NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Rethinking "Violence," and Rethinking "Religion," in Light of the Virginia Tech Killings, and the History of Childhood and Youth

Jon Pahl, The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

The terrible shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 will some day be narrated and interrogated by historians, and in all likelihood will not be interpreted, as the popular media has been inclined to do, as an isolated act of a "deranged" young man who wreaked havoc among an otherwise placid college community.  For a crucial contribution of the history of childhood and youth is to further historians' theoretical attention to cultural constructions, and how individual acts take place in a broader cultural matrix.  Namely, when we study young people we can gain clarity about how contextual contingencies (material and temporal location, racial, class and gender dynamics, etc) and discourses (languages, images, practices, etc.) join with intended policies and individual agency to constitute the cultural "stuff" out of which the history of childhood and youth is made.  That said, events like the one at Virginia Tech, or at Columbine, or at Barton Creek Mall--to name only a few, might lead us to rethink "violence," "religion," and their interactions in the history of childhood and youth.  It also needs to be said, of course, that I happen to have a book coming out that tries, in part, to do just that (Blessed Brutalities:  The Religious Origins of American Empire--NYU, 2009).  Self-promotion aside, I hope my brief musings on how I approach these topics in research might trigger productive conversations with others working in the field.

"Violence," then, is often taken in popular culture and among historians to refer to the destruction and suffering that follows from illegitimate physical aggression, notably crimes such as vandalism, rape, or murder--like the shootings at Virginia Tech.  Of course, historians also have attended to "violence" in conjunction with the suffering found in warfare, or in other forms of institutional control, notably among police, the legal system, or military.  Such a minimalist definition of "violence" has the benefit of clarity.  It links acts of destruction to the intentions of agents or the policies of institutions.  But violence is notable not only for its intended effects, but also for its contagious character.  Conflicts tend to spread through what many scholars have described as the "mimetic" qualities of violence.  "Youth violence" appears to be particularly prone to mimetic contagion.  Consequently, if scholars can contribute at all to alleviating human suffering--and I for one am willing to entertain that such an ethical aim is a legitimate one for a historian, then we must attend to the contours and causes of violence beyond crime and punishment in what Stanford's Rene Girard has called "mimetic desire" or "acquisitive mimesis." For instance, children suffer just as surely from inequitable economic, healthcare, housing, or educational policies and practices as they do from a gunshot--and some of these systems might in fact be directly responsible for the gunfights.  Yet historians often join other social scientists in struggling to dramatize in narrative how this systemic violence in history emerges from mimetic desires.  Some humans, bluntly put, feel compelled to hoard resources while excluding others from access to them.  Even more, perhaps, historians struggle to identify how languages and symbols both serve as catalysts for, and as remedies to, systemic violence.  I often try to illustrate these broader patterns of violence by referring to what I call "the violence iceberg," as below:

In a democratic society, laws or cultural mores articulated in the "soft power" of words forge the only barrier against a Hobbesian rivalry of all against all.  Yet too often, the very laws people drafted or metaphors they lived by have legitimized or produced constructions of domination and subordination, or patterns of vengeance, that masked ruthless exclusions and systemic forms of suffering.  Young people have often borne the brunt of these contradictions or hypocrisies. 

And that brings us to "religion."  For too many historians, "religion" still equals denomination or institution.  Yet religions are at root languages and practices--myths and rituals, if you will, which condense the chaos of unmediated experience into manageable displacements.  Religions take the terror of transience and the fear of suffering that lurks underneath the desire to survive and turn that terror into comfort by transmuting symbolic patterns into eternal verities with transcendent authority.  These patterns are then reinforced--when they work, by communities with definable boundaries and by regulatory institutions.  Now, such a two-step process--condensing experience into discernible patterns, and displacing desire into transcendently authorized symbols, is hardly only limited to the institutions traditionally designated "religious."  In fact, people craft transcendent meanings across many institutions.  In hyper-mediated modernity, especially, the roles of markets (think of the power of film) and nations (think of the symbol of the flag) may trump the role of traditional religions in providing people with horizons of meaning.  Furthermore, under the conditions of the official separation of church and state, where many religions contend for allegiance and none are established by law, voluntarism gives rise to hybrid religions.  These hybrid traditions can organize transrational (if not irrational) fervor at least as intense as the passion once associated only with the magical features of traditional religions.  This happens even in the most "modern" contexts.  These hybrid traditions--civil religions, cultural religions, religions of the market, or domestic religions, may in fact have come in recent centuries to play a more significant role in the lives of children and youth in many societies than traditional religions.  Yet historians have barely begun to map how such hybrid traditions have often emerged from anxieties over children and youth, on the one hand, and impacted the lives of young people, on the other.

© 2007 The Oregonian.  All rights reserved.  Used with permission of The Oregonian.

And that brings us to the relations between "violence" and "religion" in the study of the history of childhood and youth, and in events like the one at Virginia Tech.  Here, artists can help historians, perhaps.  Consider, for instance, this cartoon published by Jack Ohman in the Portland Oregonian on the day after the Virginia Tech killings (April 17, 2007).

What does all this suggest about the history of children and youth?  Few historians have difficulty in seeing how Christianity, to take only one example, produced violence that caused terrible suffering in childrens' lives across history--from Crusades to Pogroms to Colonialism.  Yet it is equally easy to map how religions--including Christianity, have brought consolation, hope, and solidarity across generations in various times and places.  What is needed, then, are historical treatments able to investigate and untangle this ambivalent legacy of the systems of symbols that are religions, including in their hybrid forms.  Doing so will require rethinking some crucial categories.   The payoff, however, might be to discover all kinds of avenues to explore about the historical causes of the suffering and flourishing of children and youth in diverse times and places.  It may be impossible for historians to prevent something like the Virginia Tech killings.  But it can't hurt to seek more fully to understand how children and youth have experienced and enacted systems of violence, and systems of religions, in their mutual and complex interactions.  At the least, that's how I think of my own work.  And I happily invite others to join me in that work--or in argument over whether that's properly part of our task.