Religion

Religious people are not only the victims of mass killings, they also can be the perpetrators of violence. Although it would be much too simplistic to suggest that religion causes genocide and crimes against humanity, it nevertheless is true that religious people, prompted by religious motivations and employing religious symbols, have committed mass atrocities. A long tradition of this exists in Europe, with early examples being the Crusades, the destruction of Jewish communities and the Inquisition's bloody assaults on the Cathars of Montsegur and Montaillou.

Although religion has been implicated in mass killings, there is often a reluctance to acknowledge its role; indeed, religions themselves typically deny their complicity. In fact, it is even controversial to suggest the role that religion and religious communities may have played in atrocities. For example, the Nazi state is typically portrayed as atheist; religious people of the period are often considered either as heroes, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the clergy who spoke out against Adolf Hitler, or as victims, such as the Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses. Generally, accounts do not emphasize the fact that the vast majority of those who committed the crimes against humanity were Protestants and Catholics. Thus, the Holocaust is depicted in terms of Nazi crimes and not crimes committed by Christians. In the twenty-first century, however, the historical literature has increasingly focused on the role of Christian anti-Semitism underlying the Third Reich and the role of military chaplains providing spiritual comfort to the perpetrators of crimes. (Simultaneously, as allies of

[WITCH-HUNTS]

The persecution and often murder of persons reputed to be "witches" is a phenomenon found in many less advanced societies. The witch-hunt was relatively widespread in Europe from about the sixteenth century. In more modern times, the term has been used to describe attacks on and purges of persons identified with certain political views. A link between the historic witch-hunts of unconventional women in seventeenth-century America and the post–World War II attacks upon public figures with left-wing views for alleged communist sympathies is the theme of a classic work of modern theater, The Crucible (1953), by Arthur Miller.

European witch-hunts were associated with the religious turmoil of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries that brought the Reformation. They were no doubt also influenced by the social and economic transformations of those times. European witch-hunts appear to have begun to decline with the Peace of Westfalia, signed in 1648 after thirty years of war—probably because of the climate of religious tolerance that the treaty encouraged. Nor could such primitive views broadly survive in the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment.

Many Christian denominations, both Catholic and Protestant, encouraged belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft. A widely circulated publication, Malleus Maleficarum, which appeared in 1486, promoted the fear of witches, who were usually poor, rural, and single women. Two years earlier, Pope Innocent VIII issued a bill titled Summis desiderantes, which allowed the Inquisition to pursue witches and witchcraft as enemies of Christianity. According to the Malleus Maleficarum,"[A]ll wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman . . . What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. . . . Women are by nature instruments of Satan—they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation" (Accessed at http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/index.html).

Victims were portrayed as being evil and unclean. Subsequent feminist analysis of witch-hunts explains them as campaigns to challenge rebellious role models for women. Some men were also victims of these witch-hunts, sometimes because they attempted to protect the women who had been targeted. Nevertheless, because most alleged victims were women, some have described these witch-hunts as "gendercide."

The witch-hunts were generally provoked by campaigns of denunciation often initiated by children or nuns. Those who were accused were then tortured until they confessed, although some died in the process. Show trials were often held, and convictions generally resulted in capital punishment. Historians believe that anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000 people were killed in the European witch-hunts.

The most famous witch-hunts in America took place in the Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. The Salem witch-hunt began when two Puritan women, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, accused the slave of Samuel Parris of the practice. The slave girl was named Tituba, and was either of aboriginal American or African origin. Quickly, the campaign became hysterical, and for many in the community the only way to avoid an accusation was to become an accuser.

Although the European witch-hunts are the best documented, many societies have engaged in similar campaigns of persecution directed against women and men believed to have supernatural powers. In a famous judgment on capital punishment in June 1995, South African judge Albie Sachs described how the death penalty, though not generally employed in pre-colonial southern Africa, was practiced in the case of alleged witchcraft.

The contemporary usage of the term witch-hunt describes the purges of communists, communist sympathizers, and persons with left-wing views, principally in the United States, in the early years of the cold war. Academics, film producers, diplomats, and journalists often lost their jobs as a result of the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. At the height of the witch-hunt, in 1953, Communist Party members Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage, the only time that capital punishment has been used for that crime during peacetime. For further reading, see Farrington, Karen (1996). Dark Justice: A History of Punishment and Torture. New York: Smithmark; Gragg, Larry (1992). The Salem Witch Crisis. New York: Praeger; Klaits, Joseph (1985). Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; and Levack, Brian P. (1995). The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition. New York: Longman. WILLIAM A. SCHABAS

Nazi Germany, many Catholic clergy in Croatia during World War II bore responsibility for supporting the Ustashe in the killing of Muslims, a circumstance that the Roman Catholic Church continues to deny or downplay.)

The Bosnian genocide provides a different type of example. In Bosnia, unlike Nazi Germany, state political and military leaders intentionally employed Christian religious language and symbols to stimulate popular violence and justify military slaughter. Although studies of Bosnia may suggest, for example, that the ethnic cleansing of Muslims was a "result of the political contest behind the wars, not ethnic or religious hatreds," (Woodward, 1993, p. 243), it is far more likely that political leaders deliberately manipulated religious imagery from Serbian history to suggest Orthodox Serbs were innocent victims of Muslim atrocities. (Sells, 1996, 2001). Many within the Slavic Orthodox churches continue to insist that the Serbs were the real victims and deny their complicity other than some understandable but limited overreactions in a "civil war."

As yet another example, the Rwandan genocide did not break out along religious lines, but religious institutions and personnel were used to promote the massive killing of Tutsi by Hutu. There have been many reports of Hutu religious leaders urging Tutsi to seek sanctuary in churches against rampaging Hutu mobs, only to learn that the supposed sanctuary was simply a planned gathering place to make the slaughter of the Tutsi more convenient for the perpetrators. Further, high officials in the Catholic Church of Rwanda allegedly participated in the organization of the genocide, in this case against other Catholics who were Tutsi. As in the other examples given here, the Protestant and Catholic churches have been reluctant to acknowledge the roles of their local leaders in the violence.

Although religious beliefs certainly are not necessary to prompt mass killings, as the history of Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge demonstrate, religion can play an important role in providing perpetrators with a sense of a God-ordained mission to cleanse the world of evil, offering solace to those who commit violence, or justifying actions taken by others. In this way, when religion provides a rationale for zealotry, religious people can be seduced into becoming murderers—just as in cases of religiously inspired terrorism and other forms of religiously inspired violence.

Religion does not, of course, play only a negative role in atrocities. Many courageous religious leaders have found spiritual inspiration that has moved them to sacrifice their lives in defense of others. Though less known than the stories of killings, devout and committed religious believers have risked and lost their lives sheltering Armenians in Turkey, Jews in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and Muslims in Bosnia and Serbia. Religion also can play a valuable—and sometimes decisive—role in reconstruction and reconciliation after the atrocities end.

SEE ALSO Catholic Church; Religious Groups

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergen, Doris L. (2001). "Between God and Hitler: German Military Chaplains and the Crimes of the Third Reich." In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack. New York: Berghahn Books.

Gellately, Robert, and Ben Kiernan, eds. (2003). The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Neier, Aryeh (1998). War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice. New York: Random House.

Sells, Michael A. (1996). The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard (2003). The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Woodward, Susan L. (1993). Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.

T. Jeremy Gunn