When Religion Becomes Evil

                                                         I.  Absolute Truth Claims

                                                                  Craig Anderson

I Corinthians 13                                                                                                             March 9, 2003

 

How much better a place the world would be, if every person would embrace their religious convictions as gracefully and honestly as Paul does in this passage from I Corinthians: “We see in a mirror dimly... We know only in part...”  This sort of mature humility is in short supply in our world just now.  Rather than respect for differences, and acknowledgment of limitations, we are much more likely to encounter religious zealots of all stripes and denominations, who are only too sure that they possess the truth as no one else does, and who are only too willing to split open our heads if necessary to punctuate their point.

 

How many people do you know who reject religion because of its terrible track record in fanning the flames of divisiveness and war down through human history?  I know quite a few, and have doubts about the enterprise of faith some days myself.  As Charles Kimball observes, while:

The record of history shows that noble acts of love, self-sacrifice, and service to others are frequently rooted in deeply held religious world views...  at the same time, history (also) shows that religion has been linked directly to the worst examples of human behavior.  It is trite, but nevertheless sadly true to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.”

Why is that?  How does religion, which can inspire nobility, become evil?  What goes wrong?  What are the warning signs?  These are our questions for the six Sundays of Lent.  I will be using Charles Kimball’s book, and six of his chapter headings as my themes, to explore what happens “when religion becomes evil.”

 

But first, how do we know when evil has arrived on the doorstep of the sanctuary, the temple, the mosque, the church?  If you return to consciousness, and blood is dripping from your split head, that is one sign.  But more specifically and helpfully Kimball points us toward one of Christianity’s most fundamental stories.  Jesus, when asked what the most important requirements of religion are, responded:  “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.”  Paul echoes this theme in Corinthians:  faith and hope are just dandy, but “the greatest of these is love.”  So how do we know when religion has run amok?  Charles Kimball argues,

“Whatever religious people may say about their love of God or the mandates of their religion, when their behavior toward others is violent and destructive, when it causes suffering among their neighbors, you can be sure the religion has been corrupted and reform is desperately needed.  This clear requirement (of love) is always found at the heart of all authentic, healthy, life-sustaining religions.”

Given all of the religiously motivated violence and destruction in our world, most vividly evident since September 11, but signaled to us in Palestine, Israel, India, Pakistan, and a host of other places, with our nation on the verge of what some see as a holy war in Iraq, it is blatantly obvious that religious reform in all our houses of faith is indeed “desperately needed.”  Strife inspired by belief, killing in the name of God has gone on from time immemorial, but in the 21^st century, our means of splitting heads have become so much more lethal and efficient, that the task of reform is arguably more urgent now than it has ever been before in human history.  Charles Kimball makes the case that “the corrupting influences that lead toward evil and violence in religious traditions,” can be identified.  He examines “five major warning signs of human corruption of religion”.  He says that, “When one finds these dynamics at work, history suggests that serious trouble lurks just ahead.”

 

Today, we begin by heeding the warning sign of competing claims to truth: claims which turn absolute and inflexible; claims which are anything but humble and aware of human limitations.  Every religion of course, lays claim to truth.  A religion which offers no insight into the meaning, purpose and conduct of our lives is hardly worth its salt.  But the danger comes in how tightly we grasp that truth, and whether in staking our claim, we push the insights and perceptions of others entirely out of the picture.

 

What Paul saw so clearly, that his view of the truth was partial: a dim reflection of ultimate reality, is not always apparent to other believers.  Some, in Kimball’s words, regard “their particular vision of Christianity or Islam or even Buddhism as the one ‘true’ way; with everything else, by definition, as false.”  We see this fault most clearly in other religions, of course, but many programs being televised on Christian networks at this very hour, evidence just this orientation.  Take the flap which flares up every few years about the validity of prayers which are not offered in the name of Jesus.  In the views of many, God is supposedly unable to hear prayers without a Jesus’ tag-line, which of course exasperates Muslims and infuriates the Jews.  Or consider the evangelist who prayed at the inauguration of President Bush, and who with many of his celebrity peers now insists that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion;” and that Allah is “a false God.”

 

Charles Kimball who spent years in the Middle East, notes that “Allah is simply the Arabic word for God.  People who speak Arabic -- including the more than fifteen million Christians who live in the Middle East today -- pray to Allah; people who speak French pray to Dieu; people who speak German pray to Gott.” 

 

Because we Christians know so little about other world religions, we remain largely unaware, in Kimball’s words, that:

“Islamic self-understanding couldn’t be clearer: Allah is the God Jews and Christians also worship.  God, according to the Qur’an... has spoken to humankind through many prophets and messengers, including biblical figures like Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and John the Baptist.  Jesus is one of the most important and prominent figures in the Qur’an; he is mentioned ninety-three times by name.  There is simply no ambiguity here.

