How Religion Can Be Used to Build a New Future

Religion is just one of many categories of power that can inform violence in the world—be it structural, cultural, or direct. When we understand these kinds of violence as interrelated, we can better work towards dismantling it and creating peace.

Side (1) of the triangle is cultural violence, which speaks to harmful norms or beliefs (for example: “immigrants are going to steal our jobs”) that can help make direct or structural violence seem justified. (2) Structural violence is systemic harm, and therefore comes from institutions or bodies of power, be it government (ie: policy like segrega... See more

it’s important to understand the many faces of violence and how it intersects with categories of power. We can easily understand physical assault as violent, but we might have a harder time naming beliefs, ideologies, or policies as such. The peace philosopher Johan Galtung believes that violence can fall under three important categories, all of wh... See more

One of the most compelling things about religion is that its sacred texts reveal so much to us about the power that lives in the stories we tell. If we can start to change the story we tell ourselves and each other about religion—to illustrate its destructiveness and its seductiveness, its capacity for informing rigidity and rebellion—we may be abl... See more

it’s easy to identify how transphobic direct violence (assaults, hate crimes, murders) is influenced by cultural transphobia (rigid enforcement of the gender binary, erasure of trans people in the public square) and structural transphobia (laws barring gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth, or removing access to public bathrooms). All o... See more

To imagine a different future, a more complicated view of religion can be a powerful tool.

If religion has become synonymous with violence or regression or injustice, it’s not just because it is embedded in so many matrices of power. It’s also because the people who are challenging the hegemony and seeking to carve out a different future have been overlooked, erased, or ignored. This is the destructive power of cultural norms.

As the critic Saba Mahmood says: “To critique a particular normative regime is not to reject or condemn it; rather, by analyzing its regulatory and productive dimensions, one only deprives it of innocence and neutrality so as to craft, perhaps, a different future.”

When we throw our hands up at religion and flatten its role in our lives, societies, and institutions, we allow hegemonic power to go unchecked.