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DOI: 10.1037/XXXXX.XXXAPA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality: Vol. 1. Context, Theory, and Research, K. I. Pargament (Editor-in-Chief)Copyright © 2013 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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Religion and evil in the Context of genoCide

James E. Waller

Despite predictions of its demise, religion continues to exert strong influence on a wide range of politi-cal, social, and individual phenomena (Fox & Sandler, 2003). Osiander (2000) has argued that religion is a political and psychological cement that binds society together. Similarly, Eisenstadt (1993) maintains that religion is and always has been one of the “premises” of civilization, making it an essential element in political processes and social change. As such, religion is potentially a major source of legiti-macy for both the establishment and those who oppose it. At the individual level, Myers (1992) is among many who have demonstrated that people active in faith communities report greater-than- average happiness and often cope well with crisis. Religion is clearly a significant source of cultural meaning, security, and individual and group identity.

Religion, however, also can, in some instances, be the source of the divisions between factions and a major influence on political and social behaviors of exclusion, persecution, conflict, destruction, and terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 1997). As Johnston and Sampson (1994) suggested, since the end of the Cold War, intergroup conflicts have become rooted less in political ideology and more in communal identity—race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. So, contrary to many predictions (and certainly con-trary to the U.S. notion of the rigorous separation of church and state), the role of religion and religious institutions in the life of states and in international affairs is becoming more, rather than less, important in understanding contemporary world politics (for

information on religion and terrorism, see Volume 2, Chapter 18, this handbook).

This chapter will focus on religion and evil in the context of a specific form of intergroup conflict—genocide—by exploring three specific interfaces: religion and culture, religion and the “other,” and religion and the institutional church. Consistent with this handbook’s vision of an “integrative para-digm,” this chapter will address several of the guid-ing themes underlying the handbook—approaching religion as a multidimensional phenomenon with myriad beliefs, practices, relationships and experi-ences; analyzing religion at multiple levels (individ-ual, familial, community, and cultural phenomena); and treating religion as a multivalent phenomenon with varying meanings and values. In so doing, and complementing other contributor’s chapters, this chapter will affirm the volume’s “integrative para-digm” of religion as a rich and complex process that can impact people in diverse ways.

Definitional Context

ReligionReflecting this handbook’s commitment to working from a shared perspective on the meanings of reli-gion and spirituality, this chapter will use “religion” or “religiousness” to refer to (a) the beliefs, prac-tices, relationships, or experiences having to do with the sacred that are explicitly and historically rooted in established institutionalized systems; and (b) the psychological, social, or physical functions of beliefs, practices, relationships, or experiences

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having to do with the sacred (refer to Chapter 1 in this volume for a more extended discussion about the meaning of these concepts as they are being used in the handbook).

This chapter, primarily looks at religion from an institutional, rather than theological, framework. It approaches religious institutions as real, formal organizations; worldly (as opposed to divine) social structures that govern the behavior of individuals within them. As institutionalized systems, they have a mission and purpose; they shape individual human lives and intentions just as they are, in turn, shaped by human lives and intentions. Religious institutions are birthed by individuals, and it is inap-propriate to separate the two. I do not regard reli-gious institutions as an instance of emergence in which they arise beyond, or transcendent of, the conscious intentions of the individuals involved. Rather, I regard religious institutions as social constructions whose combined effect, in a synergistic relationship, is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

In such an analysis, we cannot, of course, artifi-cially separate religious institutions from their underlying theological frameworks and, in fact, those frameworks (encompassing beliefs, practices, relationships, and experiences) play a significant role in institutional direction and decision making—just as they play a significant role in meeting the psycho-logical, social, or physical needs of individuals. Neither can we disentangle religious institutions from the culture in which they have been shaped and which they have, in turn, shaped (see Chapter 13 in this volume).

evilIn virtually every human culture, there has existed some word for “evil,” a linguistic acknowledgment of its reality in everyday human affairs. For millen-nia, the concept of evil was central to religious, and much secular, thought. Events in the 20th century, particularly two World Wars and the horrors of the Holocaust, kept the universal reality of evil on the front pages. Indeed, it was a time in history that led philosopher Hannah Arendt to declare, “the prob-lem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe” (Kohn, 1994, p. 134).

Her prediction, though, was not quite right. For most of the 20th century, evil remained an unpopu-lar concept among intellectuals in Europe—as well as others around the world. As Neiman (2002) pointed out, “no major philosophical work but Arendt’s own appeared on the subject [of evil] in English, and German and French texts were remark-ably oblique” (p. 2).

Until recently, the concept of evil had almost completely disappeared from the vocabulary of the social sciences that seek to understand the human situation. In 1969, the eminent sociologist Kurt Wolff wrote,

To my knowledge, no social scientist, as a social scientist, has asked what evil is. “What is evil?” is a question that rather has been raised (both in the West and in the East) by philosophers and theolo-gians, as well as by uncounted, unclas-sified, unrecorded people since time immemorial. (Wolff, 1969, p. 111)

More than three decades later, it appeared that little had changed as a survey of psychology articles writ-ten in the past 10 years found only nine that were pertinent to the concept of evil (Malony, 1998). The prevailing normative picture of humankind held up by the social sciences still portrayed, for the most part, rational creatures who could be expected to relate to and treat fellow humans with basic empa-thy, kindness, respect, and decency.

More recently, however, there are signs that the social scientific neglect of evil is beginning to be rec-tified. For instance, an entire 1999 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Review, the official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psy-chology, was devoted to social scientific perspectives on evil and violence. Baumeister’s (1999) Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty addressed a broad spec-trum of interpersonal and intergroup violence, from everyday evil to mass atrocity. A. G. Miller’s (2004) edited volume, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, included contributions from prominent social psychologists examining conceptions of good and evil in contemporary social psychology. Zimbardo’s (2007) The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, while primarily an exhaustive

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synopsis of the Stanford Prison Experiment (the first written form in which Zimbardo has revisited the experiment in such detail), extends our understand-ing of the “power of the situation” to Abu Ghraib while also turning our attention to our abilities to act heroically.

