… The preeminent contemporary historian of religion Karen Armstrong has recently written of her belief that ‘modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.’ ‘In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident,’ she writes. She speaks of the mantra recited to her constantly, by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics – the view that ‘Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history’.
It is an odd remark [she says]. Obviously the two world Wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material and ideological factors are involved, among the chief of them competition for scarce resources. Experts in political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. Yet … we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century on to the back of ‘religion’ and drive it out into the political wilderness.
This makes it difficult for an authentic Christian voice to contribute to discussions about conflict in our times. But perhaps no more difficult than Jesus found it in the conflicted society of his day.
And the joy is that The Beatitudes do not offer a mere sticking-plaster to the suffering scapegoats of the world. The beauty in the Sermon on the Mount is that it proposes a new way of human behaving towards others which, if followed, will introduce a new realm of human well-being, in the here-and-now, which Jesus calls The Kingdom of God. …
– from my Remembrance Sunday talk, The Beatitudes – Christianity with its eyes wide open, today. Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence is my latest page-turner, highly recommended.
