I've been reading "Not In God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence", by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks' argument runs parallel to what John Stoehr is talking about. Graham and all those who similarly claim to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus are engaging in "Pathological Dualism". A mind like that of Franklin Graham, or any of his followers “sees humanity itself as radically, ontologically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad". In other words, , a Godly Us and a Satanic Them.
Graham's Pathological Dualism finds its targets in Muslims and the LGBTQ community. Demonizing both groups supports the deep-rooted cultural hatreds that pervade White Authoritarian Christianity.
Sacks isn't the first thinker to talk about this. Ervin Staub's 1989 book "The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence" talks about group demonization as the first step toward genocide. Others in the 1990s talked about the common steps that lead to genocide, what Sacks calls Altruistic Evil.
In the end, there is little that separates the collective psychology of Graham, Falwell, Jeffress, and others who love Jesus but hate every one of Jesus' moral teachings from the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan Hutus, ISIS, the Bosnian Serbs and every other community of mass murderers.
I've been reading "Not In God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence", by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks' argument runs parallel to what John Stoehr is talking about. Graham and all those who similarly claim to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus are engaging in "Pathological Dualism". A mind like that of Franklin Graham, or any of his followers “sees humanity itself as radically, ontologically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad". In other words, , a Godly Us and a Satanic Them.
Graham's Pathological Dualism finds its targets in Muslims and the LGBTQ community. Demonizing both groups supports the deep-rooted cultural hatreds that pervade White Authoritarian Christianity.
Sacks isn't the first thinker to talk about this. Ervin Staub's 1989 book "The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence" talks about group demonization as the first step toward genocide. Others in the 1990s talked about the common steps that lead to genocide, what Sacks calls Altruistic Evil.
In the end, there is little that separates the collective psychology of Graham, Falwell, Jeffress, and others who love Jesus but hate every one of Jesus' moral teachings from the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan Hutus, ISIS, the Bosnian Serbs and every other community of mass murderers.
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