Taking the Religious Imagination Seriously
“We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers . . . . We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted . . . . In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your Lord and Creator. . . . Although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary . . . . The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. . . . We will never stop hating you until you embrace Islam.”—“Why We Hate You & Why We Fight You,” Dabiq (July 31, 2016)
Much as I love and respect Karen Armstrong, I must confess that her last book—Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2015)—really got on my nerves. Religion is never taken at face value as a real motive force behind violent action in the world. It’s always something else (e.g., masculinity issues, nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, schizophrenia, status anxieties, etc.). Are some people who do horrible things in the name of religion actually doing them for nationalistic reasons? Absolutely. Are some of them actually crazy? No doubt. Are some of them working out masculinity issues? Certainly. But are we really ready to say that a deep commitment to a religious vision is never the real reason why someone decides to strap a bomb to his chest, fly an airplane into a building, or open fire on a crowd? Are we really willing to say that religion—the most enduring form of popular culture in human history—is never more than an epiphenomenal smokescreen?
Most people go to the church or the mosque to find other people, not God. Some seek to be reunited with the dearly departed in a heavenly future, some seek community in a lonely present, and some seek connection with an ancestral past. But few seek God. Religion is largely a function of sociology, not theology. I get that. But saying x is largely a function of y isn’t the same as saying that x can be reduced to y. Yet that’s precisely what we so often do in the secular West.
Refusing to even entertain the possibility that religious conviction might be a root cause of religious violence is intellectually dishonest. Profoundly so. It’s not unlike the sleazy sleight-of-hand favored by Marxists of a certain stamp: “If you don’t agree with me, clearly you’ve got false consciousness.” Or the equally sleazy sleight-of-hand favored by old-school Freudians: “If you don’t agree with my analysis, clearly you’re in denial.” At a certain point, we have to at least entertain the possibility that people mean what they say. At a certain point, we have to take the religious imagination seriously.
What’s more, we need to acknowledge that the mere fact that a person’s understanding of the world is clouded by psychosis—or psychedelics or masculinity issues or status anxiety or anything else—doesn’t necessarily mean that their religious insights and experiences aren’t real. Altered states of consciousness, regardless of their origin, can reveal just as much as they conceal. I know this to be true from personal experience. I had a serious brush with psychosis when I was a teenager. During those years I also had some profoundly life-changing spiritual experiences. Were some of these visionary experiences simply delusions produced by a malfunctioning adolescent brain? Absolutely. Can they all be explained away with the primitive tools wielded by modern psychology? I highly doubt it.
Although I’ve had insights when I was half crazy (or drunk or high) that were, in retrospect, complete and utter nonsense, I’ve also had—in the same head space—genuine insights into the world, other people, myself, and my relationships—insights I wouldn’t have otherwise had—insights that remained thoroughly compelling and useful and true for me “after the ecstasy” (to borrow Kornfield’s phrase). None of this would have surprised Seneca. In On the Tranquility of the Mind, he maintains that great thoughts are all a function of a kind of divine madness: “Whether we share the Greek poet’s belief that ‘sometimes it is a pleasure even to be a madman,’ or Plato’s that ‘the man in control of his senses knocks in vain on poetry’s door,’ or Aristotle’s that ‘no great genius has ever existed without a dash of lunacy’—whatever the truth, only the mind that is roused can utter something momentous that surpasses the thoughts of other men.”
