Mark Juergensmeyer - Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World

Violence has always been endemic to religion. Images of destruction and death are evoked by some of religions most popular symbols, and religious wars have left through history a trail of blood. The savage martyrdom of Husain in Shiite Islam, the crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity, the sacrifice of Guru Tegh Bahadur in Sikhism, the bloody conquests in the Hebrew Bible, the terrible battles in the Hindu epics, and the religious wars attested to in the Sinhalese Buddhist chronicles indicate that in virtually every tradition images of violence occupy as central a place as portrayals of non-violence. This raises two haunting questions: why are these images so central, and what is the relationship between symbolic violence and the real acts of religious violence that occur throughout the world today?

To explore questions such as these, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation convened an exploratory conference of scholars at Sterling Forest, New York, in September 1989. Most of those taking part were social scientists and scholars of comparative religion who have studied incidents of religious violence and terror caused by militant Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and Sinhalese Buddhists. One scholar, however, brought a more theoretical and literary perspective to these contemporary cases. This scholar, Ren Girard, has formulated theories about the social role of symbolic religious violence that have been widely discussed in his own field of comparative literature and throughout the humanities; they have been especially influencial in the field of religious studies. But despite the wide readership that his ideas have attracted, Girard has rarely come face to face with social scientists and other investigators of cases of religious violence in modern society. One of the significant moments in the conference was the dialogue among Girard and these scholars over the applicability of his theories to the contemporary world.

The dialogue that began at Sterling Forest continued in written form in 1990, culminating in a series of essays written by several of the participants on the relevance of Girardian themes to their own analyses of contemporary cases of religious violence. It is these essays, with Girards written response, that are presented in this volume. The essays contain much more than a discussion of Girard one will find useful information and penetrating analyses of a variety of situations in contemporary Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere yet the themes that Girard has enunciated tie together the disparate interests of the authors.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for launching them on this venture, and the involvement of its president, James Hester, and its program officer, Karen Colvard, in the lively discussions that led to this book. Although this volume was not commissioned by the Foundation, nor does it contain the papers prepared for the 1989 conference in their original form, the conversation which the conference stimulated is appropriate to the Foundations primary concern: understanding, and ameliorating, the forces that lead to conflict and violence in the contemporary age.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Girard is regarded with such interest, especially in the field of Religious Studies, is that he supplies a straightforward answer to a question that has vexed thoughtful observers of religion for centuries: why violence is so central to religion. In looking for an answer, Girard turns toward certain aspects of human relations that are potentially violent, and suggests that religion provides mechanisms for defusing their violence.