









































19

PAPER

Teaching on Religion and 
Violence 
Charles K. Bellinger 
Texas Christian University

ABSTR ACT I have many times now taught a course entitled “Reli-
gion and Violence” at Brite Divinity School and Texas Christian Univer-
sity. The Brite course is in-class; the TCU course is online with Master 
of Liberal Arts students. I will describe the difference between the two 
formats and also provide sample syllabi. The course has traditionally 
focused on the “why” question—“Why are human beings violent?”—
rather than on ethical debates about pacifism vs. just war. Feedback 
from the online students often asked for another course focusing on 
peacemaking, now that the psychology of violence has become better 
understood. I therefore developed a new course called “Peacemaking in 
a Violent World,” which will also be described. I will make the argument 
that our culture as a whole would benefit from greater curricular atten-
tion to the psychology of violence, at all levels of education. I will also 
provide attendees with a bibliography for collection development in this 
area.

A brief aside first about the title. In email correspondence with Wolf-
gang Palaver, a professor in Europe with interests similar to mine, he 
indicated that he teaches a course called “Violence and Religion.” He 



20  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

prefers that ordering of the words because “Religion and Violence” 
subtly implies that religion is a causative agent and violence is the 
outflow of that cause. I agree with him on this point; he and I both 
stress that violence is a phenomenon that needs to be understood 
on its own, without the a priori assumption that religion is somehow 
its cause. But it is too late for me to go back and change the title that I 
have given to the course in the past.  

I need to begin with an account of how I became interested in 
this topic. In college, I became interested in the ethical questions 
surrounding pacifism and the just war theory. Then I read a book 
called Escape from Evil by Ernest Becker; this book opened up to me 
the question of why human beings are violent. Becker answered that 
question by pointing to the fear of death. At first I found his answer 
convincing, but as I continued to read various books in psychology, 
sociology, philosophy, and theology, I gradually became disenchanted 
with Becker and sought other guides. Eventually two authors rose to 
the top of my estimation, Søren Kierkegaard and René Girard. I later 
wrote my dissertation on them.  

During my first master’s degree program, I took a course called 
“Religion and Violence” from Mark Juergensmeyer; this was when 
he was teaching at University of California, Berkeley. Violence and the 
Sacred by Girard was one of the books assigned by Juergensmeyer; this 
was my first exposure to Girard. I did not fully understand the book 
and Girard’s significance, but when Girard himself came and gave 
a guest lecture in Berkeley, I gained a better picture of his mimetic 
theory and its relation to the Bible, and I went on to read his other 
books. Juergensmeyer, as many of you no doubt know, has continued 
to be a major voice regarding the topic at hand, through books such 
as Terror in the Mind of God, and I have assigned that book quite often in 
the past. But in my judgment, Juergensmeyer’s theory of violence is 
not very deep. His observations tend to remain at a journalistic level; 
he too readily takes the words of terrorists or their supporters at face 
value, and searches for “motives” within those words. I have come to 
the conclusion that the better-quality books on violence always have 
as their unspoken epigraph “They know not what they do.” What is 
needed is a kind of depth psychology or depth theological anthropol-
ogy that understands the motives of those who are violent better than 
they understand themselves.  



Paper  21

I have been teaching at Brite Divinity School since 2000, and I 
have taught a course called “Religion and Violence” many times. My 
approach has usually been to focus more on the “why” question of 
violence than on the ethical debates about war and how to respond 
to terrorism, though those topics do come up. I typically expose the 
students to various theories about the roots of violence in human 
behavior, which have been articulated by Ernest Becker, Carl Jung, 
Alice Miller, Kenneth Burke, Mark Juergensmeyer, and others. I also 
usually summarize the critiques of religion presented by the so-called 
angry atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, though their 
perspectives are not very philosophically substantial. I present the 
theories of Kierkegaard and Girard as those which I find to be the 
most thought-provoking and insightful. Kierkegaard focuses on the 
idea that human beings are psychologically and spiritually imma-
ture, and our violence arises out of our rejection of God’s call to us to 
become more mature, which entails truly seeing and loving all other 
human beings as our neighbor. Girard focuses on the idea that we 
copy the desires of other people around us, which creates a situation 
of rivalry, envy, conflict, and potential violence. Society prevents itself 
from suffering a breakdown into chaotic violence by channeling its 
violent impulses toward a scapegoat, which could be an individual or 
a minority group within society. Mimetic desire leads to the scapegoat 
mechanism, and the Bible reveals both of those basic cultural dynam-
ics clearly; that is Girard’s theory in a nutshell. (I would like to note, as 
an aside, that the phrase “the scapegoat mechanism” was not coined 
by Girard; Kenneth Burke was using that phrase in the 1930s, and we 
know that Girard read Burke because he comments on him.) 

