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.

Shaken: On the Anniversary of the OKC Bombing

When it happened at 9:02 AM on April 19, 1995, I was living far away, in Tacoma, Washington. I had never been to Oklahoma. Nevertheless it shook me.

I had no idea that one day I would live just a few dozen miles north of the site of the attack, that when people asked me where my home was, I'd answer "Oklahoma." Nevertheless it shook me.

I didn't know that I would marry a woman who heard the explosion and felt the Earth shake under her feet, who would remember the hours and days that followed as a haze of stunned horror and moments of involuntary weeping. Nevertheless it shook me.

I did not imagine standing on the memorial site, looking at the the rows of graceful chairs representing the dead and then noticing all the little ones, the ones that stood for the children gone. Nevertheless it shook me.

I did not know that one day I would recognize the distinctive shape of the Survivor Tree, and that it would become for me a symbol of hope in the midst of devastation. But like the world I sat transfixed by the aftermath, unable to wrap my mind around what has happened.

It shook me because it struck in the heart of America--not some big city on the coast that you might imagine the target of terrorist violence, but a city in the heartland that stood for every American town. It was a place that said, "This can happen anywhere."

It shook me because the perpetrator was an American, a disaffected young man so filled with ideological rage and righteousness, so lost and clawing for purpose that he could embrace the delusion that meaning would spring from a war against his own country, his own people, that the deaths of innocents and the shattering of innocence would be some kind of vindication of his life. He was a terrorist who said, "I could come from anywhere."

For years I'd been a student of violence, an advocate of nonviolent methods of resolving conflicts. I'd spoken out against the way that Federal law enforcement agencies were handling the Branch Davidian standoff even before it reached its tragic culmination. But I never saw it coming. I never saw how that bungled siege might help turn an American veteran into a terrorist against his own people even as he imagined himself still a soldier in some righteous war. I never truly understood the power of ideology, wedded to the right psychology, to turn a human being into an agent of horror.

It shook me. And when I see the images and hear the stories, when I stand at the memorial site looking at what difference a single moment can make in the world, I am shaken still.