The Scourge of Monotheistic Intolerance

In the fourth year of his reign, the young Pharaoh Amenhotep IV instigated a revolution in human consciousness. Amenhotep was dedicated to the worship of the god Aten, but the entire Egyptian establishment worshipped another deity, Amun, as the god of gods. In 1361 BCE, the frustrated young pharaoh was ready to make his move. He sent the high priest of Amun into the wilderness on a stone-quarrying expedition and named Aten as the head of the pantheon, building temples to the new supreme god at the sacred site of Karnak. He changed his own name to Akhenaten: “the splendor of Aten.” When the horrified high priest of Amun returned, he was sent back to the stone quarries—only this time as a common slave.

    Akhenaten didn't stop at replacing Amun with Aten. Instead, he insisted that Aten was quite literally the only god that existed. There was none other. He imposed his new doctrine without mercy. Worship of Amun was forbidden and persecuted; his name was hacked out of every monument in Egypt and abroad. The eradication of Amun's name was so pervasive that Egyptologists today rely on it to determine the dating of a monument. “The monotheistic revolution of Akhenaten,” writes Egyptologist Jan Assmann, “was not only the first but also the most radical and violent eruption of a counter-religion in the history of humankind.”

Akhenaten's brutal revolution would be short-lived. In the years after his death, the lesser gods of the Egyptian cosmos were gradually resurrected, and Amun regained his place at the head of the pantheon. But Akhenaten had initiated something that would survive long after him and continues to thrive in the present day: the religious intolerance that arises from monotheism.

    We will discover in this chapter that not only is religious intolerance tightly intertwined with monotheism, but, before the emergence of monotheism, it simply didn't exist. Religious intolerance, as we will see, may indeed be the predictable by-product of monotheistic belief, which, by definition, posits that there is only one true explanation of the cosmos, and, consequently, any other interpretation is necessarily false and at odds with the sole source of spiritual meaning.

A Cosmic United Nations

Reading the daily news filled with examples of religious intolerance around the world, it's natural to think that it's always been this way. But this is not the case. Prior to the emergence of monotheism, the idea of forcefully imposing your religious beliefs on another group was unheard-of. It was generally agreed that divinity existed in every aspect of nature, whether in a river, tree, animal, or territory. People worshipped their own deities, but they never contested the legitimacy of foreign gods. Rather, they felt it more prudent to cover their bases by respecting the gods of others.

    The ancient world was certainly not a haven of peace and harmony. The values and practices of agrarian societies frequently led to brutal massacres of populations defeated in war. However, when these conflicts took place, they were about wealth and power, not about the imposition of one ideology over another. For this reason, when one nation conquered another, the gods of the conquered nation were treated with deference. Instead of smashing the images of their gods, the victors would carry them away to weaken their enemies’ power. By the same token, individuals living in a foreign land paid respects to the local deities while remaining faithful to their own gods.

    The ancient approach to foreign deities bears more resemblance to modern international diplomacy than modern religion. Historian Jean Bottéro explains how, for example, the Mesopotamians believed a foreign pantheon had the same set of roles as their own gods. “It was as if, on the supernatural level, they had recognized the existence of a certain number of divine functions…a bit like political offices, which were pretty much the same everywhere.” When the Mesopotamians wrote down lists containing the names of foreign gods, they would put a star by the name, identifying it as foreign. There was never a question that foreign gods existed; the important issue was their relative power and relationship to the Mesopotamian gods.

    The cross-cultural standing of gods became an important element in international law, serving as a sort of cosmic United Nations. Treaties were sealed by solemn oaths invoking the gods of both nations. A peace treaty between Egypt and the Hittites from the second millennium BCE reads:

He who shall keep these words which are on the tablet of silver, whether he be Hittite or Egyptian, and shall not neglect them, may the thousand gods of the land of the Hatti and the thousand gods of the land of Egypt make him to be in good health and long life, as also his houses, his country and his servants.