In my most recent iteration of this course, which was just this past 
spring semester, one of my students offered an intriguing reading of 
Girard. One of the key phrases in Girard is acquisitive mimesis, our 
desire to have what others have; but my student suggested that it is 
not just acquisitiveness that can be imitated, but also fear. This is a 
thought-provoking idea that applies well to various historical contexts 
including our own. Politicians and other rhetors often seek to sway 
crowds in the direction of scapegoating and violence by whipping up 
fears of alleged internal or external enemies. Adolf Hitler was obvi-
ously a master of this. 

In general, I have found that the students have responded well to 



22  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

Girard’s thought; they find his ideas not only philosophically insight-
ful but also useful in terms of homiletics and pastoral care. While I 
consider Kierkegaard to be a more subtle and complex thinker than 
Girard, his writings are more philosophically challenging to grasp. 
Assigning The Sickness unto Death, as I did in the latest iteration of the 
course, was probably a mistake, because the level at which it is writ-
ten is more appropriate for doctoral-level students than first master’s 
students. In the past, I assigned a summary of Kierkegaard written by 
myself and selected excerpts from his writings. In terms of Girard, I 
have assigned both The Girard Reader and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning 
in various semesters. I have decided that I See Satan Fall is the better 
choice pedagogically because it is more accessible and provides a 
better overall introduction to his thought.  

Eric Voegelin is another key thinker I draw on. He was a political 
philosopher and historian in the twentieth century. He articulated 
what I call dimensional anthropology, which is the idea that there 
are three main dimensions of reality as it is inhabited by human 
beings. First, there is the vertical axis of God and nature, or the spiri-
tual and the material. This has traditionally been called the Great 
Chain of Being. The second main dimension is the horizontal plane, 
which means human social existence: culture, community, the nation-
state, the family, and so forth. The third dimension is individual self-
hood. Voegelin argued that the ideal is for human beings to hold these 
dimensions in a creative tension and balance; our temptation is to 
overemphasize one of the dimensions. Slavery, for example, was an 
oppressive overemphasis on the Great Chain of Being, and a false 
application of that idea to invent sub-races within the one human 
race. Collectivism, mob rioting, and lynching are examples of how the 
horizontal plane can be overemphasized and become violent. Indi-
vidual selfhood can also be overemphasized and can become a vector 
for violence. Voegelin’s thought provides an overall framework for 
understanding the order and disorder of the human soul and of soci-
ety, and I have summarized and synthesized the insights of Voegelin, 
Kierkegaard, and Girard in my book The Trinitarian Self: The Key to the 
Puzzle of Violence. 

Whenever I have taught the “Religion and Violence” course at 
Brite Divinity School, it has always been an in-class course, because 
the faculty at Brite have decided to focus on face-to-face instruction 



Paper  23

and not move in the direction of online courses. I have also taught 
courses often for the Master of Liberal Arts program at TCU, and that 
program offers a large number of online courses to students who are 
both local and geographically scattered. I have always offered “Reli-
gion and Violence” as an online course for the MLA program. This is a 
completely different set of students than those at the Divinity School. 
Many have some connection with the athletics program at TCU, either 
as athletes or graduate assistants. Some students work in various 
administrative roles at TCU; others are teachers, homemakers, busi-
ness people, high school counselors, and so forth. In general, I cannot 
assume that these students have as much knowledge of religion as 
the divinity school students do. The students in the MLA program do 
have a strong level of interest and engagement in the topic of religion 
and violence, because it is a subject that one hears about so often in 
the news and reads about in history books. 

