 Welcome to Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Chang, and I'm here today with Dr. Margo Kipp, Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at Hawaii Pacific University. And we'll be talking about violence and the religious imagination. Hi, Margo. Hi, Grace. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Thanks for joining us. So in addition to being a professor of humanities and religious studies at Hawaii Pacific University, you also are editor of a couple of things, the Journal on Religion and Violence, as well as the Cambridge series on Elements of Religion and Violence. That's right. And also, actually, another one, Oxford Research and Cyclopedia of Religion, where I do the religion and violence stuff. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because you've written quite a lot of interesting work on this topic, which is what we want to explore further today. Recently, you introduced the December issue of the Journal of Religion and Violence on violence and the biblical imagination. True. Yeah, and so I'm interested in this topic that you're writing about. And so first of all, can you tell a little bit about what you mean by religious imagination? Good question. Religious imagination is the new focus, right? There were many decades, maybe five decades ago, people were still doing theology. When you think about religious studies, you think about the logos, the logoi, about theoi, the arguments about God and the existence of God, right? There's a whole history of philosophy on that. But today, we're not so much interested in a God or the gods, and we tend to focus more on imagination because it is the stories of a religion, the narrative imagination that tends to capture people's hearts and souls and make them respond to certain themes. Themes like the good guys and the bad guys, the heroes, the villains, the just fight, the good war and the bad war, and things is good and evil and all kinds of stories that get under your skin, role models that get under your skin. So we have so many of the religion love stories, right? It's all about narrative that tends to motivate people to act in certain ways that they may not even know. They may not even know they're inspired by really just narratives, but nonetheless, it tends to feed into a lot of our, especially our ideologies of conflict these days. So narrative is everything, the stories, the imagination. Nowadays, we don't talk about imagination as much as imaginaries. This is a new lingo, I guess. But it's supposed to refer to the way the imaginations represent themselves or manifest themselves in action. So it has to do with certain things that you don't even know necessarily that you're responding to these ideas until you find yourself motivated to act. So this is an old idea. It's been around for about three decades, maybe. Koran Ijimer talked a lot about religion and the violent imaginary. Charles Taylor is the one who really made it the notion popular. He talked about religion as basically social imaginaries. So yeah, we're into the imagination now. So you might wonder, well, how does that differ? How does religious imagination differ from any other imagination? And one of the ways to see this or to understand this is that religions tend to presume that all experiences are flat. There's a deeper reservoir of either notions or experiences that motivate people, even if they're not always addressing them. So I suppose that would be the primary thing that makes a religious imaginary religious. But if you think about it, religions include a lot of other stuff besides just codes of belief and rituals and things like that, because it includes things like altered experiences and altered mind states and trance states and rituals that engender maybe terror or maybe delight and there's so much more to it than just the old codes of belief and sets of behaviors. So how these narratives foster imagination and the meaning behind these kinds of acts? And in particular, you're interested in acts of violence. So what do you mean by violence? What constitutes violence in your study? That's just as complicated as the notion of an imagination, right? So violence, we don't treat when we're doing religious studies, we don't treat violence simply as a matter of wars. I mean, those are pretty ever-present these days. And of course, there's a long history of religion and war. But we look at all different kinds of violence. For instance, we look at the notion of, I don't know, verbal violence, structural violence, the way that there's implicit suppression built into the social schemes of things. We look at victory parades as tending to have a violent dimension because they're implicit threats. So we look at all kinds of, we look at violence as multifaceted. Even the way you think can be, it automatically, you make decisions between what's good or bad. You make decisions of what's proper and improper. And you're always weighing against some framework which manifests some kind of damage to something. Your violence itself is multi-layered, the way we treat it now. So we talk a lot about verbal violence and religious studies, because especially when we're dealing with narratives. And there are so many outstanding examples of violence and, of course, religious traditions and the history of them. Is there an example of verbal violence that you can give us as far as something historical, contemporary? Yeah, no, let's take some biblical examples because they're just so profound. The Bible is really captured Western imagination, right? So here's a few that I have to pull out. This is Isaiah 13, 6, 8. Whale for the day of the Lord is near. It will come like destruction from the Almighty. Because of this, all hands will go limp. Every man's heart will melt, terror will seize them, pain and anguish will grip them. They will ride like women, like a woman in labor. They will look at gas at each other, their faces aflame. So this is an implicit threat, right? The coming from Isaiah, who's supposed to be manifesting the voice of the God, he's a prophet. And this is about losing your bearings on so many. It's not just about hitting each other. It's about losing your bearings, losing trust in the world. Here's one of my favorites from, my favorites, it's not favorites, it's just riveting. It's from Leviticus. And I will make