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By Robert Owens Scott and W. Mark Richardson

A young man detonates a bomb on a crowded bus on a busy city street, destroying himself and everyone else on board. When his family learns what happened, they are overjoyed. He went to heaven and sent the others to hell.

A former Presbyterian minister fires a shotgun outside an abortion clinic, killing a doctor and his escort. When the man is sent to death row, a guard notes that he is the only inmate out of fifty-four who shows no remorse. He was doing God’s work.

The first story comes fromThe End of Faith , by Sam Harris, who argues that religion is inherently violent. The second is fromTerror in the Name of God , by Jessica Stern, who expects religion to make people loving, and seeks to understand why it sometimes does the opposite. Gone are the days when critics dismissed religion as irrelevant and claimed that it was fading away. Instead, best-selling authors argue that religion is deeply relevant — and incredibly dangerous. They are alarmed and incredulous when polls in the United States reveal that more than nine in ten claim to believe in God (about a third worship regularly).

Most of those believers would maintain that violence is the province of extremists, or, to use the word that often functions as a synonym, fundamentalists. Critics acknowledge the distinction, but they hold religion itself accountable for maintaining the conditions for religious violence. It is easy to be offended by the implication that the corner church, synagogue, or mosque where the faithful worship is cut from the same cloth as a terrorist cell. But if the first step in spiritual transformation is confession, should we consider whether these critics have about them a touch of the prophet?

“Extremism, fundamentalism are catchwords in a way that seem to dismiss the problem, as if it belongs to those other people,” says author and former Roman Catholic priest James Carroll. “One of the challenges I deal with as a believing Christian is the way in which mainstream ideas need to be revisited, re-examined for their impact on other believers, other people, leading to violence.”

“The most obvious example of that [violence] is the profoundly mainstream idea that Christianity has entirely superseded Judaism, that Judaism as a religion has no reason to exist,” says Carroll. His research into the history of anti-Semitism in the church led him to recognize how Christianity has bolstered its own identity by telling the Jewish story from a perspective that denigrates Judaism as a moribund religion.

Jewish scholar Susannah Heschel calls this process a “counter history,” where one group tells another’s story as a way to assert power over them. Though Christianity’s dominance has led to much suffering for Jews, Heschel’s research shows ways in which Jews have in turn created counter histories for Christianity and Islam, describing both as degraded versions of Judaism.

“It’s a small step, as it turns out in history, to go from saying, ‘That religion has no reason to exist’ to saying, ‘Those people have no reason to exist,’” warns Carroll. The tendency to define ourselves positively by defining others negatively is not limited to religion, but “monotheists are great at it. There’s only one God, and your God is not it!” For Carroll such a concept is a perversion of monotheism. “The oneness of God, properly understood, is the oneness of union, of the reconciliation of oppositions [and] differences.

“None of us owns the meaning of God. And when anyone concludes that they do, they’re dangerous — that’s what history shows.”

Islamic scholar and author Tariq Ramadan agrees. “This is why we have a verse of the Koran, ‘And we made you tribes and nations in order for you to know each other.’” Ramadan says that his own early grassroots encounters with Christians and Jews were formative. They taught him not merely tolerance, but respect: “I can tolerate you without knowing you, by ignoring you,” he observes, but “there is no true respect without mutual knowledge. Out of this mutual knowledge, I’m going to know you, but not only this. You are a mirror. I’m going to know myself better.”

Self-knowledge is crucial for Ramadan, who maintains that so-called “religious” violence actually springs from ways people use religion for human ends. “If we want to get rid of violence, we have to get rid of human beings,” he says. Religion offers a means of mastering our inner violence. “This is really why we need, from the very beginning, to understand that there is no true religion without effort, discipline, and education. If you are not dealing with this, and you are confusing your religious commitment with emotions, your emotions can be blind. And it comes to violence.”

Religion educates both mind and heart, he says. The Koran and the scriptures of other religions provide “a double vision: a rational vision to understand, a vision coming from the heart to give a direction.” This dialectical process lets us discover fresh meaning in ancient texts through new ways of reading in new contexts. Scriptures become universal by giving us tools for living in any particular time.

That’s not to say we always use those tools. Black liberation theologian James Cone marvels at “the easy consciences of American churches” in the face of the deep racial divides that continue to plague our country. “Although white violence is more camouflaged and hidden today, it is just as real and brutal as it ever was,” Cone told his audience at the 2005 Paddock Lectures at The General Theological Seminary. “There is nowhere blacks can go to escape white supremacy,” which he defines as “white control of all resources essential for well being.”

He points to a recent Harvard study finding that America’s public schools became more segregated in the 1990s despite the nation’s growing diversity and public opinion in favor of integration. Schools serving mostly minority communities correlated with a lower quality of education. Though “token” persons of color hold high positions, they are constrained to follow the principles of white supremacy, says Cone.

“Why are we so content living separate lives?” he asks. “Do not all the religions demand that we reach out to the others?” He sees dialogue as a means to nurture multiracial communities and calls on local congregations to foster a movement built of discussion groups that honor the importance of speaking openly and honestly, where “all should expect that each will say something that others will deeply resent.”

Entering these difficult conversations — opening to this education of the heart — will require profound spiritual resources.

Cone says that the first step is repentance, “the profound acknowledgement that all have fallen short.” Then we must move forward in the spirit of love and understanding. “With them, all things are possible, even racial reconciliation.”

Susannah Heschel points to the gift of embarrassment. For her late father, rabbi and author Abraham Joshua Heschel, a religious person “would never say ‘I am a good person,’” she told the Jesuit magazine America. “He wrote, ‘I am afraid of people who are never embarrassed at their own pettiness, prejudices, envy, and conceit, never embarrassed at the profanation of life.’ Embarrassment is meant to be productive.”

Religion’s link to violence is indeed an embarrassment — a widely observed phenomenon that strongly contradicts the self-understanding of most religious people. Can religious people find the humility to cease defining themselves by who they are “not” and instead learn to engage others with heart and mind in the kind of open, loving dialogue that can transform persons and communities? If so, the faithful will answer religion’s critics in the only way that truly matters: not with words, but with their lives.

Robert Owens Scott is the director of Trinity Institute. The Rev. W. Mark Richardson, Ph.D. is Trinity Institute’s Senior Theological Fellow and professor of systematic theology at The General Theological Seminary.

This article appears in the Religion and Violence issue of Trinity News.