Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.

Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: Not in My Name.

Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power.

It said that every human being, regardless of colour, culture, class or creed, was in the image and likeness of God. The supreme Power intervened in history to liberate the supremely powerless. A society is judged by the way it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. Life is sacred. Murder is both a crime and a sin. Between people there should be a covenantal bond of righteousness and justice, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and love.

According to the Hebrew Bible, Abrahamic monotheism entered the world as a rejection of imperialism and the use of force to make some men masters and others slaves.

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

To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God’s name in vain.

There is nothing banal about the evil currently consuming large parts of the world.

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

Judaism, Christianity and Islam define themselves as religions of peace yet they have all given rise to violence at some points in their history.

What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning. Science tells us how but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot guide us as to how to use that power. The market gives us choices but leaves us uninstructed as to how to make those choices. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose but on principle refuses to guide us as to how to choose.

The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with

Undeniably, though, the greatest threat to freedom in the postmodern world is radical, politicised religion. It is the face of altruistic evil in our time.

Weapons win wars, but it takes ideas to win the peace. In the case of the seventeenth century the transformative ideas emerged from a series of outstanding thinkers, among them John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza and John Locke. Their key principles were the social contract, the limits of state power, the doctrine of toleration, liberty of conscience and the concept of human rights.

One of their most important principles, found also in the Qur’an (Al-Baqara 256), is that there should be no compulsion in religion.

To put it simply: The seventeenth century was the dawn of an age of secularisation. The twenty-first century will be the start of an age of desecularisation.

If we do not do the theological work, we will face a continuation of the terror that has marked our century thus far, for it has no other natural end. It cannot be ended by military means alone.

believe with perfect faith that Judaism is a religion of peace. But not everyone interprets a religion the same way. None of the great religions can say, in unflinching self-knowledge, ‘Our hands never shed innocent blood.’

Even at an everyday level, the Internet has a disinhibition effect: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read

Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

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.’

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.

Violence may be possible wherever there is an Us and a Them. 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.

Dualism is what happens when cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable, when the world as it is, is simply too unlike the world as we believed it ought to be.

But the Messiah in mainstream Judaism is not a supernatural being with the power to transform the human condition. He is simply an anointed king (the word messiah means ‘anointed’) in the line of David who will fight Israel’s battles, restore its independence, unite the people and usher in a reign of peace.

Dualism entered Judaism and Christianity when it became easier to attribute the sufferings of the world to an evil force rather than to the work of God.

He was surprised and angry when, in conversation, I told him that those words showed that he was a Christian atheist, not a Jewish atheist. He could not understand this, but it is quite simple. The words ‘the God of the Old Testament’ are only spoken by Christians. Outside Christianity, there is no Old Testament. There is the Hebrew Bible.

It has become one of the taken-for-granted clichés of Western culture that the God of the Old Testament is the God of law, letter, justice, retribution, vengeance, anger, flesh and death. The God of the New Testament is the God of faith, spirit, forgiveness, grace, forbearance, love and life. But this is pure Marcionism and, in Christian terms, heresy.

Monotheism is not an easy faith. Recall the verse from Isaiah: ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil.’ How can God, who is all-good, create evil? That is the question of questions for the monotheistic mind. Abraham asked: ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ Moses asked, ‘Why have you done evil to this people?’

what if monotheism requires the ability to handle complexity?

Pathological dualism creates a self-contained world which becomes self-confirming.

The Bible hides none of this from us, and for a deeply consequential reason: to teach us that even the best are not perfect and even the worst are not devoid of merits. That is the best protection of our humanity.

In the Middle Ages Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth century they began to be hated for their race. That is what was new.

It is not religion that gives rise to violence. It is violence that gives rise to religion.

Girard’s thesis is that the most effective way by which the two groups can end the cycle is by killing a third party, one who is neither a Montague nor a Capulet, who stands outside the feud, and whose death will not lead to another cycle of retaliation. The victim must be, in other words, an outsider, someone either not protected by a group, or the member of a group not in a position to inflict its own retaliatory violence.

The simultaneous presence of contradictory beliefs is a sure sign of the active presence of a scapegoat mechanism within a culture.

Initially favourably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds.

The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews.

His great originality is that, instead of criticising Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for giving birth to it in the first place.

If you seek to understand what a group truly intends, look at the accusations it levels against its enemies.

Dualism becomes lethal when a group of people, a nation or a faith, feel endangered by internal conflict.

Our most primal instincts of bonding within the group occur when it confronts an external enemy.

If tyrants can invoke religion – persuading people that it is their faith, their values and their God that are under attack – it becomes more powerful still, since religion evokes our most self-sacrificial instincts. The classic instance is antisemitism, and where you find it at its most virulent, there you will find despotism and denial of human rights. The murder of Jews is only one result. The real victims are the members of the host society itself. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with them. No free society was ever built on hate.

And when the violence is over, the problems remain, since the scapegoat never was the cause of the problem in the first place. So people die. Hope is destroyed. Hate claims more sacrificial victims. And God weeps.

Recall that Freud and René Girard argued that it is not religion that leads to violence. It is violence that leads to religion.

Girard then suggested that one of the prime sources of strife is not between father and son but between brothers: sibling rivalry.

It was Christianity that prevented tragedy, thought Heine, by standing between Germany and its pagan roots. Lose it and the dark gods of blood and brutality would return.

In essence, Paul had founded the Gentile, or de-ethnicised, church. As a result he was faced with an immense problem. How could Christianity be at one and the same time a continuation of Judaism and yet a radically transformed faith – in the people it addressed, the life it espoused and the story it told? This tension haunted Paul and everything he set in motion.

More generously, each might have come to Niels Bohr’s conclusion that the opposite of a trivial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. There is more than one way of being-in-the-world under the sovereignty of God. More probably they would simply have ignored one another. Their differences would not have led to centuries of bloodshed and animosity.