With God on Whose Side..

With God on Whose Side..

I receive various departmental alumni publications from my undergraduate university – even from a department for a subject I never studied academically. The material includes interesting and easily digested articles by faculty members – essentially versions of their “proper” academic work, gutted of the dense scholarship (mostly) and currently prevailing subject jargon (mostly).

One such recent essay is by a scholar, Dominic Johnson, who combines a study of politics with evolutionary theory.

One of his interests is in the evolutionary explanation of religious belief and practice, “such a prominent feature across human cultures and throughout history”, right up to the present.

Johnson’s thesis starts from the problem of “free-riding” in cooperative communities. In small(ish) communities people will, on the whole, naturally be willing to cooperate to everyone’s mutual benefit. But there will always be those (free riders, “scroungers”, criminals) who will seek to exploit the benefits without the bother of cooperative contribution. All societies need to discourage and, if necessary, punish free riding.

In intimate communities blame and shame may do the work. In larger communities, past and present, where modern means of law enforcement were or are absent, religion, so it is proposed, plays the, or a major role. God watches, or the Gods watch, and is or are liable to punish free riders either in this life or the next, or in both. Free riding, and other transgressions against a society’s norms, is kept in check by fear of supernatural judgment.

Johnson makes the interesting point in support of the thesis that, as societies got bigger and more complex, “their gods got bigger too”. Religions moved away from cults of local spirits and ancestors and the powers of gods grew greater, both in effect and scope. At the end point of this process are the monotheist omnipotent creator-divinities we are familiar with. (There is clearly more work to be done by the theory in the case of far-eastern religions.)

On this view, according to DJ, religions promote cooperation, or at least obedience within a society (and sometimes within civilisations of similar societies). But religion’s hold is loosened at the international level, at least between states of different religions, or different sects, or between a religious state and a state with no religion.

It is instructive to test this argument against one example from ancient times. In a lull during the Greek Peloponnesian War (C5 BC), Athens launched a realpolitik invasion of the island of Melos – whose “offence” was that it was neutral in the War and refused to ally with Athens. The Athenians judged that to allow this state of affairs to continue would show weakness to its other subject islands. Melos had to be brought to heel, or destroyed.

According to the history written by Thucydides, before opening hostilities, the Athenians offered a debate with the Melian authorities, by which they sought to persuade the Melians that their situation was hopeless, and that they should save themselves and surrender without a fight.

The Athenians invoked the principle (if principle it can be called) of “might is right”, in often quoted words:

..the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel, and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

The Melians claim that the Gods (Olympians shared with the Athenians) would be on their side because the Melians were standing for what is right against what is wrong.

To which the Athenians coolly reply:

Our aims and actions are perfectly consistent with the beliefs men hold about the gods and with the principles which govern their own conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can.

(Eventually the Athenians subdued defiant Melos, killed all men of military age and sold women and children into slavery.) Such is might.

This account presents the “Gods” as morally indifferent at best and as cynical upholders of “might is right” at worst. Whether the Athenians meant to characterise divine amorality for purposes of inter-state dealings, or more generally, is not clear. The former interpretation supports DJ’s thesis; the latter implication would tend to weaken his argument for religion as moral cement, at least in the Greek world (where a lot of moral dilemmas involve the implacable and contradictory demands of the gods).

What of the case against religion as a cause, of itself, of conflict? It is a truism that many wars have been, and continue to be, fought in the name of some version of religion. Karen Armstrong, the theologian and historian of religion, argues that none of the main religions is intrinsically violent, but all can be used as intensifiers or as justification for violence, and to bolster the certainties and solidarity of combatants (especially so where political life and religion are intertwined, as in the case of avowedly religiously based states today – Islamist or otherwise). Conflicts that are superficially “religious” mostly occur for fundamental geo-political reasons, Armstrong maintains. This may is a controversial view.

In the month which marks the 80^th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War on 17 July 1936, one may reflect on this admitted cheerleading aspect of religion – and, in the case of Spain, its opposite, militant anti-clericalism.

The Catholic Church supported Franco (and, by implication, his allies, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). Anarchist militia on the Republican side launched a murderous campaign against priests and other religious in response to Franco’s uprising (see my blog about ronda and Cadiz in May).

The intensifying and justificatory role was not confined to the Church in Spain. The Irish Catholic bishops, meeting at Maynooth, declared: Spain [ie Franco] at this moment is fighting the battle of Christendom against the subversive powers of Communism..

An Irish contingent, the “Blueshirts” went on a German ship to join Franco, with largely undistinguished results.

The Irish singer, Christy Moore, in his song Viva La Quinta Brigada, about the other Irishmen who fought in the International Brigades for the Republic, puts it sardonically:

The word came from Maynooth, “support the Nazis”

The men of cloth failed again

When the Bishops blessed the Blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire

As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.

The unsurprising conclusion is that religions can respond violently to a perceived existential threat, and make strange alliances in the process. This leaves open the question of whether religions can be an inherent cause of violence within or between societies.

July 2016