My own teaching style focuses more on leading discussions of the 
assigned texts, rather than on giving lectures. This means that the 
two formats of instruction are fairly similar. The difference is that 
the online course relies on the students making posts on the reading 
material and then commenting on the posts of others; this is done 
asynchronously. The in-class course has a live discussion which is 
a bit less predictable in terms of where it will go. I have not tried to 
engage the online students synchronously because the scheduling 
and technical difficulties would be too much of a hassle to deal with. 
Another difference between the two formats is that TCU has a policy of 
limiting the enrollment of online courses to seventeen students. In my 
experience, that number always shrinks to about fourteen or fifteen 
due to students dropping during the semester. The in-class course 
at Brite, however, has a limit of thirty-five students, and usually has 
between twenty-five and thirty students enrolled. Inevitably, there will 
be some students who are more talkative and others who are mostly 
quiet. This creates a different dynamic because in the online format all 
of the students are forced to make the online posts and thus contrib-
ute to the discussion.  

The last time I offered the course as an online MLA course, it was 
a compressed four-week summer session. That format also alters the 
dynamic, in that the focus really needs to be on the key books, and 
introducing several extra shorter readings is not feasible. In general, 



24  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

the MLA format assigns less reading than the Brite version because 
the students are not as capable of processing a large quantity and 
variety of materials.

Another element of the Brite course, in its most recent iteration, is 
that I was able to invite to class a guest speaker from the TCU Religion 
Department, Samuel Ross. He is a Muslim, and he was able to address 
very effectively some of the issues relating to Islam and terrorism. The 
students responded very well to that class session. 

The online students make posts, usually two or three times a 
week; the in-class students usually have about five or six short papers 
that are spread throughout the semester. In general, the quantity of 
words written by the online students is greater, because we do not 
have in-class meeting time. Another key difference between the two 
formats is that the online students are forced to comment on all of the 
reading assignments (or suffer a grade penalty). I have no feasible way 
of forcing the in-class students to comment on all of the readings, and 
I’m sure that some of the students skip some of the readings. 

I have been asked by Brite to offer “Religion and Violence” as a 
course for DMin students during the Fall semester of 2020. This will 
be a new format, because there is an online component during the 
whole semester, plus a one-week intensive in-class meeting during 
the month of October. I’m looking forward to this format and also to 
the cohort of students who will be more advanced and already in full-
time ministry of some sort. I will challenge them to apply what they 
are learning to homiletics and religious education. 

After one of the iterations of the TCU online course, several of the 
students mentioned in their course feedback that they have learned 
much about violence, but they would like to know what to do about 
it. How can they contribute to making the world a less violent place? 
This coincided with an invitation from the MLA program to develop 
new courses that have not been offered before. I therefore developed a 
course called “Peacemaking in a Violent World” and have offered that 
once so far. One very intriguing dynamic in that course is that one of 
the students was actively training to become an officer in the US Army. 
As you can imagine, he brought a different perspective than most of 
the other students, who were civilians and who were more inclined 
to agree with arguments in the vicinity of pacifism. I was glad that he 
was in the course, although he referred to Stanley Hauerwas as “igno-



Paper  25

rant” at one point. I pointed out to the student that Hauerwas can be 
called many things, but ignorant is not one of them. I know this from 
personal experience, having taking two courses from Hauerwas in 
the past. 

Bibliography on Violence and Religion
Charles K. Bellinger, June 2019

*=more select list

Contagion: A Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. 1994–present. 
(Contains many articles on Girard)

Alison, James. The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes. 
New York: Crossroad, 1998.

*Alison, James, and Wolfgang Palaver, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of 
Mimetic Theory and Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1954.

Appleby, R. Scott. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and 
Reconciliation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New 
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

*Bailie, Gil. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: 
Crossroad, 1995.

