The idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence
is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it
underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the
public role of religion to efforts to promote liberal democracy in
the Middle East. William T. Cavanaugh challenges this conventional
wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the
secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores
how the category 'religion' has been constructed in the modern West
and in colonial contexts according to specific configurations of
political power. Cavanaugh draws on this scholarship to examine how
timeless and transcultural categories of 'religion and 'the
secular' are used in arguments that religion causes violence. He
argues three points: 1) There is no transhistorical and
transcultural essence of religion. What counts as religious or
secular in any given context is a function of political
configurations of power; 2) Such a transhistorical and
transcultural concept of religion as non-rational and prone to
violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of Western
society; 3) This myth can be and is used to legitimate neo-colonial
violence against non-Western others, particularly the Muslim world.
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