12.8 — Where Religion Has Done Harm, Honestly

A book that presents seven Parts of religious material and then declines to write this chapter is not being respectful. It is being dishonest.

So: the record, stated plainly, and then the harder question of what the mechanism actually is.

The record

Violence between traditions

The Crusades. Several centuries of campaigns, with the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 and the sack of Christian Constantinople by a Christian army in 1204 among the worst episodes.

The European wars of religion. The Thirty Years' War killed a very large fraction of the population of parts of Germany — estimates vary widely and the devastation is not in doubt.

Partition. The division of India in 1947 produced communal violence that killed somewhere between several hundred thousand and two million people and displaced perhaps fifteen million. Volume VIII covers the causes, which were political as well as religious.

And the continuing pattern. Communal riots, sectarian conflict, and violence in which religious identity is the marker of the target.

Violence within traditions

The Inquisitions, prosecuting doctrinal deviation with judicial torture and execution.

The persecution of heretical movements, some of which were exterminated as populations.

Sunni-Shia conflict, from the seventh century to the present.

And the witch trials. Tens of thousands of people executed across Europe and colonial America over roughly three centuries, overwhelmingly women, on charges that were not possible to defend against.

Persecution of minorities

The treatment of Jewish communities in Christian Europe over a thousand years — expulsions, forced conversions, ghettos, massacres, and the accusation of ritual murder that was invented and repeated for centuries. And the culmination, in a modern industrial state, of the murder of six million people.

The forced conversion and destruction of indigenous religions in the Americas, Africa, Australia and the Pacific, frequently accompanied by the removal of children from families.

And current persecutions, including of Bahá'ís in Iran (12.5), of religious minorities in several states, and of people who leave a religion in jurisdictions where apostasy is a criminal offence.

Harm inside communities

The concealment of child sexual abuse by religious institutions, across multiple traditions, over decades, in which the institution's reputation was protected and the children were not. The scale of this and the length of the concealment are now documented in official inquiries in several countries.

Caste (12.2), and the theological justification supplied for it.

The subordination of women — legal disability, exclusion from education and from religious office, and control of movement and marriage, justified by scripture in every one of the traditions in this Part.

And the treatment of gay people, which in several traditions has ranged from exclusion to criminalisation to execution, and continues.

The persecution of scientific claims, though this is smaller than the popular version suggests — Galileo is the famous case and the reality is more complicated than the legend, and Volume VIII covers it.

What the mechanism actually is

Now the harder question, because "religion causes violence" is too crude to be useful and "religion is never the real cause" is a defensive evasion.

Four mechanisms, and they are separable.

One: certainty about unfalsifiable claims

A dispute about a fact can be settled by evidence.

A dispute about a claim that no evidence can touch cannot be settled at all, and if both sides regard it as maximally important, there is no procedure available except force.

This is the mechanism most specific to religion, and it is why doctrinal disputes have been so bitter and why 6.13's no closed fist and 12.9's observations about the mystics matter.

Two: the strong boundary

From 12.1: the costly practice that produces trust inside the group is the same thing that produces a hard outside.

The mechanism that makes a religious community unusually cooperative and unusually generous internally is the mechanism that makes it capable of treating outsiders as a different category.

And this is not unique to religion. Nationalism, ideology and ethnicity do it identically, and the twentieth century's largest atrocities were committed by explicitly non-religious states. Which is the strongest argument against the simple version of the charge, and it is not an exoneration — it means the boundary mechanism is human rather than religious, and religion is one of its most powerful expressions.

Three: the absence of correction

An institution that claims divine authority for its decisions has removed the mechanism by which it could be told it is wrong.

And this is where the concealment of abuse comes from. Not from doctrine — no tradition teaches it — but from an institution whose reputation was treated as sacred and whose internal authority could not be challenged from outside or below.

The general form: any institution with authority and no external accountability produces this, and religious institutions have been unusually good at establishing exactly that condition.

Four: use by power

And the most common one.

A great deal of what is called religious violence is political violence using religious identity as a marker. Partition, the Northern Irish conflict, and many communal riots are better explained by land, power, resources and political entrepreneurs than by theology — and in each case the religious identity was real and was being used.

Which does not clear religion. A thing that can be used this reliably as a mobilising identity is contributing something, and the contribution is that it supplies an unquestionable justification and a ready-made in-group.

What the traditions have said themselves

And this belongs here, because it is part of the record.

Ashoka's edict, third century BCE: one should not honour only one's own religion and condemn the religions of others, but should honour others' religions for this or that reason. Carved in rock, by an emperor, over two thousand years ago.

The Quran: there is no compulsion in religion.

The Rig Veda: truth is one, the wise call it by many names.

And every tradition's internal critics — the prophets attacking ritual, the mystics ignoring the boundaries, the reformers, and the people burned by their own institutions for saying so.

The resources for the criticism are inside the traditions. They were available and were overruled, which is 3.9's room full of good men at civilisational scale.

The honest balance

And this book will state it rather than dodging it.

Religious institutions have also built hospitals, universities, orphanages and famine relief, at enormous scale and for a very long time, in periods when nobody else was doing it.

They have produced most of the world's art, music and architecture before the modern period.

They have supplied the ethical vocabulary that was used against slavery, against colonial rule and for civil rights — by Gandhi, by King, by the abolitionists, all of whom argued from inside their traditions against people arguing from inside the same traditions.

And they supply, daily, the consolation that 12.1 identified as the function nothing has replaced.

Both columns are real and neither cancels the other. The correct conclusion is not a net score; it is that the same institutional and psychological features produce both, and that any tradition which cannot examine its own record is exhibiting exactly the failure that produced the worst of it.

What to carry from this page

A dispute about an unfalsifiable claim, held as maximally important, has no available procedure except force. That is the mechanism most specific to religion and it is worth recognising in every domain, including secular ones.

The boundary that produces internal trust is the same one that produces the outside. You do not get the first without the second, and knowing that is the only defence.

Authority with no external accountability produces concealment, every time, in every kind of institution.

And the internal critics were always there and were overruled. The resources for correction exist inside every tradition in this Part, and the question is only whether anybody with standing uses them.

Next: 12.9 — what, after eight chapters, the traditions actually agree on. It is smaller than the comfortable version and considerably more interesting.