Becker, Ernest. Escape from Evil. New York: Free Press, 1975.
Bellinger, Charles K. The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, 

Freedom, and Evil. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
*Bellinger, Charles K. The Trinitarian Self: The Key to the Puzzle of Violence. 

Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2008.
Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. Norman: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
*Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and 

the Roots of Modern Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis 

Books, 2011.



26  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

Cooper, Terry D. Dimensions of Evil: Contemporary Perspectives. 
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

*Cowdell, Scott, ed. Does Religion Cause Violence?: Multidisciplinary 
Perspectives on Violence and Religion in the Modern World. New York: 
Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

*Delsol, Chantal. The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay 
on Late Modernity. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006.

*Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis 
Books, 2001.

*Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press, 1986.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 1977.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary 
Structure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.

*Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. Things Hidden 
since the Foundation of the World. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University 
Press, 1987.

Girard, René, Rocha, João Cezar de Castro, and Pierpaolo Antonello. 
Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture. New York: 
T & T Clark, 2007.

*Girard, René, and James G. Williams. The Girard Reader. New York: 
Crossroad, 1996.

Hart, David Bentley. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its 
Fashionable Enemies. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.

*Heim, S. Mark. Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. Grand 
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.

Hunsinger, George. “The Politics of the Nonviolent God: Reflections 
on René Girard and Karl Barth.” Scottish Journal of Theology 51, no. 
1 (1998): 61–85.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God. 4th ed. Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 2017.

*Juergensmeyer, Mark, Margo Kitts, and Michael K. Jerryson, eds. 
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2013.

*Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological 
Exposition for Edification and Awakening. New York: Penguin Books, 
1989.



Paper  27

Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion After September 11. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

McBride, James. “Capital Punishment as the Unconstitutional 
Establishment of Religion: A Girardian Reading of the Death 
Penalty.” Journal of Church and State 37, no. 2 (1995): 263-287.

*Miller, Alice. For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the 
Roots of Violence. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983.

Murphy, Andrew R., ed. The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence. 
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

*Palaver, Wolfgang. René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. East Lansing: Michigan 
State University Press, 2013.

*Palaver, Wolfgang and Richard Schenk, eds. Mimetic Theory and World 
Religions. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018.

Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled. New York: Simon and Shuster, 
1978.

Ricoeur, Paul. “Religion and Symbolic Violence.” Contagion: Journal of 
Violence, Mimesis & Culture 6 (1999): 1–11.

*Sacks, Jonathan. Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. New 
York: Schocken Books, 2015.

Schwager, Raymund. Must There Be Scapegoats?: Violence and Redemption 
in the Bible. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.

Selengut, Charles. Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence. 3rd ed. 
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Stein, Ruth. For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious 
Terrorism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Steinmair-Pösel, Petra. “Original Sin, Grace, and Positive Mimesis.” 
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis & Culture 14, no. 1 (2007): 1-12.

Swartley, Willard M., ed. Violence Renounced: René Girard, Biblical Studies, 
and Peacemaking. Telford, Pa.: Pandora Press, 2000.

Taylor, Charles. “Notes on the Sources of Violence: Perennial and 
Modern.” In Beyond Violence: Religious Sources of Social Transformation 
in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, edited by James L. Heft, 15-42. 
New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.

*Voegelin, Eric. Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions, the 
New Science of Politics and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Columbia: 
University of Missouri Press, 2000.

*Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1948.



28  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

Webb, Eugene. Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, 
Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 
1988.

Williams, James G. The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred: Liberation from the 
Myth of Sanctioned Violence. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 
1992.

MY HOME PAGE

https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/cbhome.htmhttps://lib.tcu.edu/staff/
bellinger/cbhome.htm

2019 BRITE COURSE

https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/rel-viol/rel-viol2019syllabus.htm 
https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/rel-viol/rel-viol2019links.htm 

https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/cbhome.htmhttps://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/cbhome.htm
https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/cbhome.htmhttps://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/cbhome.htm
https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/rel-viol/rel-viol2019syllabus.htm
https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/rel-viol/rel-viol2019links.htm

