Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

  Many of the perpetrators, including suicide bombers and jihadists, come from European homes, have had a university education, and until their radicalisation were regarded by friends and neighbours as friendly, likeable people. Unlike the Nazis, who took fastidious care to hide their crimes from the world, today’s terrorists take equal care to advertise them to the world using professionally produced videos and the latest social media technology. Their lack of conscience in committing what leading Islamic jurists and theologians have deemed forbidden, sinful and contrary to the Qur’an is breathtaking. In Gwoza, Nigeria, one of the survivors of a massacre by the Islamist group Boko Haram described to a reporter how the radicals calmly killed their fellow Muslims one by one. ‘They told us they were doing God’s work even though all the men they shot in front of me were Muslims. They seemed happy.’7

  We need a term to describe this deadly phenomenon that can turn ordinary non-psychopathic people into cold-blooded murderers of schoolchildren, aid workers, journalists and people at prayer. It is, to give it a name, altruistic evil: evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals.

  By this I do not mean the kind of behaviour that people argue over: abortion, for instance, or assisted suicide. Nor do I mean issues like the highly complex question of civilian casualties in asymmetric warfare. I mean evil of the kind that we all recognise as such. Killing the weak, the innocent, the very young and old is evil. Indiscriminate murder by terrorist attack or suicide bombing is evil. Murdering people because of their religion or race or nationality is evil. It was for this reason that, during the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, the concept of a crime against humanity was born, to give global force to the principle that there are some acts so heinous that they cannot be defended on the grounds that ‘I was only obeying orders’. There are acts so alien to our concept of humanity that they cannot be justified on the grounds that they were the means to a great, noble or holy end.

  There is nothing specifically religious about altruistic evil. Some of the great instances in modern history – Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao Zedong’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia – were avowedly secular. Their mass murders were undertaken to avenge past wrongs, correct perceived injustice, restore honour to the nation, or institute a social order that would bring equality and freedom to the world. Only in fiction are the great evils committed by caricatures of malevolence: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron or the Joker. In real history the great evils are committed by people seeking to restore a romanticised golden age, willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of others in what they regard as a great and even holy cause. In some cases they see themselves as ‘doing God’s work’. They ‘seem happy’.

  That is how dreams of utopia turn into nightmares of hell.

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  Much has been said and written in recent years about the connection between religion and violence. Three answers have emerged. The first: Religion is the major source of violence. Therefore if we seek a more peaceful world we should abolish religion. The second: Religion is not a source of violence. People are made violent, as Hobbes said, by fear, glory and the ‘perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death’.8 Religion has nothing to do with it. It may be used by manipulative leaders to motivate people to wage wars precisely because it inspires people to heroic acts of self-sacrifice, but religion itself teaches us to love and forgive, not to hate and fight. The third answer is: Their religion, yes; our religion, no. We are for peace. They are for war.

  None of these is true. As for the first, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod surveyed 1,800 conflicts in the Encyclopedia of Wars and found that less than 10 per cent involved religion at all.9 A ‘God and War’ survey commissioned by the BBC found that religion played some part in 40 per cent of conflicts but usually a minor one.10

  The second answer is misguided. When terrorist or military groups invoke holy war, define their battle as a struggle against Satan, condemn unbelievers to death and commit murder while declaring ‘God is great’, to deny that they are acting on religious motives is absurd. Religions seek peace, but on their own terms. This is not a recipe for peace but for war.

  The third is a classic instance of in-group bias. Almost invariably people regard their group as superior to others. Henry Tajfel, one of the pioneers of social identity theory, showed how deeply this runs in even the most trivial of groupings. In one experiment he divided people into groups on the basis of the mere toss of a coin, yet they still rated the members of their own group as more likeable than the others, despite the fact that they had never met one another before and knew that they had been selected on a purely random basis. Groups, like individuals, have a need for self-esteem and they will interpret facts to confirm their sense of superiority.11 Judaism, Christianity and Islam define themselves as religions of peace yet they have all given rise to violence at some points in their history.

