Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence
- Aug 24, 2023
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
In Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong begins with the premise that religion has gotten a bad rap as the—take your pick—raison d'être, scapegoat, cause célèbre, or poster child for war. As in, to quote Charles Kimball, a professor in the Department of Religion at Wake Forest University and author of When Religion Becomes Evil, “It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.”
Armstrong isn’t having it. She sets out, if not to muddy the waters exactly, to demonstrate that nothing is quite that simple. She argues, in the early days of civilization, BCE, people wouldn’t have understood the difference between their religion and their politics. In the Common Era, violence that, on its face, appeared to be solely religiously motivated (e.g. the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition) often had political dimensions and motivations. And it wasn’t until the founding of the United States as the first truly secular nation in history that we could begin to separate the two.
As it happens, none of it matters. What Armstrong actually makes clear over the course of 500-plus pages, though I don’t think she means to, is that, whether humans wage war in the name of god or country, violence against one another—against the other—is perhaps the defining human trait. We will wage war, we will commit violence, and we will do what we must to rationalize it, justify it, sell it, enable it, and perpetuate it. To those on either side of the carnage, does it matter whether our religion or our nationalism is to blame?
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