A Plea: Do not Speak about the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict in Ways that Exacerbate It

Please, my friends, look for ways to speak out against injustice and horror that do not promote the us/them ideologies that lie behind so much injustice and horror.

I am think now about the horror in Gaza and the horrific attack in October that triggered it. I am no expert on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the cultural, religious, political, and economic realities that are in play in shaping the conflict and which need to be taken into account in formulating solutions. But what I want to say does not, I think, rely on any such expertise. 

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing and violating and kidnapping innocents, I have no doubt that those who planned and carried out the attacks justified it by discounting the lives of those they harmed: people they defined wholly in terms of group membership. Being part of the wrong group was enough to morally disqualify their victims.

When I look at the Netanyahu administration’s prosecution of its war against Hamas, I see a single-minded determination to wipe out Hamas so that its members can never harm Israeli citizens again. That single-mindedness has resulted in what looks from where I stand to be a shocking indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians. More than that, it is actively fueling a humanitarian disaster, one that has and will continue to be a source of suffering and death far beyond what bombs and bullets inflict directly, especially among the most vulnerable populations (children, the sick, and the elderly). 

In short, Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza relies on means and tactics that have predictably generated a death toll among Palestinian civilians dwarfing what Hamas inflicted in October—and the death toll keeps rising. It is hard to fathom a justification for this that does not involve a discounting of Palestinian lives just because they belong to “them” rather than “us.”

We’ve heard that “hate feeds hate,” but the principle is broader than this. Even absent overt hate, any way of thinking that cares mostly or only about “our” lives and morally discounts “their” lives drives patterns of conflict in which each side sees the actions of the other as a new outrage that justifies a response the other side will see as a new outrage, and so on ad infinitum.

The October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks predictably inspired a war to wipe out Hamas, a war that is causing untold suffering and death among Palestinians who were just trying to live their lives (lives that were already hard). And that war will, predictably, produce people seething with outrage against those they blame for their shattered lives—an outrage that will, predictably, inspire new recruits into terrorist organizations like Hamas (even if the original Hamas is totally wiped out), fueling more acts of terror that harm innocent people just trying to live their lives.

When we speak out against injustices and horrors, this is the reality into which we speak. And we must be mindful of this reality in choosing what to say. I don’t have good answers, nor do I claim to always know the right thing to say. But I think it is important to look for ways to speak that do not reinforce cycles of violence. 

And as someone with Jewish friends and loved ones (most of whom, by the way, are deeply disturbed by what is being done in Gaza), I urge those who raise their voices against the ongoing horrors in Gaza to speak about it in ways that do not feed into anti-Semitic ideologies. When you share memes or posts about the conflict on social media, I urge you to be careful not to amplify, however unwittingly, anti-Semitic dog whistles.

Of course, the same holds for amplifying words and ideas that demonize Palestinians or diminish the significance of their lives and rights and human beings.

Palestinians have for a long time lived under conditions no one should live under. Israel has for generations now been crouched in a defensive posture in a region filled with those who deny its legitimacy and seek its demise. A path forward, one that offers hope of a better life for everyone, is more important than parsing blame and weighing past wrongs. But anger and pain and resentment about past wrongs impede the efforts of well-meaning people to implement solutions. 

I cannot but believe that a two-state solution is the only path forward. And even if a two-state solution is no Kumbaya society in which Palestinians and Israelis share the land, living together in perfect harmony, it is a solution that requires co-existence as neighboring states. Achieving this will require unprecedented levels of ingenuity and dedication. As such, it will require that people set aside their us/them thinking, or at least enough people do so to reach a kind of tipping-point, one that allows for new policy decisions, new talking points, and mutual perspective-taking.

And this last will happen only if each of us takes responsibility for trying to speak about the conflict, the injustices and the suffering and the blinkered thinking, in ways that do not reinforce ideologies of division. 

When I say "each of us," I especially have in mind those of us who are not caught up personally in the conflict, who have at least some capacity to adopt an outsider's perspective. Because if we cannot avoid reinforcing us/them thinking and hateful ideologies, what hope is there for those closer to the conflict?

Taking such responsibility is hard work. It may mean pausing and reflecting on the content of a social media meme before clicking "share." It may mean reading reasonable and thoughtful articulations of opposing perspectives. It may mean thinking about word choice before we speak, and leaving behind the simple sound-bite in favor of something more in-depth. And it probably means an openness to hearing criticisms of what we do say, because even if we put in the work, that doesn't mean we will get things right.

But doing that work is something each of us can do, and if enough of us do it, the cumulative impact can change the cultural landscape in ways that can open up new, more hopeful possibilities.  

Responding to Trump's Administrations: Scapegoats and Meaningful Resistance

Yesterday I was reading about René Girard and his understanding of how societies use the scapegoating mechanism as a kind of pressure valve to channel the violent energies caused by rising conflict: people collectively identify a sacrificial scapegoat towards whom they channel all that violent energy. They "sacrifice" the scapegoat to "the gods" and achieve a kind of catharsis that brings in its wake a temporary peace.

As I was reading, I was (naturally) thinking about the current administration. That administration, as I see it, has invoked a particular form of this scapegoating mechanism as part of an effort to win the support of disaffected, white, working-class Americans. I say a "particular form," because what the administration has done is invoked divisive us/them ideology that divides the world between an in-group and an out-group, and it is this out-group that becomes the scapegoat. Not an individual, but an entire class of human beings. "These others," they say, "are the source of our troubles, and when these others are removed or marginalized our problems will be solved."

This ideological othering is the most dangerous kind of scapegoating. It sets community against community, achieving the temporary peace within a community by putting itself at war (figuratively or literally) with another community. When the targeted others are already represented in a diverse community, then the war first begins internally, requiring a kind of purge. The potential for widespread and enduring horror is quite significant if the leadership of a nation is allowed to carry out a vision defined by such scapegoating of the ideological other.

So when there is a danger of this happening, or when it is already underway, resistance is essential. (I am convinced a resistance movement must be thoroughly nonviolent, for reasons I won't explore here.) But yesterday, as I was reading about Girardian scapegoating, I began to worry that some voices in the burgeoning resistance in the US were turning Trump into a scapegoat, trying to heap on him the weight of all that is wrong in American society so that his removal from office could become the sacrificial ritual that would, in the Girardian scapegoat mythology, make everything right again.

Thinking about this, I wrote up a quick little parable or drama, meaning to warn against this possibility. Then I posted it here.

Feedback from friends on social media as well as on this blog have led me to conclude that the parable was at best ripe for being misunderstood and at worst a dangerously misleading vision. More precisely, I worry that my little parable suggested a false equivalency between two very different things: on the one hand, the kind of threat posed by a presidential administration that lifts up and legitimizes ideological hate in the course of implementing policies that scapegoat whole classes of people; on the other hand, the kind of threat posed if those who resist that administration's efforts were to fall prey in significant numbers to the scapegoating instinct.

These two things are not equivalent.

What I want to say now is this. I think there is enormous danger when the reins of power fall into the hands of those who openly preach ideological division and encourage scapegoating of whole classes of people. Those who see this happening have an obligation to speak out about the threat, to repudiate the othering, and to stand (nonviolently) against the policies and policy proposals that would implement such scapegoating of entire groups. There needs to be a meaningful resistance.

I suspect that the sort of approach that Michael Moore lays out in his "10-Point Plan to Stop Trump" would (if a large enough number of people get on board) prove quite effective in neutralizing Trump's ability to enact his ideological agenda, if not pushing him out of office. But while an action plan is crucial to any organized nonviolent campaign, the spirit in which that campaign is waged is just as important, especially for long-term success.

Most importantly, a resistance movement must avoid becoming the thing it stands against. This means, first and foremost, that it must avoid ideological othering. But just as importantly, it must also avoid the milder scapegoating that treats Trump as the problem and his removal as the solution that will restore peace and prosperity to America.

If a nonviolent resistance movement against Trump's agenda falls prey to the scapegoating instinct, that is not in any way equivalent to an administration that is trying to implement us/them ideology on a global scale. Not even close. Our world will be safer if that administration fails to implement its ideology or, better yet, stops trying either because it has been rendered toothless by our checks-and-balances (supported by a strong grass-roots movement) or has been removed through impeachment or resignation. But my worry is this: a resistance that falls prey to mythic scapegoat-thinking will, if successful in removing Trump's administration, quickly move from the elation of success to the comforting sense that all is now well, as if the problem were solved.

Furthermore, if a successful campaign is defined by the scapegoating of Trump, this may actually fuel the us/them ideology in this country, worsening the divisions and the polarized animosity. Because here's the thing: Trump is the hero of a lot of people. He symbolically represents them. If it's just about ousting Trump--and his ardent supporters are seen as nothing but a bunch of idiots that deserve to be shoved back under the rocks they crawled out from--then the danger posed by Trump's brand of ideological leadership will be alleviated only at the cost of intensifying the divisions that put him into power in the first place. The next Trump who comes along can awaken the same forces, and they may be angrier than ever.

