An American theologian who visited New Zealand has challenged the idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence.

Professor William T. Cavanaugh, who delivered public lectures as the 2012 St John’s Visiting Scholar in Religion at Victoria University, Wellington, and Laidlaw College in Auckland and Christchurch, said people sometimes argued that the real motivation behind so-called religious violence was in fact economic and political, not religious.

The Senior Research Professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology said others would argue that people who committed violence were, by definition, not religious.

Dr Cavanaugh, who is also Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University, Chicago, said these people would sometimes argue for instance that the Crusader was not really a Christian, for example, because “he doesn’t really understand the meaning of Christianity”.

“I don’t think that either of these arguments works. In the first place, it is impossible to separate out religious from economic and political motives in such a way that religious motives are innocent of violence. How could one, for example, separate religion from politics in Islam, when Muslims themselves make no such separation? In the second place, it may be the case that the Crusader has misappropriated the true message of Christ, but one cannot therefore excuse Christianity of all responsibility.”

Dr Cavanaugh suggested that “Christianity is not primarily a set of doctrines, but a lived historical experience embodied and shaped by the observable actions of Christians”.

He conceded that under certain conditions Christianity, Islam, and other faiths could and did contribute to violence.

However, he strongly disagreed with those who claimed that the religious were more prone to violence than ideologies and institutions that were identified as “secular”.

“The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the secular nation-state,” he said. “The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.”

Dr Cavanaugh has published an impressive range of books and articles, which have been translated into French, Spanish and Polish.