Although “evil” certainly has become a more oft-studied construct, it still presents a definitional and operational challenge. Most would agree that—in its broadest sense—evil is anything detrimental to the well-being of living things. Following that, we can then distinguish between the two most common cat-egories of evil: natural and human (sometimes called “moral”) evil. Natural evil is a function of nat-ural processes of change. It is the evil that originates independently of human actions—events such as earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, fires, pestilence, droughts, and diseases. Human evil, in contrast, is evil that we originate. It refers to the destructive things that we do to each other and ourselves.

This chapter will focus on the specific question of human evil—defined as the deliberate harming of humans by other humans (Waller, 2007). This is a behavioral definition that focuses on how people act toward one another. This definition judges as evil any human actions leading to the deliberate harming of other humans. In short, harm is the most salient characteristic of human evil, and it is the deliberate intentionality of harm, inflicted with reasonable foreseeable consequences, that will be the focus of this chapter.

Believing that there is much to learn about every-day evil from looking at the extremes of human behavior, this chapter will specifically focus on the harm we perpetrate on each other under the sanc-tion of political, social, or religious groups—in other words, the malevolent human evil perpetrated in times of collective social unrest, war, mass killings, and, and its most extreme, genocide. The 20th cen-tury saw an unmatched scale of systematic and intentional mass murder coupled with an unprece-dented efficiency in the mechanisms and techniques of state-sponsored terrorism, or genocide. All told, it is estimated that 60 million men, women, and chil-dren were victims of genocide in the past century alone, and the dawn of the 21st century brings little light to that darkness. A 2009 empirically based risk

assessment by the Genocide Prevention Advisory Network, for instance, found highest risks of geno-cide in Sudan and Burma followed by Somalia. Risks also remain high in Zimbabwe and Rwanda and are greater than previously estimated for Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China (Harff & Gurr, 2009).

Religion anD evil in the Context of genoCiDe: thRee inteRfaCes

Myriad historical, social, and cultural influences must be considered in understanding genocidal soci-eties and, although often marginalized in existing scholarship, the role of religion is one such factor in that broad and interconnected array of contextual forces. With that in mind, this chapter will focus on the interface of religion with culture, the “other,” and the institutional church in episodes of genocidal violence.

Religion and CultureAll cultures leave their fingerprints on the members within them—most often through the transmission of a worldview. A worldview includes the presuppo-sitions, intentions, meanings, rules, norms, values, principles, practices, and activities through which people live their lives. It is a fundamental orienta-tion that includes the core cultural ideas of what is good, what is moral, and what is the self. As Oyser-man and Lauffer (2002) explained, “as cultural beings, we see what it makes sense to see in our local worlds; we make sense of things using a culture-specific scaffolding” (p. 163). In short, a worldview is a cultural construction that frames an individual’s perception of his or her social world and, subsequently, influences their actions within that social world.

Psychologists understand the ultimate impor-tance of worldview as deriving from an awareness of our own finitude and mortality. Given our capac-ity for self-consciousness and abstract symbolic thought, humans are the only animals that know they are to die. The existential concerns (conscious and unconscious) arising from this awareness moti-vate us to transcend vulnerability, and even death, by investing ourselves in a worldview that gives the world and ourselves larger meaning and value. As

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conceptualized by terror management theory (TMT), and originally articulated by Ernest Becker, the sym-bolic identities and self-esteem that are secured by identification with a worldview transcend natural physical decay and allow us a measure of control over our own existential terror (see Greenberg, Lan-dau, Kosloff, & Solomon, 2009; Pyszczynski, Roth-schild, & Abdollahi, 2008; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, & Schimel, 2004; Becker, 1973). Understood from this perspective, allegiance to a worldview is one answer to the human problem of mortality. As Routledge, Arndt, and Goldenberg (2004) stated, “Worldviews related to religious and political ideologies, ethics, romance, and a variety of other domains transform a chaotic and unpredict-able world of inevitable death into a meaningful world of order and predictability” (p. 1348). In short, TMT theorizes that the ultimate function of any worldview is to serve as a protective anxiety buffer against existential fears inherent exclusively to human beings.

On a more proximal level, cognitive anthropol-ogy understands worldview in the rich theoretical context of cultural models. As Hinton (1998) described, “cultural models are largely tacit knowl-edge structures that are both widely shared by and mediate the understanding of the members of a social group” (p. 96). In other words, cultural mod-els give us the background, or lens, through which we interpret our social world and make judgments about appropriate responses. Cultural models are the constituent elements of an encompassing world-view in which culture-specific thoughts, norms, values, codes, and principles become part of an indi-vidual’s perceptual frame and, in certain situations, may enable the commission of extraordinary evil. Although such models influence, and are influenced by, ecological, economic, and sociopolitical factors, they often persevere despite drastic historical and structural change and are not always confined to prescribed national or territorial boundaries.

Hinton (1998), for example, has explored the contributing role played by cultural models of face, honor, shame, revenge, patronage, paranoia, detach-ment, and obedience during the Cambodian geno-cide. He has argued that the vertical structuring of Cambodian society—where people are differentiated

in terms of power, status, and patronage—lays the groundwork for a cultural model of obedience to, and respect for, authority. Enculturation to this cul-tural model of obedience and respect begins at an early age and is reinforced by a wide range of social, political, linguistic, behavioral, and religious con-ventions. As Hinton pointed out, even though the Khmer Rouge destroyed much of this traditional hierarchical system in Cambodian society, status differences continued to be structured vertically—and with more fixity—in the Communist regime. In this way, the Khmer Rouge was able to tap into a preexisting—and, for many Cambodians, highly salient—cultural model of hierarchically based authority orientation to legitimate their power, goals, social structures of inequality, and even mass murder.

For all of their influence, however, cultural mod-els do not deterministically dictate human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. For the social group, cul-tural models vary in their salience and importance between situations and through time. Moreover, people are not always successful at deciphering the prevailing cultural models in a social group. Social psychologists refer to this as pluralistic ignorance, the recognition that the beliefs that people perceive and conform to might not accurately reflect the social group’s actual beliefs (D. T. Miller & Prentice, 1994). Finally, individuals vary substantially in their motivation to embrace certain cultural models—a model that is highly relevant for some may be regarded with only passing indifference by others. As a result of all of these factors, the cultural con-struction of a worldview is differentially internalized across individuals within a social group.

