AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Cause She Says So

I’m all about peace — we’ve talked about that before, when Bush’s wars of conquest were starting — so one might think I was pleased to hear that just before New Year’s, Karen Armstrong issued a clarion call for religions to work for peace and justice.

But instead, I’m irked, and all the more so because columns from Karen Armstrong reflect what the mass media might think of as the kind of “informed insider” reporting that I called for below (if anyone in mass media types were listening, of course, which they can’t possibly have the free time to do).

Let’s ask the difficult question (that I wish an editor had asked): On what authority does Karen Armstrong determine that “religions” should be about peace and justice? Granted what any casual observer of world politics can see — that is, that adherents of every brand name of religion find in their faith the justification for killing others and for acts that Armstrong evidently finds unjust — on what basis does she claim that they misunderstand their own faiths? Is she claiming to be a wiser Islamic theologian than the imams of Wahhabism? A sounder rabbi than leaders of Israel’s extremist leaders? A more reliable Christian theologian than a just-war apologist for the Iraq Conquest? A more enlightened Buddhist than the leaders of Sri Lanka’s war against Tamil insurgents? In a word, on what basis does Armstrong make her case for peace?

So far as I can tell, she offers no positive argument for the premise that “religions”should support her vision of peace. That’s weird on the face of it; she certainly could have cobbled together a claim based in the texts that various people hold sacred. Her omission, though, suggests that her plea rests not on any particular religious faith, nor even on a general religious outlook, but on a cultural ideology that seems obvious to her. So long as that sort of naïveté passes for the voice of a theological observer, I can’t expect much of mainstream journalism’s attention to religion.

There are cases to be made for peace on the grounds of most every theological stance I’m acquainted with, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, Buddhism, and liberal democracy. But each of these cases needs to be made on the premises particular to the outlook it addresses; a Muslim has no particular reason to be moved by a Mennonite’s argument for Christian pacifism, nor a Jew to be convinced by a Buddhist or Hindu account of ahimsa. And no one has a reason to listen to Armstrong’s un-argued case that religions should be all about peace and justice; at the least, she should specify the enlightenment ideals of universal human rights, justice, and social concord that transcend particular religious commitments, ideals that (I’m guessing here) probably fund her column. That wouldn’t convince people whose theologies run deeper than their commitment to enlightenment ideals, but at least it would offer a minimal justification for her perspective.

Posted by AKMA at January 8, 2004 08:51 AM | TrackBack