Violence and Religious Life : Politics, Culture, and the Sacred in the United States

I will begin this discussion with a proposition: politics are often driven by religious forces, and religious life rarely lacks a political dimension. The integral mix of religion and politics in most human cultures confuses rather than clarifies lines of demarcation separating one from the other. The conceptual appeal of a dividing line between personal faith and public government, religion and politics in two discrete compartments, is the result of Enlightenment and postEnlightenment thinking in the creation of modern democracies, and has historically served nations claiming to protect religious freedoms. Unfortunately, the conceptual power of this false separation in the abstract―religion as an isolated, private reality removed from political, social realities in public life―frequently leads to disappointment and discouragements in real world negotiations about the shifting limits of religious freedom for some groups and the glaring excesses of religious nationalism for many political leaders from yesterday and today. The intersections of religion and politics are easy to discern in United States history, beginning in the colonial period and continuing on into the present. 1 The myriad ways any religious community―Catholic or Buddhist, Methodist or Hindu―struggles with their place and security in American society is fraught with political issues tied to identity, safety, legitimacy, and longevity. But the politics and political participation of Jews or Christians or Mormons or any other identifiable religious group on the American social landscape does not exhaust the multiple interconnections and modes of transaction enlivening the political action of religious people or the religious qualities of American politics. The nuances and complexities of religious life in America, which again is always grounded in various political webs of meaning and action, is much more complicated than simply polling Evangelicals about their voting preferences, or covering the news about America’s first Muslim congressman. One topic that allows for this kind of complex cultural analysis, and an integral social reality throughout the course of United States history, is violence. The intimate, troubling connections between religion and violence have