I have been in the habit of expressing these concerns by saying that Trump is just a symptom of a far deeper problem--a problem of ideological divisiveness that needs to be separated from the people who preach it and repudiated in much the way the Martin Luther King, Jr., repudiated racial oppression by insisting that racism, not racists, were the enemy.

But a commenter on this blog, raverroes, has pointed out to me that this is the wrong way to characterize Trump. Rather than being a symptom, he is a catalyst.

This strikes me as exactly. When he was campaigning, Trump's shameless indulgence in pugnacious rhetoric encouraged others who harbored divisive ideologies to step out of the shadow of shame that kept them from expressing their hate boldly. The social constraints against openly abusing Muslims and other minorities in public were, in Trump's rhetoric, lumped together with "political correctness" and dismissed along with its excesses. And when Trump was elected, that event carried a symbolic meaning for at least some of those among Trump's base who were most in the grip of ideologies of hate: The social forces that repudiate acting on our hateful feelings have been defeated. We are free to hate out loud.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that every Trump voter took home that message. A substantial percentage of Trump voters were never inspired by his divisive rhetoric and blatant us/them ideologies in the first place. They voted for him in spite of those things, perhaps not seeing them as the existential threat to our values and social life that I take them to be. I know people--who are surely representative of many more--who held their noses as they voted for Trump, finding him odious but thinking that his excesses would be restrained by the establishment and that his administration would make SCOTUS appointments that would favor a pro-life agenda. Others thought his promise of good jobs, of looking out for the working class, eclipsed his talk about Muslim bans and registries (which, they thought, was just talk and wouldn't be something he could implement anyway, it being unconstitutional and all).

But even if most Trump voters were not inspired by Trump's promulgation of ideologies of division, those in our society who did embrace such ideologies flocked to him and were emboldened by him. He became a catalyst. And that catalyst is now occupying the most powerful political office on planet Earth.

This, then, raises the question of what to do in response. The root problem is not any one person but an underlying pattern of thinking and acting. The root problem is divisive ideology and the illusory promise of tribal unity offered by sacrificing scapegoats. There are deep social structures and unconscious cultural forces that feed such ideology, that perpetuate such false promises. We need to work against these forces in a way that doesn't lead us to become seduced by their lure. But we also confront the reality that a catalyst for these forces now occupies the Oval Office. I'm not sure his aim is to be such a catalyst.  I suspect it is more about ego-gratification. But he remains a catalyst.

I remain convinced that we compromise any meaningful resistance to divisive ideology and its harmful effects if we turn a catalyst into a scapegoat. But raverroes has highlighted for me the crucial difference between symptoms and catalysts, and so I also think we compromise any meaningful resistance if we treat someone who has functioned as a catalyst as nothing but a symptom.

There is one final conditioning force that I believe any meaningful resistance needs to internalize. I think we lose the moral center that must define a nonviolent movement if we see only the catalyst and forget that the catalyst is first and foremost a person--a human person who has been thrown into a position he never expected to be in and who is plagued by his own demons. A person gripped by an irrepressible urge for approval while sitting in a role that by its nature draws relentless critical scrutiny. A person who is surely angry and miserable, whose spirit is layered with crud and who is desperately trying to get rid of the crud by rubbing it off on those around him. Where there is a human soul there is the need for the kind of compassion that reaches across the divides of human conflict and affirms our shared human condition even as we stand firm against the choices and behaviors that we are convinced are wrong and harmful.

The question is how to cultivate the right spirit and weave that spirit into an action plan that stands up for the vulnerable, that says no to ideological hate and scapegoating, that impedes the advance of injustice--and that can do so without falling into the scapegoating instinct even when such a potent catalyst for ideological division occupies the most visible and powerful office in the world.

I don't have clear answers, but I think we need to ask the questions.

Resisting Feedback Loops of Ideological Violence: Answering a Commenter's Question

In a comment on my previous post, Mike H asked (simply playing Devil's Advocate) how I would respond to the following claim:

"The very fact that those who oppose an all-out ban bring up the likelihood that a ban would actually increase terrorism in the future seems to prove the point - that there is an inherent problem with what we call 'terrorism' in the very essence of Islam that is just waiting to explode and which could awaken at any time or place."

Since my answer was too long to post as a comment, I post it here instead:

It is part of the very essence of ideologies of division that they operate in this way, but Islam needn't be formulated in such ideological terms. In fact, many Muslims (all the Muslims I know personally) reject such an ideological understanding of Islam.

But divisive ideologies are real--and you can find them alive and well in the Muslim world. Unfortunately, they are also alive and well everywhere else in the world. And that creates the danger of feedback loops of escalating hostility unless we stand against these ideologies.

Here's how these feedback loops work. Suppose you have two groups, A and B, and within each group there is a subgroup that views itself as locked in a zero-sum struggle with the other group. Acts by members of A that treat all of B as the enemy strengthen the position of those within B who claim that all of A is the enemy, earning them more recruits and greater strength. This in turn will lead to more acts by members of B treating all of A as the enemy...and the feedback loop is off and running.

Of course, there's the question of whether something in the Koran or in Islam's history and traditions lends itself to such us/them ideology. And the reality is this: if you leaf through the Koran, you can find texts to support such ideological thinking. I'm no expert in Muslim history, but you can probably find things there to support such ideological thinking, too. But I've leafed through the copy of the Koran that I got when I went to a Muslim open house, and so I know you can also find things there to oppose ideological divisiveness.

The same is true of the Christian and Jewish Scriptures and histories/traditions: you can find plenty of texts that support us/them ideology; and you can find texts that oppose such ideology. What you do with these complex texts and traditions depends on the interpretive lens you bring to bear. The more that ideologies of division prevail within a religious community, the more that texts and traditions will be interpreted in ways that feed those ideologies.

The Muslims I know personally read the Koran and their tradition in ways utterly opposed to the ideologies that fuel terrorism and underwrite dreams of Muslim world-domination. U.S. policies that single out Muslims in a sweeping way will cause them substantial hardship and will inspire in them fear for the future and outrage against the administration, but will almost certainly not inspire them to adopt ideologies of division and turn them into terrorists.

But there are those on the fence who will be pushed towards embracing this ideological us/them version of Islam by such policies. Of course, most who end up in this ideological camp don't commit acts of terror (although they may cheer them). But policies that treat all of Islam as the enemy will not merely help to push more people towards extremist views but will also push more of those with these extremist views into extremist actions.

But this isn't a distinctively Muslim thing. The same is true on the other side of the divide. Most Americans don't view all of Islam as the enemy. But some do. And if a handful of Islamist extremists commit another significant terrorist attack on US soil, guess what will happen? The number of Americans who think all Muslims are the enemy will grow (especially if there are prominent voices of authority encouraging it). And of those who harbor such ideology, more will be inspired to strike out against innocent Muslims, committing hate crimes and the like. The position of those in authority who harbor such ideological views will likely be strengthened, making it more likely that America will implement military policies that strike out at the Muslim world in ways that harm innocent Muslims. And it will be less likely that this cost in innocent lives will be treated as a weighty loss.

When this happens, ideological extremists in the Muslim world will likely say something like the following: "These actions by the American government show that there is something in the very essence of the West that is just waiting to explode against us!"

Put another way, this kind of language is part of the ideology of division that fuels inter-group conflict and makes such conflict escalate and become increasingly entrenched. We can step away from escalating cycles of violence only by resisting these ideas--only by stepping back and blaming the ideology of division itself, manifested on all sides, instead of fueling it on our side by saying that there is something in the very essence of "them" that causes the problem.

On Refusing to Play the "Who's Persecuted Worse?" Game: Muslim and Christian Edition

I am one of a number of progressive Christian writers who has devoted considerable attention in recent months to Western persecution of Muslims. I've certainly written more on this issue than I have about Muslim persecution of Christians.

Every once in a while, I find myself taken to task for this--often in connection with horror stories about brutal treatment of Christians in Muslim-majority countries. A friend will point out that these minority Christians are in far greater danger of being harmed for their faith than any Muslim in the West.

The message, put simply, is this: "They persecute us when they're in power worse than we persecute them when we're in power."

I don't want to play that game. I don't want to focus on which group persecutes the other more egregiously. Persecution, wherever it occurs, is awful. Wherever it occurs, it needs to stop (and probably won't).

But I can already hear the response: If persecution is the problem, then isn't it relevant to consider where the persecution is worst, and then direct my efforts mainly there? Maybe Christians minorities suffer more in Muslim majority countries than Muslim minorities suffer in the West. If so, shouldn't I care about that? Should I then focus my energies on denouncing Muslims for targeting Christians instead of the other way around?

