It's About the Hate: Targeting Religious Worshipers

Christians targeted during worship by violent extremists in Sri Lanka.

Muslims targeted during worship by violent extremists in New Zealand.

Jews targeted during worship by violent extremists in the United States, in Pittsburgh this fall and today in San Diego.

In all cases the root evil is an us/them ideology of hate. The in-groups and out-groups that the ideology latches onto may be different, but that's ultimately incidental. What matters is the hate.

The agents of hate aren't made that way by some feature of the wider faith tradition, ethnicity, etc., with which they identify. Hate always has a cover story, but the hate comes first. If the hate springs from someone who wears Christianity as a label, you can be sure that the ugliest verses in the Bible are lifted up and the call to love explained away. If the hate springs from someone who wears Islam as a label, you can be sure that the ugliest verses of the Koran are lifted up and the calls for decency and respect across differences explained away.

Hate isn't motivated by anything about its target, but it needs a target. And it needs vindication, some "purpose" that the agents of hate can give themselves over to, so that they can see themselves as foot soldiers in a cause greater than themselves. They want to indulge in the most evil of human impulses, but want to do it with a clean conscience. They want to glory in violence and death while experiencing pureness of heart.

And so they make a class of people into monsters, and they conceive themselves to be noble warriors fighting for a chosen group--a group destined for greatness or happiness by virtue of their intrinsic worth, but kept down by the very existence of the monsters.

And so they tell themselves that every death and defeat of those they consider the Children of Darkness is a gain for the Children of Light. They indulge evil in the name of good, declaring themselves heroes, laboring to build some imagined Utopia out of the corpses of the innocent.

In my first book, Is God a Delusion?, I distinguish between religion and religionism. The former offers a way of thinking about the world and a way of living life, something around which communities can form. Religionism is about using religious differences in the same manner that racism uses racial distinctions and nationalism uses nationalities: as a way to divide the world and set us against them. It is about hate above all else.

In fact, it is hard to disentangle this species of hate from others. Is anti-Semitism about religion or ethnicity? Is Islamophobia targeting people because of their faith tradition or because of middle-eastern origins? The answer is that, for the person infected by an ideology of hate, it doesn't matter. Because the point is to have a group to hate, someone that is worthy of hate regardless of who they are and what they do or what kind of life they lead. Automatic, easy hate, hate that can latch on without needing to investigate the actual character or life of the person being hated.

Whether it's religion or ethnicity or race doesn't much matter, and typically an ideology of hate uses more than one thing. Ideologies of hate are vague and ecclectic in who they target, precisely because what matters is to be able to hate someone.

This is why Jews become afraid when Islamophobia is nurtured, why African Americans feel less safe in church when a Mosque has been recently targeted. Because it's about hate. And hate breeds hate.

Such ideological hate, described beautifully by Sartre in his short book, Anti-Semite and Jew, is a demon. It possesses human beings. It is a demon that thrives and spread best under a distinctive set of conditions: when empathy is restricted to people like ourselves, when building walls matters more than building bridges, when communities become insular and polarized, when fear displaces hope, and when security for "us" matters more than compassion.

Christianity is just one faith tradition that urges us to love. All over the world, in different ways and with different words, that call can be heard.

And yet, all over the world, people find ways to put limits on the scope of that call. The more we do the latter--the more we justify limits on love and the less we aspire to love every single other person (even when we fail, as we inevitably do)--the easier it becomes for ideologies of hate to take root.

And here's the thing: we can't control others' commitment to loving widely. We can only choose in our own case, and invite others to follow our example. And as hateful rhetoric becomes louder--as it finds its way into more prominent places--love has to become louder, too.

When hate spreads, we must look for ways to amplify the voice of extravagant love.

Fred Phelps isn't Dead

Well, I suppose in a technical sense he’s dead.

And depending on what you believe, you might suppose his immortal soul lives on in some other realm. I like to imagine he’s been astonished into silent weeping by the radically inclusive love of God, and that the self-loathing he tried to slather onto others here on earth has been flaking off under the force of that love.

