Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

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 ...