Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

Overview

***2015 National Jewish Book Award Winner***

In this powerful and timely book, one of the most admired and authoritative religious leaders of our time tackles the phenomenon of religious extremism and violence committed in the name of God. If religion is perceived as being part of the problem, Rabbi Sacks argues, then it must also form part of the solution. When religion becomes a zero-sum conceit—that is, my religion is the only right path to God, therefore your religion is by definition wrong—and individuals are motivated by what Rabbi Sacks calls “altruistic evil,” violence between peoples of different beliefs appears to be the only natural outcome.
 
But through an exploration of the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, and employing groundbreaking biblical analysis and interpretation, Rabbi Sacks shows that religiously inspired violence has as its source misreadings of biblical texts at the heart of all three Abrahamic faiths. By looking anew at the book of Genesis, with its foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Rabbi Sacks offers a radical rereading of many of the Bible’s seminal stories of sibling rivalry: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Rachel and Leah.
 
“Abraham himself,” writes Rabbi Sacks, “sought to be a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry . . . To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege.” Here is an eloquent call for people of goodwill from all faiths and none to stand together, confront the religious extremism that threatens to destroy us, and declare: Not in God’s Name.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805243352
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	567,725
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS is a global religious leader and the award-winning author of more than twenty-five books. He is a frequent and respected contributor to radio, television, and the press around the world and teaches at universities in Britain, the United States, and Israel.  Rabbi Sacks holds sixteen honorary degrees and has received many awards in recognition of his work, including the Jerusalem Prize and, in 2016, the Templeton Prize. He served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013.

Read an Excerpt

When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.
 
So the book of Genesis tells us. Having made human beings in his image, God sees the first man and woman disobey the first command, and the first human child commit the first murder. Within a short space of time ‘the world was filled with violence’. God ‘saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth’. We then read one of the most searing sentences in religious literature. ‘God regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain’ (Gen. 6:6).
 
Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: Not in My Name.
 
Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state. Why was there hierarchy on earth? Because there was hierarchy in heaven. Just as the sun ruled the sky, so the pharaoh, king or emperor ruled the land. When some oppressed others, the few ruled the many, and whole populations were turned into slaves, this was – so it was said – to defend the sacred order written into the fabric of reality itself. Without it, there would be chaos. Polytheism was the cosmological vindication of the hierarchical society. Its monumental buildings, the ziggurats of Babylon and pyramids of Egypt, broad at the base, narrow at the top, were hierarchy’s visible symbols. Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power.
 
It was against this background that Abrahamic monotheism emerged as a sustained protest. Not all at once but ultimately it made extraordinary claims. It said that every human being, regardless of colour, culture, class or creed, was in the image and likeness of God. The supreme Power intervened in history to liberate the supremely powerless. A society is judged by the way it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. Life is sacred. Murder is both a crime and a sin. Between people there should be a covenantal bond of righteousness and justice, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and love. Though in its early books the Hebrew Bible commanded war, within centuries its prophets, Isaiah and Micah, became the first voices to speak of peace as an ideal. A day would come, they said, when the peoples of the earth would turn their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks, and wage war no more. According to the Hebrew Bible, Abrahamic monotheism entered the world as a rejection of imperialism and the use of force to make some men masters and others slaves.
 
Abraham himself, the man revered by 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews, ruled no empire, commanded no army, conquered no territory, performed no miracles and delivered no prophecies. Though he lived differently from his neighbours, he fought for them and prayed for them in some of the most audacious language ever uttered by a human to God – ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ (Gen. 18:25) He sought to be true to his faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith.
 
That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry. It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words ‘God is dead’, whose ethic was the will to power.
 
To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God’s name in vain.
 
 
***
 
 
Terror is the epitome of idolatry. Its language is force, its principle to kill those with whom you disagree. That is the oldest and most primitive form of conflict resolution. It is the way of Cain. If anything is evil, terror is. In suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, the victims are chosen at random, arbitrarily and indiscriminately. Terrorists, writes Michael Walzer, ‘are like killers on a rampage, except that their rampage is not just expressive of rage or madness; the rage is purposeful and programmatic. It aims at a general vulnerability: Kill these people in order to terrify those.’
 
