In Western societies, the possible connection between religion and violence after the Hamas terrorist acts of October 7, 2023 is once again the reason for profound debates. The majority of believers, whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Buddhist, of course do not carry machine guns, machetes or hatchets in their hands, do not rape in the name of religion or joyfully celebrate a bloody massacre in public. The “normal believer” sees religion as a personal devotion to a higher power.
Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that pyres were lit, crusades were organized and murders were carried out in the name of one or more gods. Of course, many of these violent acts did not only have religious reasons, but the “enemy” perhaps also represented an acute political danger. However, to many contemporaries, religious truth claims seemed to be particularly susceptible to the use of violence. Because in contrast to scientific truths, religions claim totality. According to science, monotheistic religions in particular are intrinsically violent because they are based on an emphatic concept of truth that implies the category of incompatibility.
At the beginning of the great revealed religions there are often acts of violence. Significantly, the sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac, requested by Yahweh, was not carried out at the behest of the same God, because the God of Abraham was “a merciful and gracious God.” Because of his obedience, he made Abraham the progenitor of a universal promise. According to the Christian self-image, the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross is central because it was freely chosen. This is because of God’s love for people, which is revealed in the incarnate Son of God and ultimately on the cross. By making himself a victim, the crucified man redeems humanity – and also redeems it from violence as a means of worshiping God. Because the cruel event does not legitimize anyone to do something similar to others – on the contrary.
There is no equivalent for this in Islam. It begins with the reception of a book from the hands of the archangel Gabriel, who comes from Jewish tradition, and the massacre of the Jews of Medina, carried out by the prophet personally, who had rejected the message contained in the book. For Allah is a God only merciful for those who believe. While the early Christians moved on after resistance to their preaching in the Jewish synagogues, Muhammad took up the saber. The original story of Islam therefore includes killing unbelievers in the name of Allah – this is also the instruction in the Quran. The Christian original story, on the other hand, is the gift of God incarnate out of love for the redemption of all people – a God who, in Jesus of Nazareth, was born of a Jewish mother, himself became a Jew and does not rely on a new holy scripture, but on the promise to Abraham and the Law of Moses, the Jewish Torah.
Christianity, of course, persecuted the Jews. The institution of the church branded them as Christ-killers and thereby created a theology that also led to hatred and persecution by Christians. However, the church tried to protect the Jews from persecution; they should – excluded and legally discriminated against – continue to live as witnesses to Christian truth and, if possible, be converted. At the same time, the church protected Christians from the supposedly harmful Jewish influence on them. This “dual protection” meant disastrous exclusion, but not persecution. The large expulsions of Jews were mostly political acts of state; one thinks of the expulsion of Jews from England and later from Spain. Behind the Jewish pogroms were mostly non-religious interests of a political nature as well as normal envy and resentment.
And the Inquisition, the Crusades? The Inquisition, for example, was neither extremely cruel nor, as Voltaire claimed, did it hand over tens of thousands to the executioner. By today’s standards, the punishments imposed by the secular courts at that time were often downright brutally cruel. This was not in the hands of the church and had its origins in old Germanic criminal law. The Spanish Inquisition of the early modern period was a political event by the state with collaboration from the church. Between 1540 and 1700 a total of 826 death sentences were carried out. All of this is still terrible enough, but it is in no way capable of proving a causal connection between religion and violence.
The Roman Inquisition, established much earlier – in the High Middle Ages – arose to replace the evil of spontaneous lynchings by the Christian people, who were angry at the sometimes violent heretics, and to introduce an orderly investigative procedure (“inquisitio”) in accordance with the Roman law in force at the time. The Roman Inquisition certainly saved far more people from death than it handed over to secular criminal justice based on its verdicts.
Legal history now describes the medieval inquisition process as a legal cultural progress and humanization of criminal procedure law compared to the previous Germanic procedural law. The “age of jurisprudence” began with the “inquisitio veritatis,” the “investigation of truth as a question of fact.” However, since they wanted to judge based on facts instead of anonymous denunciations, they tried to obtain confessions – if necessary with the help of torture. However, to claim a causal connection between religion and violence with reference to the Inquisition arises from historical ignorance or is cheap polemic.
However, religions can also be intrinsically political. This is exactly where Christianity and Islam fundamentally differ: Islam is a “political religion” in the true sense: as a religion, it is also a legal and social system; With Sharia he establishes a political, legal and social order. Christianity is different: from the beginning it promised alone and exclusively a path to eternal salvation and for this very reason it represents a clear division of labor between spiritual and secular power. The ancient Christian civilization did not derive its legal system from its holy scriptures, but rather retained the previous Roman law.
Of course, the Christian Church also helped shape political orders throughout history due to its teaching of the supremacy of the spiritual over the secular. However, it never finally identified itself with a particular form of political order and developed its own, canon law, on the basis of Roman law. Due to the original Christian separation of religion and politics, of spiritual and secular power – “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God” – it was always able to justify its mixing with earthly powers by citing its origins correct, often under pressure from reform movements within themselves. For Islam, however, it is precisely the unity of religion, law and social order and the associated public monopoly on violence that is its origin and essential feature. Therefore, Islamism and “political Islam” are not extreme special forms of Islam, but the “pure teaching”.
However, every religion can become political and violent as soon as it combines with political interests – for example with those of a nationalistic nature. In combination with nationalism, religion easily becomes violent, or better: nationalism becomes particularly aggressive and violent precisely when it legitimizes itself religiously. Politics then combines with religious-cultural claims to totality and is prepared – be it in the name of the cross or in the name of Allah – to literally walk over corpses.
As a political religion by its nature and origin, Islam is structurally endangered in this respect. Since it was primarily concerned with expanding its territory – called the “House of Islam” – and less with the internal conversion of those under the rule, Islam tolerated Jews and Christians throughout history as “wards” (dhimmi), a kind of second-class citizen. However, due to its political logic, this ultimately led to their expulsion or extermination almost everywhere.
This makes the thesis plausible that Palestinian national consciousness could only become a murderous opponent of a Jewish state insofar as it was linked to the religious claim of Islam as an intrinsically political religion. The political, not the religious component, if these can be distinguished at all in Islam, is the reason for the conflict. Nurtured by the Muslim Brotherhood’s racist hatred of Jews, the combination of Islam and Palestinian nationalism makes Hamas particularly dangerous and thus generated the brutal violence that manifested itself last October.
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