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Must Christianity Be Violent? Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology
Religion may be killing us. The good news is that in our post-9/11 world there is a widespread concern about religion and violence. A December 2003 Minnesota poll, for example, showed that 77 percent of respondents attributed a fair amount of the cause of the world’s wars and conflicts to religion. The bad news is that religious violence is almost always seen as a problem for other traditions, not one’s own.

In the poll just cited, for example, 34 percent of the mostly Christian respondents said that Islam is more likely than Christianity to encourage its believers to be violent. Though our “Christian nation” was waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time, few Christians saw a relationship between Christianity and violence. How could a country in which 84 percent of adults claim to follow Jesus, who taught love of enemies and embodied nonviolence, be the most militarized nation in the history of the world—a nation whose military spending exceeds that of all other countries combined?

Though religiously justified violence is common to many religions, people rarely kill each other over religious differences alone. They use God, religion and sacred texts to justify violence and killing when conflicts over land, resources, oppression, discrimination or other historical grievances escalate. Though one is Muslim and the other Christian, there are eerie similarities between the violence-justifying rhetoric of Osama bin Laden and that of President Bush. Each poses the conflict with the other as a struggle between good and evil. Each justifies the death of civilians by citing the depth of evil to be countered. Each believes that the grave depravity of the other can be met only with lethal violence. Each invokes God’s name and his religion’s respective sacred texts to justify violence against the other. Each uses religious language to mobilize supporters. ...