those of you who are left in the lands of your enemies so ridden with fear that when a leaf flutters behind them in the wind, they shall run as if it were a sword behind them. They shall fall with no one in pursuit. Though no one pursues them, they shall stumble over one another as if the sword were behind them. And there shall be no stand made against the enemy. If you think about this, this is another thread from Leviticus. But it's about creating in you this kind of perception that the rustling leaf is a sword, wielded by an enemy and you're gonna lose your balance, you're gonna fall, you're gonna lose your whole orientation and you're gonna be that whole experience that there's something chasing you like in the alley in the dark of the night or something. And you can't trust the world. That there's an implicit uncertainty to everything and there might be stuff out there that you just can't, your perceptions aren't gonna necessarily grasp. So a lot of this violent narratives are about how you relate to these stories and metaphors of course and metonyms and the whole, all the language that we use for understanding literature from the whole world, especially important in religious imagination because you're expected to respond. If you open yourself up to these stories, you can feel it, it's not, it doesn't matter if you're not an Israelite in the land of an enemy. You can relate to this perception of that there's something after you and the world's not quite reliable. And that prophecy from Isaiah, I mean that's just so implicitly terroristic. Terror will seize them, pain and anguish. They'll ride like a woman in labor. I love that there are so many female references to some of these things. But anyway, and so it's not just the Bible of course, the Bible is just one of many, many traditions. And there are so many examples of the ritual inculcation of terror. I've been studying Africa for the last couple of years and I wrote one of the introductions to our African issue of the general religion and violence. And one of the things you learn there is there's a, there are musical traditions which attempt to make you experience things entering and leaving your body and there's drumming traditions and dancing traditions and people just participate in this altered world. It's not altered at the time, it's just ever present, totally real. But I don't know if you'd call this necessarily violent but it certainly gets in you and disturbs you. And it implies that you have a sensuous openness to these kinds of musical experiences. So it sort of goes beneath the old kind of cognitive framework that we tend to have in the West, especially when you're looking at religion. Also in the African context, we have a lot of rituals which are supposed to make you immune to bolt from the old wars of the nineties in particular, the Rwanda actually, it's more of the West Coast of Africa, you have so many interesting ritual attempts to make people impervious to battle weapons. So you'll have an infliction of pain and certain kinds of cuttings that are supposed to make you resilient too. Well, as you wear special clothing, you might wear, I don't know, specially fabricated garments and sometimes pieces of animals or of other. Kind of fetish. Yes, a lot of those. And who can say that those don't have real physical effects because people get, they scare the daylights out of the other side for one thing. And they make you, if you've undergone these kinds of initiation rituals, you're on top of the world. You got it, you're in the fight part of the fight and flight thing, you're pumped. So ritual is a really important element too actually in this whole creating narrative imagination. And there's so many examples but the African ones are kind of exotic. Yeah, yeah. And the rituals kind of highlight how we think forces manifest themselves and how we can arm ourselves against those forces. So that's really fascinating. Yeah, it is. And the fact that these are 20th century wars that were still also in the Mai Mai wars, those were, that was intense. Like they take, they eat certain things they couldn't eat, certain things they could eat. They weren't supposed to bathe. This is recently, like within the last two decades and the whole world becomes suddenly a much more dangerous place, but you're in tune. You're in touch with the dangers. So there's a lot of war magic. There's more to what's amongst us than what we physically can observe in a material level. But religion and the narratives provide us with how we imagine those things. Yes, and I think those imaginations become alive. Visceral experiences, people do have visions in these battles. I mean, we have visions in any war, right? When there's a lot of adrenaline going, we have a lot of stories back from the days of the Crusades that people seen the Virgin Mary, for instance, on the battle, or the war in Yugoslavia, right? You had kids seeing the Virgin Mary at the boundaries between Croatia and certain places they wouldn't, and they just like reported their parents so the words get out. But the point is that these experiences really do change your perception. And it's in the West that we think, oh, it's just a matter of belief and that screwy belief, so just put it aside. In context, and every war has this, even our war, it's of course just as much. You're in the Sturm and Drang of battle and your life. So it's not me to say that they're not real. I think people respond to them. Great, great. That's great first half here and I'm looking forward to hearing more from you, Margo. Okay, well, great. Give you some examples. Yeah, so stay tuned, everybody. We'll be back in one minute. Aloha, Kako. