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Religion, Peace and Conflict
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Religion and Conflict
In this course, Professor Lee Marsden (University of East Anglia) explores the relationship between religion and conflict. In the first module, we challenge simplistic arguments that religion is either inherently violent or inherently peaceful. The second module looks at two theories on the effect of religion on conflict - Rene Girard’s view of religion as something which limits violence, and Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis. In the third module, we consider the process of secularisation and the place of religion in contemporary societies. The fourth module turns to liberation theologies - doctrines which emphasise support for the poor and marginalised as central to religious belief and practice. We conclude with a final module on conservative evangelicals in the US as an example of a religious group which is heavily involved in the political sphere and often associated with social conflict.
Religion, Peace and Conflict
In this module, we think about arguments that religion is either inherently violent or peaceful, and challenges to this simplistic binary. We focus on: (i) the common claim that most wars are caused by religion, and the extent to which this is supported by the historical record; (ii) key counters to this claim, such as that conflicts typically have multiple motivations, and that whilst religion may be used as a justification for war it is often not its underlying cause; (iii) the persecution of minority religious groups as a major form of violence involving religion, looking at examples in North Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan and elsewhere; (iv) the notion of religions of peace - that in all major religions there are elements which are opposed to violence, and that there are many examples of religious actors being important advocates against conflict.
Hello.
00:00:05I'm Lee Marsden, a professor of faith and global politics at the University of East Anglia,
00:00:06and I'm going to be talking to you today about religion and conflict.
00:00:11And what I want to do in this session, basically, is to,
00:00:15try and cover two things, really.
00:00:19We want to look at some myth busting, and,
00:00:20then we want to sort of look at,
00:00:23some ideas around peacemaking,
00:00:25in religion and conflict.
00:00:28Aesop,
00:00:31had a fable about the frog and the scorpion,
00:00:32and I think it's quite a useful illustration, really.
00:00:35So there's, this frog, and it's by the the
00:00:38river, and it wants to get to the other side.
00:00:42And just as it's about to set off to go to the other side,
00:00:45a scorpion comes alongside it and says, mister frog,
00:00:48will you carry me across the river?
00:00:54And the frog looks at the scorpion and says, no, mister scorpion.
00:00:57I won't carry you across the river, for if I do, you will
00:01:01sting me, and I will drown.
00:01:05And the scorpion looks at him and says, no.
00:01:09For if I were to sting you, then
00:01:14we would both drown.
00:01:18And the frog weighs us up and thinks that's that's fine.
00:01:20We'll we'll take the chance.
00:01:23So they set out, and the scorpion hops on the frog's back.
00:01:25And they get halfway across the stream,
00:01:30and the frog can feel this sting in its back.
00:01:33And just before paralysis sets in and the frog drowns,
00:01:39the frog says, mister scorpion,
00:01:45why did you sting me?
00:01:49For now we shall both drown.
00:01:50And the scorpion says,
00:01:52because it's in my nature.
00:01:55And I think that idea really of
00:01:59it being in the scorpion's nature very much reflects
00:02:03attitudes towards religion and conflict.
00:02:07Is religion the scorpion,
00:02:12inflicting suffering,
00:02:15inflicting pain because it's in its nature.
00:02:17Or maybe religion is the frog,
00:02:22more sinned against than sinning.
00:02:25Or maybe that's just too simplistic
00:02:29a way of looking at things.
00:02:32That sort of Manichean
00:02:34dualism of religion, either good or
00:02:36bad, only gets us so far.
00:02:40And what I want to show you is a far more nuanced approach
00:02:43towards religion.
00:02:47And perhaps we can do that by maybe,
00:02:49busting, a myth or two.
00:02:52When we think about religion and conflicts,
00:02:57probably the number one myth that comes up is that
00:02:59most wars are caused by religion.
00:03:03And if you were to ask somebody to name some of those wars,
00:03:07then they would say, well, you know, everybody knows this.
00:03:11You know, we think of crusades,
00:03:14Northern Ireland,
00:03:17Israel Arab conflict.
00:03:20These are all examples of of religious conflict.
00:03:23There's just so many that we can't name them.
00:03:26But, actually, you probably do need to to name them if you're going to make that claim,
00:03:30because the reality is that war occurs for many
00:03:35different reasons, not just a matter of
00:03:39religious difference
00:03:44or trying to assert the superior superiority
00:03:46of one religion over another.
00:03:49But for reasons of poverty,
00:03:53greed.
00:03:56If you actually want to look at the evidence,
00:03:57a couple of people, Charles Phillips and
00:04:00Alan Axelrod wrote in two thousand and four,
00:04:03the Encyclopedia of Wars.
00:04:07And in that, they looked at, as many wars as,
00:04:09there were records of,
00:04:13and they managed to work out about seventeen hundred and
00:04:14sixty three wars.
00:04:17Only one hundred and twenty three of those could be
00:04:19classified as being religious.
00:04:22That's probably about seven percent of all the total wars
00:04:24that there's been.
00:04:28If you actually sort of break it down in terms of the deaths
00:04:29that were caused,
00:04:33probably about three percent of all deaths caused by religious wars.
00:04:34And yet even that might be misleading.
00:04:40Wars are seldomly monocausal.
