Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

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.

Science, technology, the free market and the liberal democratic state have enabled us to reach unprecedented achievements in knowledge, freedom, life expectancy and affluence. They are among the greatest achievements of human civilisation and are to be defended and cherished. But they do not and cannot answer the three questions every reflective individual will ask at some time in his or her life: Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.

This is the simplest basis of the moral life. If you start with benevolence, then apply the rules of reciprocity, you create a basis of trust on which groups can form.

The early religions created moral communities, thus solving the problem of trust between strangers. They sanctified the social order. They taught people that society is as it is because this is the will of the gods and the basic structure of the universe.

We are the culture-creating, meaning-seeking animal.

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.

We can now answer the question of the relationship between religion and violence, as well as that of the dual nature of human beings, capable of great good but also of great evil. We are good and bad because we are human, we are social animals and we live, survive and thrive in groups. Within groups we practise altruism. Between them we practise aggression. 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.

The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap. Because he attributes a real phenomenon (pain, poverty, illiteracy, disease, defeat, humiliation) to a fictitious cause, he discovers that eliminating the cause does not remove the symptom. Hence efforts must be redoubled. If you kill witches for causing illness, the witches die and the illness remains. So you must find more witches to kill, and still the illness remains. Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.

Monotheism internalises what dualism externalises. It takes the good and bad in the human situation, the faith and the fear, the retribution and the forgiving, and locates them within each of us, turning what would otherwise be war on the battlefield into a struggle within the soul.

‘Who is a hero?’ asked the rabbis, and replied, ‘One who conquers himself.’

We can now sum up the argument. Violence exists because we are social animals. We live and find our identity in groups. And groups conflict. They fight over the same resources: food, territory, other scarce goods. That is our nature and it leads to all that is best and worst about us: our altruism towards other members of our group, and our suspicion and aggression towards members of other groups. Religion plays a part in this only because it is the most powerful source of group identity the world has yet known. Every attempt to find a substitute for religion has resulted in even more violence. Nationalism led to two world wars. Political ideology led to Lenin and Stalin. Race led to Hitler and the Holocaust. The result was the bloodiest century in human history. The idea that we can abolish identity altogether by privileging the individual over the group is the West’s current fantasy and it has led to the return of religion in its most belligerent form. So, four centuries have led us in a complete circle back to where we were in the last great era of religious war. Group identity need not lead to violence, but there is a mutant form, pathological dualism, that divides the world into two – our side, the children of light, and the other side, the children of darkness. If there is evil in the world, it is because of Them, not Us. This mode of thinking leads to some of the worst crimes in history because it causes people to demonise their opponents, see themselves as victims ...

Genesis was about the birth of the covenantal family. Exodus is about the birth of the covenantal nation. The unstated but implicit message of Genesis is this: not until families can live in peace can a nation be born.

The message of Genesis is that love is necessary but not sufficient. You also need sensitivity to those who feel unloved.

But love is not enough. You cannot build a family, let alone a society, on love alone. For that you need justice also. Love is partial, justice is impartial. Love is particular, justice is universal. Love is for this person not that, but justice is for all. Much of the moral life is generated by this tension between love and justice. Justice without love is harsh. Love without justice is unfair, or so it will seem to the less loved. That is what the Bible is forcing us to understand

in the Bible there is both a morality that applies to everyone, insider and outsider alike, and an ethic, that is, a specific code of conduct that frames relationships within the group.

There is no single, simple system that will honour both our commonalities and our differences. Tribalism – identity without universality – leads to violence. Imperialism – universality without identity – leads to the loss of freedom and the suppression of the very diversity that makes us human. That is why the Bible sets out two covenants, not one: one that honours our common humanity, the other that sanctifies diversity and the particularity of love. And the universal comes first. You cannot love God without first honouring the universal dignity of humanity as the image and likeness of the universal God.

Humanity lives suspended between the twin facts of commonality and difference. If we were completely unalike, we would be unable to communicate. If we were completely alike, we would have nothing to say.

The Noah covenant speaks to our commonality, the Abraham and Sinai covenants to our differences. That is what makes Abrahamic monotheism different from tribalism on the one hand (each nation with its own God) and universalism on the other (one God, therefore one way). Neither tribalism nor universalism are adequate to the human situation. Tribalism envisages a world permanently at war (my god is stronger than yours). Universalism risks a dualistic world divided between the saved and the damned (I have the truth, you have only error11), and hence to holy wars, crusades and jihads.

Violence is what happens when you try to resolve a religious dispute by means of power. It cannot be done. Trying to resolve ultimate issues of faith, truth and interpretation by the use of force is a conceptual error of the most fundamental kind. Just as might does not establish right, so victory does not establish truth. Both sides may fight with equal passion and conviction, but at the end of the day, after thousands or millions have died, whole countries reduced to disaster zones, populations condemned to poverty and generations to hopelessness, after the very enterprise of faith has been degraded and disgraced, no one is a millimetre closer to God or salvation or illumination. You cannot impose truth by force. That is why religion and power are two separate enterprises that must never be confused.

That is what makes liberal democracy, however odd this sounds, the best way of instantiating the values of Abrahamic monotheism. It does not invite citizens to worship the polis, nor does it see civic virtue as the only virtue. It recognises (unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau20) that politics is not a religion nor a substitute for one. The two are inherently different activities. Religion seeks truth, politics deals in power. Religion aims at unity, liberal democracy is about the mediation of conflict and respect for diversity. Religion refuses to compromise, politics is the art of compromise. Religion aspires to the ideal, politics lives in the real, the less-than-ideal. Religion is about the truths that do not change, politics is about the challenges that constantly change.

More important still is what liberal democratic politics achieves. It makes space for difference. It recognises that within a complex society there are many divergent views, traditions and moral systems. It makes no claim to know which is true. All it seeks to do is ensure that those who have differing views are able to live peaceably and graciously together, recognising that none of us has the right to impose our views on others.

Democratic politics has no higher aspiration than to allow individuals freedom to pursue the right as they see the right, with this proviso only, that they extend the same right to others. It seeks the maximum possible liberty compatible with an equal liberty for all.

Apocalypse is what happens to prophecy when it loses hope, and to politics when it loses patience.

Apocalyptic politics is the search for revolution without transformation, change without the slow process of education.

Apocalyptic politics always fails, because you cannot create eternity in the midst of time, or unity without dissent. It is like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, bringing down the building on his enemies but destroying himself in the process.

is fascinating to see how in this conversation across seven centuries, first a Muslim, then a Jew, then a Christian, then a secular humanist come together to agree on the importance of free speech and making space for dissent. Greater is the pursuit of truth than the exercise of force.

Atonement is the ultimate expression of freedom because it brings together the two mental acts – repentance and forgiveness – that have the power to break the iron grip of the past. Repentance testifies to our ability to change. Forgiveness expresses our refusal to be held captive by ill-will. Atonement is where divine and human freedom meet and create a new beginning. It is the act that defeats tragedy in the name of hope.

Wars are won by weapons, but it takes ideas to win a peace.

Sooner or later the tribes return, fully armed and breathing fire. The only adequate alternative, proposed by Genesis precisely as God’s protest against violence, is to say that he has made two covenants with us, one in our common humanity, the other in our specific identity. The first is about the universality of justice, the second about the particularity of love, and in that order. Our common humanity precedes our religious differences.

Suicide and murder are forbidden in the Abrahamic faiths. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all know the phenomenon of martyrdom – but martyrdom means being willing to die for your faith. It does not mean being willing to kill for your faith.