Narrow Identities and Violence

Personal indistinguishability of individual includes many feature of the individual such(prenominal) as race, religion, profession, personal interests, ethnicity, and language among other attri butes. Yet all everywhere the world we see individuals and groups formation themselves in narrow and exclusive terms.We take the view that, in day to day life, the antithetical aspects of record remain latent. Social and economic context present a background against which individuals choose to retain these different possibilities or to commit to star of these possibilities and to renounce the others.Religious Indentity and violenceThere are few topics that altercate the capabilities of historians more than than religion and violence. When the two subjects are combined, the challenge is only increased. How do historians, discuss the often extreme, or alien manifestations of religious belief?And how should we explain religiously motivated violenceor violence that seems to be inspired by re ligious beliefs or authorities?Religious and violence opens up a precise territories for our consideration. This is the assumption that religious violence is really not fundamentally about religion that other interests, claims, or identities of an economic, ethnic, political, or even psychological nature are at stake.With this assumption it seems to imply that religion raise be reduced to something else.I certainly endorse the idea that in most situations in medieval and primaeval modern ages, religious violence is really about religion. This may be less true of more recent times.I wonder, however, how consistently useful it is to think of religion as a affable identity in medieval and early modern ages. Situations certainly existed in which people assigned religious labels to one another and/or thought of themselves as part of a religious group, most obviously in religious borderlands or in regions where multiple religious groups lived alongside one another.But the insight com mencement ceremony provided by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and subsequently refined by a number of historians, namely that it was only over the course of the late Middle Ages, and especially in the wake of the Reformation, that the concept of religion took on something approach path its modern sense of an organized set of beliefs and practices about the divine rather than an attitude of piety toward the gods, is an fundamental one to keep in mind.And while it is certainly true that many forms of religious violence in late medieval or early modern Europe were directed against neighbors assigned some rigid label such as Jews, Dalits, incidents of religious violence may have been especially likely to follow at moments when new beliefs were spreading into an area and the religious situation was far too fluid to be neatly defined.So when public scenes of disrespect to the consecrated host sparked violent Catholic retaliation in France around 1560, the violence was motivated by outrage aga inst those so depraved as to attack Gods body, but the clash cannot be usefully analyzed as one between two groups with fixed social identities.The violence was all about rival beliefs and their public manifestation and defensea clear social function of religion as a symbolic system. To go from there to speaking of religion as an irreducible identity is a linguistic step it probably isnt useful to take.