How can unspeakable trauma be addressed in religious life? How might be understand the impact of violence within religious communities? Do we need to reconsider "the myth of religious violence"? The papers in this panel argue for the need to theorize and critique theories of religious violence in the context of contemporary social life: whether in relation to confronting trauma, intra-group harm, or Christian nationalism. Together, they raise important questions about how religious violence might be better studied and addressed empirically.
Papers
The extraordinary violence in Israel and Gaza that began on October 7th, 2023, has brought to the fore questions about encounters with the “unspeakable.” Such unspeakability will be negotiated and explored in this paper through the lens of trauma theory and pastoral care or ministry. The paper will lay out a means of practice to address the unspeakable. The first step demands awareness of the dimension and depth of human violence. The second step requires attention to human affect (in terms of regulation) and constitutes the beginning of distinguishing macrostructures (social groups and politics) from microstructures (dynamics in the human psyche) to facilitate new learning. After revealing these mechanisms, I address empathy as entering into the experience of the other and allowing the self to be undone by that other, a process I will consider through the theological and psychoanalytic concept of the wounded healer.
The violence practiced by religious collectives is a widely examined area in social sciences. Usually the subject of the study is inter-group violence between either different religious groups or between religious groups and other social entities. Intra-group violence, i.e., violence practiced by a religious community towards its own members, has received less attention. However, there have been increasing attempts to conceptualize these systems of violence. In the presentation, the concept of spiritual violence is developed in order to explain religious intra-group violence: it aims to create conceptual and theoretical foundations for understanding spiritual violence. The ideas of violence, power and authority elaborated by Hannah Arendt will be considered in relation to spiritual violence, and also, the notions of Johan Galtung and Willem Schinkel about structural violence and violence as a reduction of being will be pondered. Lastly, the article analyzes the idea of vulnerability as an element of spiritual violence.
In 2009, Dr. William Cavanaugh deconstructed this myth in his text The Myth of Religious Violence. He tied this myth to the demonization of the Islamic world after the September 11 attacks. I believe that the contemporary deluge of material on Christian Nationalism refocuses this myth inward upon the religious Other in America. Contemporary scholars of Christian Nationalism, such as Dr. Bradley Onishi, are reproducing this myth. Their analysis is necessary, but further work is needed to avoid further reifying the imperial logic of the American nation-state and painting Christian Nationalists as the irrational other.