Reviewing ‘War on Sacred Grounds’ by Ron E. Hassner

It seems to me as though Hassner is too good at thinking first and foremost about religious conflict as political conflict.

Thus he advises resolutions, or provides the analysis of religious conflicts in this book, in such a way as to suggest the framing of future solutions, which looks favorably on religious and political leaders alike who will secularize and make rather more figurative their religious places and postures, preferring abstractions over concrete religion, wherever competing claims regarding the concrete lead to war.

If I summarize what Hassner seems to be saying in this title, the politicians are mostly to blame for wars over sacred places, especially the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet religious figures – rabbis, for instance – who find clever ways to interpret their devotional source material so as to make neutral the contested places, are as close as anyone can be said to be to doing the Lord’s work.

What’s so uncomfortable and disconcerting about this default posture is that it seems to cynically dispense with religion as merely another means to the end of managing humanity for the modern, secular, humanist, expert class.

Where Hassner bemoans political leaders who have been disrespectful to competing religions, and thus stirred up what he sees as unnecessary turmoil, and he presents in a negative light the same sort of political leaders who fail to understand well even their own professed religion, yet leverage it in an attempt to score political points, the subtle but consistent tone of Hassner’s treatment of religion seems to do an arguably worse thing to all religion, in presenting a rather cold, cynical, sterile, disenchanted sameness to all competing truth and justice claims.

Over taking any of the world’s leading religions too seriously, except to check the box on all of them as a show of respect to their adherents, what the reader is clearly expected to prefer is the kind of thinking common to The Internationalists’ project. See also Oona Hathaway and Scott J Shapiro’s work by the same title for more on the backstory for that.

But that is to say, unless I’m badly mistaken, ‘War on Sacred Grounds’ is not only predicated on the assumptions inherent to that century-long effort chronicled by Hathaway and Shapiro, it is also an attempt to practically apply it in the 21st century. This is geopolitical science, and the managerial class must know how to do their duty to establish world peace.

The only problem is that, though moderates all around may be impressed, each man or woman who really believes his religion to be true in a mutually exclusive way to other religions will be put off, and take it as an insult that the likes of Hassner believe this, that all the religions of the world are to be flattened by the new paradigm of modern scientistic positivism, even with the utmost paternalistic condescension. And if the true believers in their own religions object, the missionaries of modern scientistic positivism like Hassner will just call them extremists, and excuse themselves thereby for breaking off meaningful discourse with them in preference for merely informing them after the fact what decisions have been come to as concerns their heritage.

In theory, this is only the least bad option because much credit is given to the powers of propaganda, and the lure of economic incentives to be gained from rewarding religious moderates. But that is just where the likes of Hassner will say they are being realistic, not cynical.

In practice, the effect in the long-run will be much the same as when European princes bought off the Barbary Pirates and Vikings. At a certain point, unless the raiders are killed or converted, they only come back stronger and more determined after they’ve spent the cash you gave them last time. “Moderates,” real or imagined, can easily reveal themselves to the world as “extremists” as soon as they cease being pacified by bribes.

But then that is to say also that, at the end of the day, there really are only two options to resolve the sort of religious conflicts Hassner is analyzing in this work. Reward those who do what is good, and punish those who do what is evil. Yet to do this, one must have a fixed and persuasive conviction about good and evil which comes from somewhere or someone more authoritative than one’s self.

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