Conflict and Religion Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Conflict and religion both are ubiquitous social processes, but at first they may appear to be autonomous, even contradictory, social processes: Conflict presumes division, distress, and discord; religion presumes cohesion, tranquility, and peace. However, conflict can also be integrative and religion can move actors to challenge and overturn the social and political order. Consequently, following Lewis Coser’s observation that all social life “always involves harmony and conflict, attraction and compulsion, love and hatred,” analysis reveals a similar dichotomous affinity between conflict and religion, one that can be observed at all levels of the social structure: individuals, groups, social classes, societies, and civilizations.

Individuals

Recognizing that religious action has an individual as well as a social component, Sigmund Freud locates the very origins of religion in a primordial conflict between a human being’s instinctual impulses and the necessary restraints each person must impose on his or her expression to gain membership in an accepting and orderly social world. The gods and religion enter to compensate individuals “for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.” But religion at the same time disquiets them with its normative demands. In past ages, religious imperatives moved the likes of Arjuna, Siddhartha, Confucius, Muhammad, Ignatius Loyola, and countless others to disregard prevailing worldly or profane logics to exert themselves to conform the ways of the world to the demands of the sacred as they understood it. Similarly, in modern times, it is the felt force of compelling normative directives that, for example, oblige a pharmacist to refuse to honor a prescription for the “morning-after” contraceptive because of its putative abortifacient qualities.

Finally, religion as an agent of both social conflict and social integration at the level of individuals exists in Santeria as practiced among many of Latino/a heritage in the United States. Santeria had its origins in a syncretic amalgam of the religion of the Yoruba people of West Africa brought as slaves to Cuba and the Catholic religion that the Spanish slave owners imposed on them. Centuries later, carried on the waves of the Cuban diaspora in the latter half of the 20th century, Santeria’s appeal widened to encompass other groups, particularly other Spanish-speaking U.S. immigrant communities. Taking refuge in the spells and magical practices of Bruharia, the dark side of Afro-Cuban religion, served to relieve tensions arising out of interpersonal disagreements and hostilities; and the traditional religious practices and meanings of Santeria, once established in the new land, served to restore a sense of cultural coherence to members of these communities amid the anomie of their marginalized social status.

Groups

When conflict and religion intersect at the level of communities embedded within larger, more encompassing societal configurations, it can occur either within such groups or between them.

Within-Croup Conflict

Early Christianity was fragmented by widely divergent understandings of what could legitimately be accepted as orthodox and what should be condemned as heresy. Absent any means of arbitration, each body thought its version was “the truth” and had its own scriptures to back up its claims. The struggle among groups adhering to these varieties of belief— Ebionites, Marcionites, Gnostics, and, last, those that came to be accepted as orthodox—endured until the fourth century, when a clerical hierarchy under the church at Rome achieved the dominance necessary to promulgate an authoritative canon of scripture and formulate statements of faith to which all believers must adhere. Those who continued to hold to beliefs that were not assimilated into the newly proclaimed orthodoxy were regarded as deviants and were relegated to the outgroup; the ingroup found strengthened cohesion in its sense of doctrinal purity.

Between-Croup Conflict

While acting out division, between-group conflict concurrently increases the antagonists’ intragroup cohesion by reinforcing unity of purpose in the face of assault on the group’s boundaries. Illustrative of this process is U.S. politics, which, according to many analysts, beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century and running into the first decade of the 21st, has become increasingly polarized, and in which the two main political parties have become ideologically both more homogenous and more adversarial.

Marking much of the division between the parties is its manifestly religious coloring, although many of the issues separating the parties, on their face, are religiously neutral. Often gathered under umbrella terms like “family values,” battle lines are drawn over controversies such as contraception, abortion, and end-of-life decisions; prayer in schools and school vouchers; evolution and embryonic stem cell research; homosexuality, same-sex marriages, and premarital sex; and feminism and capital punishment. On none of these matters are normative postures based on explicit scriptural warrants, nor do they come with traditional doctrinal formulations. However, each is fraught, at the level of culture, with unresolved disputes as to life’s origin and end, its nature and meaning, and appropriate ethical organization of the social world during the span that bridges life’s alpha and omega.

The growing conflict and polarization between the parties is a consequence of intensifying cohesion as each group faces off against a threatening enemy. The political right sees giving any ground to the left on what it considers core moral norms as another step on a slippery slope to moral relativism. The political left sees subjecting the progress of reason and science to limits arising out of the right’s position on contested matters to be little more than surrender of social progress to atavistic superstition. Each group strives to make its norms prevail in the broader community at a time of anomie when governing social norms appear to be ambiguous or changing in ways thought undesirable by the contending parties.

Classes

The concept of class conflict—a specific type of between-group conflict that served as the motive force for social change in his theory of history and society— was Karl Marx’s legacy to sociology. Perhaps the most important significance of religion in Marx’s notion of class conflict is indirect. Ludwig Feuerbach argued in The Essence of Christianity that it is not God who created man, but man who created God; that humans are ruled by their own creations, not by an independent, all-powerful God. Marx later took this insight of Feuerbach and concluded that, if the structures of society (state, economy) that eviscerate vast swathes of humankind are the product of human action, then human action (revolution) can change them.