Even the mighty Roman Empire accepted without question the validity of foreign gods. When the Romans conquered a city, they would frequently set up a dedication to whichever gods protected that territory. Sometimes they would conciliate a local god by placing his image alongside the Roman gods in their camp.

    There was, however, one notable exception to this traditional tolerance of foreign worship: the teachings of Zoroaster, the next monotheist to appear after Akhenaten. As we've seen, Zoroaster saw the cosmos as an eternal struggle between the Truth and the Lie. Good was equated with the Truth so uncompromisingly that there was no room for independent thought. Freethinking became heresy, while intolerance toward followers of the Lie became an article of faith.

The Holy War of the Old Testament

Zoroaster's theological dogmatism was unparalleled in the ancient world— until, that is, the next outbreak of monotheism: The Old Testament. In an unending barrage of rancor, the children of Israel are repeatedly commanded by Yahweh to show no mercy to those they defeat in the name of the Lord.

    The book of Deuteronomy—an early manifesto of monotheism, as we've seen—contains a series of bloodcurdling orders given by Yahweh to his followers. When the Israelites conquer an enemy's city, they are to show no mercy:

When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies.

This, at least, can be understood within the zeitgeist of the ancient world. Massacring all the men is an extreme policy even by ancient standards, but at least it fits within accepted ancient practices, in which the spoils of war went to the victors. However, in Deuteronomy, this approach is reserved only for distant nations. For those nations unfortunate enough to exist in the territories Yahweh decided to give the Israelites as an inheritance, a more awful fate is in store: “Do not leave alive anything that breathes,” commands Yahweh. “Completely destroy them.” Why should the Israelites carry out this terrible genocide? Because “otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.”

    In the new monotheistic paradigm, a war of conquest for power shifts to a war of ideology—a holy war. Even the women and children of the conquered nations are considered too dangerous to be left alive—not because they might exact revenge for the slaughter of their menfolk but because they might influence the Israelites to stray from the sole worship of Yahweh.

    This call to genocide is not an isolated passage. Deuteronomy, along with other parts of the Bible, is replete with it. In another section of Deuteronomy, the Israelites are given explicit instructions after conquering their enemies to “destroy them totally”:

Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.

Elsewhere, in the book of Joshua, we are treated to the story of the siege of Jericho, immortalized in popular culture as a miracle of God in which the city walls come tumbling down from the trumpeting sounds of the Israelite army. What is not generally discussed is the cheerfully narrated genocidal atrocity after the collapse of the walls. “Everyone charged straight in,” we are told, “and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep, and donkeys…. Then they burned the whole city and everything in it.” This event was considered an unequivocal triumph: “So the Lord was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.”

    Perhaps even more disturbing than the glorification of massacres is the requirement that God's commandments must be carried out unfalteringly, regardless of how inhumane they appear. A particularly sinister episode in the book of Samuel drives this point home. The Israelite king, Saul, is told by Yahweh to conduct the by-now-familiar genocidal campaign against the Amalekites. Saul does as command, except that, having slaughtered the entire population, he keeps the king of the Amalekites, Agag, alive and saves the best of the sheep and cattle to sacrifice to his Lord. Yahweh is furious at even this slight disobedience and sends his prophet, Samuel, to tell Saul he is now rejected by Yahweh as king of Israel. Saul immediately tries to make amends. He calls for Agag to be brought to him and puts him to death right there, abjectly following Yahweh's command. It is worth recalling that, during the Nuremberg trials, the claim of “just following orders” became notorious as an insufficient defense against the charge of mass murder. It is a grim irony of history that the first exemplar of genocide carried out in the name of ideology came from the holy book of the Jewish faith, the very people that the Nazis tried to wipe out with their racist ideology.

    In reality, the military power of the Israelites during the biblical era remained very limited, and these genocidal narratives were no more than rabid fantasies. However, the widespread reverence given to the Old Testament as a result of the spread of Christianity means that these invocations for merciless slaughter in the name of God remain available to be read and endorsed anywhere there is a Bible to be opened.

