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From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion's connection to violence.For the first time in American history, religious self-identification is on the decline. Some have cited a perception that began to grow after September 11, 2001-that faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance, and divisiveness, something bad for society. But how accurate is that view? And does it apply equally to all faiths? In these troubled times, we risk basing decisions of real and dangerous consequence on mistaken understandings of the faiths around us, in our immediate community as well as globally. And so, with her deep learning and sympathetic understanding, Karen Armstrong examines the impulse toward violence in each of the world's great religions. The comparative approach is new: while there have been plenty of books on jihad or the Crusades, for example this one lays the Christian and the Islamic way of war side by side, along with those of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism. Each of these faiths arose in an agrarian society with plenty of motivation for violence: landowners had to lord it over peasants, and warfare was essential to increase one's landholdings, the only real source of wealth before the great age of trade and commerce. In each context, it fell to the priestly class to legitimate the actions of the state. And so the martial ethos became bound up with the sacred. At the same time, however, the faiths developed ideologies that ran counter to the warrior code: around sages, prophets, and mystics within each tradition there grew up communities that represented a protest against the injustice and violence endemic to agrarian society. This book explores the symbiosis of these two impulses and its development as these confessional faiths came of age. But modernity has also been spectacularly violent, and so Armstrong goes on to show how and in what measure religions, in their relative maturity, came to absorb modern belligerence-and what hope there might be for peace among believers in our time.
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Praise for Karen Annstrong's Fields of Blood "Elegant and powerful. ... Erudite and accurate, dazzling in its breadth of knowledge and historical detail. ... Armstrong has done a great service by showing us how wrong some of the simplistic assumptions have been. But she also makes us aware of how much more there is to be known about the awesome dimen-The Washington Post sion of religion in public life." "A compelling examination of the true forces underlying religious violence." -The Huffington Post "Written in a lucid and fleet prose .... [Armstrong is] one of the keenest minds working on understanding the role religion plays -Minneapolis Star Tribune in cultures around the globe." "Panoramic work .... Enjoyable and informative." -Salon "A valuable, readable rebuttal of a pernicious contemporary myth .... Armstrong goes through the centuries and assorted cultures to demonstrate again and again how religious principles and religious leaders were co-opted to support warfare." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch "A tour-de-force of the history of the world's major religions .... Fields of Blood is thought-provoking as it examines one of the more fascinating elements of human civilization." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Armstrong is doing us a great service .... We feel we are in the -The Guardian (London) hands of an expert." "Riveting.... [A] mighty offering. Armstrong is one of our most -The Observer (London) erudite expositors of religion." "Provocative and supremely readable .... Bracing as ever, [Armstrong] sweeps through religious history around the globe and over 4,000 years to explain the yoking of religion and violence and to elucidate the ways in which religion has also been used to counter violence." -