Upon hearing that Stalin trained as a priest in his youth before going on to oversee the death of more than 40 million as leader of the Soviet Union, Christopher Hitchens allegedly remarked: “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?” It is precisely this vitriol towards and misunderstanding of religion that Karen Armstrong confronts in her new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Surveying several thousand years of history and more than a half dozen religious traditions, she compellingly refutes the claim repeated like a mantra by “American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers, and Oxford academics” that religion is inherently violent. In contrast, she argues that faith has become a scapegoat to absolve the violent tendencies of our human nature and state building projects. This transference has been facilitated by the “myth of religious violence,” a founding assumption of the modern state system that misconstrues religion as an irrational and bellicose force the state must tame in order to preserve social harmony.

Armstrong’s contribution complements a number of books published over the past two decades that emphasize both the violent and irenic sides of religion. Her analysis is to be commended for the questions it raises, its historical scope, and the attention it gives to the intersection of religion and politics. However, the reader may be ultimately left unclear of and unconvinced by the full logic of her argument. In addition, more details on how to advance the book’s appeal to foster the nonviolent side of religion would make for a more satisfying conclusion.

One Lot for the Lord

Fields of Blood is organized into three major sections, arranged chronologically and, to a certain extent, by religious tradition. Part One focuses largely on spiritual practices in ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China. The concluding chapter to this section also explores the formative years of Judaism as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Part Two investigates the historical connection between the two other Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, and Islam) and political power, while Part Three is concerned with more contemporary acts of violence claiming religious justification. Here, fundamentalist movements from a variety of faith traditions are explored, but radical Islam is the primary focus.

In each section, Armstrong argues that the link between religion and violence is far more complicated than conventional wisdom suggests for two major reasons. First, until the Protestant Reformation, religion and politics were not understood as distinct phenomena. Rather, religion pervaded all aspects of life, including how we governed and fought. This interweaving can be observed quite explicitly, for instance, in the founding principle of the Byzantine Empire (symphonia), which regarded church and empire as inseparable. “Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract gin from a cocktail,” Armstrong quips in a particularly amusing line. Thus, isolating religious motivations from political ones is nearly impossible in many conflicts.

While religion may not be the cause of conflicts, it may shape violence in interesting ways.

Second, religious traditions have been used to justify bellicose and peacefu