Religion and Violence: The New Atheist Challenge and Critical Responses

الدين والعنف: التحدي الإلحادي الجديد والردود النقدية

SUMMARY

The claim that religion is uniquely or especially prone to violence — that the world would be safer if religion were diminished or eliminated — is one of the central rhetorical pillars of contemporary New Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens) and a widely held assumption in secular Western culture. Within the project framework, this is treated as a transversal objection requiring serious engagement. The framework's response operates on three levels: empirical (the historical-statistical claim that "religion causes violence" does not survive careful examination), conceptual (William Cavanaugh's argument that the very religious/secular distinction underlying the claim is a modern Western construct), and internal-theological (the recognition that religious traditions, including Islam, have both produced violence and produced sustained resources against it). None of these defuses the difficulty; each contributes to a more textured picture than the New Atheist challenge supplies.

The New Atheist Argument

The post-9/11 New Atheist literature put the religion-and-violence question at the center of contemporary religious debate. The principal claims, drawn from Sam Harris's The End of Faith (2004), Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006), Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006):

Religious belief, by its commitment to unfalsifiable truth-claims, is structurally incapable of self-correction
Religious traditions provide warrant for absolutist moral commitments that override ordinary humanitarian restraints
History demonstrates that religions repeatedly produce violence — the Crusades, the Wars of Religion, the Inquisition, jihad, partition violence, contemporary religious terrorism
Religion has an "essence" that tends toward absolutism and violence even when individual religious people are peaceable
A world with less religion would be a less violent world

Hitchens's slogan "religion poisons everything" captures the rhetorical force of the position. The argument has had substantial cultural influence beyond philosophical debate.

The Empirical Challenge

The first response to the New Atheist argument is empirical. Several lines of evidence complicate the strong "religion causes violence" thesis:

The twentieth century. The most catastrophic violence of human history — World War I, World War II, Stalinist purges, Maoist policies including the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward famine, the Cambodian genocide — was substantially produced by movements (nationalism, communism, fascism) that were either explicitly secular or actively anti-religious. The death tolls of secular violence in the twentieth century exceed by orders of magnitude any plausible reckoning of religious violence across all of human history.

Statistical studies. Researchers including the Encyclopedia of Wars compilers (Phillips and Axelrod, 2004), Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod's surveys, and contemporary peace studies have argued that wars classified as primarily "religious" constitute a relatively small fraction of historical conflicts (estimates vary from 7% to roughly 10–15% depending on classification methods). The substantial majority of historical wars have been fought primarily for territory, resources, dynastic claims, and ethnic-political competition.

The dependence of violence on other factors. Where religious violence occurs, careful historical analysis typically finds it deeply intertwined with political, economic, and ethnic factors. The "Wars of Religion" in early modern Europe, often cited as paradigmatic religious violence, involved Catholic powers fighting Catholic powers, Protestant powers fighting Protestant powers, and Catholic-Protestant alliances against shared political enemies — patterns that the simple religious-violence narrative cannot explain.

None of this empirical evidence implies that religion never produces violence, or that religious actors bear no responsibility for the violence committed in religion's name. The empirical evidence does, however, undermine the strong claim that religion is uniquely or especially prone to violence relative to other forms of human commitment.

Cavanaugh's Conceptual Challenge

William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2009) developed the most sustained contemporary critique of the religion-and-violence thesis. Cavanaugh's argument has three central theses:

First: there is no transhistorical, transcultural essence of religion. What counts as "religious" or "secular" in any given context is a function of political configurations of power. The categories themselves are not stable across cultures and historical periods. Classical Greek polis-religion, pre-Reformation European Christianity, classical Islamic dīn, and contemporary American evangelicalism are not instances of a single underlying category that can be evaluated together for its violence-proneness.

Second: the contemporary religious-secular distinction is a modern Western construct. It was developed historically in the context of the consolidation of the early modern nation-state, which required asserting itself against ecclesiastical competitors by relocating religion to a "private" sphere. The very framework within which one asks "is religion violent?" is not theologically or philosophically neutral; it is part of a particular configuration of power.

Third: the myth of religious violence functions to legitimate secular violence. If religion is the source of irrational violence, then secular nation-state violence — when used to control or contain religious actors — is presented as rational and necessary. The myth, on Cavanaugh's reading, has been particularly weaponized in post-9/11 Western framing of conflict in the Muslim world.

Cavanaugh's argument is contested. Critics (including Stephen Shoemaker, John Boyer, and others) argue that even granting his points about the constructed nature of the religious-secular distinction, the empirical patterns of violence-by-self-identified-religious-actors remain a phenomenon requiring explanation. The framework treats Cavanaugh as supplying a powerful conceptual reframing without claiming it dissolves the question.

The Internal-Theological Layer

The response to religion-and-violence cannot rest exclusively on empirical statistics and conceptual deconstruction. Religious traditions, including Islam, have produced violence in their names, and the question of theological resources for both producing and restraining this violence is a serious internal question.

