buffoons. The pompous composer of the opera

is outraged when he discovers that his masterwork is to be followed by such a frivolous offering.


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The situation becomes much worse for the composer and his Prima Donna when the master of the

house announces that, in order to leave time for the fireworks display, both the tragedy and the

comedy will have to be performed simultaneously, on the same stage.50

As the curtain rises on the second act of Strauss opera, Ariadne is at the grotto grieving

her abandonment by her lover Theseus. Ariadne resolves to await Hermes, the messenger of

death, to take her away to the underworld, the realm of death. However, Zerbinetta and her

troupe of comedians interrupts Ariadnes tragedy and alters the direction of the opera. Zerbinettahooks Ariadne up with a new lover, the young god Bacchus, who carries her off to the heavens in

a comic resolution of the drama. Zerbinetta has the final word: When a new god comes along,

were dumbstruck.

In this metaphor, the Church interrupts the tragedy of the human drama by enacting the

comedy of redemption in Christ. The Church is neither forced to shun the stage nor to seek a

minor supporting role in civil society, for the earthly city is a performance, not the stage itself.

The city of God does not allow the earthly city to define one public space, but constantly

redefines what is truly public. Church and nation-state are not primarily institutions but actors in

the public drama of human history. History is the one public stage on which God is telling the

story of redemption. Both cities are concerned with the same questions of ultimate concern:

What is the purpose of human life? How should human life be ordered to achieve that purpose?

The difference is that the city of God tells the story that we believe to be true, that God in Christthrough the Spirit has saved us from the tragedy of inevitable violence. The Church in this

metaphor is not a separate institution or enclave, but works with other actors to enact the drama of

redemption.

I will conclude by returning to the example of the Iraq War and see how this vision of the

Church can play out in practice. Before and during the Iraq War, the majority of American

Christians were content to see themselves as Americans first, and Christians second, ignoring

their churches opposition to the war. Several prominent American Catholic commentators made

the public argument that the Church was welcome to give its opinion on the war, but judgment of

this matter belonged to the President.51

The assumption is that the Church is one of many

contributors to the one public debate on the war; when the nation makes up its mind, the Church

in America should loyally support the war effort. Suppose, however, that the Church saw itself as

a public in its own right, and as a more universal public than America, one capable of thinking inbroader terms than American foreign policy interests. (This is one of the wonderful things about

having a Polish pope). The Churchs public role would be to enact a different drama, one of

reconciliation not war. The Church could do this by first refusing to participate in an unjust war,

and second by supporting the ongoing efforts of groups like Voices in the Wilderness, who have

been bringing medicine, toys, and food to Iraq since 1991, in violation of US law. Such efforts

enact a different drama by dismissing national borders as ultimately unreal.

Nothing in my paper should suggest that Christians are somehow innocent of complicity

in violence throughout the centuries. It is to suggest, on the contrary, that repentance for our

complicity in violence must not take the form of meekly accepting the myth of religious violence

and shrinking the church down to fit more comfortably into the nation-states monopoly on

political space and violence. Our repentance should take the form of resisting the violence of the

state, fostering an eschatological sense that the earthly city is passing away, and that the church iscalled to witness in its own public life to the new order of peace and reconciliation.

1

Martin E. Marty, with Jonathan Moore,Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American

Conversation About Religions Role in Our Shared Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 23.2

Ibid., 24.3

Ibid.


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4

For example, R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham,

Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000);Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of

Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil

(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002); Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World

(London: Frank Cass, 1992); Charles Selengut, Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence (Walnut Creek, CA:

Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and Richard E. Wentz, Why People do Bad Things in the Name of Religion (Macon,

GA: Mercer University Press, 1993).5

Marty, 27-8.6

Ibid., 25.7

Ibid., 29.8

Ibid., 10.9

Ibid., 14.10

Ibid., 10.11

Ibid., 11.12

Ibid., 11-14.13

Richard E. Wentz, Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion (Atlanta: Mercer University Press, 1993), 37;

cf. 13-21.14

Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), 1.15

Ibid., 15.16

Brian C. Wilson, From the Lexical to the Polythetic: A Brief History of the Definition of Religion, in What is

Relligion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998),17 Jonathan Z. Smith,Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),xi.18

Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17.19

Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 10-11. Dubuisson writes, We should also avoid describing as

universal values that the West alone has invented. Since their domain is always fundamentally one of conflict, these

values would effectively become universal only when all the others had been destroyed and eliminated by us; ibid.,

21.20

Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in John T. Noonan, Jr., The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of

Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 216.21

Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 138.22

Noonan, 233.23

Carlton Hayes,Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Robert N. Bellah, The American Civil

Religion,Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967); Peter van der Veer, The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in

Victorian Britain and British India,Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia , ed. Peter van der Veer and

Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 39; Talal Asad, Religion, Nation-state, Secularism,

Nation and Religion, 17891; Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle,Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and

the American Flag(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).24

Kimball, 38.25

David C. Rapoport, Some General Observations on Religion and Violence in Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Violence

and the Sacred in the Modern World(London: Frank Cass, 1992), 120.26

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 23-35.27

See Eugene McCarraher, The Enchanted Earthly City: The State and the Market in Modern Theology, forthcoming28

Marty, 162.29

John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1960), 45.30

Ibid.31

Ibid., 49.32

Ibid., 24.33

Ibid., 291. See Michael J. Baxters essay John Courtney Murray in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds.,

The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 150-64.34Ibid., 293.

35Walter Benjamin,Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us

that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.36

I take this phrase from Roxanne Eubens bookEnemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of

Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.37

Alasdair MacIntyre,Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago and LaSalle, IL:

Open Court, 1999), 132.38

Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,Journal of the

American Academy of Religion LXIV, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 768.


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39

Randolph Bourne, The State in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York:

Harper & Row, 1964), 71.40

Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice, 770.41

At one point in the City of God, Augustine does appear to make the straightforward identification of the Church with

the city of God; in XVI.2, he refers in passing to Old Testament figures that are to be referred only to Christ and His

church, which is the city of God. Later Augustine says, the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ, and the

kingdom of heaven because it contains the righteous within it; St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods(New York: Modern Library, 1950), XX.942

Ibid., XVIII.54.43

Ibid., XIX.21-5.44

Ibid., XVI.4. On political authority as a result of sin in Augustine, see R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society

in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 197-210.45

See Augustine, The Trinity, IV.11.46

Augustine, The City of God, XIX.17.47

Ibid.48

I tend to agree with John Milbank that Augustines curbing of sin by sin is problematic, for the earthly city tends

toward more serious sin in its prideful claims of self-sufficiency; see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory:

Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 406-08, 417-22.49

Oliver ODonovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20-1.50

Richard Strauss,Ariadne auf Naxos (New York: Dover Books, 1993). I am grateful to Doug Asbury, a student at

Seabury-Western Seminary, for calling my attention to this opera during a class discussion of my bookTorture andEucharist. Strauss opera is based on Molieres 1670 playLe Bourgeois Gentilhomme.51

George Weigel, The Just War Case for the War,America 188, no. 11 (March 31, 2003): 7-10 and Michael Novak,

War to Topple Saddam is a Moral Obligation, The Times (London), February 12, 2003.

cavanaugh - violence, religion, and the state

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