The victims of terror are not only the dead and injured, but the very values on which a free society is built: trust, security, civil liberty, tolerance, the willingness of countries to open their doors to asylum seekers, the gracious safety of public places. Religiously motivated terror desecrates and defames religion itself. It is sacrilege against God and the life he endowed with his image. Islam, like Judaism, counts a single life as a universe. Suicide and murder are forbidden in the Abrahamic faiths. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all know the phenomenon of martyrdom – but martyrdom means being willing to die for your faith. It does not mean being willing to kill for your faith.
 
Terror is not a justifiable means to an acceptable end, because it does not end. Terrorists eventually turn against their own people. Walzer again: ‘The terrorists aim to rule, and murder is their method. They have their own internal police, death squads, disappearances. They begin by killing or intimidating those comrades who stand in their way, and they proceed to do the same, if they can, among the people they claim to represent. If terrorists are successful, they rule tyrannically, and their people bear, without consent, the costs of the terrorists’ rule.’ There is no route from terror to a free society.
 
Nor is it the cry of despair of the weak. The weak have different weapons. They know that justice is on their side. That is why the prophets used not weapons but words. It is why Gandhi and Martin Luther King preferred non-violent civil disobedience, knowing that it spoke to the world’s conscience, not its fears. True need never needs terror to make its voice heard.
 
The deliberate targeting of the innocent is an evil means to an evil end, to achieve a solution that does violence to the humanity and integrity of those we oppose. To give religious justification to it is to commit sacrilege against the God of Abraham, who is the God of life. Altruistic evil is still evil, and not all the piety in the world can purify it. Abraham’s God is the power that rescues the powerless, the God of glory who turns the radiance of his face to those without worldly glory: the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the marginal, the outsiders of the world. God hears the cry of the unheard, and so, if we follow him, do we.
 
Now is the time for Jews, Christians and Muslims to say what they failed to say in the past: We are all children of Abraham. And whether we are Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau, Leah or Rachel, Joseph or his brothers, we are precious in the sight of God. We are blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed. God’s love does not work that way.
 
Today God is calling us, Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and live at last as brothers and sisters, true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith, honouring God’s name by honouring his image, humankind.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements                                                             ix

I:   Bad Faith
   1.   Altruistic Evil                                                                        3
   2.   Violence and Identity                                                         27
   3.   Dualism                                                                               44
   4.   The Scapegoat                                                                     66
   5.   Sibling Rivalry                                                                    87

II:   Siblings
   6.   The Half-Brothers                                                             107
   7.   Wrestling with the Angel                                                  125
   8.   Role Reversal                                                                    144
   9.   The Rejection of Rejection                                               161

III:  The Open Heart
   10.   The Stranger                                                                      177
   11.   The Universality of Justice, the Particularity of Love      189
   12.   Hard Texts                                                                        207
   13.   Relinquishing Power                                                         220
   14.   Letting Go of Hate                                                           238
   15.   The Will to Power or the Will to Life                               252

Notes                                                                                         269
Bibliography                                                                             289

Editorial Reviews

In his sobering yet soul-stirring new book, Not in God's Name, Sacks confronts "politicized religious extremism" and diagnoses that cancer crisply: "The 21st century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning. Religion has returned because it is hard to live without meaning." Given that "no society has survived for long without either a religion or a substitute for religion," and given that believers are proliferating, Sacks predicts that the next 100 years will be more religious than the last. Bottom line: Any cure for violence in God's name will have to work with religion as a fact of life. That is where Sacks's brilliance as a theologian radiates. He thinks two matters need tackling. There is "identity without universality," or solidarity only with one's group. Then there is "universality without identity," the unbearable lightness of humans in a transactional but not transcendent world. Sacks wants to preserve the joy of participating in something bigger than the self while averting the hostility to strangers that goes with tribal membership.

