Religion and Violence 371
from sectarian and schismatic competition for countercultural predominance that oc-
curs in the context of broader counterhegemonic violence (discussed later).
Religion as an Organizing Aspect of State Domination and Colonization
A “colonial” logic consolidatesinternalorexternalterritory for a state claiming monop-
olization of the legitimate use of force. Religion can become a tool of conquest, both
through cultural hegemony, and more materially, by settling and organizing popula-
tions in a colonized territory. In some cases, as with the Cistercians’ medieval expansion
into eastern Europe, the religion itself is a colonizing movement. At the extreme, in
the Christian crusades, St. Bernard de Clairvaux promoted a fusion between military
organization and religious order, arguing that a member of a crusading order “serves his
own interest in dying, and Christ’s interest in killing!” The Crusades – and especially
the Iberianreconquista– provided the original template for subsequent European col-
onization, according to the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von
Ranke (Partner 1997: 160–1). In the beginning, Roman Catholicism sanctioned state vi-
olence, for example with the papal bulls that authorized Henry the Navigator to enslave
peoples he encountered on his voyages “to convert and combat the infidel” (Houtart
1997: 2). This pattern continued in the Latin Americas. But with the papal bulls, reli-
gion became a subordinate partner. In the spread of the Portuguese and Spanish empires
to the Americas, violence was the prerogative of the expansionary state, and conquest
was first and foremost a military achievement. For its part, the Roman Catholic Church
engaged in forced conversion and organization of indigenous populations through its
networks of missions (Rivera 1992).
Even if religion is not directly involved in the exercise of violence to secure and
control territory, to the degree that it sacralizes a political regime, it lends legitimacy to
that regime and thus functionally supports regime violence. Tacit or explicit religious
support of brutal regimes can be significant. The religious justification of slavery in
the U.S. South during the nineteenth century is an obvious example, as are religious
acquiescence to Hitler’s Germany, the United States’s prosecution of the Vietnam war,
and the Argentine dictatorship in the twentieth century.
UTOPIA, HEGEMONY, AND VIOLENCE
Given that religions sometimes participate in or legitimate state violence, it is not sur-
prising that religion also can be a significant force in counterhegemonic conflict. There
are many kinds of utopian religious movements, and the vast majority of groups do not
become committed to violence unless they become objects of establishment repression,
and for the most part, not even then. However, two countercultural orientations – the
mystical and the apocalyptic – have distinctive potentials for grounding violence. Of
the two, mysticism recently has underwritten hierocratic violence in the Solar Temple
and Heaven’s Gate by producing a metaphysical understanding of death as transcen-
dence through suicide (Hall, Schuyler, and Trinh 2000). In other cases, mysticism is
invoked in counterhegemonic movements to promote an aura of invincibility, as with
the proclamation of participants’ immunity from the effects of the colonizers’ bullets
during the Mau Mau rebellion.