{"id":1445,"date":"2013-05-01T20:52:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-01T20:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/05\/evil-religion.html"},"modified":"2013-05-01T20:52:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-01T20:52:00","slug":"evil-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/05\/evil-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"Evil Religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><\/p>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">At CNN\u2019s Belief Blog, John Blake offers four warning signs of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/religion.blogs.cnn.com\/2013\/04\/28\/when-religious-beliefs-becomes-evil-4-signs\/\" style=\"color: #702233;line-height: inherit;text-decoration: none\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">when religious beliefs become evil<\/a>. These include absolutism, charismatic leaders, apocalypticism, and the end justifying the means. He notes that \u201cthe line between good religion and evil religion is thin, and it\u2019s easy to make self-righteous assumptions.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Blake catalogs \u201cevil\u201d religions and their dangerous actions:<\/span><\/div>\n<ul style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;margin: 0.5em;padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.5em\">\n<li class=\"li1\" style=\"line-height: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Army of God abortion clinic bombers<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\" style=\"line-height: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">The mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\" style=\"line-height: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Aum Shinrikyo\u2019s sarin gas attack on a Japanese subway station in 1995<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\" style=\"line-height: inherit;margin: 0px;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">The Roman Catholic Church\u2019s sex-abuse scandal<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">This list is unsurprising. When people label religion \u201cevil,\u201d they almost always include Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo and the Branch Davidians (who are represented here in an image accompanying Blake\u2019s article). The common assumption follows that these religious groups can be marked as evil because they are imbricated in violence, death and destruction. We can cluck our tongues sympathetically at the supposedly brainwashed people deluded into joining these movements, and we can rest easier at night by assuming that our religious commitments must be the safe kind.<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Moreover, we can hold onto the vision of \u201chealthy religion\u201d that Blake espouses. If only we were versed in these four signs, the argument goes, then maybe these tragedies wouldn\u2019t happen.<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">If only it were this easy. Such an understanding of \u201cevil\u201d religion is predicated on a sense that religion is inherently \u201cgood.\u201d Blake even writes that \u201creligion is supposed to be a force of good,\u201d as if claiming this aloud necessarily makes it so.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">This efforts to establish the goodness of some religions over the horror of others is nothing new. The history of white supremacy, doomsday groups and terrorism suggest that Blake\u2019s piece lacks a nuanced engagement with the complicated relationships between religion and violence.<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Members of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan branded themselves as a particular form of white Protestantism. Klansmen imagined themselves as knights fighting to preserve the American nation from immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and African Americans, and they crafted a white Jesus who would have gladly worn the infamous hood and robes. The burning cross was not for them an object of terror; it reflected the light of Jesus, whose redemptive sacrifice saved humanity. The Klan considered itself to be a religious order, yet the general consensus was that the Klansmen could not be religious because they were also white supremacists.<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"p1\" style=\"background-color: white;color: #111111;line-height: 1.4em;margin-bottom: 1em;padding: 0px\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Read the rest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.christiancentury.org\/blogs\/archive\/2013-05\/evil-religion\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At CNN\u2019s Belief Blog, John Blake offers four warning signs of\u00a0when religious beliefs become evil. These include absolutism, charismatic leaders, apocalypticism, and the end justifying the means. He notes that \u201cthe line between good religion and evil religion is thin, and it\u2019s easy to make self-righteous assumptions.\u201d Blake catalogs \u201cevil\u201d religions and their dangerous actions: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Evil Religion?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"At CNN\u2019s Belief Blog, John Blake offers four warning signs of&nbsp;when religious beliefs become evil. 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