In the Social Principles of Christianity, Marx spoke directly to the relation between religion and the class struggle: the ruling class uses religion as an ideological device to suppress the underclass. In what is perhaps Marx’s most oft-quoted comment on religion, he wrote in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion “is the opium of the people.” He exhorted the working class to reject their false consciousness, to refrain from taking refuge in the promises of happiness in an afterlife, and instead focus on the realities of their current circumstances and the causes of their misery, and act to change them.

It is an ironic twist in the history of ideas that it was local Catholic bishops in Latin America along with their lower clergy (as the principal theorists and practitioners of liberation theology) who responded to Marx’s exhortation in Critique. They counseled the poor and oppressed to reflect on the conditions of their lives, and, by growing in understanding that God does not will it thus, to recognize their state of dependency and oppression and to develop the capacity among themselves to act rationally and self-reliantly to alter that reality. However, in yet another example of within-group conflict, by the late 1980s the Roman Catholic Church’s governing hierarchy reined in the movement for fear that it threatened its own legitimacy.

Societies

War is the ultimate social conflict. As does conflict at other levels in the social order, war intersects with religion. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, now over half a century in duration, is an example: two peoples, each self-identified as followers of an Abrahimic religion, engage in deadly pursuit of incompatible goals. Israel’s goal in the struggle is to guarantee the security of its borders as a nation-state within the territory of the former League of Nations mandate for Palestine. By contrast, Palestinians seek precisely to eliminate not individual Israelis but Israel as a nation-state within traditional “Palastina.”

Through the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel united Jerusalem as its capital and increased the territory under its control by three and a half times its original size. Since then, various initiatives sought final resolution of the conflict in terms of a land-for-peace principle: assuming that both parties wanted peace, Israel would exchange territories captured in the war for guarantees from the neighboring Arab states that Israel would be secure within its borders. While Egypt and Jordan negotiated individual treaties of peace with Israel, the central conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people has remained without resolution. The land-for-peace principle does not permit resolution of their conflict because the combatants’ goals are incompatible.

Internal politics make it untenable for Israel even to consider sharing Jerusalem, and the same politics require Israeli leaders to equivocate about surrendering the West Bank, the covenanted lands of Samaria and Judea, to a Palestinian state. Conversely Palestinians developed a sacralized political claim on the land as a driving force in their emergent solidarity as a nation. The targeted outcome for each side is political control over the entirety of the land. The mutual incompatibility of the two goals (reclamation of the Abrahimic covenant versus Palestinian sovereignty) makes unworkable a land-for-peace exchange and its implicit vision of two independent states, side by side, sharing ancient Palestine.

Civilizations

The concept of civilization refers to a complex social grouping that subsumes all other forms of structured social activity including nationality, kinship, ethnicity, and, in particular, politically organized societies. Today, obvious to all is a split between the umma— the totality of Muslims in the world—and historically non-Muslim populations. In another irony of history, what some in Islamic civilization see in modernity, Christianity, and the West as evil is itself the spawn of conflict within an earlier civilization, Christendom, a half-millennium ago.

The precursors and leaders of the Reformation acted to shift the locus of authority from a centralized papacy to local institutions responsible in varying degrees to individual believers. Martin Luther and England’s King Henry VIII by their ecclesial defections fractured papal political sway over huge swatches of Europe’s territory. Soon bourgeois revolutions in the political sphere followed revolutions in the religious sphere to realign the balance of power from feudal nobility and monarchy to new classes made influential and wealthy by economic changes. Economies, characterized through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance by medieval guilds, mercantilism, and chartered corporations, were freed from these constraints by the rise of modern capitalism, first commercial, then industrial.

In parallel with these transformations, intellectual emancipation from ecclesiastical and political dominance was precipitated by Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, the economic thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the political thought of the French philosophes. Christendom’s social cohesion, embodied in Pope Gregory VII’s paradigm of the monarch’s dominance in earthly matters and the church’s dominance in heavenly matters, was forever lost to the secularized, contradiction-laden logics of modernity’s autonomous value spheres.

Religion, then, does not obviate the likelihood of conflict but offers fertile soil in which the dichotomous dynamics of conflict—both division and cohesion—can take root and flourish. In many historical cases—seen especially among monotheistic traditions—religious groups, viewing themselves as the only legitimate religion, have erected both structural and cognitive frameworks to maintain an “ingroup/outgroup” dichotomy and to ensure internal purity. In other cases, although claiming commitment to a transcendent relationship with an ultimate reality and a constructive relationship with others in the world, religious people for religious reasons have and continue to turn violent and destructive.

Bibliography:

Ehrman, Bart D. 2006. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. New ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hall, John R. 2003. “Religion and Violence: Social Processes in Comparative Perspective.” Pp. 359-81 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by M. Dillon. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. [1962] 1996. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. New York: Vintage Books.
Kimball, Charles. 2008. When Religion Becomes Evil. New York: HarperOne.
Lewy, Guenter. 1974. “Millenarian Revolts: Jewish Messianism: Eschatological Revolt and Divine Deliverance.” Pp. 70-101 in Religion and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Miles, Jack. 2002. “Theology and the Clash of Civilizations.” Cross Currents 51(4). Retrieved March 26, 2017 (http://www.crosscurrents.org/Mileswinter2002.htm).
Moore, Barrington Jr. 2000. Moral Purity and Persecution in History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Oren, Michael B. 2002. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sigmund, Paul E. 1990. Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

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