Interfaith Insight - 2024
Permanent link for "Can a Nation With Power Still Be Ethical?" By Douglas Kindschi, Sylvia and Richard Kaufman Founding Director, Kaufman Interfaith Institute, GVSU on October 15, 2024
This question is being asked especially this year because of the conflict in the Middle East and Israel’s response to the terrible Hamas attack on Israel a year ago. It will also be addressed at this year’s triennial Jewish-Christian-Muslim Dialogue being held on Thursday, December 5. The theme for the day and evening sessions will be The Challenge of Power, Morality, and Religion.
Returning for the sixth time to Grand Rapids will be Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Rabbi Hartman has been a frequent critic of the Israeli government, writing in The Times of Israel and expressing his concerns in publications and podcasts from the Institute. He has raised the issue of whether a powerful country with an army can be moral as it responds to threats against it. Many in the United States expressed similar concerns as our country responded to the 9/11 attack with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing civilians in the hundreds of thousands.
The dialogue will also consider the role of religion in these matters of morality. Each of our traditions has been complicit and even supportive of countries with power expanding their control of others, often with expanding influence of the religion itself.
Donniel Hartman wrote about many of these issues in his earlier book, Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself. The three religious traditions all look back to Abraham as the father of their faith traditions. Abraham is chosen by God “so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” (Genesis 18:19) This was 500 years before Moses received the law and more than 1,500 years before Christianity and Islam.
The ethical principle is thus recognized by God and precedes religious law, ritual and doctrine. In that same Genesis chapter, God shares with Abraham his plan to destroy the city of Sodom for its wickedness. But Abraham responds to God by asking whether it is just to destroy the city if there are fifty righteous who are in it. In effect he is holding God to the standard that he was being asked to teach his children, “by doing what is right and just.” God agrees and will not destroy if there are fifty righteous in the city.
Abraham goes further and pushes the same question about 45, 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 righteous in the city. God finally agrees, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” This is a remarkable passage. Abraham took seriously his charge to pursue what is right and just, even challenging God to do the same.
Hartman continues his concern for the priority of the ethical in describing ways in which religion can lead to harm rather than good.
“The human religious desire to live in relationship with God often distracts religions’ adherents from their traditions’ core moral truths,” Hartman writes. “We have seen religion arise as a central force in world politics and frequent instigator of global conflict. … The failure of religion to produce individuals and societies that champion the values advocated in them is both puzzling and deeply unsettling. Even more troubling is that often religious faith itself is the catalyst that emboldens individuals and governments to murder, maim, harm and control others in the service of ‘their’ God.”
One feature in religion that Hartman identifies as potentially leading to unethical acts, he calls “God Manipulation.” This is when religion is “manipulated in a way that quiets the voices of moral conscience, draping self-interest in a cloak of pious devotion and stripping those defined as ‘other’ of moral status.” In Hartman’s first case of “God Intoxication,” we ignore the needs of others, while in the case of God manipulation our self-interest and self-confidence lead us to do evil in the name of God.
The history of religious violence is the history of thinking that my religion, my tribe, possesses absolute truth and that I can act with complete confidence that I am right, and all others are wrong. It leads to the thinking that those who do not believe as I do, or worship as I do, really don’t know God and must be opposed.
This was the logic behind the Inquisition and the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries, which led to the deaths of over 10 million people. It is what led to the Holocaust and other acts of genocide. It is part of the desensitizing of soldiers to let them see the enemy as less than human and thus permissible to kill.
Hartman says that humility is the antidote for God manipulation. Who are we to say what God’s ultimate plan is? Who are we to act in ways that are morally wrong just because we think we know what God wants? He stresses the moral basis for all religion.
Hartman will be joined by Mustafa Akyol, whose recent books were discussed in previous Insights (see below), and Dr. Elaine Pagels, whose books will be the subject of future Insights leading up to the Dialogue. Click here to register for the Dec. 5 Interfaith Dialogue.
Other insights in the "The Challenge of Power, Morality, and Religion" series:
"How Can We Learn from Our Abrahamic Neighbors?" From Mustafa Aykol's The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims
"Does Conflict in the World Have a Religious Basis?" From Mustafa Aykol's The Islamic Moses
"Learning From History and From Positive Religious Teachings" From Elaine Pagels, Ph.D.'s The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics
"Loving Country Has Limits Imposed by Biblical Covenants" From Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman's Who Are the Jews — And Who Can We Become?
"Faith, Grief, Struggle and Renewal: A Personal Journey" From Elaine Pagels, Ph.D.'s Why Religion?: A Personal Story