Let me explain why I don't.

It isn't because the persecution of Christians in some parts of the world isn't a problem. It isn't because my heart doesn't bleed when I hear about a Christian boy in Pakistan who was beaten and then set on fire after admitting he was a Christian to the two men accosting him.

The reason is because this attack on a Christian boy in a Muslim-majority country springs from the same deep ideological well as this brutal attack on a Muslim woman in Toronto, or this attack on a Muslim woman in southern France, or this shooting of a Muslim taxi driver in Pittsburgh, or any number of other recent incidents in which Muslims in the West have been targeted for verbal abuse, vandalism, and violence.

The reason is because all of these attacks are about dehumanizing and assaulting the "other," the one who is different, who isn't one of "us." I look at my world and I see an all-too-human impulse to create in-groups and out-groups, and then target members of the out-group not for anything they have done, but simply for belonging to the wrong group. When the out-group is a minority and the in-group a majority, this ideological targeting can often rise to the level of systematic persecution and oppression.

But if the problem is this sort of us/them ideology and the violence and injustice it inspires, the question for me is how I can best use my voice to address that problem. And here it matters that I am a Christian living in a Christian-majority country where Muslims are far more likely to be the targets of Islamophobic persecution and attacks than the other way around.

My audience is primarily Western, primarily Christian. I could, of course, talk to that mostly-Western audience mostly about other people's propensity to fall into us/them thinking, other groups' conscious and unconscious biases. I could focus my attention on how even moderate Muslims, when they fail to stand against extremist ideology in their own ranks, become part of the problem.

But what effect would that have? It won't cause those other people to pause, to introspect, to think about the ways in which they are promulgating divisiveness. etc.--because they aren't my audience. Will it cause Christians in the West to pause, to introspect, to think about the ways in which they are promulgating divisiveness?

Or will that kind of emphasis only serve to promulgate divisiveness? If I, as a Christian, start focusing on all the times when Muslims have acted badly against Christians, all the ways in which Muslim extremists have assaulted Christians, will that break down the us/them ideologies that I think are the real problem, the deep human propensity that does so much harm?

There is no great mystery here, but it needs saying: When members of one group start denouncing the horrors and crimes committed by another group, that does not tend to reduce in-group/out-group ideology. The way to reduce such ideology is for members of a group to be on guard against the rumblings of such ideological hatred within their own ranks, and to speak out against it when and where they see it happening. I feel called to do exactly that.

I'm an American Christian. As a Christian, I believe in taking the plank out of my own eye before taking the speck out of my neighbor's eyes. I believe that if I want to work against the human tendency to divide the world into us and them, I need to start with myself and my community.

We live in a world where there are different religions, different nations, different cultural traditions. Humanity is divided into groups, and that's not going to change. What might change is the tendency of these groups to vilify each other. What might arise is a world where people who are different can co-exist in greater harmony, a world where we dehumanize each other less. How should I work for that?

I can, of course, try to talk to other groups about their tendency to wrongly vilify and dehumanize my group. There are times when all of us may be called to do just that--especially when we or those close to us have been the targets of ideological hate, and our impassioned words can give a human face to what has been dehumanized.

But in general I have far more influence within my own communities, the ones I understand, the ones whose languages I speak. If in-group/out-group ideology is a problem, then the first step is to turn to my group and say, "Let's not do this ourselves. Let's not get sucked in. Instead of chastising moderate Muslims when they fail to sufficiently repudiate the extremism among them, let's model what that's like. Let's be what we want to see in the world. Then we will be far better positioned to work for change."

"Who is more egregiously persecuted?" is a blame-game. I want to play the change-game. And change, meaningful change, begins with ourselves and moves out from there.

Religion vs Religionism: The Case of Islam

Predictably, Western responses to the terror attacks in Paris have sparked ongoing discussions that amount to a kind of Western forum on Islam.

I have been actively engaged in some of these conversations. Through those conversations, I've encountered more than once a view that I want to address with some care on this blog. It goes something like this:

"Islam as a religion is bad, but Muslims as people are not. In fact, most Muslims have a basic decency that causes them to resist the pernicious teachings of their faith. But they are capable of displaying moderation only because their conscience and humanity have led them to reject what Islam really teaches. The majority of Muslims are decent people in spite of Islam, while the minority are terrorists because of it." 

A good example of this perspective can be found here. In many ways, the reasoning is similar to the "love the sinner, hate the sin" rhetoric that many conservative Christians invoke with respect to homosexuality. But in this case, it's "I love Muslims but hate their religion." They say it's Islam that needs to be opposed, not Muslims (who are victims of a bad religion along with the rest of the world). They resist the "Isalmophobia" label (just as Christians who condemn same-sex intimacy resist the "homophobia" label), and they generally concede that the majority of Muslims oppose the violence of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

What are we to make of this stance towards Islam?

First of all, I think there is something initially suspicious about defining a religion's essence in terms of something that the majority of that religion's adherents repudiate. But I don't want to explore that issue directly here. What I want to focus on are the serious pragmatic dangers I see in this anti-Islam perspective. I say anti-Islam, instead of Islamophopic, for a reason. I think it is too quick to simply lump this perspective in with more overt expressions of Islamophobia. But precisely because it is less obviously pernicious, I think this view has the potential to do harm in ways that overt Islamophobia can't.

Let me develop my concerns in terms of a distinction I made in my first book, Is God a Delusion? There, I distinguished between religion and religionism. By "religion," I mean a way of life and way of seeing our world meant to offer a distinctive understanding of ultimate reality and a path to orienting our lives in relation to that reality. By "religionism" I mean an ideology of division that uses religious identity markers as the basis for distinguishing in-groups and out-groups and representing them as locked in a zero-sum struggle that allows no quarter.

In other words, religionism sees the chosen group--selected by religious identity markers--as pitted against another group in something like the way racism sees different races as pitted against each other. Any gain for the "other" is a loss for the chosen group (and vice versa). The chosen group has a mission--to usher in the good and the right--whose achievement demands that the other be put down, marginalized, or destroyed.

Most religious traditions have, among the authorities to which they appeal and the historical and cultural resources from which they draw, a range of elements they can use to delineate a way of life and a way of seeing the world. But their traditions also contain elements that can be exploited by those who seek to build ideological communities of hate.

In other words, they contain elements suited to constructing a religion, and elements suited to constructing religionism. This mix of elements is certainly evident in Islam. There are those who will claim that the resources for religionism are especially strong in Islam. I am not expert enough to speak to the relative degree to which such resources are present in different faith traditions, and dwelling on these differences strikes me as a distraction--a way to chest-thump and say, "My faith is better than yours," rather than focus on the more urgent task.

And what is the more urgent task? It is the task of discouraging religionism, of encouraging faith traditions to focus their resources on building a religion rather than an ideology of hate.

This task cannot be pursued without due attention to those features of a faith tradition that lend themselves to religionism. As such, we cannot be naive. We must avoid rosy glasses. We do no one a favor by pretending that features supporting Islam's brand of religionism don't exist, by obscuring them or hiding them under the rug. In my own faith tradition--Christianity--I try to be conscious of how religionism can creep in. It is only by being realistic about the dangers that I can stand against Christian religionism from within.

Likewise, there are many Muslims who are determined to stand against Islamism from within. The vast majority of Muslims attach their allegiance to Islam not to Islamism, to religion not religionism. As such they can, without denouncing their religion, denounce the use of their tradition's resources to cultivate divisive ideologies that motivate terrorism and violence.

Moderate Muslims are committed to opposing Islamism, to attacking it in terms of the very religious resources that Islamism invokes. To the extent that they do so, they are probably the best hope for overcoming Islamist extremism--and certainly the best hope for overcoming it with minimal bloodshed and pain.

If we ignore their efforts, we cannot honor or support those efforts. And it seems to me that honoring and supporting those efforts is utterly crucial.

Again, let us not be naive or unrealistic. Honoring the work of moderate Muslims does not preclude frank conversations and earnest debates about the challenges of reconciling certain elements of Islam with the values and practices of Western democratic liberalism. Those who respect and honor each other can debate and discuss differences and even offer forceful criticism--because the purpose of such debate and criticism is to help each other grow and pursue the goal of living in community together.

But if we say that all of Islam is the problem, we play into the Islamist us/them division, providing fodder for the narrative that all of Islam is threatened by the West and that the survival of the former requires the latter to be brought low.

If we say that moderate Muslims have betrayed the essentials of their faith, we do nothing to help moderate Muslims in their effort to stand against extremism from within. In fact, we make their efforts more difficult. Instead of honoring them, we label them as sell-outs who don't represent their faith.

And we essentialize the problem of Islamist extremism. We say, in effect, "Extremism is so essential to Islam that there is no way to eliminate extremism without eliminating Islam itself."

