In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century

by Omer Bartov (Editor), Phyllis Mack (Editor)

Despite the widespread trends of secularization in the 20th century, religion has played an important role in several outbreaks of genocide since the First World War. And yet, not many scholars have looked either at the religious aspects of modern genocide, or at the manner in which religion has taken a position on mass killing. This collection of essays addresses this hiatus by examining the intersection between religion and state-organized murder in the cases of the Armenian, Jewish, Rwandan, and Bosnian genocides. Rather than a comprehensive overview, it offers a series of descrete, yet closely related case studies, that shed light on three fundamental aspects of this issue: the use of religion to legitimize and motivate genocide; the potential of religious faith to encourage physical and spiritual resistance to mass murder; and finally, the role of religion in coming to terms with the legacy of atrocity.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-born historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a noted historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of genocide.

Reviews

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This edited volume focuses on the role of religion in justifying genocide and/or the lack of resistance to and complicity in genocide. It makes no pretense of covering all genocides of the twentieth century, but instead focuses on four: the Jewish, the Armenian, the Rwandan genocides and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. It is divided into three parts: Part I -- The Perpetrators: Theology and Practice; Part II: Survival: Victims and Rescuers and Part III: Politics, Faith and Representation. Overall the essays were of excellent quality and Part III addressing the politics of remembrance is particularly strong.

My only disappointment was with Part I, as I had expected the essays to delve more deeply into the ways in which theology was used either to justify or resist the murder of targeted populations. However, most essays in this section did not discuss theology at any length, even though most of these essay focused on theologians, bishops, or pastors. In fact the sum total of the "theological content" of most of the essays in this section consisted of identifying their subject's profession; once identified, the analysis immediately switched to their politics and their action. The one notable exception was Susannah Heschel's contribution, "When Jesus was an Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda" in which she painstakingly traces how an internal crisis within Protestant theology led to a blending of Christianity with National Socialist racist ideology. As the author points out, liberal Protestant theologians in the late-nineteenth century had set out to discover the historical Jesus; the problem was that they discovered that Jesus's teachings were identical with those of other rabbis of his day. To maintain a boundary between liberal Protestantism and Judaism, they needed to define what made Jesus different from other rabbis; the solution for many theologians was to declare that Jesus was not in fact Jewish, but Aryan. These theologians would found the League for German Christian and would set out to remove all traces of Judaism from Christianity. As this movement gained momentum, the line between theology and racist ideology became increasingly blurred; institutes sprang up dedicated to making Jesus Aryan and warning against the threat that Judaism posed for German Christianity. The largest of these institutes was the Eisenach Dejudaization Institute, whose membership included over 50 university professors of theology; thus, this was no fringe movement within the German Protestant Church. While there was opposition to these institutes within the Protestant Church, specifically from theologians of the Confessing Church, Heschel argues convincingly that their primary objection was not directed against the Institute's antisemitism. In fact, many theologians of the Confessing Church also supported theological anti-Judaism. The German Christian movement created a theology that "manipulated and exploited morality" (101).

As the editors note in the conclusion, "the genocidal twentieth century is now itself receding into history" (382), however too often religious institutions of various faiths continue to operate as structures that facilitate violence rather than counteracting it.

[Arby · Rating 4 out of 5]

WOW this isn't depressing at all!