“Whoever Does Not Believe Will Be Condemned”

In contrast to the Israelites, the Roman Empire did succeed in establishing their military power across much of the ancient world. When they did, it was a challenge for them to come to terms with the absolutist refusal of monotheistic religions to tolerate different viewpoints about the cosmos. There was no reference point for this type of behavior. The Pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes had openly ridiculed the traditional set of beliefs he saw around him, but he nevertheless lived to a ripe old age. It is not surprising, then, that pagan thinkers and administrators became increasingly dismayed when Christianity infiltrated the empire and began enforcing unprecedented control over the beliefs and practices of everyone around them.

    The early centuries of the Christian era resounded with the battle between tolerant pagans and absolutist Christians over freedom of thought in the Western world. Most thinkers of the time acknowledged the idea of a divine higher power, but pagans readily accepted that different groups might give this deity a different name. “It makes no difference,” wrote Celsus, a second-century Platonist, “whether we call Zeus the Most High or Zeus or Adonis or Sabaoth or Amun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians.” 

    The rivalry between Christian and pagan effectively came to an end with the emperor Constantine, whose rule fused the power of Rome with the theological absolutism of Christianity, creating the legacy of Christian domination that would define the European experience for the next millennium and a half. The pagans would henceforth be fighting a rearguard action for tolerance.

    The Christians, now firmly in charge of Rome, removed treasures from traditional temples as part of their campaign to stamp out paganism. Symmachus, the pagan prefect of Rome, trying desperately to stop them, wrote a moving letter to the emperor with words that resonate through the ages. “What does it matter,” he asked, “by which wisdom each of us arrives at the truth? It is not possible that only one road leads to so sublime a mystery.” But he was fighting a losing battle. Bishop Ambrose, who had the emperor's ear, wrote back, “What you are ignorant of, we know from the word of God, and what you try to infer, we have established as truth from the very wisdom of God.” In the classical tradition, there were many ways to find the truth. For Christianity, there was only one way, and everything else was a falsehood to be persecuted.

    Christianity ushered in a new form of monotheistic intolerance. The scope of the Old Testament's dogmatism had been limited to the Jewish people. There was no concern about what other people believed or didn't believe, except insofar as it might compromise the Israelites’ devotion to Yahweh. Now, after Paul universalized the Christian faith for all people, we see for the first time a systematic elimination of heterodox forms of belief and practice in any region where Christianity held sway.

    The inspiration for this new form of intolerance came directly from the Gospels. The Gospel of Mark, for example, quotes Jesus's words after his resurrection, presenting his cosmology in the same stark terms that Zoroaster had first used: “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”

“The Wondrous Workings of Divine Vengeance”

As Christianity gained dominance over other religions, the church fathers were only too eager to take Jesus's words to their logical conclusion. “Of this you can be certain and convinced beyond all doubt,” proclaimed Bishop Fulgentius, “not only all pagans, but also all Jews, all heretics and schismatics will go into the everlasting fire which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels.”

    The battle waged by the early Christians was not just against competing faiths but against the very notion of independent thought, which might undermine faith in the word of God. The idea arose that if you believed Christ was the savior sent by God for all mankind, this was the only truth you should ever care to know. “After Jesus Christ,” wrote church father Tertullian, “we have no need of speculation, after the Gospel no need of research.” Augustine referred to intellectual inquiry as “the disease of curiosity…to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”

    Driven by this aversion to intellectual curiosity, the Christian establishment set about systematically destroying any writing that might call their new faith into question. In 529, the Christian emperor Justinian banned pagans from teaching higher education, and, later that century, Pope Gregory the Great burned libraries holding classical writings. Christian suppression of free thought remained a central part of the European experience for more than a thousand years. As late as 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for espousing pantheistic beliefs.