Cultural models remain, however, the associative network, or system, underlying the cultural con-struction of worldview. For many, religion is the part of culture that offers the most explicit answer to the meaning of life and, in so doing, affords us the greatest salve to the anxieties that beset life. At times, religion, in its institutional manifestation, motivates an impulse to heal—as evidenced by its role in the origins of some of our most humane and caring social institutions, its application in libera-tion theology as seen in the civil rights movement and struggles for human rights in Latin America,

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and its provision of security to oppose potentially destructive ideas and practices throughout wide swaths of society. At other times, however, institu-tionalized religion can be a motivating element in the impulse to kill. There is a dark side of religious belief systems that often are fused with ethnic and national identities. In this sense, religion is epiphenomenal—attached to and living off other phenomena.

One of the phenomena to which religion is often attached to, and lives off of, are cultural models of authority orientation. Blass (1991) reviewed research demonstrating that subjects who scored high on a multidimensional measure of Christian religious orientation were more accepting of the commands of an authority than were those who scored lower or were indiscriminately antireligious. Similarly, Altemeyer and Hunsberger (1992) found that children who grow up in fundamentalist fami-lies do tend to obey the authorities and follow the rules, but they also tend to be self-righteous, preju-dicial, and condemnatory toward people outside their groups.

The trends of this research suggest that religious belief systems emphasizing divine influence and authority may be particularly relevant in shaping our responses to worldly influence and authority. Although the teachings of most religious belief sys-tems are replete with affirmations of the dignity of human life and the responsibilities of human beings to respect and preserve that dignity, there is a wealth of social psychological research suggesting that reli-gious belief systems influence individuals’ proneness to prejudice (see Chapter 24 in this volume). Allport and Ross (1967) found that indiscriminately proreli-gious persons—those who report being both intrin-sically and extrinsically religious—“are the most prejudiced of all” (p. 432). More recently, Rowatt, LaBouff, Johnson, Froese, and Tsang (2009), utiliz-ing a large national random sample, found that gen-eral religiousness is not associated with universal acceptance of others, but, rather, is associated with a selective intolerance toward those persons perceived to behave in a manner inconsistent with some tradi-tional religious teachings. This more nuanced understanding of the relationship between religious belief systems and prejudice suggests the existence

of proscribed (explicitly opposed by an individual’s religious group) and nonproscribed (either endorsed or implicitly encouraged) prejudices (see Batson & Stocks, 2009).

The general finding, however, that enduring reli-gious belief systems make us more amenable to the commands of authority also is affirmed by the his-torical realities surrounding many cases of mass kill-ing and genocide. It was in Rwanda, for instance, that many of the worst massacres occurred in churches and mission compounds where Tutsis had sought refuge. It is very likely that more people were killed in church buildings than anywhere else in Rwanda. From the beginning of the genocide, human rights groups charged that some church leaders from various denominations used their authority to encourage the massacres and join in the killing.

Unfortunately, the reality of such charges are now undisputed as we have a sad litany of well- documented cases. For example, in June 2001, a Belgian court convicted two Benedictine nuns, Sisters Gertrude Mukangango and Julienne Kisito, who were found guilty of having participated in the massacre of more than 7,600 people at the Sovu convent in Butare. Despite the convictions, the Vati-can has taken no steps toward excommunicating the nuns and, indeed, a Vatican spokesperson could not understand why the court singled out the two nuns “seeing the grave responsibility of so many [other] people and groups involved” (Hennig, 2001). Rwanda also saw the head of its Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop Thaddee Ntihinyurwa, accused of abetting the murder of Tutsis by ordering at least 600 people out of the Nyamasheke Cathedral in which they sought to seek refuge and into a local stadium, where they were killed. Ntihinyurwa appeared before the Gacaca court in Nyamasheke district in July 2005 and was questioned intensively but has remained as Archbishop of the Kigali Dio-cese in Rwanda.

An Anglican Bishop, Samuel Musabyimana, was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for the crime of genocide, specifi-cally “for killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the Tutsi population with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a racial or

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ethnic group” (a copy of indictment can be found on the ICTR website at http://ictr-archive09.library. cornell.edu/ENGLISH/cases/Musabyimana/indictment/ indictment.html). The indictment claims that, although Musabyimana publicly stated that he did not oppose the killing of Tutsis, he did not want killings at the diocese and that the Tutsis should be taken to Kabgayi to be killed. The indictment fur-ther alleges that Musabyimana participated in, or facilitated, the killings by specifically instructing subordinates to assist soldiers and militias, and by directly or indirectly providing firearms to civilians, under circumstances in which he knew, or should have known, that Tutsi civilians would be killed. Samuel Musabyimana died in detention on January 24, 2003, before the start of his trial.

Religion and the “other”The psychological construction of the “other” is piv-otal to understanding the development of moral sanctions, or exclusions, that excommunicate “them” from our common social or moral commu-nity. The roots of us–them thinking run deep in our human psyche. Human minds are compelled to define the limits of the tribe. Kinship, however defined, remains an important organizing principle for most societies in the world. Knowing who is kin, and knowing who is in our social group, has a deep importance to species like ours. We construct this knowledge by categorizing others as “us” or “them,” a tendency that many scholars have called one of the few true human universals. Once these boundaries are established, we tend to be partial toward “us” and label “them”—those with whom “we” share the few-est genes and least culture—as enemies. We have an evolved capacity to see our group as superior to all others and even to be reluctant to recognize mem-bers of other groups as deserving of equal respect.

Ethnocentrism and xenophobia are two comple-mentary psychological adaptations that are central to understanding this process. First, ethnocentrism refers to the tendency to focus on one’s own group as the “right” one. Sumner (1906) first coined this term and defined it as

a differentiation that arises between ourselves, the we-group, or in-group,

and everybody else, or the others-group, out-groups. The insiders in a we-group are in a relation of peace, order, law, gov-ernment, and industry to each other. . . . Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. . . . Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.” (pp. 12–13)

Ethnocentrism is a universal characteristic of human social life and, as often as not, it is fairly harmless. From an evolutionary perspective, there is an advantageous reinforcement of communal iden-tity and “we-ness” when groups consider their ideas, their cultures, their religions, or their aesthetic stan-dards to be either superior to others, or at least in certain ways to be preferential or noteworthy in comparison to other groups. As Hinde (1989) wrote, “It is not unreasonable to entertain the possibility that natural selection acted on individuals to enhance this identification with groups and to aug-ment the (real or perceived) superiority of the group with which they identified” (p. 60).

