Is Monotheism Inherently Violent
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Kunzler 1
Jake Kunzler
2/24/22
RELS 1070
Professor Patrick Mason
“Is Monotheism Inherently Violent?”
Mountainside stones are transformed into tablets bearing commandments capable of
shaping a people only through a process of engraving whereby those stones become tablets, and
cannot be tolerated still to hold the mundane nature of what they previously were. Only through
the firm maintenance and defense of ontological border walls can an identity be organized, and
nowhere are those walls more jealously guarded than in the organization of the structure referred
to as “self”. The battle is for survival as the failure to maintain formations of identity over time
has the potential not to lead to the formation of a newly structured identity, but a devolution into
infinitely regressive patterns where ends are never met due to their constant altering through
reestablishment. Peoples, governments, cultures, and religions, are equally prone to that
regressive loss of collective identity. Should the traditions and practices that shape them fall into
disrepair and begin to shift faster than they can be chiseled into social memory, then the resultant
amorphous sociality will adopt the structures closest in proximity to it and eventually lose
whatever markers served to distinguish it as separate in the first place. For this reason, the
maintenance of identity in any world in which violence exists will require also at least the
capacity for that violence. The establishment of monotheistic religious identity particularly
requires that possibility due to its totalizing and a priori connection to the understanding of the
human condition, and the then necessary positioning of the other as lesser in a world of limited
resources.
Kunzler 2
Founder of Mormonism Joseph Smith stated once in a eulogy that “If men do not
comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves” (Smith). Here Smith
articulates a common thread between the differences in monotheistic thought. Should an
omnipotent deity exist, then the human experience is to be actively defined in relation to that
deity, rather than the inverse. The Hebrew Bible declares after all that “God created humankind
in his own image,
in the image of God he created them…” (Gen 1:27 NET). When one being
constitutes the origin point of all meaning, then self-comprehension becomes sourced not
internally but within that infinite other. Cultural identities are built on shared theology because
individuals relate together to that same common source of meaning in faith. People, while not
divine in themselves, cease to be separated by nature and instead become unified, all sourced in
that same point of divinity. Lacking some tangible proof of God, the assertion of deity as the
basis for the understanding of the self is inherently dogmatic through its grounding in faith. The
resulting position is both a priori in its root source of meaning, and unassailable as no aspect of it
is grounded purely in human logic or reason.
How then does the non-believer fit into that equation? If they are viewed as belonging to
the same type of thing as oneself, it becomes necessary either to view them as disconnected from
their true source of being, or as lacking possession of that being in the first place. Ultimate
conditions for self-understanding cannot be established without the enforcement of potentially
damning implications for those who lack access to those conditions. I have no knowledge of a
belief system, monotheistic or polytheistic, that describes some form of eternal reward without
its contextualization as an alternative to eternal punishment. When individuals are granted
freedom from violence by virtue of their general human dignity, that freedom becomes void
when the dignity of their humanity comes into question. Should conflict points between peoples
Kunzler 3
never occur, that question may never need to be asked. We live however in a world where
Pharaohs are rarely content to hire their own people as farmers and construction workers, and
Temple Mounts can support only one building at a time. Equal distribution of resources requires
the belief of equal worth between individuals to whom resources are to be distributed. Any factor
that establishes fundamental differences between the value of persons translates into the
prioritizing of some over others in access to materials necessary for physical and spiritual life.
While monotheism does not require the direct physical violence of warfare or assault to
function, violence cannot be understood to entail only those interactions. There is violence
inherent in the forced establishment of priority among people. Doctors Winter and Wagner
describe that violence in their article
Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st
century
as “Our normal perceptual/cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-
groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice … and become either invisible or
demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer” (Wagner
and Winter Pg. 4-5). The degree to which an identity is normalized cannot be separated from the
equivalent degree to which alternative identities are delegitimized. God cannot choose any
people to be His without the establishing of other peoples as somehow disconnected, or at least
less connected, to him. However, instead of serving to dissuade from monotheistic belief, an
understanding of its inherent relationship with violence should promote thought and discourse
into the promotion of peaceful ways to interact with those who lie outside of faith. While the
conditions for that violence must necessarily exist, its actualizing does not. The degree to which
we can learn to separate the two will function as the degree to which any of God’s chosen
peoples can peaceably coexist in an increasingly interconnected world.
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Kunzler 4
Works Cited
Smith, Joseph. “The King Follett Sermon.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
, 7
Apr. 1844, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-
sermon?lang=eng.
Christie, D. J., Wagner, R. V., & Winter, D. D. N. (Eds.). (2001).
Peace, conflict, and violence:
Peace psychology for the 21st century.
Prentice Hall/Pearson Education.