Book Review of Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church, William T. Cavanaugh, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011, 200 pages.
My thanks to Oxford University Press for a review copy of the first book, and to Eerdmans for a review copy of the second.
I learned of the first publication and that reviewed below in following through on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “After Atheism” Ideas five-part series by David Cayley. In After Atheism: New Perspectives on God & Religion, Part 3 - William Cavanaugh, the author interviewed mainly discusses his book Migrations of the Holy (2011), reviewed below. It in some ways follows through on the first book under review.
This book could have been discussed in the second related series of seven broadcasts by David Cayley entitled “The Myth of the Secular”. (By the way, David Cayley is in the process of uploading all his CBC broadcasts at David Cayley – something a friend called a (I’ll add “rare”) “treasure trove.”)
The book’s title is designedly provocative. In the West, everyone knows that “religion” (Christianity) historically, and in resurgent worldwide Islam, is indisputably violent. Cavanaugh asserts nonetheless that the claim that “religion is … essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state (p. 4).”
Conventional wisdom implies that “religions” such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism over against “ideologies and institutions” such as nationalism, Marxism, capitalism, and liberalism, are “essentially more prone to violence – more absolutist, divisive, and irrational – than the latter.” In response, the author is blunt: “It is this claim that I find both unsustainable and dangerous (p. 6).”
“Violence” in relation to those cited in the book “generally means injurious or lethal harm and is almost always discussed in the context of physical violence, such as war and terrorism (p. 7).” Not only does the author use the term “myth” to indicate the claim is false, “but to give a sense of the power of the claim in Western societies (p. 6).” The claim seems a given and inevitable – and therefore difficult to refute.
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