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Religion, State, Power, and Heresy
Religion is an exceptionally powerful human force. It deals with gut issues such
as the meaning of life, death, war, moral behavior, community, and sexuality. It
acts on the individual human psyche, psychology, and behavior. Its impact is
rarely limited to the individual alone, but acts upon an entire community of
believers who take part in community acts of worship. At the same time, religion
helps define and strengthen the community of like-minded believers.
Given the extraordinary power of this force, can we be surprised that seats of
worldly power should seek to harness the force of religion to their own ends?
Such is a key focus of this book: the relationships among religion, power, and
the state. The state ultimately seeks to adopt and take over the religion, making it
the “state religion.” Once tied to the state, the religion’s doctrines and theology
then become linked to state prestige, power, and control. The religion can be
Judaism, Christianity, or Islam; it doesn’t really matter. Because at that point,
disagreement on doctrine ceases to be merely a theological exercise and, rather,
takes on serious political implications. Those who part company with the state-
dominated ideology are branded as heretics—indeed, such differences can
become tantamount to treason.
But what is heresy actually? The word evokes images of robed Inquisitors,
instruments of torture, tearful recantations, martyrs, and burnings at the stake.
And so it has often been in history. But in fact, heresy often gets a bad rap. In
reality, it seems closely linked to a creative process in the history and evolution
of ideas.
The origin of the word “heresy” is innocent enough; in Greek, it originally
simply meant “choice,” a conscious decision to follow a particular path of ideas.
In Christianity, it began to denote divergence from orthodox teaching. And
orthodoxy, of course, originally meant no more than “correct opinion.” But who
is to say what opinion is “correct” or “right”? This is the nub of the problem: the
quality of heresy actually lies in the eye of the beholder. And the determination
of what is “right opinion” eventually emerges almost strictly as a prerogative of
power.
Heresies have existed from the dawn of the most basic religious cults, when
individuals who stood up and critiqued community teachings about the gods and
spirits were blamed for catastrophes that subsequently befell the community.
Victims get sacrificed on altars, virgins are tossed into flaming volcanoes to
placate the gods. The fulminations of Old Testament prophets focus on how
Jewish iniquity has brought suffering to the Jewish people and how God will

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visit further punishments upon the community for flouting His commandments.
Jonah gets tossed into the sea. Jesus preaches the imminence of the end of a
sinful world.
Preservation of orthodoxy seems to emerge as a supreme and contentious
problem for all three monotheistic faiths, far more so than for other major world
religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, or Confucianism. This may be
partly due to the fact that the monotheistic religions are “revealed,” that is, they
are believed to have existed eternally and preexist the exact moment of
revelation to their prophets. There is less room for flexibility on doctrine.
I remember discussions in India over a decade ago when I was researching
material for a book on the issue of Islam versus the West. Several Hindu scholars
told me, “Your proposition is flawed from the start. The real fault line is not
between Islam and the West at all, but between Hinduism as polytheism, and all
the monotheistic religions of the West—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” In the
Hindu view, the monotheistic faiths, with their commitment to the One God and
his revealed nature, are thus inherently more narrow-minded and intolerant.
We are all familiar with the use and abuse of religion by states or power
groups in warfare, politics, or struggle for other ends in history. It would, of
course, be simpleminded to reduce the entire phenomenon of religion to no more
than a pretext for power and conflict; nonetheless the exploitation of religion for
secular ends is a constant in political and social history. Religious institutions
therefore end up spending a great deal of time striving to preserve orthodoxy. In
this sense, then, orthodoxy comes to represent the right to define and control