If the wars of religion had been solely motivated by sectarian bigotry, we should not expect to have found Protestants and Catholics fighting on the same side, yet in fact they often did so.

via The myth of religious violence | Karen Armstrong | World news | The Guardian.

There was as yet no coherent way to divide religious causes from social causes. People were fighting for different visions of society, but they would not, and could not, have distinguished between religious and temporal factors in these conflicts.

And so,  as it turns out,  the guy who sort of introduced the first popular “separation between church and State” view,  Martin Luther,  conceptualized the very idea of “wielding secular power” upon religious subjects.  As this process of separation grew in the emerging nation states,  the church itself , as it often does,  accommodates the values of the use of “ordained and thus ‘proper’ force” and adopts it as a clerical hierarchical method (though not consciously,  of course.  But “accommodation” is almost never a “conscious” thing by nature of what it is).  So it is not at all surprising to me that social customs and approaches of Arabic and Nomadic societies and collectives would be imported into “Church-based” or “Caliphate-based” or “Talmudic-based” constructs of a “God ordained order”.

For Luther, the state’s prime duty was to restrain its wicked subjects by force, “in the same way as a savage wild beast is bound with chains and ropes”.

It was soon,  if not already,  to be the usual process for any conception of proper authority and means of correction.  Was not Luther himself seemingly shaped here by the already established secular order and accompanying approach to the wielding of authority?  Why is it that many “Islamic” extrapolations would not unwittingly (theologically speaking)   import the “coping with authority” structures which have made sense to that kind of a society?  Some Immans evolved and adapted (whether that included a certain amount of accommodation itself –  usually did ) ,  and some did it far more slowly,  and some, no doubt,  sought first to consolidate their own authority (as any cleric in any tradition has been wont to do).

My point  in all the “Islam is worse” kerfuffle is that this does not come from “a religious mindset”  (if such a thing can be stripped of some nebulous “everything else” which would “pinpoint”  the bad stuff.  Trouble is,  that “bad stuff” is EVERYWHERE,  and the form in which  that “bad stuff” comes out is tied to specific things IN THAT COLLECTION of cultural factors and historical evolution of that culture ,  with its many branches).

It’s not even that it has to be “nation states” that constitute the model,  since those are relatively late in world history.  But there have always been prevailing narratives, common assumptions about proper ordering, and interactions within the “religious” conceptions of that community.  The people who are saying there is something particularly pernicious about the “basis” or “fundamentals” of Islam,  who have very little knowledge of socio-political history of Arab-Desert-Nomadic people and its various strands,  and even less grasp of the religious experience or concept of interpretation,  are thus,  to put it colloquially,  “Clueless”.   But then,  such folks are not particularly inclined to venture too far into sociological analysis,  and stop short,  within the framework of throwing stones from a distance.

So, Luther,  great reformer that we was,  was also a grand accomodator of worldly values (his world):

“A worldly kingdom,” he insisted, “cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.”

But Armstrong leaves “the secular” (in this case the secular victors of the French Revolution)   with no excuse for then creating for themselves,  their own “religion”:

no sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion, than they invented another. Their new gods were liberty, nature and the French nation, which they worshipped in elaborate festivals choreographed by the artist Jacques Louis David.

Further identifiable narratives for the divine nature of the nation state:

When Napoleon’s armies invaded Prussia in 1807, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte similarly urged his countrymen to lay down their lives for the Fatherland – a manifestation of the divine and the repository of the spiritual essence of the Volk. If we define the sacred as that for which we are prepared to die, what Benedict Anderson called the “imagined community” of the nation had come to replace God. It is now considered admirable to die for your country, but not for your religion.

Think how often you hear “the ultimate sacrifice” being applied to dying in war.  Which leads right in the issue of “religion” being applied to what is proudly proclaimed as “the secular”,  and in the case of some atheists,  “non-religious” . But ,  as Armstong goes on to articulate quite nicely, “NOT SO FAST”.

Part 3 (final part of look through KA’s The Myth of Religious Violence)