Within the Islamic tradition, the historical and contemporary picture is complex:

Classical Islamic law developed substantial restrictions on the conduct of warfare: protection of noncombatants (women, children, religious figures, agricultural infrastructure), prohibition of certain weapons and tactics, requirements for declaration and proportionality. These constraints were articulated by Abū Yūsuf, al-Shaybānī, and the major classical jurists.
Classical and modern voices including al-Ghazālī, Ibn Taymiyya (in many of his rulings on the conduct of war), Muhammad ʿAbduh, Rashīd Riḍā, Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (despite controversial positions on specific cases), and contemporary scholars including Tariq Ramadan and Hamza Yusuf have developed substantial Islamic resources against indiscriminate violence.
Contemporary jihadist movements (al-Qāʿida, Daesh) have been substantially condemned by Muslim religious authorities globally, including the Amman Message (2005), the Open Letter to Baghdadi (2014, signed by hundreds of Muslim scholars), and major fatwas by Al-Azhar and other authorities.
At the same time, honest engagement requires acknowledging that some classical and contemporary readings of Islamic sources have produced violent conclusions, and that the theological work of preserving the restrictive tradition against extremist readings is ongoing.

Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014) provides one of the more substantial contemporary surveys of religion's complex relationship to violence across multiple traditions, neither minimizing the violence nor accepting the New Atheist reduction.

What the Framework Concedes

Following its general method of honest engagement with objections, the framework concedes:

Violence has been committed in the name of religion, including in the name of Islam. The denial of this is not a defensible response.
Religious belief, by its capacity to ground absolute commitments, has the capacity to motivate violence in ways that purely instrumental commitments do not. The capacity is real even if it is not deterministic.
The work of preserving the restrictive ethical tradition within religious communities is ongoing and never finished. The fact that resources exist within the tradition is not the same as the fact that they are uniformly deployed.
The cumulative case for faith (across the masālik) does not require that religious traditions be morally perfect; it requires that the case for the cumulative truth-claims be strong enough to bear the weight of acknowledged moral failures.

These concessions distinguish the framework's response from naive apologetics that denies any religion-violence connection.

What the Argument Does Not Establish

Equally, the framework distinguishes the fact that religion has sometimes produced violence from various inferences sometimes drawn from it:

That religion is uniquely or especially prone to violence (empirically contested, see above)
That religion has no resources against violence (empirically false, see internal-theological layer)
That eliminating religion would reduce violence (the twentieth century strongly suggests otherwise)
That religious truth-claims are therefore false (a genetic-fallacy move from moral failures of adherents to falsity of doctrine)
That a particular religion's truth-claims are refuted by violence committed in its name

The cumulative case for faith does not depend on the moral perfection of religious adherents. It depends on whether the cumulative considerations across the masālik provide rational warrant for the faith-claim itself.

KEY DISTINCTIONS

• Religion as cause vs. religion as factor: Even where religion contributes to violence, it is rarely the only or decisive factor • Empirical statistics vs. essence-claims: Empirical patterns of violence vs. claims that religion has a violence-prone essence • The constructed religious-secular distinction: Cavanaugh's challenge to the framework within which the question is posed • Religious actors committing violence vs. religion as such producing violence: Crucial distinction often blurred • Restrictive vs. extremist theological readings: The internal pluralism of every major tradition on the ethics of violence • Moral failures of adherents vs. falsity of doctrine: The genetic fallacy in religious-ethical argumentation

MAJOR PROPONENTS (of the New Atheist position)

• Christopher Hitchens — God Is Not Great (2007); "religion poisons everything" • Sam Harris — The End of Faith (2004); religion as faith-without-evidence motivating violence • Richard Dawkins — The God Delusion (2006); religion as memetic complex including violent dispositions • Daniel Dennett — Breaking the Spell (2006); broader naturalistic critique • Steven Weinberg — Often-cited remark "Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion."

MAJOR CRITICS / RESPONDENTS

• William Cavanaugh — The Myth of Religious Violence (2009); conceptual critique • Karen Armstrong — Fields of Blood (2014); comparative-historical survey • John Gray — Black Mass (2007); Seven Types of Atheism (2018); critique of New Atheism from a secular perspective • Terry Eagleton — Reason, Faith, and Revolution (2009); literary-critical critique • Charles Taylor — A Secular Age (2007); broader contextual challenge • Khaled Abou El Fadl — The Great Theft (2005); Islamic critique of extremism from within the tradition • Sherman Jackson — Initiative to Stop the Violence: Sadat's Assassins and the Renewal of Islamic Authority (2015) • Tariq Ramadan — Various works on Islamic ethics and contemporary violence • Hamza Yusuf — Public engagement on Islam and violence; founding role at Zaytuna College