Ethnocentric loyalties show themselves early in life. The importance of both the caretaker–infant bonds and stranger anxiety reactions of the first year of life demonstrate a universality of the us–them differentiation process. Experimental social psychol-ogists have even demonstrated that classifying indi-viduals into arbitrary groups in the laboratory (for example, forming groups on the basis of a coin toss or musical preferences) can elicit ethnocentric reac-tions (see Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Other recent social psychological experimental evidence suggests that the concepts “us” and “them” carry positive emotional significance that is activated automatically and unconsciously (Leyens et al., 2000). Once iden-tified with a group—even in the complete absence of any links, kinship or otherwise, among individuals in that group—individuals find it easy to exaggerate differences between their group and others.

Included with ethnocentrism is a second univer-sal adaptation—xenophobia, the complementary

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tendency to fear outsiders or strangers. It can even be said that in forming bonds we deepen fissures. In other words, defining what the in-group is also requires defining what it is not. As Tajfel and Forgas put it, “we are what we are because they are not what we are” (cited in Brewer & Miller, 1996, pp. 47–48).

Ridley (1996) argued that humans have evolved natures with a host of social instincts. On the positive side, these social instincts equip us “with predispositions to learn how to cooperate, to dis-criminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit [ourselves] to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labour) (p. 249). On the negative side, however, these social instincts also promote ethno-centric conflict by providing a critical building block for in-group alliance and out-group hostility. In other words, the evolution of sociability, altruism, and cooperation goes hand in hand with the evolu-tion of animosity to outsiders, or what Ridley referred to as “xenophobic group loyalty” (p. 167). We cooperate to compete. There is no “us” without a corresponding “them” to oppose.

On a broader societal level, governments, propa-ganda, and militaries can easily evoke our evolved capacities for ethnocentrism and xenophobia. At the extreme, these capacities may even translate into a genocidal imperative as they are used to forge in-group solidarity and undermine the normal inhibi-tions against killing out-group strangers. As Ghiglieri (1999) wrote,

Xenophobia and ethnocentrism are not just essential ingredients to war. Because they instinctively tell men precisely whom to bond with versus whom to fight against, they are the most dangerously manipulable facets of war psychology that promote genocide. Indeed, geno-cide itself has become a potent force in human evolution. (p. 211)

Although social exclusion, let alone genocide and mass killing, is not an inevitable consequence of these adaptations, we are reminded that—once identified with a group—we find it easy to exagger-ate differences between our group and others,

enhancing in-group cooperation and effectiveness, and, frequently intensifying antagonism toward other groups. Most religious belief systems, by their very nature, play on ethnocentrism and xenophobia and, in the extreme, may even foster a devaluing effect on the human life that falls outside the veil of the faithful. They distinguish all too clearly between “us” and “them,” between the committed and the nonbelievers, between those whom the gods love and those whom they hate. In this way, religion can define the “other” in forms perverted to justify and reward the most horrendous of human deeds. Car-roll (2001), for instance, traced how Christianity’s early self-definition in opposition to Judaism devolved, over the centuries, into often vitriolic forms of anti-Semitism as revealed in the founda-tional texts and practices of Christianity—and as culminating in the churches’ silence, and complic-ity, in the attempted extermination of European Jewry under Nazism (1939–1945). Recent research by Pargament, Trevino, Mahoney, and Silberman (2007) confirmed that continuing perceptions of Jews as desecrators remains central to understand-ing contemporary anti-Semitic attitudes (see also Pargament, Magyar, Benore, & Mahoney, 2005, for an investigation of the relationship between desecra-tion and physical health).

Religion may even justify a moral imperative for mobilizing a collectivity for extraordinary actions and, frequently, does so through ritualizing con-duct. Ritual conduct refers to behaviors that are apparently excessive or unproductive but that none-theless are persistent. In other words, ritual conduct is persistent indulgence in apparently noninstru-mental exercises—exercises that consume radically limited energies and resources but that also cement a moral imperative for social exclusion and, even, mass murder. During the Yugoslav Wars (1991–1995), for instance, Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic priests offered ritualized blessings for sol-diers embarking on sacred missions to exterminate Bosnian Muslims. A 1992 article in a popular Croa-tian Catholic magazine rejoiced that the cross of Christ stood next to the Croatian flag, a Croatian bishop next to the Croatian minister of state, and “guardsmen wore rosaries around their necks” (cited in Sells, 1996, p. 103).

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Recent experimental research by Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, and Busath (2007) found that scriptural violence, sanctioned by God, can increase aggression—especially in believers. As they have concluded, “To the extent religious extremists engage in prolonged, selective reading of the scrip-tures, focusing on violent retribution toward unbe-lievers instead of the overall message of acceptance and understanding, one might expect to see increased brutality” (Bushman et al., 2007, p. 204).

Conversely, religion can widen our circle of moral commitment to alter who is a “we” and who is a “they.” In so doing, group membership can be redefined along the boundaries of an interdependent or superordinate group. For example, the identity of Hutu Muslims in Rwanda centered more on religion than ethnicity. For them, religion was not fused with or co-opted by ethnic or national identities. Rather, religion was the primary identity and other allegiances fell secondary to it. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu Muslims—living together in the Biryogo neighborhood of Kigali—stood up to the militias and most Muslim Tutsi were spared. The fact that mosques never became the killing sites that many Christian churches and compounds became, helps explain why Islam currently is the fastest growing religion in Rwanda—already claiming about 15% of the population (Lacey, 2004).

Religion anD the institutional ChuRCh

There have been notable cases in which religious institutions stood and resisted the power of state-sponsored terrorism. For example, German Roman Catholic and Lutheran leaders’ opposition to the “T4” program, Hitler’s systematic program of state-sanctioned murder disguised as “euthanasia,” is well chronicled (e.g., see Burleigh, 1997). It was such institutionally led opposition that led to the official termination of the T4 program on August 24, 1941.