    Like the scorpion that allegedly bites itself when caught in a ring of fire, the scourge of intolerance was inflicted from the start on other Christians who differed in their interpretation of the faith. In the first few centuries of Christian hegemony, internecine wars between power blocs supporting different interpretations of the scriptures inflicted far more casualties than the Roman persecution of Christians. This set the stage for the monotheistic intolerance that has since become the norm for global history. In a typical example from the thirteenth century, a papal legate described with glee the slaughter of the Cathars, a heterodox Christian sect: “Nearly twenty thousand of the citizens were put to the sword regardless of age and sex. The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.”

    After the sixteenth-century Reformation, the entire continent of Europe was ravaged by two hundred years of holy war between Protestants and Catholics. Protestant leader Thomas Muntzer spoke for his age when he called on his fellow believers to slaughter the Catholics: “Don't let them live any longer, the evil-doers who turn us away from God, for a godless man [a Catholic] has no right to live if he hinders the godly…. The sword is necessary to exterminate them…. If they resist, let them be slaughtered without mercy.”

    Christian intolerance of other Christians, distressing in its brutality, is surpassed only by the deluge of violence Christianity vented on followers of other faiths. The Jews, living as a minority in Christian Europe, were particularly vulnerable. From Christianity's outset, the refusal of the Jews to accept the Gospels made them a natural target of persecution. Finally, in 1096, in the German town of Speyer, centuries of abuse erupted into a murderous frenzy that would continue for a millennium, reaching its culmination in the Nazi horrors of the twentieth century. Christian mobs, according to a chronicle of the time, “showed no mercy to the aged, or youths, or maidens, babes or sucklings—not even the sick…killing their young men by the sword and disemboweling their pregnant women…. They threw them, naked, through the windows onto the ground, creating mounds upon mounds, heaps upon heaps, until they appeared as a high mountain.”

    Anti-Semitism became an institutionalized part of Christianity, pervading the entire worldview. One of countless examples of this occurred at a thirteenth-century theological debate between Christians and Jews held at Cluny in France, attended by the pious Louis IX, who would later be canonized as Saint Louis. When one of the rabbis challenged the divinity of Christ, “a knight in the audience jumped to his feet and broke open the rabbi's head with his sword. The abbot of Cluny protested, but King Louis declared that the best way for a Christian to defend his faith against nonbelievers was ‘to thrust his sword into their entrails, as far as it would go.’”

    The rise of Islam opened a new avenue for religious fanaticism. This burgeoning faith was as certain in its conviction of truth as Christianity. Like the monotheistic creeds before it, Islam's holy text, the Quran, is filled with exhortations of vengeance and slaughter of those who don't share its beliefs. “Slay them,” it demands, “wherever ye find them and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter.” The promise of an eternal soul living an afterlife in heaven is frequently used to encourage holy war. “If you should die or be killed in the cause of Allah,” believers are told, “His mercy and forgiveness would surely be better than all the riches they amass.” As with Christianity, hatred for nonbelievers is encouraged, fueled by the knowledge that their souls will be forever damned: “The unbelievers among the People of the Book and the pagans shall burn forever in the fire of hell. They are the vilest of all creatures.”

    The inevitable struggle between these two faiths, each convinced of its infallibility, quickly materialized, reaching its apotheosis in the medieval Crusades that unleashed an unprecedented contagion of violence. Pope Gregory VII kicked off the carnage in 1073, declaring that killing enemies of Christianity would result in eternal salvation. When the Christian soldiers finally conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they massacred thousands of Muslims and Jews in a paroxysm of slaughter. According to an eyewitness, the Archbishop of Tyre, “it was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies…. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot.”

    For two hundred years, one Crusade after another would sear images of hate and slaughter into the collective consciousness of Christians and Muslims alike. Even in the twenty-first century, echoes of the Crusades continue to inform geopolitics. The founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, declared the killing of Americans and Jews to be a sacred duty, stating, “We will see Saladin [a renowned Crusader] carrying his sword, with the blood of unbelievers dripping from it.” In 2003, US general William Boykin, commenting on the “war on terror,” declared, “The battle that we're in is a spiritual battle…. Satan wants to destroy this nation…he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.” Referring to a Somali military leader, Boykin added: “My God was bigger than his. I knew my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

The Religious Tolerance of India

How directly is monotheism to blame for imposing this religious intolerance on humanity? After all, our newspapers frequently contain stories of murderous rivalry between various religions around the world. Surely, one might speculate, the other great cosmologies of world history— Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism—have had their own equally brutal histories of hatred, intolerance, and genocide?

