Those of us who do work relating to feminism and religion often wonder how one can do scholarship in these areas without assuming these categories are somehow “more” than mere constructs. What would you say to someone who thinks these categories refer to distinctions that occur in the “real world”?
As someone interested in how discourse is shaped, and how it shapes us, how do you understand “religious violence”? Is it a constructed myth, a lived reality, or some mixture of the two?
JB: Well, it all depends on who is using such a term, and for what reason. If the term is meant to imply that religion leads to violence more easily than secularism, then we can certainly come up with a host of examples that would show how religion can operate to mitigate violence, and how wars have been waged in the name of “secular” states, especially against religious minorities. But even that kind of rejoinder suggests that there is absolute difference between religion and the secular domain, a thesis that has been ably contested by many people including Janet Jakobsen, Anne Pellegrini, Talal Asad, William Connolly, Saba Mahmood. I think that the term “religious violence” is sometimes meant to describe the violence that emerges from “religious fanaticism” but is there, implicit in that argument, a view that religion has a potentially violent fanatic potential that non-religious positions lack? Was the United States acting from religious grounds in its wars against Vietnam, the Taliban, or Afghanistan? It was a war against religious communities perceived as fanatical, but was there nothing fanatical about our own acts of military aggression? When irrationality and fanaticism are projected onto the religious Other, that gives those who are doing the projecting the chance to regard their own actions as “rational” or “civilizational” even though they are quite murderous, and include collateral damage – that ultimate euphemism for the practice of killing innocent civilians. Of course, there are violent religious groups, but is it their religion that makes them violence, or their politics? We still have a long way to go in sorting out these matters.
In light of our limits of self-knowledge and personal transparency, in what ways do you see feminist critiques of patriarchal religion as problematic? What ways do you see the discourse surrounding feminism and religion as noble, virtuous, and enabling?
JB: I am not sure I am the one to answer these important questions. Of course, there are many religions, including my own, that have strong patriarchal bias. Judaism actively celebrates the patriarchs, but many feminists have found ways to re-read or read against the patriarchal grain. They have found women in the bible and sought to retell biblical stories from their perspective or in ways that figure them prominently. Those are not my practices, but I understand and respect them. Perhaps what is most important is to understand that traditions have to be repeated in ritual and retold in story form in order to continue to remain alive as tradition. When we speak about living traditions, we are speaking about traditions that, to stay alive, have to adapt to new historical challenges, and find ways of speaking to people where they live now. So traditions can, and must, be revised to stay alive, which means not only responding to feminist challenges, but affirming feminism as a way of affirming some of the values you mention, dignity and equality – and perhaps even the affirmation of life.
Biography from The European Graduate School: Judith Butler, Ph.D., Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her B.A., and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984. Her first training in philosophy took place at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland. She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
About the Author: Kile Jones is a Ph.D. in Religion student and the founder of “Interview an Atheist at Church Day.” He writes on religion, ethics, and atheism and is the founder of Claremont Journal of Religion.
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