Such cases, however, have been the scattered exceptions to the more general rule of recent history in which religious institutions have been notori-ously silent, or even complicit, in the face of genocidal violence. This section of the chapter spe-cifically focuses on the role of indigenous Christian

institutions in contexts of genocidal violence. How do such institutions shape a culture in which geno-cidal violence may occur and how do they respond to such a culture both during and after the genocidal violence? The following section of the chapter will analyze three stages of institutional Christian response to genocide—pregenocidal, genocidal, and postgenocidal.

Pregenocidal responses include the fusion of reli-gious belief systems with ethnic, national, and polit-ical identities that provide theological justifications for us–them thinking by constricting the churches’ universe of moral obligation. Most often, this fusion is not a joining of equals; generally, the ethnic, national, or political identities co-opt religion and, eventually, neutralize it. The church loses its critical role as a prophetic voice of the voiceless and becomes, instead, married to other social identities that privilege it among powerholders and mobilize the church to preserve, rather than challenge, the status quo. It is, as Volf (2000) described, an “idola-trous shift of loyalty” in which faith is “employed” as a weapon in an ethnic, national, or political struggle.

A consequence of this fusion is the churches’ role in providing a theological justification for us–them thinking. In Christian institutions, us–them think-ing constricts the churches’ universe of moral obli-gation and leaves the church unwilling to curb the ethnic and national ethnocentrisms, or political divi-sions, to which it has become fused. In this way, Christian institutions help build the scaffolding for moral sanctions, or exclusions, that heighten inter-group tensions and may, ultimately, “excommuni-cate” the victims of genocidal violence from the perpetrators’ moral community. The danger, and historical reality, of such exclusions makes Freud’s famous dictum seem more true than exaggerated: “Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion” (cited in Atran, 2002, p. 115).

During the Holocaust, the institutional identities of the Catholic Church and Protestant churches were compromised by their decision, motivated by self-interest to retain their prominent place in soci-ety, to maintain some degree of independence by entering into various “agreements” with the Nazi regime. Although it could be argued that such

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arrangements ensured institutional independence from Nazi control, it is equally clear that there was a fusion of identity that neutralized the churches’ voice and negated most forms of public institutional criticism of Nazi policies and practices (for an over-view, see the edited volume by Spicer, 2007).

Moreover, the groundwork for the moral exclu-sion of Jewish victims was laid in the centuries preceding the Holocaust as Jews were regarded as aliens who were on the remote fringes of Christian Europe’s universe of moral obligation. The historical stigmatization and exclusion of the Jews meant that the traditions, habits, images, and vocabularies for extreme dehumanization were already well estab-lished. The centuries-old image of the vile and dia-bolical Jew was woven into the fabric of German, and European, culture. The deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda ribboning throughout Germany society during the rise of Nazism was thus profoundly effective in placing, and keeping, the Jews entirely outside the realm of moral obligation for perpetrators.

In Rwanda, the churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church, had historically reinforced us–them thinking and behavior both in public life and in the church itself. As early as 1957 (although an even more accurate analysis would go back to the introduction of Christianity during the colonization of Rwanda), the Catholic Church in Rwanda had supported the creation of a Hutu identity and nationalism. As radical Hutus gained power after the social revolution of 1959–1962, the Catholic Church found itself with well-placed connections at all levels of government and with unimpeded access to the centers of power. Similarly, many within the hierarchy of the Protestant churches in Rwanda had developed intimate ties with the Hutu regime over the years. Although several Rwandan bishops made statements urging unity, justice, peace, and har-mony between 1990 and the start of the genocide in 1994, such admonitions came too late to reverse decades of religion-entrenched us–them thinking in Rwandan society.

So, in 1994, as Hutu extremists began to domi-nate the government and plan the genocide, it was easy for the church—both Catholic and Protestant—to fuse its identity, and interests, with the ethnic,

national, and political identities, and interests, of the genocidal regime. As Scheer (1995) wrote of the church in Rwanda, “Staying on the good side of the local mayor became as important as staying on the good side of God (sometimes more so)” (p. 326). As early as August 1994, within weeks after the end of the genocide, a World Council of Churches team that had visited Rwanda concluded that both Catho-lic and Protestant churches alike had “betrayed their beliefs by aligning themselves far too closely with the former Hutu-dominated regime and its tribal politics” (“Rwandan Churches Culpable,” 1994, p. 778). Clearly, the blood of tribal ethnic ties ran deeper than the waters of baptism in Rwanda.

Similarly, Sells (1996) explored the role of Chris-tian mythology in the fusion of religion and ethnic-ity in Bosnia that makes the two identities virtually indistinguishable—one “ethnoreligious” identity. Central to the ethnoreligious identity of Bosnian Christians was the historical construction of Bos-nian Muslims as “the other.” Sells traced centuries of religious-based Serb ideology in which Muslims are portrayed as Christ killers, heretics, perverts, and sadists. He labeled the ideology as “Christoslav-ism,” meaning the notion that Slavs are Christian by nature and conversion to another religion is ethnic or racial betrayal. Sells argued that such Serbian mythology provided the ideological fuel to motivate and justify the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims in pursuit of an ethnoreligiously pure state.

In this vein, the Serbian Orthodox Church has been particularly criticized for its role in the Bos-nian genocide. The church’s episcopate is domi-nated by hardline nationalists with visions of a traditional, patriarchal society. As Sells (2003a) pointed out, there was a close relationship of Serb bishops to war criminals, massive Serb funeral pro-cessions of war criminals, and repeated church attacks on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as an anti-Serb plot. In 1995, Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, said he personally believed that “much of what we are seeing in the Serbian Orthodox Church” could be criticized in terms similar to those in which the ecumenical movement criticized pro-Hitler Christians in Germany (Paul, 1995, p. 881).

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Although Bosnian Serb extremists were responsi-ble for about 90% of the war crimes committed dur-ing the conflict, Bosnian Croats also were affected by a similar religious-based ideology that fostered anti-Muslim stereotypes and depicted them as enemies of Christianity. The role of Catholicism in the Bosnian genocide has been less acknowledged, and the crimes of Bosnian Croat extremists were fewer, but they were no less in intensity. Sells (2003b) has chronicled, for instance, the activities of Bishop Ratko Peric and Franciscan friars in the Mostar region of Bosnia in supporting Catholic militias’ involvements in mass killings, expulsions, annihila-tion of the sacral heritage of other traditions (“ triumphal shrines of exclusion”), and imprison-ment of Muslims in concentration camps where prisoners were starved and tortured regularly.