Once you have adopted that kind of absolutizing stance towards Islam as a whole--in the face of the majority of moderate Muslims who disavow extremism--you force moderates to rush to the defense of their faith.

At best, you distract them from the task of fighting Islamist extremism. At worst, you fuel the divisiveness that drives religionism, thereby strengthening the extremists and weakening the moderates.

People do not easily give up their religious identities, their traditions, their communities of faith. For people of faith, these things are central to who we are.

It is one thing to invite people to build their identities around those elements of their faith tradition that are about religion rather than religionism, to encourage them to see those elements as what is truly essential, and to celebrate and support the internal efforts of a faith community to fight extremism in those terms. If you do that--if you cheer the message of those who would build their faith tradition around its messages of peace and coexistence--you are not their enemy. Peaceful coexistence is possible (even though you might disagree strongly about many things).

But what if, as an outsider to a faith tradition, you slap the label of "inauthentic sell-outs" on those who would build that faith tradition around peace and coexistence? What if you insist that the "real core" of their faith is its endorsement of us/them extremism?

What if, when confronted with the majority of moderate Muslims, your message to them is this:

"You cannot with integrity be a moderate Muslim. As an outsider to the faith, I understand the faith better than you do and know that it is inherently violent and extremist. If you want to disavow violent extremism with integrity, your only option is to disavow your faith. If you don't disavow your faith, I will conclude that you are lending cover to extremism and implicitly supporting evil." 

If you adopt that view, what are you doing?

You are demanding that they give up their religion.

You are expressing a commitment to wiping from the world something central to their identity.

And when you do that, you help the extremists to construct the picture of zero-sum struggle that defines religionism and feeds cycles of violence. You help to fashion a world in which peaceful co-existence becomes progressively harder to realize.

This is the pathway to spreading the cancer of extremism rather than cutting it out. This is what I fear. This is what I pray we will resist.

Us and Them and Murder: Islamophobic Terrorism

This morning I was greeted by two disturbing pieces of news. First, I read that a Muslim woman, dining at a TGI Friday's last week, found pieces of bacon shoved into the straw of her drink in what appeared to be a deliberate show of disrespect for her religiously-rooted dietary restrictions. The second piece of news was more extreme: Yesterday, three Muslim college students--two sisters and the husband of the elder sister--were murdered in North Carolina. The alleged perpetrator, Craig Hicks, described himself as an anti-theist who was openly hostile to religion.

Here is a brief glimpse at one of the victims, a dental student, who made this video to raise money for a missions project:



The motives for the shooting remain undisclosed, but if they prove to be bound up with Hicks' anti-religious stance, then I think we need to keep two things in mind: First, Hicks' atheism is no more the reason for his violent attack than Islam is the reason for 9/11. In both cases, the problem lies with a kind of ideological targeting of people based on group membership. While Islam can be and has been invoked to underwrite that sort of us/them ideology, other things can be and have been invoked as well--including Christianity and atheism. This fact never justifies sweeping generalizations about the group and its members. In fact, falling prey to such sweeping generalizations is the first step towards embracing the very us/them ideology that is the root problem.

Second, if Hicks targeted his victims because they were Muslim, then we ought to take very seriously the idea that what he did should be called an act of terrorism. Islamophobic terrorism. And even if it isn't terrorism, the ideological patterns of thinking that underwrite terrorism may have played a role: It is easier to kill people if you first ascribe to an ideology that dehumanizes them.

What is terrorism? In my academic work on the subject, I've argued that it has to do with how victims of violence are targeted. Terrorists operate from an us/them ideology that sees every member of an enemy group as a legitimate target. Terrorists may select targets based on strategic or symbolic considerations, but they don't discriminate based on their innocence--because all members of the enemy group are seen as guilty, simply because they belong to that group.

Hence, no one in the targeted group is safe. That's why terrorism terrorizes. Being an American is enough to make you a legitimate target in the eyes of Al Qaeda extremists.

This way of viewing terrorism connect the dots between ideas and violence: If you embrace an ideology that divides the world between "us" and "them," and you portray all of them as collectively guilty, then you are laying the groundwork for terrorist violence. And violence that is done because of this sort of ideological motive is different in kind from violence done for, say, personal gain or jealous rage.

Among other things, those who kill because of allegiance to an ideology of hate are harder to deter. If you see yourself as an agent of the Children of Light fighting a war against the Children of Darkness, you may be perfectly happy to sacrifice yourself for the cause. Threats of punishment won't hold you back.

And that's why the most chilling thing I read this morning wasn't the news report of the triple murder (although that surely chilled me deeply). Instead, it was a comment, posted on one of the websites recounting the TGI Friday's incident, that reads as follows:

We unfortunately MUST do to them that which they wish to do to us, all I wish to do is to work, provide a living for my family. worship how I wish, (or not) and enjoy life. THEY want CONTROL over my life and how I live. THEY want me to convert or die. THEY want to tell me what to wear, what to eat, and what to do everyday... They are like the current U.S. Government under Obama on Steroids. Lock and Load Real Americans.

Notice here the universal imputation of nefarious motives, the repeated invocation of THEM. And then the call to arms: Lock and load. THEY are a threat to US. WE have no choice but to load our guns and shoot them down.

And to think this diatribe was sparked by the story of a woman who wanted her dietary restrictions respected, and instead had the forbidden food all but shoved down her throat.

Adherents to this kind of ideology know that members of their own group aren't all the same: they're normal human beings who want to live normal human lives, with diverse values and interests. They worship in different ways (or not at all). Some want to stand on a soapbox and spread their faith; others just want to eat at TGI Friday's without having bacon shoved into their drinking straw. But instead of seeing the same humanity and diversity in the other group, those in the grip of divisive ideologies offer a sweeping portrait of what "they" want. And what THEY want is so bad for us that we have no choice but to treat them in ways we would never treat members of our own group.

The philosopher John Ladd, in an essay that has strongly influenced my thinking, finds in Nazism a kind of template for violent ideologies: Such ideologies begin with what he calls the doctrine of bifurcation: the world is divided between the chosen group and the "other" group. They then move onto a doctrine of moral disqualification. The others are in some way rendered less than human: they aren't like us, and so can be legitimately treated in ways that we couldn't otherwise justify. But that's not enough. Another key tenet of these ideologies is the notion of a group mission: Our welfare is threatened by THEM, and so we must, to bring good and right back into the world, knock THEM down--marginalize, oppress, or destroy. Lock and load.

This is the sort of pattern of thinking that enables terrorists to ignore questions of guilt or innocence, and so target civilians. It is the pattern of thinking that feeds cycles of ideological hatred and violence. And were it isolated to a rare comment on an occasional blog post, we could set aside acts of violence like the triple murder in North Carolina as just the actions of a lunatic.

But when the lunatic is acting out the implications of a worldview that is repeatedly endorsed in the public sphere--when there is a subculture that repeats and disseminates and encourages this kind of thinking--the lunatic becomes more than a lunatic. The lunatic is the agent of a cause, and terrorism is the means of pursuing it. This is why our public leaders and intellectuals need to be so very careful about what they say and how they say it--because even those who don't believe in bifurcating the world into the good and the bad, the light and the dark, sometimes find themselves falling into rhetorical patterns and arguments that play into dangerous ideologies of the sort Ladd describes (as Sam Harris has done more than once).

We can't and shouldn't stifle free speech and free expression. But we can model modes of expression that encourage cooperation rather than division, that resist the urge to absolutize any group. And when hateful and ideological speech proliferates, we can counteract it with speech of our own, speech that calls it out for what it is and highlights its dangers.

The vast majority of atheists are well-meaning, decent human beings who care about humanity and disavow us/them ideologies. But sometimes, us/them tropes are invoked by influential atheist figures (who themselves denounce extremism) in ways that fuel subcultures of extremism. People are drawn to the seductive simplicity of a world where enlightened atheists are locked in a (metaphorical) war with the benighted religious fools who threaten the welfare of us all. They indulge this simple worldview, usually just with heated words and self-righteous diatribes. But when enough people begin to say "lock and load," eventually someone does just that. When someone does, we must recognize the depths of the problem--but we should resist the urge to absolutize atheists or attribute to all atheists the ideological motives of the extremists.

And, just to be clear, let me repeat the preceding paragraph with one small change:  The vast majority of Muslims are well-meaning, decent human beings who care about humanity and disavow us/them ideologies. But sometimes, us/them tropes are invoked by influential Muslim figures (who themselves denounce extremism) in ways that fuel subcultures of extremism. People are drawn to the seductive simplicity of a world where enlightened Muslims are locked in a (metaphorical) war with the benighted unbelievers who threaten the welfare us all. They indulge this simple worldview, usually just with heated words and self-righteous diatribes. But when enough people begin to say "lock and load," eventually someone does just that. When someone does, we must recognize the depths of the problem--but we should resist the urge to absolutize Muslims or attribute to all Muslims the ideological motives of the extremists.

