It belongs to non-modern religion to believe two things:
- To believe that religious behavior and belief is a constituent of the natural order.
- To believe that religion and belief are part of the framework that holds up the natural order.
In its most primal form religion taught that a people's rituals and beliefs both existed from the beginning and were somehow necessary for the annual return of the rains, or the migration of the herds and flocks, or the changing of the seasons.
The major religions in our contemporary world no longer assert that the natural order is upheld by their rituals. But there is a strong belief within Islam, Christianity, and Judaism that the moral order of our social world is dependent on religious belief and practice. This is easy enough to see in the now common trope asserting that everything went wrong with US morality when prayer was taken out of public schools. Or in an older Catholic teaching characterized by the short novel Mr Blue by Myles Connolly, which imagines that the future of society hinges on a single celebration of the Eucharist. Supporters of the Tridentine Mass appear to concur.
What we need to notice here isn't the kind of pious assertions of First Things intellectuals, their traditionalist Protestant sympathizers, or their various Muslim counterparts. It is just how high the stakes have been raised in the question of religion and the social order. Holders of this belief in the causative relationship between right religion and the social order are asserting that any attack on true religion is an attack on the entire social order and invites nothing but social chaos.
It is in this often mild-mannered assertion that we find the real roots of radicalism and violence. When we believe that failure to conform to our religious ideal isn't just a poor personal choice, but a direct attack on the social and moral order that provides for our life and well-being, then violence is inevitable. We've created a zero-sum game that allows only for retreat into some religious redoubt from the chaos outside or an all out counter-attack to destroy the enemy of all that is good.
Which is why ISIS launched yet another sectarian attack against Shi'ites in Peshawar just yesterday, March 7th, 2022. In the understanding of Islam found broadly among the group called Islamists it is believed that the moral and social order of humanity depends on the propagation of Islamic teaching. Shi'ite belief and practice varies from this teaching in ways that for Islamists undermines the entire mission of Islam and indeed the future of humanity. So when all else fails violence is the only option.
It may seem churlish to compare Conservative Christians with ISIS, but only if we forget how much violence has been begotten in the name of purging Christianity of its defects and the world of its opponents for the sake of upholding the moral order of the universe. Christians didn't go out of the business of religious war and killing heretics (if we ever left it) because we somehow rediscovered Jesus' teaching 1800 years after his birth. We were put out of business by a growing secular society that wouldn't tolerate such nonsense and justifiably wanted to put, and keep religion in its place. Modernity had its own violent follies to explore.
And it is nonsense. Religious teaching may inspire, and religious ritual underscore, the best of human values. Religious revelation may indeed inspire us from the Transcendent to see ourselves and our world in new ways. But in no way is the natural or moral order of the universe dependent on such revelation, teaching or ritual. The universe is too big, and humanity too varied and complex, for our current moral evolution to be dependent upon any one religion or indeed all religions combined. This doesn't make religion irrelevant. It just makes it a part, and a part only, of God's providence for creation and it's creatures.
Religious violence is rooted in the claim that religion is more than God intended it to be. Indeed it is rooted in the religious assertion that our world depends on religion rather than God. So long as this persists we'll have religious bullies asserting themselves against the dreaded heretics of their own fold, swinging out their elbows to claim a right to public power, or whining defensively that secular society never really understood their good intentions. The upshot will be a continued decline in all such religion, with which God will manage and still extend God's love and care for creation and humanity just fine.
