Barney Zwartz and religious violence
Posted by Brian on Sat 24-Jun-2006 at 6:30 pm
The Australian National Secular Association in association with the Rationalist and Humanist Societies ran a very successful conference in Melbourne last weekend. The topic was ‘Keeping God out of Government’ and among the participants was one Barney Zwartz. Zwartz, a conservative Presbyterian who doubles as religion editor of the Melbourne Age, told us a few ‘home truths’ the most coherent of which seemed to be that, like Christianity and Islam, we had our fair share of ‘fundamentalists’.
I don’t think this is right. A central feature - I think the central feature - of humanism, rationalism and freethinking (I don’t know about ’secularism’, often used as a comprehensive political swear-word by people like Zwartz) is the provisional nature of knowledge, and I mean all knowledge. The only thing I’m pretty sure of is that I’m not sure of anything - and I’m not even quite sure of that. To characterise this as a species of fundamentalism - to class it with Christian and Muslim fundamentalisms - is to deprive the term of meaning.
Anyway, Zwartz seemed anxious for us to read his Saturday piece in the Age (17 Jun. 2006) so when I got home I had a look at it. The title seemed unpromising: ‘So violence is all religion’s fault? Think again’. Now I know that a sub-editor may have been responsible for this heading, but it’s just plain ridiculous. Nobody thinks that all violence has a religious base and it doesn’t even reflect the argument that Zwartz advances in the article.
To cut a long story short, Zwartz describes as a ‘myth’ the idea that ‘religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence’. He reiterates this notion several times: ‘the myth of religious violence’, ‘this myth about religious violence’, etc. But smack in the middle of the piece, Zwartz effects a spectacular change of direction:
[Regarding actions of the Crusaders] - So religion can and does contribute to violence. Where the myth is wrong is in saying religion is more violent than secular ideologies.
Even to make some sense of this quite different argument, we’d first need to define the term ’secular ideologies’. In various parts of his article, Zwartz strongly implies that the current American administration may be viewed as espousing an ultimately secular ideology, which raises a host of intriguing (indeed, unanswerable) questions. Having arrived at a mutually agreeable definition, we would then need to locate someone who had actually claimed that ‘religion is more violent than secular ideologies’. So many of Zwartz’s assertions - not to mention those of arch-caricaturists like Andrew Bolt and Bill Muehlenberg - are little more than sweeping statements practically unworthy of serious rebuttal.
Some correspondents in unBelief’s discussion forum take a more direct line of attack than Zwartz. No vague ’secular ideologies’ for them. Recently, a Catholic apologist expressed displeasure when I talked about the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples of institutionalised Catholic violence without mentioning that ‘atheist regimes’ like the Soviet Union and Communist China had also murdered millions of people. I didn’t see how this would have made the Catholic Church look much better, but in any case I’ve never seen a convincing link made between the atheism of Communist governments and the violence associated with their rule. Stalinist purges, for example, surely had rather obvious economic and political roots rather than purely - or often even partly - anti-religious ones. And my controverters can’t really say, ‘Oh, but if Stalin had been religious he would have killed less people’ because Zwartz has already admitted that ‘religion can and does contribute to violence’ and no-one in their right mind denies this. Actually, a religious nationalist Stalin operating in the context of the Second World War is a truly apocalyptic prospect to behold, especially for Jews.
I like a lot of Zwartz’s stuff and I was pleased about some of the things he said at last weekend’s conference. But as for his article - well, I guess everyone puts in the occasional shocker.