In The Beginning, There Was Evil

Paul Pillar is a former high-ranking CIA analyst who believes "the more that religion is infused into public life, the more that mankind suffers." Newly provoked by the State of Kentucky's financial support for a Bible-based theme park and the latest trendsetting comments by Sarah Palin, Pillar, blogging at "The National Interest," writes:

Religious beliefs inherently contain the seeds of intolerance, and thus of conflict and extremism, in ways that most secular belief systems do not. If one believes one's dogma comes from divine will and providence, it can less readily be compromised in good conscience than beliefs of more mundane origin. And those on the other side of a conflict can be seen not just as in opposition but as evil.

Religious belief, because it deals with the unknown and unknowable, must quite literally be a matter of faith. And questions of faith, because they cannot be resolved through public debate, appropriately dwell in the realm of the personal and the private. Once injected into the public realm and more specifically into matters of state, then they become one more form of the tyranny over the mind of man against which the deist Thomas Jefferson swore eternal hostility upon the altar of God.

Well, except for the secular belief systems of communism and National Socialism, which mass-produced intolerance and extremism in a magnitude of which al-Qaeda and the Taliban can only dream. Closer to home, just this week, the secular left seems pretty intolerant of President Obama's idea that rich people should be allowed to keep a little more of their own money so they can goose the economy for the next two years. Their rage is palpable, and while I don't hear them saying those who disagree with them are necessarily evil, I sometimes hear them coming pretty close.

It seems to me that intolerance and extremism are inescapable expressions of human nature, the natural byproducts of pain, fear, pride, or, usually, some mixture of the three. Far from being the root cause of these inclinations, faith practice at its best helps people notice and control them. If instead religion reinforces or encourages what is worst about people, it means that religious leaders and institutions aren't doing their jobs. They've let their own pride and certitude (or fear and pain) prevent them from appreciating the awe and humility with which any sane person approaches the altar of the Almighty.

Around the world, there are all too many such religionists. That religion must do better is an axiom that many of its practitioners readily accept. But the idea that humanity is safe when it ignores the Creator's judgement perished in the death camps and gulag, in Cambodia and Rwanda. Of course that prideful idea has perished many times in the many thousands of years of human history that preceded all those modern savageries, but the idea keeps being resurrected. Even when people betray God by wreaking havoc and pretending it's for his glory instead of their own, there's a certain deviousness involved in saying that the crime was committed by God or even by religion, when the blame really belongs to the human creature acting as it has since before anyone could even mouth God's name.

Augustine And The Jews

In her book Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, BU's Paula Fredriksen credits Augustine of Hippo (354-430) with being enlightened enough about Jews that he may have saved Jewish lives.

The fourth and fifth centuries witnessed vicious anti-semitism. Bishop John Chrysostom of Constantinople, patron of the church I serve, compared Jews to animals who were unfit for work and ready for slaughter, while Augustine's contemporary Ambrose defended priests who burned down a synagogue. In contrast, Augustine's relatively enlightened view was that Jews should be protected so that their existence would affirm the validity of the Hebrew testament while their tenuous lives in the diaspora continuously demonstrated the perils of failing to come to Christ.

That doesn't sound very enlightened, of course. While Augustine is given due credit by Fredriksen's reviewer in the "New Republic," David Nirenberg, his catalog of of anti-Jewish polemic from the church's ancient, medieval, and modern eras is uniformly discouraging (an echo of Constantine's Sword by James Carroll). Only in the 1960s did the Vatican stop requiring congregations to pray each Sunday for the salvation of the poor Jews. With anti-anti-semitism having such a weak hold on the institutional church, Benedict XVI's equivocation or inattentiveness about a Holocaust-denying priest was especially discouraging.

No doubt mindful of the Benedict-Williamson episode, Nirenberg writes, "Are Christian teachings essentially anti-Jewish?" without offering a direct answer. He does fault Fredricksen for failing to try to document how many lives Augustine's "slay them not" directive (invoking Psalm 59) may actually have saved. As for how many died at the hands of a Nazi regime which, Nirenberg writes, worked carefully "to establish a resonance between its own anti-Semitic ideology and the religious teachings of the Christian confessions" -- that number, we know.

Most faithful people, except for those in denominations or sects explicitly rooted in some kind of universal salvation, must grapple with whether their confessions and creeds spell doom for anyone who doesn't believe them. For us Abrahamic people -- Jews, Christians, and Muslims -- the mystery began early, when God gave to Abram's band the land over Jordan that already belonged to someone else and called one group Chosen, the other Canaanite.

Reading scripture literally, some Jews (though not many) say that means no Palestinian state. Reading scripture literally, some Christians (how many? I'm not sure) say no salvation for Jews. If one then says that reading scripture literally is the problem, what's left of the faith? For Christians, at least for me, it's in the perfectly loving mind of Christ itself. We seek it continually.