The New York Times Book Review - Irshad Manji

08/10/2015
Chief rabbi emeritus of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, Jonathan Sacks (Covenant & Conversation) turns his prodigious intellect to deconstructing the mechanisms of religious violence. This well-researched tome spans human life, from the birth of human communities and discussions of the mechanics of social cohesion, to contemporary issues of terrorism and the healing work of recent popes. Weaving in the anthropological contributions of monotheism against the fractious lethality of dualism, Sacks dissects our civilization in crisis through the prism of anti-Semitism. If tyrants can convince others that their faith, their values, their God is under attack, Sacks argues, then they have a potent paranoiac cocktail for sustaining repression, and unleashing the dangerous “altruistic evil” that arose in Nazi Germany and that we see in terrorist attacks today. But if Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can overcome their “sibling rivalry”—which Sacks dismantles in a fresh interpretation of Genesis—these monotheistic religions can again offer a generative, life-affirming model of moral cohesion in our postmodern world. Sacks displays his wide learning and empathy in service of an ambitious, ingenious worldview. We’d all be wise to listen. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A Sunday Times (London) Bestseller

"An urgent and authoritative exploration of the roots of religious violence, from one of the world's great contemporary theologians. From Sacks's first gut-wrenching sentence, the reader has a solid sense that what follows are the deeply thought, carefully weighed words of an impeccable scholar. His reading of the Hebrew Bible is astute, illuminating layers of meaning too often missed. Sacks is a clear-eyed and compelling illuminator, and his methodical deconstruction, which routs out flawed understandings of the Bible, drives us emphatically toward hope, toward a theology that lets go of hate."
—Barbara Mahany, Chicago Tribune

“In his remarkable book, Sacks argues that believers must face the painful facts. He is careful to document that wars of religion are not unique to Islam. He believes that to persuade religious people of the Abrahamic faiths, arguments against religious violence must be rooted in theology, not in secular ideas alone.”
—E. J. Dionne Jr. The Washington Post

“The heart of Sacks’s powerful argument is a compelling exposition of Genesis [that] suggests an astonishing rereading of the narrative. . . . The book is a wondrous and valuable probe of our current world of violence that invites us to rethink and rehear the founding texts that are invoked to fund crusades. . . . It points authoritatively toward an alternative practice of public life grounded in a common humanity that subverts all tribal temptations. . . . Wise and important.”
—Walter Brueggemann, The Christian Century

“Not in God’s Name is a really important book that I urge you to buy and read. . . . [It] is terrific.”
—Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN

“In Not in God’s Name, the brilliant Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that ISIS is in fact typical of what we will see in the decades ahead. . . . [His] greatest contribution is to point out that the answer to religious violence is probably going to be found within religion itself.”
—David Brooks, The New York Times

“Sacks’s sobering yet soul-stirring new book . . . [offers] an ingenious rereading of Genesis. . . . His brilliance as a theologian radiates.”
—Irshad Manji, The New York Times Book Review

“Sacks’s analysis reflects an erudite mind fully engaged with philosophy, politics, and social studies of the most rigorous kind. It is when he turns his attention and all these resources to a theological engagement with the connection between religious faith and violence that he makes his greatest contribution . . . I cannot think of a more important new book for people of faith to read and study together . . . Jonathan Sacks is an enlightening presence for the whole world, and his message resonates today more powerfully than ever.”
—Michael Jinkins (president, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary), Huffington Post
 
“An intelligent analysis of old and new connections between religion and violence . . . Sacks tackles this task with the tenderness of a believer and the rigor of a scholar, drawing both on a thorough knowledge of ancient texts and history, and on modern insights such as those of Freud and the French literary critic and authority on sacred violence, Rene Girard.”
—The Economist
 
“This is a courageous and imaginative book.”
—Martha Minow (dean, Harvard Law School), The New Rambler

“Sacks believes that Islamic violence, like Jewish and Christian violence, flows from a misunderstanding of sacred text. In Not in God’s Name he illuminates a wiser faith and a gentler God. It’s a perceptive, poignant, and beautifully written book.”
—William Saletan, The Wall Street Journal

“A remarkable exploration of the reasons behind religious violence and solutions for stopping it, [through a] fascinating and ingenious reinterpretation of the book of Genesis. . . . Sacks’s treatment of Scripture is alone worth a close read. A humane, literate, and sincere book, one with something truly new to say.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Inspired by Isaiah’s vision of nations beating their swords into plowshares, Sacks embraces religion as the pathway to peace. . . . He unfolds a genuinely inclusive and pacific Abrahamic faith by burrowing into the Hebrew Bible . . . discerning deep themes conducing both to a universal justice between all peoples and a profound sense of God’s particularizing love for diverse covenant communities. A much-needed antidote to lethal animosities.”
—Booklist (starred review)
 