Or plug in "Christians," if you prefer.

We don't yet know what motivated the killings of three young Muslims in North Carolina the other day. We don't know why Craig Hicks gunned them down. But there is a pattern of thinking in place in this country--sometimes articulated by self-described atheists, sometimes by self-described Christians, sometimes by others--that treats all Muslims as a single unit, characterizing them as an enemy that threatens us all and against whom we must be prepared to take up arms. When someone follows that call and strikes out against innocent members of the group, it is terrorism. Islamophobic terrorism.

If Hicks isn't an Islamophobic terrorist in the sense described here--and he may well not be--then there are others out there who have been primed to be just that. Some use the mistreatment of a Muslim woman in a restaurant as the occasion for a call to arms against the "Muslim threat"--as if the fact that she was treated with disrespect is proof that her kind are poised to ruin our way of life.

We can't address the danger that such ideologically driven individuals pose by treating them as nothing but isolated lunatics. We need to pay attention to the way that the ideas we permit and nurture in the public square can fuel our potential for terrorist violence.  

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.

Want to Save the World? Build inclusive communities where people matter

...or so says Frances Moore Lappé in a recent article, "Could Our Deepest Fears Hold the Key to Ending Violence?" The essay beautifully synthesizes a range of related insights that have impressed themselves on me through the years--insights which have been vividly driven home for me through my work with the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), especially facilitating AVP workshops in prisons.

Everyone wants to matter. More importantly, we want to matter to a community. Pugnacious communities that encourage violence prey on those of us who feel marginalized, who for one reason or another feel as if we don't belong or as if our contributions go unnoticed. What these communities offer is seductive precisely because violence vividly affects the world. The impact of violence, though negative, is inescapable. A community built around the valorization of violence thus offers the promise of finding belonging through actions that undeniably matter.

Who can deny that the Boston bombers mattered, that their actions made a difference in human lives? The difference was an awful one, a shattering difference. But for those who hunger for relevance, those who doubt their own significance in the world, violence is an obvious answer. And when a shadow community frames such vivid destructive actions as heroic, and treats those who commit them as champions of the shadow community, the outcomes are as predictable as they are tragic.

If you are disaffected, afraid of irrelevance, alienated from those around you, it matters a whole lot who reaches out to you. If extremists defined by in-group/out-group ideologies reach out to you, you're likely to reach back if you're hungry enough. Much depends on where else you can go to get fed.

When Jesus said, "Feed my lambs," one can't deny that real food, the sort that fills actual human bellies, was intended. But maybe another kind of food was also on his mind--the kind of food that inclusive communities can provide, when they offer creative outlets for making a positive difference in the world and a sense of belonging built around such meaningful creativity. At its best, that is what the Church can be. At its worst, it becomes defined by in-group/out-group ideologies, marginalizing some members who become disaffected and angry, and feeding others the wrong kind of food.

So, what can we do, each of us, to help make our own communities places where the alienated can come to feel as if they've come home? Where can we help build communities of this sort? How can we make sure that our world is a banquet of opportunities for real inclusion and creative (rather than destructive) meaning, so that no one is tempted by the poisoned food?

A Simple Principle

I think it may help, in the effort to avoid a lot of confusion, misrepresentation, and polarizing conflict, if we just keep one simple principle in mind:

Moral responsibility can be shared.

The other day an attack on the U.S Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, killed the US Ambassador J Christopher Stevens and three others, including security officer and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty, and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith.

The perpetrators of the attack remain unknown, and tracking them down may prove difficult--but everyone agrees, of course, that they bear the primary and most immediate responsibility for the tragic deaths. But if you're inclined to look more broadly, beyond the attacks themselves to events that helped generate an outraged protest that either spiraled our of control or (as seems now to be the more likely story) was opportunistically fueled and used as part of a broader plot--if you're inclined to ask how all of us might have helped avert this tragedy, you face the risk of being dubbed an apologist for the perpetrators.

It happens a lot. Someone points to broader social forces that helped motivate violence, and it's as if they've said that the perpetrators of violence were nothing more than blameless robots programmed by these social forces. You note how others were needlessly provocative or inflammatory, and it's as if you've said that the perpetrators were puppets wholly controlled by those who provoked them. But this way of thinking assumes that responsibility has to fall in just one place. It doesn't.

To put things bluntly: Some of the biggest #@*!-ups happen because lots of people behave like idiots. To point out the idiocy of one of the contributors does not amount to absolving the idiocy of the others. Nor does it imply that those most immediately responsible for the gravest harms of a tragedy aren't worthy of special condemnation and punishment in a way that the others who contributed are not.

More importantly, to acknowledge your own role--or your own community's role--in creating a problem is just plain human decency. So is apologizing for it. You shouldn't resist doing the decent thing because you're afraid that somehow it lets others off the hook or implies that others more intimately involved in the problem aren't to blame. But we are afraid to do this, far too often, because we are caught up at least implicitly by this misguided idea that moral responsibility can't be shared. Sometimes pundits and politicians play off this misguided propensity to score political points.

But when we think about it explicitly, of course we all know better.

If I sleep with your wife and you attempt to murder me in a fit of rage, I am not responsible for the attempt on my life. But I am responsible for what I did. I am responsible for having the affair. I am responsible for the provocation. If I concede that I provoked you, I am not implying that there's nothing wrong with the sort of character that sends someone over the edge in the face of infidelity. While people should be angry when their spouses break their vows and others are complicit in that, no one should become murderously angry. If you're like that, then you've got a serious character flaw. If you acted on the urgings of that character flaw, you've done something seriously wrong.

And so the fact that I was able to provoke you to murderous intent speaks poorly of your character. But that I provoked you in this particular way speaks poorly of mine.

But now suppose I knew this about you in advance. And suppose I knew not only that you're easily provoked to murderous rage by infidelity, but that your wife (my would-be lover) would also be at risk should you be triggered. Suppose I went ahead and slept with your wife knowing that her life was also thereby put at risk. But suppose I didn't care. I took no steps to protect her. I didn't help her get to a domestic violence shelter or anything like that before indulging myself in ways I knew could trigger you to kill her. I just ignite the spark in pursuit of my pleasure and walk away.

If you then murder your wife, do I bear any responsibility? I'm not talking about legal responsibility here. I mean moral responsibility.

Of course I do. Admitting this doesn't reduce the gravity of what you did, the depths of your moral failings, the reality of the danger that letting you roam free in the world poses to us all, especially those you come to possessively "love" as if they were things that belong to you. It's possible for all these serious moral failings and wrongs to fall squarely on your shoulders, even if there are a bunch of serious moral failings and wrongs that fall squarely on mine. Even if both your moral failings and mine helped push circumstances forward to the tragic outcome.

But when it comes to the failings I have the best hope of correcting, I need to look inward. While that doesn't mean we should ignore the wrongs of others or not seek to apprehend those who pose the most imminent threat to human safety, it does mean that when we or our communities play a role in a complex chain of events that culminates in tragedy, we should ask ourselves what changes we can make closer to home, so that we aren't implicated in future tragedies. And when we do so, it doesn't follow that the gravity of what others have done is mitigated or erased.

Because moral responsibility can be shared.

Recently, a juvenile, amateurish filmmaker made a horrible movie. It wasn't just bad art--although from what I can tell it was really, really lousy on that score. But it was also deliberately offensive and slanderous--and its target was Muslims, a large and diverse group of people. In the film, not only is Mohammed depicted (something that by itself is known to be deeply offensive to Muslims), but he is depicted as being a murderer and adulterer who approved of pedophilic sex abuse.

A hate-filled religious ideologue, the Koran-burning Terry Jones, then went ahead and championed this amateurish, offensive, slanderous move, helping to bring what was otherwise a dead-in-the-water film (it showed once, apparently to a mostly empty theater) to the attention of the large and diverse religious community being slandered. The filmmaker and its champion did this knowing full well that some of those in the targeted religious group have a history of ideology-fueled violence.

To say that these people--the filmmaker and the crazy Islamophobic preacher--bear some moral responsibility for what happened next does not mitigate the gravity of extremist violence. Because moral responsibility isn't this limited resource with only so much to go around.

And if one looks more broadly at our American culture; if one asks whether the incendiary hatred of Muslims on display in this film is a distillation or amplification of broader social attitudes that we should be working on changing, one does not thereby mitigate the gravity of what the film-makers and those who championed them did. Because moral responsibility can be shared. 

Here is a fact: Sometimes I know how others are likely to respond to my actions because I know something about their character. Sometimes crazy extremist behavior is a predictable outcome of certain broad social patterns and ideas. This is not to say that people who behave as predicted bear no responsibility for their actions. People can and do take responsibility for themselves and their choices, rising above their conditioning...at least if they're encouraged, challenged, and supported in the right way.