Ultimately, the product of such mythologies and ideologies that define “us” and “them” is an excom-munication of victims from the perpetrators’ moral universe. In Sells’s (2003a) words, “Religions in their ideological manifestations have traditionally been strong at promoting an interior identity in opposition to the religious other than in affirming identity in affirmation of the other” (p. 329). This is a moral exclusion, with theological backing, that can have disastrous consequences. As Fein (1979) wrote,

A church holding out the possibility of conversion to all must assume a common humanity, and therefore may not sanc-tion unlimited violence. But a doctrine that assumes people do not belong to a common species knows no limits inhibit-ing the magnitude of permissible crime. (p. 30)

Genocidal responses include sins of omission (silence and denial) as well as sins of commission (active participation in killings). In the former, there is a resignation of institutional agency in the face of mass murder and, in the latter, a functional involve-ment in the process of destruction.

During a genocide, institutional responses most often center around silence. In the Holocaust, as pointed out, church hierarchies followed their own narrowly defined best interests, particularly that of

protecting their own institutional autonomy within a totalitarian state. Such interests were best advanced by silence, rather than by protest or hero-ism. In Rwanda, church hierarchies also remained mostly silent. When churches spoke, their words were seldom direct calls for institutional action but were most often public displays of “theologically correct” hand-wringing. In May 1994, for instance, in the midst of the Rwandan genocide, Catholic and Protestant leaders issued a joint letter calling for an end to the killing; yet they failed to condemn the atrocities or to describe the mass murder as geno-cide. Likewise, Pope John Paul II called for a general end to the violence, but made no specific, overt plea to Rwandan Catholic Church leaders to use their authority to do so (for an overview, see the edited volume by Rittner, Roth, &Whitworth, 2004). Simi-larly, the Pope’s numerous pronouncements to end the violence in Bosnia unfailing called for interna-tional intervention but seldom called for institu-tional leadership from the Catholic churches in the region.

Although it borders even more on a sin of com-mission, we also often see silence take the form of active denial as an institutional response during genocide. For instance, even after the revelation of Serb-initiated atrocities at the beginning of the Bosnian genocide, the Holy Episcopal Synod of the Serbian Orthodox church distributed a document in response to the “false accusations against the Serbian people” in which they denied the existence of such atrocities. “In the name of God’s truth,” the document read, “and on the testimony from our brother bishops from Bosnia-Herzegovina and from other trustworthy witnesses, we declare, taking full moral responsibility, that such camps [concentra-tion and killing camps] neither have existed nor exist in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina” (Sells, 1996, p. 84). Unfortunately, at the time this document was composed in May 1992, thousands of non-Serbs were being raped, driven from their homes, and killed—all before the eyes of local Serbian Orthodox priests and bishops.

Perhaps the most chilling are the sins of commis-sion in which individual actors, laity, and clergy of Christian institutions, actively participate in—even organize—the killings. Although present in the

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Holocaust (clergy members were even found in the membership of the Einsatzgruppen killing units) and Bosnian genocide, these sins of commission, as we have read in this chapter, are most extensively documented in Rwanda. In addition to examples discussed in this chapter, there are also clear accusa-tions of active participation by clergy of the Free Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Seventh-Day Adventist Churches in the Rwandan genocide. According to an August 2001 report by afrol News, Bishop Aaron Ruhumuliza, head of the Free Meth-odist Church in Gikondo, Kigali, helped the militia carry out a massacre in his own church on April 9, 1994. Michel Twagirayesu, the president of the Pres-byterian Church in Rwanda and a former vice presi-dent of the World Council of Churches, is alleged to have betrayed parishioners and fellow clergy alike in Kirinda, Kibuye (Hennig, 2001). Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was the first church leader to be brought to trial at the ICTR. In February 2003, the ICTR found it proven beyond reasonable doubt that Ntakirutimana had trans-ported armed Hutu killers to a church and hospital in the Kibuye region of western Rwanda, where they killed hundreds of Tutsi refugees who had been encouraged by Ntakirutimana to seek refuge there. At his trial, a British prosecutor stated, “Dressed in his customary suit and tie, Pastor Ktakirutimana watched as people were shot and beaten to death, encouraging the killers to ensure no one survived” (Reuters, 2001).

Finally, although Christian institutions should be credited with decisive humanitarian efforts that provide physical, emotional, and spiritual suste-nance following genocidal violence, postgenocidal responses also include (a) the accentuation of the church’s persecution and resistance (marked by the appropriation of the victim groups’ suffering as well as the glorification of individual heroes and martyrs) and (b) official declarations of contrition that avoid direct acknowledgment of institutional guilt.

Following genocide, Christian institutions often will accentuate their own persecution by appropri-ating the victim group’s suffering. Such appropria-tion is a deliberate act of acquisition in which the victim group’s suffering is borrowed, or co-opted, by Christian institutions to accentuate their own

persecution. In this way, Christian institutions, and their actors, distract attention from the victim groups’ suffering by reallocating that attention to their own suffering.

For example, we see an appropriation of the Jews’ suffering in the Catholic Church’s response following the Holocaust. Rather than engage in self-critical analysis of their institutional response (which many have described as complicity; e.g., see Cornwell, 1999) to the Nazi process of destruction, the Vatican’s primary response was to appropriate the Jewish victims’ suffering by taking quick steps to ensure that the Nuremberg Trials also included the persecution of the Christian church, particularly the Catholic Church in Germany and the Nazi-occupied territories. While choosing, on the grounds that the “universal religious mission of Church would be compromised,” not to cooperate with the Nurem-berg Tribunal in preparing a list of war criminals (and even advocating that war criminals be given clemency), the Vatican readily supplied the tribunal with “an important collection of documents dealing with the persecution of the Church [Catholic] by the Nazi regime” (Gallagher, 1962, p. 169).