“Sacks turns his prodigious intellect to deconstructing the mechanisms of religious violence. . . . He displays his wide learning and empathy in service of an ambitious, ingenious worldview. We’d all be wise to listen.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Rabbi Sacks is one of today’s most interesting thinkers, writers, and speakers. His interventions into the public debate rarely fail to encourage thought, knowledge, and, indeed, wisdom. I suspect that this latest book will contribute a significant amount to the ferocious debates around religion and violence in our world today.”
—The Spectator (London)
 
“Sacks can’t be accused of shirking the big issues. In Not in God’s Name he considers a subject that believers of all faiths have a huge difficulty explaining: Why do so many insist on advancing their belief in God as a justification for violence? It is, as the briefest survey of the headlines will confirm, a timely inquiry. Sacks, unsurprisingly, rejects the suggestion that religion itself is what causes the problem, though he does believe that if it is to be solved, theology must play a part.”
—The Guardian (London)
 
“A global campaigner for greater religious understanding between all the faiths . . . Sacks is unmistakably a man on a mission, and he is sure that there is plenty we can do, if we find the will . . . His book is one front in that battle.”
—The Telegraph  (London)
 
“The book makes interesting and valuable points . . . Sacks reminds us that it is wrong to casually conflate ‘orthodox’ believers with armchair fundamentalists. The two approaches to faith are not only different but opposed to one another, he says. It is a case well put, and worth hearing.”
—The Independent (London)
 
“Not in God’s Name makes an explicit link between [religious] extremism and the growing gulf between a secular West and a religious world . . . It is a persuasive analysis.”
—BBC News

From the Publisher

08/01/2015
Sacks (law, ethics, & the Bible, Kings Coll. London) asks a probing question of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam): How, if we are made in the image of God, can radical religious adherents commit horrific atrocities in God's name? With ardent and straightforward language, the author, who served as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013, seeks to authoritatively discredit the idea that, by its very nature, organized religion breeds violence. Using historical anti-Semitism as the lens through which to consider acts of religiously motivated brutality, Sacks finds that modern iterations of social dissociation from one's group find resolution in the Internet's virtual social networks. Misreading and misapplying texts further fuels the capacity to inflict suffering upon one's fetishized enemies, even though, concludes Sacks, "No religion won the admiration of the world by its capacity to inflict suffering upon its enemies." VERDICT While Sacks has no recipe to cure religious violence, he successfully illustrates the roots of responsibility in this terrible dynamic. A worthy read that is sure to spur conversation.—Sandra Collins, Byzantine Catholic Seminary Lib., Pittsburgh

Library Journal

★ 2015-09-01
A remarkable exploration of the reasons behind religious violence and solutions for stopping it. Sacks (The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, 2012, etc.), a British rabbi and member of the House of Lords, tackles one of history's intractable questions: why have the world's three monotheistic religions always been in conflict? More importantly, what can be done about it? In the first third of his work, the author uses psychology, sociology, and philosophy to tease out an answer. He explains the problems of altruistic evil and of unrestrained dualism before exploring René Girard's theories of sibling rivalry, concluding, "[the three religions'] relationship is sibling rivalry, fraught with mimetic desire: the desire for the same thing, Abraham's promise." What follows is a fascinating and ingenious reinterpretation of the book of Genesis, with an emphasis on the many sibling relationships in the book. Sacks argues that, repeatedly, Scripture sets up classic mythic scenarios only to foil each expected conclusion with an unexpected reconciliation. He concludes that the whole of Genesis points to a "rejection of rejection," an affirmation that all people are recipients of God's love and blessing. This leads to the last and most difficult third of the book, concerning the implementation of this knowledge in solving the problem of religious violence. Sacks notes that seeing the world through the eyes of "the other" is the surest way of creating peace. He also points out the futility of continued hatred and urges others to trust in God's ability to judge, not in our own. However, some readers may be left wondering how Sacks' conclusions could ever be seriously heard by the world's staunchest fundamentalists. Nonetheless, the author has contributed an artful and meaningful work on interfaith dialogue. His treatment of Scripture alone is worth a close read. A humane, literate, and sincere book, one with something truly new to say.

Kirkus Reviews