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to navigate the journey with us. We are here every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., and we really want you to be with us where we look at the options and choices of end of life care. Aloha. Hey, has your signal just been taken over or am I supposed to be here? This is Andrew, the security guy, your co-host on Hibachi Talk. Please join us every Friday on Think Tech Away. Hi, I'm Marianne Sasaki from Life in the Lot. I'm so excited to be marching on Washington on Saturday, January 21st with the big women's march on Washington. And here with me is Michael, who's heading up the local march for women on Oahu. Come on out and visit us, and we're gonna be at the Capitol on January 21st, starting at eight o'clock, gathering by 9.30, and March starts at 10. That'd be great. All right, everybody, welcome back to Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Cheng, and I'm here with Professor Margo Kitts of Hawaii Pacific University, talking about violence and the religious imagination. Welcome back, Margo. Thanks. So we were talking before the break on your research and some of the findings in your studies about this topic, and we kind of concluded about how religion, the narratives inspire this kind of imagination that mobilizes people to act. And really, what you were saying before we went on break is how, unlike some of the modern philosophers, the world has not become disenchanted. Religion still animates a lot of our imagination and our action. It's so obvious, isn't it, when you open up the newspaper today, right? We have so many, so much hostility on coming from these, like, the drags of the different religions. For instance, obviously we have tremendous Islamic, Jewish, Christian nexus of tensions, at least at the moment. That's very hard not to, very riveting, very hard to take your eyes off of it, especially for me, because my background is in the ancient Near East, which is ancient Middle East. From modern perspective, it's an ancient, it's the Middle East, but from the European perspective, before the modern era was the ancient Near East. But nonetheless, I'm personally riveted to that whole, that whole mess, and it's just heartbreaking in parts. And we see that also in any religious tradition, as you were talking about in African context, as well as in the Buddhist context, the 969 movement in Myanmar. Absolutely, and picking on the Rohingya Muslims. Yes, there's a tremendous, no religious tradition. One thing that I really need to get out there, there are no religious traditions that have pristine histories. There's violence and even the Buddhist origins. There's wars at the start, right, from Sri Lanka. And there's plenty of, obviously we've had a lot of problems, the Tamils and the Buddhists in Sri Lanka as well, or some Tamils, L-T-T-E. So yeah, nobody's got a clean slate, so. And it's always some people, right, within a religion, as you were saying, coming from some of this violence, rhetoric and behaviors, coming from the dregs, it's not the religion itself, but what's interesting is what you're talking about is studying the narratives of the religion. Yeah, so the narratives are there. The fact that people harness them is because they're there. And there's, like, I gave you some biblical examples, but there are, you know, anyone can, for instance, in the jihadi context, as you probably know, there are many verses that address jihad in the Koran. We're talking about the Islamic tradition. And they range hugely from, you know, kind of turn the other cheeky those all the way to kill the infidel wherever he may be found. But even in that most, the verse that gets picked up by ISIS and folks like that and really exploited to their own ends, right after that it says, but if he asks for mercy, show him compassion, for God is merciful. So there are no just straight out Trump at the war, kind of, kind of, everything's contextualized, that's my point. So in the modern context, it's just obvious that everybody's, there's just, there are conflicts that are just breaking out under religious banners now, are they originally religious? Are they intentionally religious? Does everyone think of them as religious? Of course not, there's so many different dimensions to, especially in the Middle East right now, there's so many territorial issues and there's so much. But on the other hand, everything seems to feed into religion ultimately, because if you're talking about, I don't know, something like suicide bombing from our perspective here in the West, you just think, oh man, that guy's misguided. But, you know, when you look at it in context, that's very brave. People going out and, I mean, diluted as they may be, but they get heralded as heroes, they're role models for people and there's some, there's dimensions to this that I don't think we appreciate in the United States. I'm not saying it's good, believe me, I'm not promoting it, but I just think it's really important that we understand that there are cultural dimensions to these outbreaks that are not just a matter of rational choice theory, as we tend to think of things in political science, for instance. Yeah, religion's all about understanding the metaphors and the motivations of, as I said, the Slien times and narratives that people can harvest, the role models, like from the prophet and his companions, right? They're always held up as the perfect society of warriors who were fighting for justice and against injustice. And so, those images are right there for harvesting. Yeah, and it seems like a lot of religions, they do see their members of their community as either being victimized or threatened and that seems to be kind of the reason behind the compulsion to act in violent ways. Is there any, I mean, is that correct or? I totally agree with that and especially in this country, you're seeing a lot now with the religious right, the reconstructionists who want to, who feel like they're losing control of their society and they pass rules about Sharia law, which have no relevance to anything. And you have their Christian reconstructionists, right? You wanna go to reconstruct this United States on a theological model of theocracy and they're very insistent that this is a Christian nation. They're willing to fight for it. So we have the abortion clinic bombings and all kinds of Rush Dune and his crew talking about how to, with a proper family arrangement where the wives honor the husbands and you're kind of a flipping back to some fantasy world which was not there in the Bible. It's kind of a made up moral right? Imagine. Yeah, because there's so many, yes, exactly. But not necessarily based in the text. So yeah, there are plenty of examples, contemporary examples or it's, although in some cases, for instance, in the settler movements in Israel, of course, you have Israel probably the most complicated, just as complicated as we are here in Oahu, right? You have people from everywhere and many different