Violence in the name of God

Is there something uniquely bloodthirsty in the teachings of the Koran that has inspired a generational wave of Muslim suicide bombers and their supporters? These days a lot of people would like to know. Or is a justification for violent martyrdom to be found in any religion that relies on faith rather than reason -- and has claims to be the only true faith? A spate of atheist writers have recently made that argument. Or does the flaw lie not in our creeds but in our genes? Are human beings simply a violent species, compelled to slaughter our children over and over again?

Bruce Chilton, professor of religion at Bard College and rector of an Episcopal church in Barrytown, N.Y., describes in “Abraham’s Curse” how the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the murder of a young woman near his church by a deranged disciple of the Afro-Caribbean god Ogun made him ponder these questions with new urgency.

Chilton, whose previous books include “Rabbi Jesus” and “Mary Magdalene,” rejects the atheists’ argument out of hand, saying the decline in religious belief since the Enlightenment has done nothing to make the world more peaceful. Nor does he think we are doomed by biology. He sees human sacrifice -- as opposed to wars “fought for practical gain or defense alone” -- as an artifact of the rise of cities at the end of the Stone Age, a “cultural reflex” that “runs below conscious control and transcends individual psychology and the usual logic of ethical action.” In Chilton’s view, this is a hopeful diagnosis: Culture, unlike biology, can be changed.

He focuses on the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac, a key episode for Jews, Christians and Muslims. Abraham obeys God’s command to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah, but at the last moment an angel stops him, saying Abraham has proved his faith and pointing out a more suitable sacrifice: a ram caught in a thicket. The true and original meaning of the story, Chilton insists, is that human sacrifice is not God’s wish, but he shows how all three religions, in times of persecution, have twisted this meaning 180 degrees to glorify martyrdom.

In the 2nd century BC, the Jewish Maccabees revolted against persecution by the Greek heirs to the empire of Alexander the Great. They waged guerrilla warfare with self-sacrificial intensity and won. This encouraged them to view the Abraham-Isaac story -- in Hebrew, the Aqedah or “binding” -- in new ways. They produced variants of the story that emphasized Abraham’s nobility and Isaac’s willingness to die. In some, Abraham kills his son, whom God later restores to life.

The Maccabee spirit, Chilton writes, inspired the Jews who committed mass suicide when besieged by the Romans at Masada in AD 73, victims of medieval pogroms in Europe who killed their children before the Christians could, and, finally, the likes of the extremist right-wing Jew who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 because Rabin proposed ceding too much land to the Palestinians.

Jesus demanded that every follower be willing to “take up his cross” if necessary. The early Christians, brutally persecuted by Rome, found that the glories of martyrdom -- described with relish in a “pornography of violence” borrowed from the Romans themselves -- won them new converts. The church came to view Isaac’s near-death as an imperfect precursor of that ultimate sacrifice, the Crucifixion.

After Christianity became the official religion of Rome, Christian soldiers fighting for the empire could take on the mantle of martyrdom. This in turn, Chilton writes, enabled the Crusades, the pogroms, the savage wars of the Reformation and, in our own time, a “sacrificial reflex” that can easily be “retooled in the service of nationalistic propagandas.” He concludes: “The impulse to praise martyrdom, and therefore to encourage susceptible adolescents to become martyrs, is embedded in the cultural DNA of the West.”

He quotes from Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” which follows the Aqedah story closely until the last two lines. The angel urges Abraham to sacrifice the “Ram of Pride” instead of Isaac.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Just as Owen intuited in his time, Chilton writes, our motivation in sending young Americans to fight and die in Iraq today is largely mythical and unconscious, as is the mind-set of the Muslim jihadists who battle them with the same suicidal zeal as the ancient Maccabees.

What about Islam? It began during persecution by 7th century Arab polytheist regimes, fought to survive, then to prevail, was attacked by waves of Crusaders and Mongols and later was squeezed and partitioned by European colonial powers. Muhammad, unlike Jesus, was a prominent man who raised and commanded armies. But Chilton’s examination of the sacred texts of Islam reveals nothing uniquely militant (much less “Islamo-fascist”). Instead, he sees the same pattern he saw in Judaism and Christianity: Revisions to the Aqedah story -- in many of these, Abraham’s son Ishmael, father of the Arabs, is sacrificed rather than Isaac, father of the Jews -- are used to justify extreme measures in times of stress.

In the nuclear age, “we have no human future if we insist on remaining on Mount Moriah,” Chilton writes, but he expresses hope that the same three Abrahamic religions that have transmitted the disease of human sacrifice for so long also carry within themselves the cure: the story’s original, humane meaning.

Is this a realistic hope, or just the dream of a scholar carried away by his scholarship? Is the Aqedah truly a taproot of violence or just one root among many? Chilton has done what a scholar can do: told us an erudite, closely reasoned yet often fascinating tale that lets us view our heritage in a fresh and provocative way.

Michael Harris is a critic and author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”