The Myth of Religious Violence

Abstract The myth of religious violence is the pervasive secularist idea that there is something called “religion,” endemic to all human cultures and eras, that has a tendency to promote violence because it is essentially prone to absolutism, divisiveness, and irrationality. Religion must therefore be separated from “secular” phenomena like politics for the sake of peace. This book argues that the myth of religious violence is a piece of Western folklore that underwrites Western violence. The book shows that religion is not a universal and transhistorical phenomenon. Religious-secular and religion-politics distinctions are modern Western inventions. The book shows that what counts as religious or secular in…