Katherine Armstrong traverses a vast arc, but this is ice skating, not deep sea diving

Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood offers a milder version of a similar argument. It charts the complicated relationship between religion and violence across a wide arc of history. But its main contention, if it has one, is that the relationship is contingent, at best, for a number of reasons. Armstrong, unlike Cavanaugh, does not deny that there is such a thing as religion. But its forms are protean and often too contradictory. The second move is a familiar one. What we think of as religious violence is often produced by a variety of motives: economic competition, political power and competition for status. Religious violence is most lethal when allied to political power, but in that alliance, Armstrong suggests, politics is often the driver. Armstrong concedes that religion often produces a form of othering that authorises violence against others. But this othering cannot be the main story since most religious violence is wreaked on co-religionists. She often presents fundamentalism as largely a defensive move: it is often secular extremism, persecution or the experience of a hostile secular world that produces religious violence.

The book breezily runs this story through a wide range of historical episodes, from ancient Israel to China, India to the Middle East, Modern Europe and the contemporary world. The underlying story has a loose pattern. Societies are initially violent, though they are egalitarian in the hunting-gathering stage. As agrarian surpluses make settled society possible, violence and exploitation increase. Initially, what we think of as religion often sanctions ritual violence. But as society becomes excessively violent, religion becomes an instrument in the pacification of violence. Violent and avenging gods are replaced by gods that emphasise non-violence and kindness. Some of these religious movements even try and pacify the violence of the state, as Ashoka did. But none of these religious movements can overcome the fundamental fact that the state is an instrument of violence. So almost all religious civilisations harbour a dual face: Abrahamic religions have both the avenging Yahweh and the pacifying Christ. The Koran can be used to both pacify and justify violence. In China, the same set of mythologies and beliefs, whether Daoism or Confucianism, can produce contradictory courses of action. There is nothing inexorable in any religion that leads to violence.

But often, even within religious hierarchies, there is a struggle for power. Armstrong is most acute when showing how intra-religious ideological disputes, which are often about the control of religious organisations, produce deadly power struggles, often cloaked under theological difference. These struggles break the unity of religion and society. And the most acute of these, the struggles within Christendom, finally produced the modern separation of church and state. Thus began what might be called the “privatisation” of religion, both as a matter of theology and as a political strategy to secure toleration.

Armstrong then reiterates the famous Tocquevillian irony: one of the most religious countries in the world has produced the most secular state. The Puritans and founding communities of the United States were mostly religious zealots, but their fervour and independence were instrumental in delegitimising the alliance between church and state. Both religion and freedom could prevail in America because religion and state power were not aligned. The state did not have to crush religion for its worldly ends and religion, in turn, did not have to fear the state. In contrast, since church and state were allied in Europe, the conflict between them was more pronounced.

In Islam and much of the Middle East in contrast, initially, a similar pattern plays out: religion is both a source of pacification and of violence. But in much of the rest of the world, consolidated nation states replace religion as the ideology that consecrates death, and at the same time the nation state provides a space for a privatised religion. But in the Middle East, because of the pattern of outside intervention, the modern nation state does not emerge as an entrenched institutional form. So the complex alignment of religion and politics continues. In South Asia, patterns of colonial identification and the pressures to create a modern nation state produce a new ethnicisation of religion, where religion has less to do with belief and more with the construction of an identity in relation to the state. What South Asia produces is not so much fundamentalism, as communalism.

Fundamentalism, in its violent and non-violent forms, Armstrong argues, will keep reappearing as long as religion experiences the external world as hostile. But she seems to place the onus on the march of secularisation to find a place for religion, rather than on religion to adjust to the fact that the world can no longer be experienced as an unbroken totality. Much of this story is familiar, and Armstrong’s virtue is to allow you to see interesting parallels across the world. But this book is more ice skating over a wide terrain rather than deep sea diving. Despite a potentially riveting historical story, the book has the flatness of a didactic enterprise: it does not illuminate the complexities of religious motivation, nor does it quite solve the mysteries of political violence.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and a contributing editor to The Indian Express