Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

Polytheism was the cosmological vindication of the hierarchical society.

Between people there should be a covenantal bond of righteousness and justice, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and love.

He sought to be true to his faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith.

That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world.

In November 2014, for example, there were 664 jihadist attacks in 14 countries, killing a total of 5,042 people.

In Afghanistan Christianity has almost been extinguished. In 2010 the last remaining church was burned to the ground. People converting to Christianity face the death sentence.

In Egypt, 5 million Copts live in fear. In 2013, in the largest single attack on Christians since the fourteenth century, more than fifty churches were bombed or burned in an attack that has been called Egypt’s Kristallnacht.

In Sudan, an estimated 1.5 million Christians have been killed by the Arab Muslim militia Janjaweed since 1984.

altruistic evil: evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals.

In its place had come the market economy and the liberal democratic state, in which the individual and his or her right to live as they chose took priority over all creeds and codes.

Finally in the 1960s came the secularisation of morality, by the adoption of a principle first propounded by John Stuart Mill a century earlier – namely that the only ground on which anyone, including the state, is justified in intervening in behaviour done in private is the prevention of harm to others.

Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?

The controversy over The Satanic Verses (1989) led to the assassination of its Japanese translator, the stabbing of its Italian translator, the shooting of its Norwegian publisher and the death by fire of thirty-five guests at a reception for the book’s publication in Turkey.

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom argued in The Starfish and the Spider that leaderless organisations will dominate the future. The starfish and the spider have similar shapes but different internal structures. A decapitated spider dies, but a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg.

Weapons win wars, but it takes ideas to win the peace. In

The seventeenth century was the dawn of an age of secularisation. The twenty-first century will be the start of an age of desecularisation.

A creed that tells us that we are no more than selfish genes, with nothing in principle to separate us from the animals, in a society whose strongest motivators are money and success, in a universe that came into existence for no reason whatsoever and for no reason will one day cease to be, will never speak as strongly to the human spirit as one that tells us we are in the image and likeness of God in a universe he created in love.

Narrowcasting speaks to a targeted public and exposes them only to facts and opinions that support their prejudices.

the rational actor who makes decisions on the basis of individual choice and calculation of consequences. For the rational actor there is no problem that cannot be solved, no conflict that cannot be resolved. All we need to do is sit down, brainstorm, work out alternative scenarios and opt for the outcome that is maximal for all concerned. What rules in this universe is interests. Sometimes they are individual, at others collective, but interests are what are at stake.

Identity is always a group phenomenon. It comes laden with history, memory, a sense of the past and its injustices, and a set of moral sensibilities that are inseparable from identity: loyalty, respect and reverence, the three virtues undermined by market economics, liberal democratic politics and the culture of individualism.

mindset, myth and sibling rivalry. First, there is a specific mindset that makes altruistic evil possible: dualism.

Faith is God’s call to see his trace in the face of the Other. But that needs a theology of the Other, which is what I offer in this book.

How is it that people kill in the name of the God of life, wage war in the name of the God of peace, hate in the name of the God of love and practise cruelty in the name of the God of compassion?

So we are angels and demons, angels to those on our side, demons to those on the other side.

barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating.

we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.

Against non-believers – members of another faith or of none, and those of our own faith we deem to be heretics – religions can be brutal and pitiless.

He called it Tit-for-Tat. It said: on the first encounter be nice, and on subsequent encounters repeat the other person’s last move.

If you do to others what you expect them to do for you – share food, give warning of impending danger and the like – then the group will function effectively and survive.

Biologists call this reciprocal altruism. Some deny that this is altruism at all. It is ‘self-interest rightly understood’, or what Bishop Butler called ‘cool self-love’.

This requires a fair amount of memory, which explains why animal groups like chimpanzees and bonobos are small. Some biologists think that humans developed language so that they could better co-ordinate their activities. It also allowed them to gossip, sharing information about which individuals were trustworthy and which were not.

One ingenious biologist, Robin Dunbar, worked out that there is a correlation among species between brain size and the average size of groups. On this basis he calculated that for humans, the optimal size is 150.

Regardless of whether we regard religion as true or false, it clearly has adaptive value because it appeared at the dawn of civilisation and has been a central feature of almost every society since. The early religions created moral communities, thus solving the problem of trust between strangers.

The fundamental theme of the early religions in Mesopotamia and Egypt was the tension between cosmos and chaos, order and anarchy, structure and disarray.

As Shakespeare put it in Ulysses’ speech in Act 1, scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida, the finest-ever account of the cosmological mind: The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre Observe degree, priority and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order.

Others like Richard Schweder and Jonathan Haidt have shown how the rich repertoire of religious ethics, with its dimensions of respect for authority, loyalty and a sense of the sacred, furnish a more comprehensive or ‘thick’ morality than the relatively pared-down features of secular ethics, based on fairness and the avoidance of harm. It is not that religious people are more moral than their secular counterparts, but rather that their moralities tend to have a thicker and richer texture, binding groups together, not merely regulating the encounters of randomly interacting individuals. As Haidt puts it: ‘Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.’7 Many believe that the word ‘religion’ comes from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind’.

Robert Putnam has shown, in his and David Campbell’s book American Grace, it is specifically in religious communities in the United States that you find the strongest reservoirs of social capital, willingness to help strangers, to give to charity for both religious and secular causes, and to be active in voluntary associations, neighbourhood groups and so on.

this has to do not with religious belief as such, but rather with membership i...

Religion was the metaphysical grounding of the social structure, and thus the basis of political order. The head of state was the head of the religion. The king, ruler or pharaoh was either a god or a son of the gods or the chief intermediary with the gods.

Religion enters the equation only because it is the most powerful force ever devised for the creation and maintenance of large-scale groups by solving the problem of trust between strangers.

Most conflicts and wars have nothing to do with religion whatsoever. They are about power, territory and glory, things that are secular, even profane. But if religion can be enlisted, it will be.

After a devastating series of religious wars there was a genuine belief among European intellectuals that the divisions brought about by faith and dogma could be transcended by the universal truths of reason, philosophy and science. Kant produced a secular equivalent of the idea that we are all in the image of God. He said: treat others as ends, not only means.

Its most famous expression was Beethoven’s setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, with its vision of a time when Alle Menschen werden Brüder – ‘All men become brothers.’

three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust. The cost of these three substitutes for religion was in excess of a hundred million lives. After that, no one who argues that abolishing religion will lead to peace can be taken seriously.

The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is the effort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual. The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state.

We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever.

Meanwhile the energy of the West has been sapped by the decay of the very things religion once energised: marriage, families, communities, a shared moral code, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct, the covenant that linked rich and poor in a bond of mutual responsibility, and a vision of the universe that gave rise to the social virtue of hope.

Durkheim argued otherwise. He said that in a society undergoing anomie – the loss of a shared moral code – more people will commit suicide. We cannot bear the absence of public meanings and collective moral identity. Faced with the prospect, vulnerable individuals will choose death rather than life. Though Durkheim could not have foreseen it, a variant of this is happening in our time. It is the reason why seemingly normal, well-educated and adjusted people with careers and families ahead of them become jihadists and suicide bombers, choosing death rather than life.

And substance abuse.

As Eric Hoffer noted in The True Believer (1951) and as Scott Atran has shown in his study of suicide bombers, Talking to the Enemy, individuals join radical movements to alleviate the isolation of the lonely crowd and become, however briefly, part of an intense community engaged in the pursuit of something larger than the self.9 They are motivated by genuine ideals.

But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all-evil, heralding a war between the children of light and the forces of darkness. That is when altruistic evil is born.