The Use Of Violence

 

On Pages 106 and 107 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer points out that effective mass movements like Christianity spread so far and wide, not just due to persuasion, but also by the use of force, fanaticism and a convert or die strategy. How can a good religion be or stay good if its followers use evil means to spread it? To the degree that Christianity or any other religious, nationalist, or other kind of mass movement, was spread fanatically by the sword, to that degree their worldly spread and influence was an evil means to power and followers. That is undeniable and Hoffer does not avoid telling the truth. We cannot undo what Christians did hundreds of years ago, but we can urge religious folk going forward to not be fanatical, to use only persuasion to acquire new believers, and to live by egoist ethics not group ethics (Group ethics make self-hating agents able to use the sword and violence to pollute and muddy the name of a good deity and his religion.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “There is hardly an example of a mass movement achieving vast proportions and a durable organization solely by persuasion. Professor K. S. Latourette, a very Christian historian, has to admit that ‘However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and the armed forces may be, and however unpleasant it may be to acknowledge the fact, as a matter of plain history, the latter has often made it possible for the former to survive.’ It was the temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion. Conquest and conversion went hand in hand, the latter often serving as a justification and a tool of the former. Where Christianity failed to gain or retain the backing of state power, it achieved neither a wide nor a permanent hold. ‘In Persia . . . Christianity confronted a state religion sustained by the crown and never became a faith of more than a minority.’ In the phenomenal spread of Islam, conquest was a primary factor and conversion a by-product. ‘The most flourishing periods of Mohammedanism have been at the time of its greatest political ascendancy; and it is at those times that it has received its largest accession from without.’ The Reformation made headway only where it gained the backing of the ruling prince or the local government. Said Melanchthon, Luther’s wisest lieutenant: ‘Without the intervention of civil authority what would our precepts become?—Platonic laws.’ Where, as in France, the state power rose against it, it was drowned in blood and never rose again. In the case of the French Revolution, ‘It was the armies of the Revolution, not its ideas, that penetrated throughout the whole of Europe.’ There was no question of intellectual contagion. Dumouriez protested that the French proclaimed the sacred law of liberty ‘like the Koran, sword in hand.’ The threat of communism at present does not come from its preaching but from the fact that it is backed by one of the mightiest armies on earth.

 

It also seems that, where a mass movement can either persuade or coerce, it usually chooses the latter. Persuasion is clumsy and its results uncertain. Said the Spaniard St. Dominic to the heretical Albigenses: ‘For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying and weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, ‘where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.’ We shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas, who will arms nations and kingdoms against this land . . . and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have been powerless.”

 

My response: That mass movements are usually evil is evidenced by their preference to using fanaticism, violence, and the sword to gain converts, when moderate coaxing and gentle urging might be resorted to.