This appropriation of the victim group’s suffering is complemented by a tendency to inordinately, and sometimes inaccurately, accentuate the exceptional individual actions of Christian heroes and martyrs in the face of mass destruction. Alongside the con-tinued pursuit of the beatification of Pope Pius XII and the glorification of Christian martyrs, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bernhard Lichtenberg, Kurt Gerstein, Martin Niemoller, or Corrie ten Boom, there is a misdirection of attention away from the complicity of the dominant social structure of an institution (the Church) and to the exceptional actions of individuals. At issue here is not necessarily the veracity of their lives and witness. Rather, at issue here is how the Christian church has used the lives and witness of exceptional individuals to deflect attention from a self-critical analysis of the churches’ institutional response during genocide. Rather than focusing on the silence and neglect of the many and, particularly, the institution, there is a glorification of the individual actions of the few.

This most recently was seen in Pope Benedict XVI’s May 2006 visit to Auschwitz. Visiting

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Auschwitz as “a son of the German people,” Bene-dict was silent on the collective guilt of the German people, the biblical and Catholic roots of anti- Semitism, the role of the Catholic church under Pius’s leadership during the Holocaust, and his own personal experiences during the war as a member (involuntarily conscripted) of the Hitler Youth. He was not silent, however, in continuing a Papal tradi-tion of extolling the virtues of the exceptional Cath-olic individuals who stood up in the face of Nazi tyranny. Benedict’s address at Auschwitz highlighted the lives of two Auschwitz victims—both now Cath-olic saints—who have become a source of tension between Catholics and Jewish groups: Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest accused of editing anti-Semitic tracts; and Edith Stein, a convert from Judaism who entered a convent in a failed bid to escape Nazi per-secution. In this example, the accentuation of excep-tional individual actions is coupled with a gross appropriation of the victim group’s suffering. As Abraham Foxham, national director of the Anti- Defamation League pointed out, Benedict did not make “one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews” ( Meichtry, 2006).

Following the Holocaust, the initial work on statements of contrition came from individual Christian theologians, not institutional leaders. Such individual statements of contrition, however admi-rable, avoided directly shining a spotlight on the dark recesses of Christian institutional actions before and during genocidal violence.

So, it was with much anticipation that the world received the post-Holocaust statement, Nostra Aetate (Latin for In Our Time), issued by the Catholic Church in 1965. Although the Vatican heralded the document as a significant change in Jewish– Christian relations, critics assailed it for its brevity (“much too little and much too late”) and its lack of acknowledgment of the Holocaust as a reference point. In response, this Conciliar declaration was followed in 1975 by the Guidelines for Implementing Nostra Aetate and in 1986 by the Notes on the Correct Ways to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church. Despite the Catholic Church’s efforts, however, many still expressed dissatisfaction. So, in 1998, the church

issued We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah as yet another addition to the ongoing dialogue in Jewish–Christian relations. Like the declaration and imple-menting documents that preceded it, We Remember found its critics. Many took the document to task for the continuing failure of the Catholic church to acknowledge its complicity in the Holocaust; others expressed concern that the conciliatory tone in the document was weaker than many of Pope John Paul II’s public statements; still others criticized the foot-noted tributes to Pope Pius XII and the document’s attempt to defend the dubious validity of a distinc-tion between theological anti-Judaism (opposition to Judaism by people who accept a competing sys-tem of beliefs and practices; see Langmuir, 1990) and social anti-Semitism (powered by nationalist and racist myths that castigate Jews as an alien and dangerous race threatening the survival of the nation; see Perry & Schweitzer, 2002).

Over the next several decades, post-Holocaust declarations of contrition emerged from a wide range of Protestant denominations around the world. As Obrecht (2000) pointed out, most of these statements shared two important similarities. First, they affirmed God’s continuing covenantal relation-ship with, or election of, the Jewish people as the people of God. Such affirmations, often couched in dual covenantal or “partners in waiting” language, were meant to reverse centuries of theological supersessionism as Christian doctrine. Second, most of the statements affirmed the responsibility of the church to teach about Judaism from Judaism’s own texts. In so doing, it was hoped that the misleading stereotypes that lay at the root of us–them thinking in Jewish–Christian relations would be ameliorated.

In Rwanda, reactions of contrition, although varying in degrees of accountability, came from many Christian churches. In May 1995, the arch-bishop of Canterbury, speaking for the Anglican Church, went to Rwanda himself and apologized. In December 1996, Protestant and Catholic Christians—laity and clergy, Rwandan and European—came together in Detmold, Germany, to “confess their own offense and to humbly ask for-giveness of their victims” (Ntezimana, 2002, p. 1). That same month, the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda became the first denomination to confess

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the failure of its leaders to provide the moral and spiritual strength to denounce and oppose the geno-cide. Other Protestant congregations asked pardon for the atrocities committed by their members and even excommunicated members alleged to be orga-nizers of the genocide.

An official denominational response from the Seventh-Day Adventists did not come until 2 years after the genocide and, even then, the response, given by General Conference president Robert S. Folkenberg during a sermon in Kigali, only addressed broad issues of Christians’ responsibility for forgiveness and reconciliation with no clear mention of a need for accountability. The Catholic response has been no more concrete. In May 1996, Pope John Paul II wrote in a letter to the Rwandan people:

The Church . . . cannot be held responsi-ble for the guilt of its members that have acted against the evangelic law; they will be called to render account of their own actions. All Church members that have sinned during the genocide must have the courage to assume the consequences of their deeds they have done against God and fellow men. (Hennig, 2001)

Browne (2010) offered a stinging summary of the church’s response:

And what did the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church do in the wake of this mass murder? It gave aid and assistance to the genocidal priests in escaping ret-ribution in Rwanda and elsewhere. . . . There was no church inquiry into its own culpability for what happened. I suspect there were few if any canoni-cal trials. There was no Pastoral Letter expressing shame for the involvement of the functions of the Catholic Church in that terrible crime. No apology. No papal visitation to identify with the victims. No papal audiences for the survivors. Nothing.

