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In the Summer 2012 issue of The Journal of Mormon History, historian Patrick Q. Mason takes issue with this statement from Charles Kimball, in his widely read book, “When Religion Becomes Evil”: “It is somewhat 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.” Mason’s take on that view, shared by many of this era’s “New Atheists,” is that “Kimball’s assertion is, to use his own word, more trite than true.“
There is, of course, religious violence. As Mason notes, Sept. 11 is both the anniversary of the Twin Towers/Pentagon attacks and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, both committed by religious zealots. But, comparing state violence to religious violence leads Mason to conclude that Kimball’s quote should read “… more evil perpetuated in the name of (the state) than by any other institutional force in human history.”
Mason is the author of one of the best LDS-themed history books, “The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South,” New York: Oxford University Press. In his short JMH essay, he cites research from political scientist R.J. Rummell, who counts the number of people killed in the 20th century by state-sponsored violence, which Russell calls “democide.” Rummell’s total: 262 million victims, or 297 million if one includes casualties of wars. The total encompass genocide, politicide and mass murder. Considering examples of genocide — the Ukraine famine, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Holocaust and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the foolishness of assigning religion as the chief cause of evil is evident.
A source for the rise of “democide,” notes Mason, is the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, ostensibly designed to put an end to religious wars. Mason writes, “The treaty which concluded the Thirty Years War created a stable international system by ‘establishing the basic unit and symbol of modern international relations: the sovereign state.’ … Catholics and Protestants could agree that religion now constituted an invalid cause for international conflict.”
As Mason drily notes, Westphalia did not end war and violence, but it did create a new rationale for acceptable conflict. He writes, “In sum, Westphalia created our modern system of nation-states, defined not only by territorial sovereignty but also by their ability to corner the awful power of mass violence within their borders.”
The main purpose of this portion of Mason’s essay is to disprove the pop cultural idea that religion is primarily a source of evil, an idea espoused by the late Christopher Hitchens as well as popular New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and even Bill Maher. Certainly, not every use of war or violence by a state is wrong. Most of us would regard the allied forces in both world wars of the 20th century as honorable causes. Others may disagree. As the current wars on terror go on, support of our objectives there have dropped considerably.
Quoting William Cavanaugh, the author of “The Myth of Religious Violence,” Mason shares an interesting empirical test to absolutism. Cavanaugh writes, “Now, let us ask the following two questions: What percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? … It seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state — Hobbes’s mortal god — is subject to far more absolutist fervor than religion. For most Americans Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most would take for granted the necessity of being willing to kill for their country, should circumstances dictate.“
We often like to describe our modern times as more peaceful and progressive than long ago, when religious conflicts often were the primary cause of death and misery. Mason’s arguments present an opportunity to ponder the idea that equitable, and perhaps even more, death and misery is still a part of our culture. It’s just linked to a cause more easy for most to link violence with than religion.
-- Doug Gibson
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