But, more often than not, people don't defy predictions. They don't take responsibility, but instead simply act out their conditioning. And sometimes that conditioning leads them to respond to certain triggers with violent umbrage.

Knowing that they're there, what do we do? We shouldn't be held hostage by them, of course. We shouldn't do something wrong, say or do things we don't believe, just to appease them. I don't think, for example, that we ought to abandon our national commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of expression and begin suppressing inflammatory filmmakers and crazy preachers, just because there are extremists out there who will begin targeting decent, caring human beings just for sharing a national identity with a hateful bigot or two.

But it's one thing to say we shouldn't be held hostage to the poor character or ideological conditioning of others. It's something else to say we shouldn't pay attention to how our own character flaws, our own unreflective ideologies, help to fuel violent feedback loops with the harmful conditioning of others. 

Far too often, pointless tragedies happen because too many people, in diverse ways, mistake the humiliation and dehumanization of others for something worth doing. Too many allow themselves to be guided by these deeply divisive ideologies that spring from ancient tribal instincts and are vindicated by appeal to a tribal god (and then, predictably enough, insist that this tribal god is the God of all people, the creator Who sustains in being every Hindu, every Muslim, every Christian, every Jew, the God whose sustaining love supposedly encompasses the whole creation).

How can such tribalism swamp our better natures? It rears its head most powerfully when it is embraced by people on both sides of an ideological divide, when there are those who identify themselves against one another, who target one another, who universalize and absolutize their dehumanizing depictions of one another.

If you have a few tribal voices within a community of tolerant, compassionate human beings, and if, in the community anathematized by those tribal voices, you have nothing but tolerant, compassionate human beings who reach out in fellowship...well, the tribal voices won't be a good thing even then, but they lose much of their power. They face a kind of persistent challenge that can motivate many of them to take responsibility for their own ideological conditioning, reflect on it, discuss it, and eventually transform it.

Sometimes, however, there are broad unspoken social sentiments that, while not themselves overtly hostile and vitriolic, provide the stew out of which a few extreme voices emerge to spew overt hate. Two such communities, perched on opposite sides of an ideological divide, can progressively feed off the extreme messages coming from the vocal minority on the other side. The voices react to each other, enrage each other, and in targeting each other end up reinforcing their respective dehumanizing views of the other side. And as innocents on both sides become the targets of the extreme acts of the few, more members of each community start to listen to those hate-filled tribal voices, the voices that universalize and absolutize the dehumanizing depictions of one another. More and more of us stop taking responsibility for our own complicity, instead blaming the other side and vindicating our own attacks--physical attacks or rhetorical, with movies or with guns--by unreflective invocation of an ideology of hate.

Casting all the blame at the doorstep of a few individuals or at the doorstep of the other community, refusing to recognize that responsibility can be shared, that it should be shared, that we all must take responsibility for ourselves and each other...these are habits that only play into the tragic feedback loop through which tribalism comes to swamp our better natures.

Moral responsibility can be shared. And it must be shared, especially in the face of tragedies. Or we're all in trouble.

The Politics of Division: A Case Study in Anti-Gay Rhetoric

Last month I devoted a blog post to picking apart the anti-same-sex marriage argument of Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum—what we might call his “napkin gambit.” The other day I was reminded of that post—and the YouTube clip of Santorum’s campaign speech that inspired it—by a cartoon that a friend called my attention to. As a reminder, here is the campaign speech at issue:





And here’s the cartoon:

Now Santorum’s hopes of winning the GOP nomination are thankfully slim, but he's still pushing remorselessly at the same themes. And the ideas driving his campaign are not restricted to him along. Of those ideas, the ones I find most disturbing here aren’t his opposition to same-sex marriage as such (although I think that is unjust), or his argument in support of that opposition (which I find as flimsy as, well, a napkin). I know people who oppose same sex marriage--often on the basis of arguments I find flimsy--whom I'd describe as decent, well-meaning human beings. If they have a reason for standing where they stand, it's neither hate nor homophobia. You can talk to them about the issues, and they'll listen to you with (it seems to me) an openness to being persuaded.

In fact, I know opponents of same-sex marriage who actually seem to want to be persuaded--who feel compassion for the plight of their gay and lesbian neighbors and wish for their sakes that they could endorse a different view. But something--usually what they take to be the necessary implications of their religious faith--has led them to regretfully take the stand they've taken.

Now I think there are things going on in these cases that are troubling, but they aren't nearly as disturbing to me as what I see going on in the Santorum clip. What’s so disturbing here is the in-group/out-group ideology which frames Santorum’s perspective, his arguments, and his campaign.

The cartoon above exposes part of the dynamic that defines such bifurcating ideologies. But I think it’s worth digging a bit deeper into this dynamic. If we look carefully at the clip from Santorum’s campaign speech, we see Santorum framing his candidacy in terms of an epic struggle between two communities: “the faith community” and, of course, gays and lesbians.

In the spirit of the bible-thumper in the cartoon, Santorum goes so far as to describe LGBT responses to his attacks on marriage equality as a “jihad against Rick Santorum.” But this labeling is the culmination of a broader effort to paint LGBT efforts for equality as an attack on the faith community as a whole. Referencing the landmark Lawrence vs. Texas case which declared sodomy laws unconstitutional, Santorum catastrophizes the implications of allowing that ruling to stand uncontested:

…we will see not only marriage destroyed but we will see ultimately the faith community destroyed and...ghettoized as bigots because they stand up and preach biblical truth.

With a final flourish, he represents himself as, among the presidential contenders, the best defender of the faith community—the one who cares enough to fight the LGBT community’s supposedly sinister efforts to realize marriage equality.

In evoking the language of jihad—which the American religious right takes, however imprecisely, to be Islam’s equivalent of “holy war”—Santorum not only frames himself as a soldier in a war against Christianity’s enemies, but seeks to place the pursuit of marriage equality into the same category into which so many conservative Christians locate the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Muslims and homosexuals are battering at the gates of the faithful, and the very survival of Christianity is at stake.

There is nothing especially new about this pattern of thinking, nor is there anything novel about using it to pursue political power. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on the structure of Santorum’s rhetoric—because it helps reveal why this campaign speech before an anemically small gathering is not something to be laughed off or dismissed as just the ideas of a harmless crackpot who’ll never get elected. After all, he did get elected to the Senate.

Santorum’s rhetoric is dangerous precisely because of its structure. In fact, the ideological picture that Santorum paints on the campaign trail has precisely the same structure as those ideologies used to support what John Ladd, the recently deceased Brown university philosopher, has called “collective violence.”

Ladd argued that there’s a crucial difference between private violence pursued for personal gain and “collective violence,” by which he meant violence done by people who see themselves as agents of a larger whole, and who target their victims not for personal reasons but simply because those victims belong to the enemy group.

So, for example, Anders Breivik—the homegrown Norwegian terrorist who perpetrated July’s horrific attacks—saw himself as an agent of a culturally Christian west struggling against a hostile Islamic world and its enablers. He was not acting for personal gain but to further a conceived group mission. His victims were not chosen because of any personal qualities, but simply because they attended the wrong summer camp—and so identified themselves as members of the wrong group.

Ladd pointed out that collective violence occurs within the framework of a justifying ideology. And what does that ideology look like? Santorum’s recent campaign speech is nothing short of a blueprint. First, the world is divided into groups—a chosen group and the “others.” Ladd called this the “Doctrine of Bifurcation.” Next, the groups are represented as being locked in a zero-sum struggle, one in which any gain for one group means a loss for the other. Members of the chosen group are faced with a solemn mission to defend their group—and by implication all that is good and right—against the dire threats posed by the others. This is what Ladd called the “Doctrine of Group Mission.”

These elements are clearly present in Santorum’s stump speech: There’s us, the chosen group, the heterosexual Christians; and then there’s them, the jihadis, the Muslim terrorists and the homosexuals. We’re locked in a struggle in which any gain for them—even so modest a gain as no longer being subject to criminal prosecution for having a consensual sexual relationship—is perceived as a threat that may very well destroy us.

Sometimes, within such ideologies, a case is given for the direness of the threat. But such a case needn’t be especially compelling (and Santorum’s clearly isn’t), since its function isn’t to undergird a substantive philosophical position but to set up the ideological divide. That ideology, in turn, serves a function of its own, one which becomes clear at the close of Santorum’s speech, where he announces himself to be the agent who will defend the chosen group. This becomes elevated to a sacred mission, a duty that others are shirking but that Santorum is prepared to live out, even at risk to himself.