In Bosnia, stopping short of directly acknowledg-ing institutional responsibility, Catholic bishops

haltingly asked “for forgiveness from all those who feel in some way hit by the injustices of sons of the Catholic Church” in a February 1996 pastoral letter. In the same letter, they also were quick to pledge to “forgive all who have done injustice and evil to us” (Malcolm, 1996, p. 8). Responses from the Serbian Orthodox Church have even more fully evaded responsibility and, instead, have stressed that all sides and religious factions in the region—including Catholic Croats and Bosniak Muslims—are guilty. In addition, the Serbian Orthodox Church expressed “deep concern” about the 1995 Dayton Peace Agree-ment between the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian governments (“Peace Terms Worry Serbian Ortho-dox,” 1996, p. 8).

On one hand, there is great reason to applaud these profound, and sometimes courageously intro-spective, statements of contrition offered by the churches. Public confession of actions, or inaction, before or during genocidal violence that humbly recognize the failure of the church, as an institution, and of church leaders, as individuals, to be a pro-phetic voice for the voiceless must not be dis-counted. On the other hand, what is missing from nearly all of the official declarations of contrition following each of these genocides is full acknowl-edgment of the guilt of the churches as institutions. Only passive complacency has been admitted, rather than active complicity. At the institutional level, there has been little confrontation with their own sin, a gaping void where there should be a call for sincere repentance. Where guilt has been confessed, it has been inevitably confessed at either the level of individuals or with a global abstractness that offers no concrete hope that such an event will not be repeated.

impliCations anD ConClusion

The chapter has reviewed the interface of religion with culture, the “other,” and the institutional church in episodes of genocidal violence. We have seen the ways in which religion becomes conflated with cultures of authority, is used as a tool of exclusion to justify moral indifference, and is insti-tutionalized in ways that shape a culture in which genocidal violence may occur and respond to such a

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culture both during and after the genocidal violence. This is a bleak picture of religion, the sacred, and the abuses of religion in established institutionalized systems that should cause pause even amongst the most ardent of believers.

We also, however, have touched on how religion can challenge cultures of illegitimate or immoral authority, can be used to foster inclusion and moral sensitivity, and can be institutionalized in humane and caring ways that give voice to the voiceless and demand power for the powerless. There are striking moral moments when religious institutions are active in reconstructing their societies torn by con-flict. Religious actors have, for instance, had a signif-icant influence on transitional justice in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Peru, Sierra Leone, and East Timor (Philpott, 2009). Following the Holo-caust, Jewish–Christian organizations, with signifi-cant Christian institutional leadership, are operating around the world to foster interfaith dialogue. In Rwanda, Christian clergy and laypeople have joined Kagame’s “Government of National Unity” in preaching and fostering unity among the Rwandan people. In Bosnia, Sarajevo’s Cardinal Vinko Puljic has become one of the most prominent, and active, spokespersons for tolerance and multicultural coexistence.

What remains necessary is an examination of the capacity for religious institutions to redeem themselves—and the world—by being involved in postgenocidal transitional justice. Religious institu-tions, particularly those that remain independent in their policies and practices from the state, can be powerful forces of mobilization for political activ-ism. As was seen in Nazi Germany, genocidal regimes are often more reluctant to restrict the activ-ities of religious institutions and organizations. Reli-gious institutions and organizations are ready-made networks that also have good access to the media, offer places to meet, provide membership lists, maintain educational institutions, and train leaders (Tuckwood, 2008). Religious institution can act as “superconnector” social networks, so well-linked as to exert an outsize influence in a genocidal society (see Christakis & Fowler, 2010). Many religious institutions and organizations have far-reaching international support and connections, and may, in

states with weak or unstable governments, even be the strongest institutions (Fox & Sandler, 2003). All of these factors point to the promise of religion and religious institutions to offer resistance in the face of genocidal intent and violence.

Several vital questions must be addressed in future research. How can religious institutions pre-pare themselves to foster cultures that encourage voices of defiance and resistance in the face of mass murder and still protect the integrity of religious identity? How can these institutions overcome the inertia inherent in organizational structures, people, and processes—particularly in those institutions feeling the “divine” weight of ecclesiastical hierarchies?

More important are the questions from which we must draw practical applications of education, pre-vention, intervention, consultation, and social change for the structure, policies, and procedures of religious institutions. Here we are asking questions regarding both the nature of organizational change and the magnitude of change (Robbins, 2001). The nature of change relevant to religious institutions involves both changing structure (alterations in authority relations, coordination mechanisms, etc.) as well as changing people (changes in attitudes, expectations, perceptions, behavior, etc.). Structural changes require overcoming the built-in mecha-nisms, often centuries in the making, that have evolved to produce stability in religious institutions. This structural inertia is compounded by a group inertia founded in strong, both explicitly and implic-itly, group norms. Changes in structure also often involve changes in long-held power relationships, particularly in religious institutions with strong ecclesiastical hierarchies. Similarly, changing people must confront resistance stemming from habit, secu-rity, and fear of uncertainty.

Even if religious institutions can overcome the challenges to structural and people changes, they are still faced with issues of the magnitude of change. The magnitude of change is determined by the implications of change for individuals and organiza-tions. First-order changes that are an extension of the past—that is, consistent with prevailing values and norms, linear, incremental, continuous, marginal, and requiring no fundamental shifts in

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assumptions—are too often the default in the self-reflective responses of religious institutions to geno-cide. For many, however, the changes necessary for religious institutions to redeem themselves and become fully involved in postgenocidal transitional justice are even more drastic—second-order changes that represent an emergent and unbounded break with the past born through multidimensional, mul-tilevel, discontinuous, and radical change involving reframing of assumptions about the nature of reli-gious institutions and the world in which they oper-ate. Such second-order change could include concrete restructuring of doctrine, ecclesiology, or church hierarchy—that is, changes fundamental to the nature of religious institutions and also central to reclaiming the integrity of religious identity in the aftermath of mass atrocity.

As Volf (2000) pointed out, too often the social agenda of the church is isolated from the message of reconciliation. To do reconciliation most effectively, however, we can no longer avoid asking tough ques-tions of why religion so easily becomes conflated with cultures of authority. We can no longer avoid asking why, in the name of their chosen sacred deity, religion has been at the front of defining the “other” throughout human history. We can no lon-ger ignore the deep analysis necessary to understand why religious institutions can be silent, or complicit, in the face of mass destruction. It is only in facing such questions that religious institutions can begin to fulfill their promise and foster periods of peace and tolerance in a pluralistic society.

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