Jens Schlieter

The talk will discuss the justification and legitimization of violence in the systematic study of religion. More specifically, I will use ethical vegetarianism/veganism as both a test case and an analytic tool to uncover a hidden dimension in prominent theories of religion and violence: the normative view that to eat meat is not just the default foodway of omnivore but enables effective communication with transcendent God/s, strengthens and revives the group, and prepares for hunting and war. Building on the concept of “carnism” (Melanie Joy 2009), I will call this the “carnist school” in the theory of religion. With variations, carnist ideas have been propagated by W. Robertson Smith and S. Freud, G. Bataille and R. Caillois, K. Meuli and J. Burkert, R. Girard and M. Bloch, to name but a few. Carnism, in other words, features both in certain religions and in the study of religion. In both contexts, it justifies the ubiquity of the homo necans and the existence of transcendent God/s demanding blood sacrifice. The carnism school can even take a dramatic and drastic turn, arguing that the collective bloodshed of sacrificial killing prepares the group, as a transgressive act, for the transgressions of war: from animal sacrifice to heroic self-sacrifice. To analyze carnism and its role in justifying violence in the theory of religion, the talk will experiment with a counterfactual history of a meat-free utopia: How would our theories of religion look if vegetarian strands within Pythagorean, Jewish and Christian, or Jain, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, had become dominant, turning meat-eating into a practice of some minor “heretic” communities?