The Reality of Religious Violence, by Hector Avalos (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2019, ISBN 9781910928585). xiv + 499 pp. Hardcover, $97.50.

In his 2005 book Fighting Words: The Origin of Religious Violence (Prometheus Books), the late secular humanist religious studies scholar Hector Avalos advanced a bold thesis. He argued that religious language and concepts can promote violence whose intractability is magnified because religious claims cannot be conclusively proven or disproven. He charged that religious claims spur belief in—and conflict over—illusory “scarce resources” such as:

1. Inscripturation (the elevation of some teachings and not others to dogma by capturing them in scripture);
2. Sacred space;
3. Group privileging; and
4. Salvation

Religious language encourages the faithful to consider these metaphorical “resources” as scarce, as real, and as worth fighting over as a genuine dearth of food, water, or living space. The tragic difference is that once you secure, say, enough living space, everyone can agree that you have done so and the fighting can stop. How much sacred space is ever enough? Who decides? If no one can, how does the fighting ever end?

Fighting Words touched off a rich and many-stranded controversy among religion scholars. One of them, William T. Cavanaugh, replied directly to Avalos with his 2009 book, The Myth of Religious Violence; its thesis can be largely inferred from its title. The Reality of Religious Violence is in some ways Avalos’s direct reply to Cavanaugh. In other ways, it is a synopsis of the tangled disputes that have arisen around Avalos’s thesis, especially relating to violence in Christianity and Islam; a refinement and updating of Fighting Words’s contentions; and finally an omnibus presentation of Avalos’s latest defenses against his critics.

If this sounds like an intermediate entry in some series of novels that no one can understand unless they’ve read all that came before, the opposite is true. The Reality of Religious Violence is a cohesive work that stands alone most successfully. A reader unfamiliar with religious studies could dive into this book and come away with a clear basic understanding of its disagreements. A reader with a deeper background will gain a vivid sense of ongoing scholarly disputes and the passion with which contending viewpoints are defended. Because Avalos writes with such clarity and wit, one never feels that one has plunged into a nested skein of arguments too arcane to grasp.

Avalos writes as an open secular humanist and an enthusiastic participant in a so-called Second Wave of the New Atheism. (As he sees it, the first wave involved scientists and public intellectuals—think Dawkins and Hitchens—while the second involves scholars of religion who are nonbelievers in religion.)

In The Reality of Religious Violence, Avalos further explores his contention that “religion itself creates scarce resources over which people fight.” Consider John 14:6: Jesus declares that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” That is, salvation is a scarce resource attainable only by following Jesus. Of course, that can never be verified—who can prove that he or she has gathered up enough merit to assure salvation? When controversy erupts, reality provides no stopping points on the way toward endless and ever-escalating violence.

Killing for nonreligious reasons—self-defense, say, or when killing is the only possible response to a genuine scarcity of a resource necessary to life—can be moral, Avalos concedes. By contrast, religious violence, whose “benefits” can never be verified, is always immoral. “The fact that religious violence is always immoral, and the fact that non-religious violence is not always immoral, is the fundamental ethical distinction between religious and non-religious violence [emphasis in original].”

Later in the book, Avalos considers Islam at some length. Here he is responding principally to scholars Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, who view Islam as essentially peaceful. Avalos disagrees: “Rather, violence forms one of the initial premises of Islam, be it in the Quran or the life of Muhammad, who continues to be a model for Muslim behavior.” Avalos provides one of the best single analyses of the multiple meanings of the term jihad that I have read. While jihad can be a synonym for struggle, it is more commonly—and accurately, I think—understood as a call to violence. “Just as Islam does endorse the idea that divine violence is a legitimate instrument against unbelievers because of their unbelief,” Avalos writes, “the Quran can be read as endorsing the idea that unbelief is in itself an offense against which violence is a permissible defensive action.”

A book is not only an argument in text form; it is also an object. I applaud this volume’s design, which features footnotes at the bottom of each page. While some may find it kludgy when a text is as densely referenced as this one, I much prefer to glance down to scan a citation rather than having to flip to the end of a chapter or the end of the book.

Another aspect of the book’s production is more troubling. It suffers from repeated errors in copy editing of a sort that I don’t think can be dismissed as a British typographical convention that looks odd to Americans. Commas turn up in some of the darnedest places. There is also at least one surprising bibliographic omission. In a note on page 212, Avalos cites one of his own works—The Bad Jesus, also published by Sheffield Phoenix Press—yet the work does not appear in the bibliography.

We live in a world where careful proofreading is increasingly considered dispensable, even among academic publishers. Nonetheless, it disappoints when a scholarly work priced at nearly $100 USD is marred by so many preventable glitches.

Still, I would urge curious readers to look beyond the comma faults. If you’ve ever wondered what the atheist religion scholars and the Christian religion scholars are arguing about—or if you’re familiar with the domain and want to immerse yourself in one of the field’s most intriguing areas of (dis)junction—The Reality of Religious Violence is hugely worth exploring. (Don’t be shy about seeking a library copy.)