Monday 12th August - Friday 16th August 2002
Prague, Czech Republic
| Papers Listing | Cultures of Violence | Conference Programme and Abstracts |
Session 3: Religion, Heresy and
Violence
Peter Day - Ploughshares
into Swords
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
No abstract is presently Available
Brian Sandberg
- The Infection of Heresy: Religious Conquest and Confessional
Violence in Early Modern France
Assistant Professor of History, Millikin University, USA
This paper concerns the relationships between religion, violence, and political culture in early modern European history, particularly during the latter stages of the French Wars of Religion. The paper is an outgrowth of my book manuscript, Bonds of Nobility and the Culture of Revolt: Provincial Nobles and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France, 1610-1635, which examines nobles' participation in armed confrontation and civil warfare in southwestern France during a period of severe religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The paper will explore provincial noble society, culture, religion, and politics through the lens of nobles' orchestration of violence, as nobles eagerly created and led military forces against their rivals. Provincial nobles' participation in organized violence produced a 'culture of revolt' that promoted political chaos, created shifting loyalties, provoked rivalries, and perpetuated conflict within noble culture and society in southwestern France.
Religious conquest and confessional violence played a decisive role not only in the shaping the forms of violence and coercion during the French Wars of Religion, but also in the outcomes of civil conflict. The ultimate rationale for conflict in southern France in the early seventeenth century was to accomplish religious conquest through conversion and implementation of the militant church. Each confession struggled to advance its doctrine through the spread of its followers and the protection of its churches. In the civil warfare of the 1610s and 1620s, the Catholic warrior nobles began to turn the tide decisively against the "infection of heresy" of the Huguenot churches, leading to the collapse of the Protestant Godly Community in France.
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Paper - 
Mike McFarland - Religion,
Conflict and the Secular
Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Religions play a major role in violent conflict. The media portray a number of local conflicts, from Northern Ireland to Gujurat, and larger issues, such as "Islam versus the West," as religious. There are a number of problems with such a simple typology as "religious conflict," so I think in terms of "the religious element in conflict." Religions often play a role beside cultural, political, and other factors, but are rarely (if ever) the sole cause of violence. Moreover, as Appleby suggests in his "ambivalence of the sacred" thesis, multiple readings of religious traditions are possible, readings that may encourage or discourage violence. Thus, a sensible approach to the religious element is to strengthen groups with nonviolent interpretations. Appleby's approach is similar to those proposed by Galtung, Gopin, and others.
However, this would not take place in a vacuum. We can not study "religious conflict" as a discreet category. Beyond religions' interrelationship with other factors mentioned above, there is another consideration -- the role of the secular. Many of the approaches to promoting nonviolent religious discourses, even those proposed by religious actors, are imbued with elements often considered "secular," such as tolerance, freedom of belief, and so on. Of course, these elements are not foreign to religious traditions, but the particularly secular ways they are implemented in areas of the West may be. Rather than considering secular modernity a value-neutral norm by which we measure peaceful discourses, we must regard it as a historically and culturally grounded belief system. In this way, we can free religions to develop their own discourses. In dialog, they may adapt lessons from the secular world, but need not adopt secular forms wholesale. In this paper I will begin an exploration of this idea, in particular drawing on some ideas from integral theory, a relatively new interdisciplinary school from the United States.