Let me be clear about some things. I’m certain that Santorum has no plans of going on a killing spree. The fifty or so people in the room with him have no such plans. There is nothing about his ideology of division that explicitly promises violence. And just because collective violence is embedded in ideologies of division, it doesn’t follow that every ideology of division gives birth to a murderous Anders Breivik. In fact, it may even be true that the impact f Santorum’s message is partly sanitized by the “love the sinner, hate the sin” mantra, which operates (most of the time) to keep the violence against gays and lesbians covert and psychological rather than overtly deadly.

Nevertheless, ideologies of division are a stewpot for a distinct kind of violence. Not long ago the ideological message of “Islamic invasion” hit home with murderous consequences in Breivik’s twisted psychology—causing quick defensive responses from some of those who had been preaching this message. They’d been preaching it not because they wanted anyone to go on a killing spree, but because they wanted to promote restrictive anti-Islamic policies. They couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see how supporting their agenda in these ideological terms could breed self-styled soldiers willing to take the war to another level.

Likewise, Santorum likely doesn’t see how his rhetorical choices contribute to the patterns of thought that culminate in gay bashing. He and others will continue to paint overt violence against gays and lesbians as born out of the twisted individual psychologies of the perpetrators. But Ladd’s message is that we make a grave mistake when we confuse collective violence for individual violence, precisely because we fail to see how our broader social patterns of thinking feed into the motivations of those who do the killing.

I need to stress here what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that Rick Santorum and his conservative followers are the enemy, an “other” group with whom we, the chosen ones, are locked in epic struggle. It would be frightfully easy to fall into that pattern of thinking—but to do so would be to fall prey to the very thing I am criticizing, a phenomenon so seductive that even moral outrage against it can easily slip into its perpetuation in another form.

What I am arguing is that Santorum is promulgating a dangerous pattern of thinking, dangerous in part because it is so seductive. It is a pattern that doesn’t fall on just one side of party lines. On the contrary, the hostility across party lines is one of its effects. Santorum is a case study of how easily and naturally we fall into ideologies of division, without ever seeing the role that such ideologies play in fomenting the range of social problems we bemoan, from congressional deadlock to hate crimes.

And refusing to see this, we behave as if the rhetoric of holy war, the message that we are doomed unless they are stopped, is just a way to drum up votes.

Shelter from the Storm

(A picture taken by Bruce Hundley of downtown Stillwater after yesterday's storm--which swept through like a brief but damaging hurricane)

It took very little time for the temperature to plummet from 106˚ F to 79˚ F. We were driving in the minivan when it hit. When I saw the force of the wind I gunned the engine to get off the tree-lined street we were on and onto a main road. The children, strapped into their car seats in the back, stared wide-eyed out the windows. The sky ahead of us was still blue, but behind us it was black, and it was roiling over us. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw lightning tear the sky in two.


“Were they predicting storms today?” my wife asked. I shrugged my ignorance, and she began urgently tapping the keys of her Blackberry to try to find a weather update.

We could be forgiven for not paying attention. For weeks now the weather had been the same: blistering heat and sun, temperatures approaching or topping 110 most days. And then, on Thursday, our air conditioning had finally groaned and shuddered to a stop. The repair crews were overworked and, because of the back log, couldn’t get to our house until Monday.

We boarded the dogs, carried the fish tank to the neighbors, and—since we had overnight guests—rented a hotel suite that could accommodate seven people. The next day, after our guests left, we moved in with my wife’s cousins.

When Monday finally arrived all we could think about was getting the AC fixed and getting settled back into our own house and our own routine. My wife’s cousins are wonderful people, and we enjoyed our unexpected long weekend with them. But it was time to be home.

The day was spent in a holding pattern, waiting for the AC people to call. An urgent conversation with our home warranty company, just before 5 PM, finally rustled up the repair crew, who declared our air conditioner operational again just before 6. We didn’t think to check the weather before deciding to run back to our relatives’ house, pick up our things, and then stop somewhere for dinner before heading home.

As we got into the van I noticed the dark skies—but they were to the north, and since I’m used to thinking of dangerous Oklahoma storms as moving towards the northeast, I imagined the storm would miss us. I felt a twinge of regret. We badly needed the rain.

We had managed to load our overnight bags into the car and start down the tree-lined lane before the wind really picked up. We’d made it out from under the trees before it became truly frightening (winds upwards of 80 miles an hour, according to this morning’s newspaper report).

We could see the dark streaks of torrential rain off to our left, but where we were it was still just spitting. The surging storm quickly consumed the last bits of blue sky. I thought at first it was hail that was beating on the car, but it was wind-blown debris. My son said something about a tornado, but my wife quickly assured him that it wasn’t the season for it.

But I could see the worry in her eyes. It may not have been a tornado, but the straight-line winds were dangerously tearing at every tree and pole that lined the street to our left.

Suddenly, most of a tree broke loose and blew across the road ahead of us. I slowed down and maneuvered around it. A minute later a lightning bolt struck a power line next to our van.

“There’s a church!” my wife gestured to our right. “Pull into the parking lot behind it.” Another bolt of lightning hit a field across the street, immediately sparking a fire in the parched grass.

It was a large church building, and there were a number of cars in the spacious lot—so we knew there were people there. I pulled up to the covered drive by the front entrance. My wife and kids jumped out and ran for the doors, but they were locked. They immediately turned and ran the length of the building, looking for an open door. As I turned the van around I saw a gust of wind bodily lift my son off the pavement. My wife clung to his arm and clutched my daughter to her breast. Then they disappeared into a doorway.

I parked the car and for a moment wondered whether it was safer to stay where I was. But my family was inside, and the large open lot didn’t threaten much in the way of blowing debris. So I ran for it. The door opened for me, and I was in.

I saw my family sitting in the hallway. My daughter was clinging to my wife, who was whispering soothing words. “Safe now, safe now.”

My son stared up the hallway towards a bank of windows, which offered a clear view of the storm. We watched as the rain finally hit, torrents beating down. “What’s that coming off the roof?” my son asked.

I looked at the sheets of white that were blasted off the roof by the wind. “That’s water,” I said.

“It’s like a waterfall!”

I became aware of others. A solidly-built older man with a cross on his t-shirt clapped my shoulder and offered words of welcome. And then a white-haired woman was leading me by the hand, saying something about all the food that was still left, asking if we’d eaten any dinner. I could feel the pressure of her warm fingers, the gentle tug.

A middle-aged man with a developmental disability came up to me and asked me how I was. When I said I was fine he smiled and wandered away. We were in a fellowship hall, with old 1950’s album covers propped at each of a dozen round tables. Older women began fussing over us. Our plates were soon heaped with casseroles and macaroni and three bean salad. “There’s homemade ice cream over there,” someone told me. “Be sure you try some of that!”

The storm continued to rage outside, but it didn’t take long for the kids to care more about the table full of desserts. And then the gathering began to move to a different part of the hall. Chairs had been set up in rows facing a low stage, where a grey bearded man was settling himself behind a keyboard. He’d used hair gel to pull his bangs into what I thought of as a “Sha Na Na” point.

Someone at an adjacent table said something to me which I couldn’t understand. I looked up. A heavy young man with slightly slurred speech asked me again whether I wanted a song sheet. I shook my head. “Maybe when I’m finished eating.”

But soon my family was sitting in the back row, singing “Ain’t That Ashame” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” The old woman who’d led me by the hand was trying to get someone to dance.

The place was called Countryside Baptist Church, and I have no doubt they embrace a theology that's far more conservative than mine. Many of their beliefs—about hell, about homosexuality—are ones I’d likely call harmful. But in this moment what they offered was hospitality, and shelter from the storm. There were no conditions placed on their welcome, no theological litmus test my family needed to pass before we could pass through their doors. They saw our need and they took us in.

And if we’d been two gay men, fresh from our honeymoon in Niagara Falls, I have no doubt they would’ve done the same thing. The doors would have opened. Had we been a Muslim family I’m convinced the welcome would have been just as immediate.

In either of those cases, at some point, someone might have felt the need to evangelize, to try to “save” a lost soul. The welcome would, then, have become infected with a thread of condescension: You aren’t like us, and your otherness makes you incomplete. To be whole you must become like us. Even if the words were never spoken, the guests might have sensed them in furtive glances.

But this impulse—this urge to draw dividing lines in the dirt (and then invite those on the far side to cross over)—wouldn’t have come immediately. For some it wouldn’t have come at all, and for others it would have felt out of place in the face of the original impulse to open the door. And for those who might have actually spoken the words—you are other; you need to change—it would have been out of duty, a duty born of doctrine.

The impulse to open the door was born out of something deeper than that—a force of solidarity and empathy that, while expressed in Christian doctrine, is experienced as far more than just a teaching.

