Not in God's Name Read Free Page A

madeviolent, as Hobbes said, by fear, glory and the ‘perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death’. 8 Religion has nothing to do with it. It may be used by manipulative leaders to motivate people to wage wars precisely because it inspires people to heroic acts of self-sacrifice, but religion itself teaches us to love and forgive, not to hate and fight. The third answer is: Their religion, yes; our religion, no. We are for peace. They are for war.
    None of these is true. As for the first, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod surveyed 1,800 conflicts in the
Encyclopedia of Wars
and found that less than 10 per cent involved religion at all. 9 A ‘God and War’ survey commissioned by the BBC found that religion played some part in 40 per cent of conflicts but usually a minor one. 10
    The second answer is misguided. When terrorist or military groups invoke holy war, define their battle as a struggle against Satan, condemn unbelievers to death and commit murder while declaring ‘God is great’, to deny that they are acting on religious motives is absurd. Religions seek peace, but on their own terms. This is not a recipe for peace but for war.
    The third is a classic instance of in-group bias. Almost invariably people regard their group as superior to others. Henry Tajfel, one of the pioneers of social identity theory, showed how deeply this runs in even the most trivial of groupings. In one experiment he divided people into groups on the basis of the mere toss of a coin, yet they still rated the members of their own group as more likeable than the others, despite the fact that they had never met one another before and knew that they had been selected on a purely random basis. Groups, like individuals, have a need for self-esteem and they will interpret facts to confirm their sense of superiority. 11 Judaism, Christianity and Islam define themselves as religions of peace yet they have all given rise to violence at some points in their history.
    My concern in this book is less the general connection between religion and violence than the specific challenge of politicisedreligious extremism in the twenty-first century. The re-emergence of religion as a global force caught the West unprotected and unprepared because it was in the grip of a narrative that told a quite different story.
    It is said that 1989, the year of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, marked the final act of an extended drama in which first religion, then political ideology, died after a prolonged period in intensive care. The age of the true believer, religious or secular, was over. In its place had come the market economy and the liberal democratic state, in which the individual and his or her right to live as they chose took priority over all creeds and codes. The hymn of the new dispensation was John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, with its vision of a post-ideological, post-religious world with ‘Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.’
    It was the last chapter of a story that began in the seventeenth century, the last great age of wars of religion. The West had undergone a process of secularisation that had taken four centuries.
    First, in the seventeenth century, came the secularisation of
knowledge
in the form of science and philosophy. Then in the eighteenth century came the secularisation of
power
by way of the American and French Revolutions and the separation – radical in France, less doctrinaire in the United States – of church and state. In the nineteenth century came the secularisation of
culture
as art galleries and museums were seen as alternatives to churches as places in which to encounter the sublime. Finally in the 1960s came the secularisation of
morality
, by the adoption of a principle first propounded by John Stuart Mill a century earlier – namely that the only ground on which anyone, including the state, is justified in intervening in behaviour done in private is the