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In God's name

Taken to extremes, religion has a dark and deadly side

By Sandi Dolbee

November 9, 2001

The Crusades. The Inquisition. The Thirty Years War.

The Holocaust. Genocide in Rwanda, in Sudan, in Armenia. Assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X and Pensacola abortion doctor John Britton.

The KKK and the IRA.

Jonestown. Branch Davidians. Aum Shinrikyo. Heaven's Gate.

Salem's witch trials. The bombings of American embassies in Kenya and in Tanzania. The sneak attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen.

And Sept. 11, 2001.

A lot of bad things happen in the name of faith. There is a dark side to religion, a mean streak that can turn destructive in the time it takes to say a prayer.

When sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer hears this litany of horror, he is not surprised.

"That's just some of them," he says. "Religion has always been full of blood."

It is the ultimate irony. Something that does so much good in the world can also do such bad.

"Religion is a two-edged sword," says Juergensmeyer, who teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara and is the author of "Terror in the Mind of God." "On the one hand, it can promote violence. On the other hand, it can displace it."

Ask Annie Laurie Gaylor, an atheist and co-founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., about this subject and she'll share a quote from Steven Weinberg, winner of a Nobel Prize in physics in 1979.

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil," Weinberg says. "But for good people to do evil -- that takes religion."

To that, Gaylor adds her own words: "It's not some coincidence that we've had more people killed in the name of a god than for any other single reason."

How could this be? Is there a fatal flaw in the faiths of the world? What should we do?

Those who study these questions say that the problem starts with humans who ruin the holy with extremism and absolutism.

"In every religion if you read Scriptures carefully enough, you can find passages that promote violence and other passages that argue against it," notes Michael Gaddis, an assistant professor of history at Syracuse University in New York and a scholar of religious conflict.

The same Bible that exhorts the annihilation of whole cities also commands people to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly. The same Koran that has verses promoting peace also has verses urging war against infidels.

But it's not the contradictions that take a human life. That's done by people who pick and choose these verses and then blend them into a lethal stew of their own making.

Says Gaddis: "In each case, it's not so much the religion, it's the way a particular bunch of extremists interpret that religion."

Zeal can harden people. Compromise may be the art of politics, but for religious zealots, you are either with them or against them. And when that line gets drawn, heaven help anyone who crosses over it.

Religious historian Evelyn Kirkley suggests that religions that believe in one God are particularly susceptible to violence.

When taken to extremes, monotheism can lead to intolerance (my God is the only God and he's only talking to me), a fervency that you and your particular mission are divinely inspired (you've been made in God's image and others must convert) and a conviction that you'll be rewarded and those who don't agree will be punished (even if you have to do the punishing).

"Those are factors that seem to me that could lead to fundamentalism and a sense of 'our way or the highway,' " says Kirkley, an assistant professor in the Department of Theological and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego.

"When you have that kind of God-ordained authority," she adds, "it can sanction virtually any kind of violent activity."

It can turn suicide into martyrdom. Fear of dying, normally a pretty good deterrent to doing stupid things, is supplanted with the promise of eternal life in Paradise -- or some other honor befitting such sacrifice.

In the Crusades, which pitted Christians against Muslims in one holy war after another during the Middle Ages, "the belief on both sides was that to die in battle against the heretic was immediately to receive salvation," says Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Likewise, killing becomes divinely anointed.

"It's better to kill an infidel than have that infidel pollute the multitude," explains Leonard. "Those are the seeds of the Inquisition. Those are the seeds of violence."


So where do we go from here?

It would be unfair to make religion the sole culprit of civilization's litany of horror.

Other ingredients also fuel the fire. Geography. Politics. Economics. Egos. All, and any, of them can lead to violence as well.

"You don't have to believe in God to be a nationalist and think you ought to nuke your enemy," says Leonard, from Wake Forest. "Any kind of commitment or devotion, any kind of zeal, can turn to violence and bigotry all too quickly."

This also isn't about abolishing religion.

"Should we outlaw music because some music is ugly?" asks Juergensmeyer, the Santa Barbara sociologist who also is director of the Global and International Studies Program at the university there.

"I think, he adds, "good religion shouts out bad religion."

Gaddis offers this scenario: "Let's say you're a Christian. A nice, church-going Christian, and you believe in God and stuff like that. Then you learn that some guy has set off a truck bomb and killed a bunch of people and has said he's doing it for Christ.

"Are you going to stop being a Christian because of that or are you going to say, 'No, that guy doesn't speak for me, he's perverting religion?' "

Besides, even if today's religions were erased, something else would crop up in their place. "Somehow, by virtue of our humanity, we are a religious people," says Kirkley of USD.

But we can at least be aware of the warning signs of when religion is about to make a wrong turn.

For Kirkley, one of those warning signs is when faith, with all of its healthy doubts, turns into unquestioning certainty. "That's when any religion can and historically has moved into that danger zone."

Another warning sign is when religion shifts from the private sphere of shaping morals and values of individuals into the public square of dictating state policy.

"As recently as the 16th and 17th centuries just about every government in western Europe thought it was their divinely ordained duty to burn heretics at the stake and to burn witches at the stake," says Syracuse historian Gaddis.

"One of the things we learned from that, really, is we need to have separation of church and state."

The solutions?

Tolerance, respect for diversity, finding a way to hold firm to your own faith without dismissing the faiths of others. In short, practicing something that human nature is not very good about: acceptance.

Leonard suggests that people of faith ought to be more cautious about the claims they make in the name of God.

"One of my mentors used to say human beings often sign God's name to contracts God never wrote," he adds.

And lest the abusers win, he issues this call: "People who oppose violence and who want to challenge that idea that violence is something God approves, this is the time to stand up and speak out."

Otherwise, the silence can be deadly.


© Copyright 2001 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.