Kimball includes, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are talking about the same deity.  Is it because we no longer have atheistic communists to kick around, that we have had to find other scape-goats to define ourselves over-against?  There is no better way to rally the faithful that to create an external enemy, and then to ridicule them with absolute and exclusivistic claims to truth.  But this has grown to be a very dangerous game in our world, with our zealots only riling up their zealots and further dividing the world into armed and dangerous camps.

Suppose that instead we were to recognize, as Paul did, that our views are limited, our experiences of the Holy only partial, and that our approaches to Allah do not “exhaust all the possibilities.”  Humility can become a means to overcome divisiveness, and a basis for greater tolerance. 

 

Unfortunately, the sacred texts of the various religious traditions are open to ready abuse when it comes to claims of absolute truth.  If we reflect only for a moment, this is apparent in struggles of contemporary Christianity over the creation stories in Genesis.  Kimball says that when he teaches undergraduates, they readily appreciate the symbolic nature of creation stories from other cultures.  I remember how fascinating it was to hear students in Micronesia tell their ancient stories of human origins, and how helpful they found it to compare those stories with the two creation stories in Genesis, and then to study modern scientific views. 

 

But somehow, a rather substantial portion of the population around us has gotten it into their heads, that Genesis is exactly how it happened:  talking snakes; fruit which could render insight into good and evil; a real garden; and a God who liked to stroll in the shade of the garden at the end of a busy day.  Which is not to say that this creation myth isn’t true at many levels, just not at the level of modern scientific insight and discovery.  I love a story about a Native American who prefaced the telling his tribe’s creation story with the rejoinder, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true....” 

 

Only in Christianity are there battles over sacred texts.  In Islam too, parts of the Qur’an have been ripped out of context, and elevated to absolute truth, with sad and tragic consequences in the form of suicide bombers.  There are texts in Islam’s holy scripture which do promise martyrs they will not have to linger between death and the Day of Judgement, but will go directly to heaven.  But as Kimball notes, the problem is:

“Who determines what constitutes martyrdom?  Unlike the majority Sunni Muslims, the Shi’ites have an organized, hierarchical structure for clergy.  Recognized leaders in particular settings can and do render such decisions.  Beginning in the 1980's, extremist leaders in Hizbollah did just that, with several of them declaring that suicide attacks against Israelis constituted martyrdom.

Not only do these interpretations ignore the historical setting of such passages, from a time when early Muslims were under attack and self-defense was considered valid; but as Kimball notes, there are also:

“Others who have studied the Qur’an who quickly point out that such verses must be understood in relationship to dozens of passages that affirm Jews and Christians as People of the Book, who, like Muslims, are promised a place in heaven. 

 

Only a highly selective reading can produce the kind of narrow interpretation which justifies suicide bombings and missions.  Such a stance ignores completely the multiple and unambiguous admonitions in the Qur’an against any form of suicide.  It also overlooks strict Islamic prohibitions against killing women, children, and noncombatants, even during times of war.  For these reasons, many Muslim leaders in the aftermath of September 11 denounced the violent extremists as terribly misguided and uninformed about fundamental teachings in Islam.”

For many, the claims of sacred scripture become absolute claims.  History and context are ignored.  The need for interpretation and reflection is disregarded, and texts become weapons to wield against those who appear to be different from us or seem to disagree with us.  But the Jewish community especially, the oldest people of the book, the ones who have lived with scripture the longest, have a wonderful tradition of deep study, and vigorous debate and discussion about the meaning of texts.  In their view, “meaning is not a property of a text but something that must always be wrestled with and continuously sought and redefined.”

 

In our Congregational heritage too, such an approach was taken by John Robinson, pastor to the Pilgrims in Holland, who in his final sermon before the Pilgrims left for to the new world, promised that “there is more truth yet to break forth from God’s Holy Word.” 

 

From these points of view, sacred texts are neither transparent in their meanings, nor frozen in time.  They were written in particular places by inspired, but still limited human beings, who saw only dimly, and who knew only in part.  To take one collection of holy writings, and raise them above all others as representing the final or absolute truth, is again to do violence to the nature of truth.  Such violence then spreads, as we reach out to whack others whose limited views are different than our own limited views.  How much better it would be to study our sacred texts together, to find the similarities, to appreciate the differences, and to gain new insights each from the other.  We might do that if we were more humble, if we remembered that treating our neighbors with less than respect and love is unacceptable and terribly dangerous in our time.

 

If a religion is to avoid becoming evil, its adherents must resist absolute claims to truth; they must reject uses of sacred texts which justify exclusion, brutality, and mayhem visited upon other members in God’s whole human family.  That is a tall order, and one we are not fulfilling very successfully.  But there are ways, and faithful, humble people use them all the time.  May their numbers increase.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Lenten sermon series relies on:

 

Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil, Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.  New York, 2002.

 

“Charles Kimball is a professor of religion and chair of the department of religion at Wake Forest University.  An ordained Baptist minister who received his Th.D from Harvard University in comparative religion with specialization in Islamic studies, Dr. Kimball is the author of three books about religion in the Middle East.”                        ...from the book jacket