points of view and it's not like it's a homogenous society. But among the settler movements, a lot of the zeal goes back to Abraham and the idea, or at Moses, the covenant with Abraham and one with Moses too, where they're given the land of Canaan, at least with Abraham that says this land in which you'll be strangers, but after the Moses covenant becomes more of a... All of these ancient narratives kind of are very important. I think they're right for people. Their seeds continue to shape imagination. So it's not like anybody's forgotten them. I mean, and you were saying about, you know, political scientists and, you know, for the most part, I think, yeah, social scientists have assumed in the modern era, I have assumed that human beings are rational, that we are enlightened and we've, you know, we behave based on material, self-interest, cost-benefit analysis, but from the perspective of religious studies, it seems like, you know, if that has been the case for a period, it wasn't a very strong expansion of that way of thinking and that we've had sort of a continuous kind of, you know, influence of religious imagination throughout history. I think that's a really important point because it doesn't mean every aspect of your life is driven by religious models. Obviously, we do make rational choices with your bank account and various things, but I'm sure you know that present work ethic is, you know, just so structured American imagination of what it thinks that we are. But ultimately, it boils down to that individual motivation. You rape what you sow and these are all ideas that are harvested from the Bible, but it does seem to me we were really wrong to think that rational choice theory was being in the end of the whole thing because who would have thought, you know, 20 years ago that religion would be the inspiration for so many wars. We thought we were past that. And so, like, so present in a lot of our religious, at political discourse, social discourse, all around the world, including in very modern countries. Absolutely. So, friend of mine has written quite a bit for the Oxford Handbook online, which you can go check out in Oxford Research, Cycle and Pediatrics and Religion. He's written on, Mark Juergensmann, Cosmic War and how some of these old narratives are totally present for modern fighters who believe that they're fighting something bigger than just a wrong government. They're fighting, you know, the end of order. They're fighting for a worldview that has to be there in order for, in many cases, redemption to come. It's hard to believe from a rational university oriented perspective, but there are many people who are waiting for the end of the world. There's raptures and Christianity and Judaism. You have the Messiah's gonna come. You have, in Islam, you have the Mahdi's gonna come. You have so many theories of our pictures, imaginations of a time when everything's gonna be put right if we just fight the proper war and get rid of the bad guys. It seems, it seems trivial to us, perhaps, walking around in Honolulu, but it's there. I mean, you just have to read the text. Read ISIS, you know? They think it's gonna come in rock-off. The end of the world will be the place for the salvation of the chosen, so. Yeah, I remember reading about how, you know, even the United Nations was read by some Christians as kind of an indication of the end of the world because of, yeah, the disillusion of barriers among people and some of the, yeah, some of the themes that they were finding parallels in the Bible. So it's really fascinating how people, yeah, still, still, these ideas still resonate and come back to the present. And the Christian movement in the United States, it seems very present to this, the one that fights for the, Israel has to have the promised land in order for Jesus to come back, right, for the second coming. And this is, and so they're a very big lobby on behalf of Israel, this Christian group that's, you know. For Christian interests. Yeah, for a particular Christian, it doesn't mean all Christians are like that, of course, Christianity, 2000-year-old history. It's not just one thing. Well, and you were talking about, you know, their cultural context and, you know, all these religions, universal religions, like Christianity, Islam, I mean, they're, you know, Christianity's not just Christianity we have in the US or even in the West. Like Christianity is a global religion and like the cultures of those regions do animate that and the imagination, I assume. It's so true, Africa is just a great example. Islam and Christianity have been indigenized in such interesting ways. Indigenized in the sense that they've been, I don't know, melded with pre-existing traditions and they seem to do just fine, right? Living, integrated, I don't mean the people, I mean the whole world views are just, they've integrated different elements. And Christianity's always done that, right? And where do we get the Easter Bunny, you know? Obviously we have a lot of old traditions that... Kind of secularized, but still, we can't erase the religious foundations of it. Yeah, and why is that associated with Easter, you know, when there's always so many? Yeah, so in the West, we take a lot of this stuff as a matter of faith, you know, like some interior condition. But I don't think that's how these traditions tend to be experienced necessarily everywhere. When there's instead, you know, particularly among certain evangelicals, there are experiences that happen. You feel transported, you're born again. You have, these are the kind of experiences that would have been hard to put into a philosophical narrative 50 years ago, I think in the academia, but now they're essential. Thank you. Thank you so much, Margo. It's really interesting to hear from a religious studies perspective, and your research in this field is very, yeah, it's really fascinating. So thank you for coming on the program and enlightening us. So I encourage anyone who wants to, to go to the Journal of Religion and Violence, and there are some articles that are on, grunt, ace, or unfree. You can just read them, the introductions and a few other things. I don't know if you can necessarily get Oxford Handbook online, but some of these, if you write to me, I'll give you a password, I'll let you get in. Thank you for joining us.