God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms

of religious violence. His exploration portrays the analysis not as historical fact, but as the soteriology that legitimates the Sovereign as the crown of a liberal authority structure, where the orthodoxy (championed by writers such as John Rawls and Francis Fukuyama) maintains that squabbles over dogmatic differences inevitably become disruptive of public order unless the sovereign intervenes to separate religion from other facets of public life. This is in spite of a considerable body of evidence that includes the intertwining of both religious and socioeconomic institutions during that period, numerous instances of cooperation among Protestant and Catholic combatants against other Catholic armies, or the period of ‘absolutist governments with confessional states’ that characterised the ‘peace of Westphalia’. The distillation of a distinct ‘religious’ variable as the primary engine for violence also becomes the underlying principle of American foreign policy. Cavanaugh cites a single article by Bernard Lewis, who first wrote on the clash of civilisations before it became popularised by Huntington, and who spoke of the need for vigilance against the Muslim world because of its obsession in filtering all socio-political events through a distinctly religious lens. One might think odd the attention to this single article, until one notices the imprimatur given to that article by then Vice-President Dick Cheney. Drawing from this, Cavanaugh draws rather striking parallels between the days of Colonialism, where ‘religion’ was used as a discursive tool for subjugation of the New world, and our present day, where the distinct category ‘religion’ was similarly used for the West to bring the blessings of secularisation to the Muslim world, whether it wants it or not. Although conceptually simple, Cavanaugh’s work is invaluable in unveiling a world of complexity that surrounds the concept of ‘religion’. This work also provides a call to awareness to the Foucauldian structures of authority driving the current, or indeed any, discourse on religion. The only fault one can find is that, as the negative analysis unfolds, one feels increasingly eager for a positive programme to be put forward. That this does not materialise may disappoint all but those familiar with his earlier work. Nonetheless, his great contribution to this area within the space of a compact volume is not to be denied.