The equation of institutional religion with violence and fanaticism will not do

Evidence

A major motive of secularism has clearly been the desire to end cruelties—the deliberate infliction in this world of pain to the living body of others, and the causing of distress to their minds—that religion has so often initiated and justified. Only a secular legal constitution (so it is argued) can restrain, if not eliminate altogether, religious violence and intolerance toward religious minorities. This firm linking of institutional religion to cruelty has its roots in Western Europe’s experience of religious wars and in the complex movement called the secular Enlightenment. But this perspective tends to overlook the devastatingly cruel powers of the twentieth century—Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Imperial Japan, the Khmer Rouge, Mao’s China—that were anything but religious, and the brutal conquests of African and Asian societies by European powers in the nineteenth century that had little to do with religion. Of course these instances of secular cruelty do not prove that institutional religion cannot generate cruelty and violence. But then religious movements have also preached (and practiced) compassion and forbearance. My simple point is that an equation of institutional religion with violence and fanaticism will not do. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 485

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the broader adjudication literature on secularization and to contemporary debates about religious violence, and to the learned claim that ‘even a Spanish naval victory would not have changed Europe’s destiny’ about ideological crusades being Western.

Related

• Secular regimes have matched religious ones in systematic cruelty (similarity 0.89)
• The secular is conceptually dependent on the idea of religion. (similarity 0.80)
• The secular cannot be conceived without the category of religion. (similarity 0.79)
• European secularism secured domestic peace by displacing religious violence onto the colonized world. (similarity 0.78)