  My concern in this book is less the general connection between religion and violence than the specific challenge of politicised religious extremism in the twenty-first century. The re-emergence of religion as a global force caught the West unprotected and unprepared because it was in the grip of a narrative that told a quite different story.

  It is said that 1989, the year of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, marked the final act of an extended drama in which first religion, then political ideology, died after a prolonged period in intensive care. The age of the true believer, religious or secular, was over. 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. The hymn of the new dispensation was John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, with its vision of a post-ideological, post-religious world with ‘Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.’

  It was the last chapter of a story that began in the seventeenth century, the last great age of wars of religion. The West had undergone a process of secularisation that had taken four centuries.

  First, in the seventeenth century, came the secularisation of knowledge in the form of science and philosophy. Then in the eighteenth century came the secularisation of power by way of the American and French Revolutions and the separation – radical in France, less doctrinaire in the United States – of church and state. In the nineteenth century came the secularisation of culture as art galleries and museums were seen as alternatives to churches as places in which to encounter the sublime. 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. This was the beginning of the end of traditional codes of ethics, to be replaced by the unfettered sanctity of the individual, autonomy, rights and choice.

  By the late twentieth century most secularists had come to the conclusion that religion, if not refuted, had at least been rendered redundant. We no longer need the Bible to explain the universe. Instead we have science. We do not need sacred ritual to control human destiny. In its place we have technology. When we are ill, we do not need prayer. We have doctors, medicine and surgery. If we are depressed there is an alternative to religious consolation: antidepressant drugs. When we feel overwhelmed by guilt, we can choose psychotherapy in place of the confessional. For seekers of transcendence there are rock concerts and sports matches. As for human mortality, the best thing to do, as the advice columns tell us, is not to think about it too often. People may be uncertain about the existence of God, but are reasonably sure that if we don’t bother him, he won’t bother us.

  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 pow
er. 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.

  Religion has returned because it is hard to live without meaning. That is why no society has survived for long without either a religion or a substitute for religion. The twentieth century showed, brutally and definitively, that the great modern substitutes for religion – the nation, the race and the political ideology – are no less likely to offer human sacrifices to their surrogate deities.

  The religion that has returned is not the gentle, quietist, eirenic and ecumenical form that, in the West, we had increasingly come to expect. Instead it is religion at its most adversarial and aggressive, prepared to do battle with the enemies of the Lord, bring the apocalypse, end the reign of decadence and win the final victory for God, truth and submission to the divine will.

  Not all anti-modern religion is violent. To the contrary, highly religious Jews (Haredim) are usually quietist, as are Christian groups like the Mennonites and the Amish, and Muslim groups like the Sufis. What they seek is simply the opportunity to live apart from the world, construct communities in the light of their values, and come close to God in mind and soul. In their different ways they are testaments to grace.

  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.

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  It demands a response, but from whom? Intellectuals have faced extraordinarily violent reactions to their work. 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.

  In Holland in 2004, Theo van Gogh, who made the film Submission, was murdered in broad daylight in central Amsterdam, shot several times at close range, then knifed in an attempted beheading. The 2005 Danish cartoons led to violent demonstrations across Africa, Asia and the Middle East in which at least two hundred people died.

  After a 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg by Pope Benedict XVI, five churches were attacked in the West Bank and Gaza, a sixty-five-year-old Italian nun was murdered in Mogadishu and a Christian priest abducted and beheaded in Mosul. In Paris the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, were firebombed in 2011 and attacked by terrorists in January 2015 and the editor, cartoonists and other staff killed. In a global age, speech is no longer free.

  The most vociferous response has come from the ‘new atheists’, a group that emerged after the 9/11 attacks. Sadly they ruined their case by caricature, making the claims, palpably false, that all religion leads to violence and most violence can be traced back to religion. This is taking a pneumatic drill to perform microsurgery. All religions have had their violent moments, as have all substitutes for religion, and they have all also achieved periods of tolerance, generosity of spirit and peace.

