VideoOftentimes the distinction between religious violence and secular violence is just the distinction between violence that we want to condemn and violence that we want to either ignore or praise. There was an incident a few years ago where, at a conference in Dubai – it was after the invasion of Iraq and there was sectarian violence that erupted in its wake, and a diplomat from the United States said, we’re not going to stand by and let people impose their will on Iraq by the use of violence. And a Middle Eastern journalist who picked this up remarked, very ironically, did the United States not use weapons when they invaded Iraq? There’s this idea that what they do is violence and what we do is not violence. And so the distinction between religious violence and secular violence is often used in that way.
One way of thinking about it from a biblical point of view is through the lens of idolatry, right – that people worship all sorts of things that are not God as if they were gods – you know, Mammon, and as Paul says in Philippians, their gods are their bellies, and so on. And so this is not a kind of new insight, it’s nothing more startling than the basic biblical insight that people treat all sorts of things as if they were gods. And so the real question is, is that violence in any sense justifiable? But the distinction between religious violence and secular violence is often just used to distinguish violence between things we like and things that we don’t like.