Religion as Aggression

World's tallest buildings, 1850.

My left-leaning friend laments the “colonization” of the Mediterranean basin by the followers of Jesus a few thousand years ago. All a matter, in the end, of religious intolerance. Okay, at first it was all voluntary, but not once Constantine Christianized the empire. Then one had to be Christian or face consequences.

We pride ourselves on being more religiously tolerant than our ancestors—just imagine trying to impose our religion on someone! But I suspect we may be giving our ancestors a bum rap. It is easy to accept religious diversity so long as your own religion is not really Christianity any longer, or any of the recognized others, but secular humanism, human rights, materialism, and science. It is, after all, when that shift happened in our culture, especially in the nineteenth century, that we really started relaxing about religious differences.

It seems to me symbolically significant that, up until 1884, the world's tallest buildings were always (at least next to another, ancient religious structure, the pyramids) cathedrals. In that year, the Washington Monument, an image of secular humanism, became the world's tallest, and secular buildings have held the record ever since. The Washington Monument was surpassed by the Eiffel Tower, essentially a shrine to science and technology. Since the Eiffel Tower was surpassed in turn in 1930, the biggest shrines are either to technology—broadcast masts—or to commerce.

A fairer comparison to the attitude of our ancestors, who held that Christianity was simply truth, since it was indeed what they believed, as we now do science and human rights, would be how peacefully we can tolerate in our midst people who reject the basics of both science and human rights. Not just science or technology alone, because science or technology, unlike Christianity, lacks a moral dimension; so rejecting it is not so much considered morally disturbing as just insane.

Now, wouldn't we have a problem? Don't we? Note that it is on human rights grounds that “we” went in to Kosovo, or Bosnia. Were we wrong, or simply aggressive, to do so? Were we right to stay out of Rwanda, or Syria? Should we have nothing to say about female genital mutilation? Perhaps; but it gets hard to make the case.

You might scoff that religious differences are not that morally significant. But they often are. When you contrast Christianity with historical paganism—back when people actually believed in either—for example, you have to consider issues like human sacrifice. Contrast Christianity with historical Hinduism, and you have issues like suttee, the caste system, and such. With Islam, you had issues like slavery. I think we would still consider such issues morally significant today. We would just ascribe them to human rights instead of Christianity.