  In general, the West has suffered from the tendency to fight the last battle, not the next. The Cold War produced, in figures like Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, great defenders of freedom. Their target, though, was the totalitarian regime of Stalinist Russia. They showed, successfully, that a Marxist utopia is in principle impossible since the great ideals, such as freedom and equality, conflict so that the more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

  The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain that freedom was preferable to slavery, Popper that open societies were better than closed ones, and Berlin that negative liberty was better than its positive counterpart. But so insistent were they that no truth is final that the effect of their work, albeit unintentionally, was to give strength to the principle of moral relativism.

  Moral relativism is no defence whatsoever against those currently waging war against the West and its freedoms. If relativism is true, then nothing can be said truly or absolutely to be wrong. As a matter of subjective belief I may regard the killing of civilians, the use of children as human shields and the enslavement of young girls as bad. However, I will then have to concede that you see things differently. You believe it is a sacred imperative undertaken for the greater glory of God. Our values are different because our worldviews are, to use Isaiah Berlin’s word, incommensurable. Such discourse may have made compelling sense in the serene surroundings of Oxford during the long peace that prevailed for half a century after the Second World War. But it is utterly inadequate to the challenge today.

  What then is the alternative? For this we need to travel back to the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries following the Reformation. There was war in France between Catholics and Huguenots between 1562 and 1598, followed by the devastating Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648. There are striking parallels between then and today.

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  As now, the unrest began with a revolution in information technology. The technology was printing, developed by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century. Many inventions have changed the world, but when there is a change in the way we record and transmit information, the repercussions are more systemic, transforming institutions, cultures and even the way people think.

  The new technology made it easier and cheaper to connect with ever wider populations. The result was a spread of literacy, a democratisation of access to knowledge, and a subsequent challenge to all existing hierarchies of power. Then as now, the primary expression of the change was religious – Luther’s Reformation, begun when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517.

  Most of the basic doctrines set out by Luther in the early sixteenth century had already been formulated two centuries earlier by John Wycliffe in Oxford. The reason they did not spread then but did later was the impact of printing itself. The first book to be widely printed was the Bible. In England alone it has been estimated that more than a million Bibles and New Testaments were published between 1517 and 1640. Luther’s own declaration was transmitted by the press. Within fifteen days it had appeared throughout Germany and within three weeks printing presses in three different towns were turning out copies. By 1546, a total of 430 separate editions of his biblical translations had appeared in print.

  The result was a century of religious war, transformation of the map of Europe, the beginning of the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the birth of a new political dispensation, ushered in by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, based on sovereign nation states and the balance of power. It is this entire system that, according to Henry Kissinger’s World Order, is currently at risk.

  What printing was to the Reformation, the Internet is to radical political Islam, turning it into a global force capable of inciting terror and winning recruits throughout the world. The extremists have understood that in many ways religion was made for the twenty-first century. It is a more global force than nation states. Religious radicals use the new electronic media with greater sophistication than their secular counterparts. And they have developed organisational structures to fit our time.

  Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom argued in The Starfish and the Spid
er 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. That is what has happened to the many successor movements of al-Qaeda.

  So it is worth returning to the seventeenth century to see what ended the wars of religion then, giving birth to the modern world and transforming the West into the vanguard of civilisation, overtaking China on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire on the other.

  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.

  Not all of these thinkers were religious. Hobbes and Spinoza were both considered atheists in their time. Milton was one of the great religious poets and Locke was a Socinian Christian. Nonetheless, all four drew their political ideas primarily from the Hebrew Bible. One of their most important principles, found also in the Qur’an (Al-Baqara 256), is that there should be no compulsion in religion.

  Those principles remain valid today, but there is one major difference between now and then. In the seventeenth century, the primary movement was against the religious power of the Catholic Church in favour of the secularisation of the various societal domains. Today the revolution, at least in the Middle East, is against secularism of two different kinds. The first is the secular nationalism of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, regimes widely seen to be corrupt and oppressive. The second is the secular culture of the West, judged by those for whom tradition resonates to be decadent, materialist and soul-destroying. 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.