I like to imagine that his old mantra, “God hates fags,” has been replaced by a new one: “Even me? You love even me?”

But when I say that Fred Phelps isn’t dead, I mean that his spirit of dogmatic pugnacity lives on. That signature Phelpsian hatred—wrapped up in a message of divine mandate, bow-tied with Bible-verses, and then shoved in our faces as if it were the gift of Christ to humanity—is alive and well.

And it comes at us in more and less blatant forms.

Atrocity and Empathy: How to Answer Anders Breivik’s Desire to Speak

Anders Behring Breivik, the homegrown Norwegian terrorist responsible for murdering close to a hundred Norwegians on Friday, wants a chance to explain why he did it—or more precisely, why his acts were “atrocious but necessary”. It’s as if he thinks mass murder should give one a public platform.


In a sense, it already has: Who would’ve paid attention to his more-than-thousand-page manifesto and other internet writings (or helpful summaries of them) before he set off a bomb in downtown Oslo and then went on a killing rampage at a youth summer camp?

Other extremists, perhaps. Scholars trying to understand the character of European neofascism and related groups. Anti-terrorism agencies trying (imperfectly) to anticipate when words and bluster are about to spill over into overt violence. But the general public? Before Breivik’s horrific acts, they could’ve cared less.

And their indifference is perfectly justified. Breivik has nothing new to say. He’s just repeating the same old formula of hate. Jean-Paul Sartre already provided a brilliant analysis of the psychological underpinnings of that formula in his classic Anti-Semite and Jew. Recently deceased Brown philosopher John Ladd has helpfully spelled out the main structure and precepts of ideological group hatred, in the pursuit of an understanding of what drives collective violence, why it’s so intractable, and how we might respond (I've outlined his thinking in the last chapter of Is God a Delusion?, but the original article appears in the anthology Justice, Law, and Violence). These things are worth reading, if only for the sake of recognizing in ourselves the attenuated traces of such thinking, the stamp of ancient tribalism.

Breivik fills in Ladd’s framework with his own anti-Muslim, anti-multiculturalist details. But it’s the same old stuff. He embodies and lives out the psychology Sartre described. But explosions and atrocity don’t make this sludge any more worthwhile.

Nevertheless, our need to understand drives us towards news accounts of who he was and what motivated him. The need to understand what lies behind atrocities is very basic, and I think it is especially felt by the victims—both direct and indirect—of horror. “How could you?” is not simply a rhetorical question.

And so I say let him speak.

But not yet. If he spoke now it would just be the same drivel we’ve heard before, devoid of insight. All he knows is his mad rhetoric. He doesn’t yet understand how such falsehoods, such twisted ideas about reality and the human condition, could drive him to do what he did. At this moment he remains under the delusion that he did what he did because it was justified. Justified. Sharing such delusions will not answer our need. It will not answer the anguished “How could you?”

And so I say let him speak, but not before all the surviving victims, the families and loved ones of the victims, and all those affected by Friday’s horror have first had the opportunity to confront him with their pain and rage and loss. This may take awhile.

And it isn’t enough that the victims have the chance to confront the man who shattered so many lives. They need for him to really hear and understand.

In other words, let him speak, but only after his surviving victims have not only had their say, but succeeded in breaking through the defensive walls of ideology and self righteousness that keep people like Breivik from truly comprehending the experiences of their victims and confronting the evil of what they’ve done.

Let him speak, but first make sure that “atrocity” is more than just a word to him. Require that before making his case for what he did, he sincerely feel in his very bones the trauma of each child he stalked and the shattering agony of those whose loved ones were lost to his bullets and his bomb.

After all, what does it mean to say an atrocity is “necessary”? Breivik surely does not mean that he was determined by the laws of physics to do what he did—in which case we should view Breivik’s actions in the way we view deadly volcanic eruptions and tornados. Breivik doesn’t mean that. He means that his murderous acts had to be done in order to achieve a greater good.

In other words, Breivik wants to say that the “good” achieved by his deeds is greater than the evil done. If that’s what he wants to say, then let’s insist he actually try to understand the magnitude of the evil he’s done. And he won’t understand that until he can genuinely empathize with those he’s harmed.

