originally published 3/1/2010

Theologian William T. Cavanaugh, author of The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford, 2009), examines the emptiness of the myth of religious violence. He begins by illustrating how the idea of “religion” as modern people understand it was an invention of early modern European thought meant to divide ways of life into the public and the private so as to allow the modern State to isolate, truncate, and control the newly invented private sphere, henceforth called “religion.” This development arose out of centuries of struggle between ecclesiastic and civil authorities in Europe for power; when civil authorities gained the upper hand, Cavanaugh argues, they redefined the jurisdiction of the Church to be the newly-constructed private realm while taking the public realm for itself. As the dominance of the modern State grew over the past three centuries, their public political role and the Church’s private religious role came to be solidified. Cavanaugh shows that this division between politics and religion has its own creation myth in the so-called “wars of religion” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a myth that is belied by an examination of the warring parties in that period. He points out that the very fact that Catholics fought other Catholics, Protestants fought other Protestants, and that Protestants joined Catholics to fight other Protestants and Catholics indicates that there was something more going on than warring over theological disputes. That something was the beginning of a centralizing, homogenizing modern State that sought to exert control and bring uniformity over the diverse plurality of medieval locales and provinces, whether Protestant or Catholic, which resisted the growing centralization of the State, whether under Protestant or Catholic control. Cavanaugh argues that the deeply ideological separation of religion and politics has never been neutral but instead reflects a largely Western ideological conceit that is facing growing challenges centering on what is, at best, a tension within the division, and at worst, an incoherence. This interview was originally published on Volume 101 of the Journal.

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