But this is not to say that for the people at Countryside Baptist Church last night, their status as a Christian community played no role in motivating their unqualified hospitality. While I have no doubt that this force of love is at work in human beings across every ideological and religious divide; while I know that atheists open doors to those in need, and that what motivates them is the same immediate sense of care and solidarity in a world of troubles—while all of this is true, I also believe that the community of spiritually united people that Christianity calls the Church has the capacity to nurture this force of love.

If one runs to a private home, the welcome is always less certain—the impulse for hospitality at odds with fears about security and privacy. If we’d pulled up in front of the local country club, we’d have likely enjoyed a grudging welcome in the entry hall. Had we waited out the storm in a fast food restaurant, we’d have enjoyed the same canned welcome one typically receives, and the same invitation to order off the menu.

But here were people gathered, explicitly, in the House of the Lord. They were gathered for “50’s Night” rather than for a Bible study or prayer meeting, but that made no difference. By coming together within these walls they had put on an identity that went beyond their private one. They were the people of God, and with that identity comes a responsibility: to manifest God’s hospitality, to express God’s welcome and God’s love.

It’s true enough that a gay teen growing up in a conservative Christian church will experience much pain and isolation, even quiet despair, because of teachings that are imbued by the community with the obduracy of divine will. But in a raging storm, that same gay teen knows where he can run for shelter.

In contemporary debates about the harms and dangers of organized religion, New Atheists and other critics of religion have made much of the historic atrocities and the contemporary extremisms. And there can be no doubt that the structures and institutions of organized religion can be put to the service of hate. But in a considered conversation about whether organized religion does more harm than good, we cannot forget the less dramatic realities that organized religion can and does help to nurture: the day-to-day acts of goodwill, the gestures of welcome, the offers of shelter from the storm.

The question is whether organized religion’s power for nurturing hospitality and benevolence can be harnessed without the baggage of in-group/out-group ideology, without the false certainties that make productive dialogue about complex moral matters impossible, without the dogmatism that throws up walls against new insights and discoveries.

I believe it can. I believe it can because I believe that where people are gathered together in God’s name there is a force at work more fundamental than our human impulse for tribalism, greater than our individual hunger for certainty. I believe it can because, sitting here in my office today, I can still feel the pressure of that old woman’s hand, leading me and my family into the fellowship hall while, outside, the storm raged on.

Buchanan Defends Breivik

Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, but right-wing anti-Islamic voices in Europe and the United States have been coming to the defense of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of last week’s brutal terrorist attacks in Norway.


Admittedly, they haven’t defended his violent actions. What they’ve defended is his cause. Breivik conceived his terrorist acts as part of a crusade against the intrusion of Islam into European culture, and against the “multiculturalists” and “cultural Marxists” he took to be abetting this invasion. Breivik’s defenders are denouncing what he did—denouncing it as the wrong way to pursue the cause. But they want to say that the cause itself is just.

It is tempting to respond with nothing but indignation—but such a response is insufficient. Let’s be clear about something: An idea may be sound even if it is espoused by a violent fanatic. If Hitler declared that 2 plus 2 equaled 4, he’d be right. Right-wing defender’s of Breivik’s cause (such as Pat Buchanan, whom I'll get to in a minute) want to say something along these lines: Yes, he’s mad and his means are horrific, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. Let’s not discard the anti-Islamic, anti-multiculturalist worldview just because one man systematically slaughtered summer campers in its name.

The problem with this thinking, however, is that there is real reason to believe that Breivik’s ideas here lend themselves to violence. It’s no accident that those who see the world in terms of an intractable conflict between “us” and “them” are also those who are most likely to resort to terrorist violence. And even those who don’t resort to violence themselves nevertheless contribute to the polarization of social groups, the animosity and distrust across ethnic and religious lines that in the long run breeds violence.

Consider Pat Buchanan, whose recent essay, “A fire bell in the night for Norway,” reflects on Friday’s terrorist atrocity. He rightly anticipates that Breivik’s acts will inspire some thinkers to dig through Breivik’s manifesto to uncover the ideological seeds of violence—and he anticipates that those on the left will call attention to the lurking dangers in at least some of the right-wing notions Breivik espouses.

But rather than acknowledge the power of ideas to shape behavior—and the responsibility for caution that therefore falls on those with a public platform—Buchanan instead frames an international tragedy and the efforts to understand its etiology as a left-wing smear campaign against the American right:

[Breivik’s] writings are now being mined for references to U.S. conservative critics of multiculturalism and open borders. Purpose: Demonize the American right, just as the berserker's attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson was used to smear Sarah Palin and Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing was used to savage Rush Limbaugh and conservative critics of Big Government.

One can’t deny that some on the left will be opportunists in this way—although hardly everyone on the left was being merely opportunistic in calling out Sarah Palin and others for using militant “lock and load” rhetoric after a madman’s assassination-attempt against one of the politicians Palin had put in the crosshairs. Some (like me) were motivated by a sincere concern that such rhetoric contributes to a cultural climate in which violence is more likely.

Likewise, the existence of political opportunists on the left doesn’t mean that those who draw connections between certain right-wing ideas and Breivik’s violent mindset are necessarily wrong to do so. The question is whether a sound case can be made for this connection. It certainly cannot be made with respect to conservative political ideas taken as a whole. And I'm not inclined the think the right is alone in harboring dangerous ideas.

But I think a case can be made that certain pugnacious ideas enjoying popularity among right-wing pundits today played a role in shaping the horror in Norway. More specifically, I think it can be made with respect to the core idea from Breivik’s manifesto that Buchanan endorses—namely, the inescapability (and justifiability?) of a “Crusader's war between the real Europe and the ‘cultural Marxists’ and Muslims they invited in to alter the ethnic character and swamp the culture of the Old Continent.”

Here is what Buchanan says:

But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.

That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.

Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis.

With her native-born populations aging, shrinking and dying, Europe's nations have not discovered how to maintain their prosperity without immigrants. Yet the immigrants who have come – from the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia – have been slow to learn the language and have failed to attain the educational and occupational levels of Europeans…

Buchanan is right that Europe confronts important challenges brought on by the introduction of diverse cultures into its previously homogenious populations. What is deeply troubling is the lesson that Buchanan reaches from this, expressed in his concluding flourish:

As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.

With these closing words, Buchanan seeks to evoke the specter of armed invasion, of Muslim armies coming to conquer. But immigration is not invasion. And while there are legitimate issues pertaining to regulating immigration and promoting the healthy integration of an immigrant community into the society into which it settles, it is easy to confuse the desire to preserve one’s cultural identity in a new land with a resistance to healthy integration. Likewise, it is easy to confuse conflict with violence, and so to see the inevitability of cultural conflict as the inevitability of violence.

These confusions are ones that pundits like Buchanan routinely exploit. The result is that previously homogeneous societies, rather than looking for ways to transition peacefully and painlessly into the greater multiculturalism that demographic realities and globalization make inevitable, find themselves resisting even the small-scale diversity one finds in places like Norway.

The result is as predictable as it is paradoxical. The accusation that immigrants refuse to integrate is used as a justification for practices that further isolate and marginalize the immigrant communities. Rather than looking for ways to promote integration, communities are encouraged to resent the immigrant communities. On a deep cultural level, a wall is built up around the immigrants. And their further isolation and failure to integrate is used to vindicate the resentment.

In other words, Buchanan’s species of rhetoric contributes to a feedback loop that deepens the divide between immigrant communities and the societies they have come to inhabit. The difficult challenge of building bridges of community across ethnic and cultural divides—a challenge that must be met if healthy coexistence is to happen—is not just made harder. The cultural resources needed to meet that challenge are instead redirected to building higher walls.

And behind those walls, resentments fester. Without sustained positive interactions with the broader population, there is little to neutralize or mute the resentments. Extremist elements become more potent and are more likely to be quietly supported—or at least not actively opposed.

In short, the accusation that immigrant communities are a “problem” that pose a “threat” becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The polarization, the in-group/out-group ideologies, becomes increasingly entrenched—and parties on both sides view the other with growing paranoia and hostility. Until, finally, someone strikes out with shattering violence.

While we cannot deny that there are extremists who wear the mantle of Islam—any more than we can deny that there are extremists who wear the mantle of Christianity—the kind of mistrustful anti-Muslim sentiments expressed by Pat Buchanan and those like him can only fuel the fires that generate extremists of both sorts. If terrorism has a cause—a root cause in the human psyche—it is the pattern of us-them thinking encouraged by Buchanan and others like him. Although Buchanan’s rhetoric is more cautious than extremist manifestos of people like Breivik, this may not be a virtue. It may only serve to make a pernicious ideology more palatable, and hence more likely to be swallowed.

Polarizing us-them thinking needs to end. Breivik’s crimes show us why. Buchanan, astonishingly, reaches instead the conclusion that when it comes to his vision of a Crusaders’ war between Europeans and Muslims, “Breivik may be right.” I can hardly think of a more inverted lesson to draw from last week’s terror.