00:04:44If you look at the twentieth century wars and you look at
00:04:48the the Great War, the first World War,
00:04:53nearly thirty five million military and civilians were
00:04:55killed in that conflict.
00:04:59If you compare that to the crusades where about three million,
00:05:01it died through that.
00:05:05There's a huge disparity between popular conceptions
00:05:08and the reality of what's happening on the ground.
00:05:12If you look at genocide,
00:05:16and over the twentieth century,
00:05:18probably about a hundred and sixty million people were
00:05:19killed in genocide.
00:05:21But a hundred million of those were in the Soviet Union or
00:05:24China, both atheistic
00:05:29communist states.
00:05:32So there's a big disparity.
00:05:35What we do see happening, after the end of the Cold War
00:05:37is that the political dimension sort of
00:05:42changes as we no longer have this bipolarity,
00:05:45in competition between the United States and the Soviet Union,
00:05:49and there tends to be a breakup of these,
00:05:54huge blocks of support for one side or or the other.
00:05:58And what tends to happen is that religion becomes a
00:06:02signifier for nationalist movements.
00:06:06So we see this in the former Yugoslavia,
00:06:08where people who would live happily side by side with their Muslim,
00:06:12whether they were Orthodox or whether they were Catholic.
00:06:16And nationalist sentiment allowed a
00:06:20situation whereby the signifier of what it meant
00:06:24to be Serbian or Bosnian was defined by,
00:06:27the religious faith.
00:06:32Wasn't the faith driving the conflict, but rather being
00:06:33used, hijacked as it were,
00:06:38by political interests
00:06:40to have some kind of cohesion.
00:06:42If you want to look at where religion really does come into
00:06:46conflict, I think we have to think about
00:06:50religious persecution
00:06:54and the persecution of,
00:06:56people for holding a particular religious faith,
00:06:58which occurs right across the world,
00:07:02some areas more extreme than others.
00:07:05The bishop Petruro did a report on behalf of the foreign office
00:07:09where he looked at the treatment of religious
00:07:14groupings around the world.
00:07:17And his research basically led him to the conclusion that
00:07:19Christianity was the most persecuted faith in the world,
00:07:23followed shortly behind by Islam.
00:07:28Organizations like Open Doors have a a world watch list of
00:07:32about fifty countries that they sort of monitor.
00:07:36I find that North Korea, for example,
00:07:40is always at the top of that list through its wholesale
00:07:42persecution of Christians and other people of faith.
00:07:46We're all aware of what's been going on in the Xinjiang
00:07:51province in China with the Uighurs and the persecution by
00:07:54the Chinese government of, of this Muslim group, in
00:07:58in West China.
00:08:04Myanmar.
00:08:07And there's the the ethnic cleansing, as it were, of the Rohingya,
00:08:08Muslim community from Myanmar.
00:08:14And we hear reports constantly of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
00:08:18states,
00:08:23who will persecute minorities,
00:08:25particularly the Christian community,
00:08:28but also faiths which are sort of a
00:08:30deviant from from Sunni Islam.
00:08:33Probably in terms of persecution,
00:08:37the example of Daesh or Islamic State,
00:08:40is the most conclusive,
00:08:45issue really in terms of of attitudes towards
00:08:47persecution of of minority groups,
00:08:51through a particular view of their, of their faith.
00:08:55And, this led to the persecution of the Yazidis and Christian
00:09:00communities as as well.
00:09:04But
00:09:08it's not just a matter of persecution.
00:09:10There's also the other side of the coin where religions become
00:09:12religions of of peace.
00:09:16And although there's conflict, also,
00:09:19there's an element within each of the major faiths which is
00:09:22determined to make peace.
00:09:26There's a consensus among the major religions of the world of
00:09:29duty of care for the downtrodden.
00:09:33Violence in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran
00:09:38is mitigated by other verses.
00:09:42If you look at the root the derivation of of Islam from
00:09:47Salama or Salima, then that's very much a matter of peace
00:09:50and Islam being seen as being a religion of peace.
00:09:55Within the Hebrew Bible, the command the sixth commandment,
00:09:59thou shall not kill, is
00:10:03emblematic of a desire for for peace.
00:10:06Christianity itself was a pacifist religion by and large
00:10:11up until the fourth century when, Constantine
00:10:14declares the Roman Empire that Christianity be the religion of
00:10:18of of the empire.
00:10:22That emphasis in Christianity is who remained with the peace
00:10:24churches, people like the Quakers, the Mennonites,
00:10:27the Amish, who have this testimony of,
00:10:30of peace and work actively towards peace.
00:10:33And we can see it in Northern Ireland.
00:10:37In order to bring warring sides together,
00:10:39it was the work of clerics.
00:10:42It was a work of people like father Alex Reid and Jerry
00:10:44Reynolds in the Clonard Monastery who brought together
00:10:47the IRA, Sinn Fein, the SDLP,
00:10:51to get them to give up the armed struggle.
00:10:56So there is a capacity within religion, not just for
00:10:59violence, not just for conflict,
00:11:04but also and principally, I'd suggest,
00:11:06for peacemaking and for, and for passivity.
00:11:09
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Marsden, L. (2024, May 20). Religion and Conflict - Religion, Peace and Conflict [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/religion-and-conflict
MLA style
Marsden, L. "Religion and Conflict – Religion, Peace and Conflict." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 20 May 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/religion-and-conflict