My first cousin’s daughter, Marin, was in downtown Oslo when the bomb exploded. My relatives in Norway were frantic, terrified they’d lost this promising, beautiful life just before she was about to embark on a high school exchange year in the United States. Thankfully she was safe, in a different part of the city from where the bomb exploded.

But two of her cousins were less lucky. They were at camp.

No one immediately understood the magnitude of this greater crime at the campground on Utøya island, this mass murder of children and young adults—no one except those who were there. Marin’s cousins were. Both survived, although the older sister was shot in the leg and lay for an hour surrounded by the corpses of her friends, listening to him shooting and, as she describes it, whooping with glee (her harrowing account--in Norwegian, I'm afraid--can be found here). The younger sister played dead and was not physically injured.

Both survived, and yet I do not doubt that something profound was killed in each of them that day. Witnesses reported that Breivik was being meticulous about his murderous work, and so was blowing the heads off of those who were already on the ground. Marin’s cousins survived because they were lucky, because Breivik didn’t have time to finish his work. Did they know that he was walking among the dead, putting a bullet in each brain? What would that have done to them? What was shattered in them by what Breivik did that day?

Perhaps it was the capacity for trust, for optimism, or for sleeping peacefully at night. So let’s tell Breivik that before he’s allowed to make his case to the Norwegian people, he must first share the terrified dreams of each survivor. He must wake up screaming as he imagines himself swimming desperately for safety, unwilling to trust the boats coming to help him. He must sob through dreams of lying in a heap of dead bodies as a murderous madman fires again and again, extinguishing human lives for the sake of an ideology of hate utterly disconnected from Goodness and Truth.

Until he is in a position to demonstrate that he is not just pretending empathy, but really feels every bullet fired as if it were shot into his own flesh, every bit of shattered glass as if it were tearing through his torso…until he experiences the magnitude of the evil he’s done as if it were shredding him from within…until then, he should not be allowed to make his case. Because until he feels all these things, he won’t understand the atrocity he wants to call necessary.

There’s another name for what I’m describing. It’s the pain of redemption. It’s the experiencing of being welded back into the good, and seeing what one has done from the standpoint of the good. To stand at such a place—the only standpoint from which anyone can, with authority, declare that achieving an aim is worth the cost—is to experience with absolute clarity the depths of one’s own evil, and to experience it as one who is devoted fully and truly to the good.

There is no anguish greater than this. It is hell. And in this sense of “hell” I hope to God that hell is real. Because hell in this sense is no different from salvation.

Of course, when Breivik meets this condition for being given the opportunity to speak—when he is redeemed—he’ll see that his aims in perpetrating horror were nothing more that the projections of his ideological hatred, and hence, being evil, could not possibly outweigh the atrocity of his means. He’ll come to see what he’s done as evil all the way down.

Is it possible for someone like Breivik to be redeemed in this way? I believe it is, but this belief is a religious one. A religious hope. It is the hope that the kind of God described by Christianity is real. If so, then love wins. If so, then Breivik will experience something more profound than the outward suffering that condemnation and punishment can inflict. If so, then the power of ideological hatred will not ultimately prevail, even in the hearts of its most brutal advocates.

But if there is a transcendent God like this, our experience of evil rampant, of horrors unchecked in this life, speaks to a distance between us and the divine. It is a distance imposed, perhaps, by the strictures of material existence, of time and space—a divine withdrawal necessitated by the logic of creation, by the need to fashion a space for that-which-is-not-God (an idea expressed in the kabbalistic notion of Tzimtzum). In such a world, we cannot sit and wait for God. We must be His instruments, through which redemptive power can move and change the world—or the twisted spirit of a man like Breivik. And even our wrath, our outraged “Look what you’ve done! Look and understand!”—in other words, our insistence that the agents of atrocity empathize with their victims—even this can be a channel for redemptive grace.

My hope is that Goodness is, in the end, strong enough to blaze like sunlight even into the darkest places, even into the souls of the damned.

When it does, then by all means let Breivik speak. Until then, let him listen in silence.