Summary
Miroslav Volf traces the roots of violence, religious and non-religious.
Transcript
Christian faith does not have [a] monopoly on violence. It has a history of violence, but it does not have [a] monopoly on it. Other religions have been throughout history and continue to be violent. Non-Christian, non-religious, more atheist regimes have tended, as well, to be violent and the argument has been made and can be made that more violence in the 20th century has been committed in the name of denial of God than in the name of affirmation of God. All of this I think is true.
I think again you have, in a sense, [an] illustration – even with non-Christian or non-religious regimes, you have [an] illustration of the point that has been made also about religion: proximity of religion to power leads to religion being implicated in violence. If you have an ideology which is almost [a] quasi-religious ideology like Marxism was, or even like Nazism in a sense was, and if you have it acquiring political power, [the] result will be, again, kind of a single totalitarian mindset that seeks to impose itself upon the unwilling; and then you are going to have violence. So it’s this kind of totalitarian mindset that can be either religious or it can be irreligious, but in either case it is a significant root of violence.