    Astonishingly, it turns out this is simply not the case. Before the influx of monotheism and later forms of absolutism from the West, the cultural traditions of Asia had no experience of the kind of murderous religious intolerance documented here. While there was competition for patronage between faiths, the notion of heresy as something to be eliminated didn't exist. Hajime Nakamura, a leading cross cultural authority on Asian spiritual traditions, observes that “in India there were no religious wars. Neither Buddhists nor Jains ever executed heretics. What they did to heretics was only to exclude them from the orders. Religious leaders in India died peacefully attended by their disciples and followers. Toleration is the most conspicuous characteristic of Indian culture.”

    King Ashoka, whose ancient Mauryan empire covered virtually the entire Indian subcontinent, reflected this tone of religious tolerance on stupas erected across the land, which exist to this day. During his reign, he converted to Buddhism but continued to promulgate respect for other faiths: “The sects of other people deserve reverence,” he declared. “He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others…in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.”

    Buddhism spread to other parts of Asia while losing its preeminence in the Indian subcontinent to Hinduism. Within Hinduism, there are sects that elevate different gods, and, just as Christianity is split between Protestants and Catholics, there is a deep split in Hinduism between Vaishnavite and Shaivaites. This split, however, while a source of friction and occasional persecution, never led to the murderous hatred perpetrated within the Christian system. When believers of other faiths arrived in India, whether Jews, Christians, or Zoroastrians, they received an equally tolerant welcome.

    The Muslim invasions of North India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries would, for the first time, bring the scourge of monotheistic intolerance to the Indian subcontinent. In Varanasi, the holy city of the Hindu faith, the first Muslim invader, Muhammad of Ghor, destroyed idols in a thousand temples and rededicated the shrines to “the worship of the true God.” The remaining Buddhist monasteries were sacked, libraries burned, and monks murdered.

    However, after the initial wave of monotheistic carnage, a more tolerant state of affairs emerged. The Indian subcontinent appears to have acted as a shock absorber to the fervor of Muslim fundamentalism, causing an uneasy tolerance to develop between the two belief systems. While persecution of Hindus continued, most Muslim rulers demonstrated a more enlightened attitude, which reached its apex in the sixteenth-century reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. Akbar abolished religious tests and other forms of civil discrimination, appointed Hindus to high political office, and encouraged interfaith marriages, setting an example with his own nuptials. Driven by a burning desire to understand the source of spiritual meaning, Akbar initiated a series of theological debates at his palace, inviting representatives of virtually every faith around: Sunni, Shia, and Sufi, Shaivites and Vaishnavites, Jains, wandering ascetics, and even some Portuguese Catholic priests.

    Sadly, Akbar's vision of religious tolerance barely outlived him. By the time of the British colonization of India, taxes had been re imposed on Non-Muslims and the practice of Hindu rites restricted. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the British brought with them greater religious tolerance. Instead, they were driven by a missionary zeal to shine the light of Christian morality on the darkest corners of the world, of which India seemed an exemplary case. According to one nineteenth-century English historian, emancipating Hindus from the “great abomination” of their religion was the sacred duty of every Christian. William Wilberforce, remembered for his efforts to abolish slavery, considered Christian missionary activity in India to be “the greatest of all causes,” denounced Hindu deities as “absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty,” and concluded that “our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.”

Harmonization of Religion in China

Like India, China demonstrated a tolerant approach to religious beliefs throughout the pre-modern period. Nakamura observes that “religious wars or struggles over ideology, which frequently arose in Europe, did not arise in China…. The emperors of China and India were similar in that they both did not regard religious differences a justification for war.”

    The Chinese propensity for harmonization of different points of view reveals itself throughout their long history of evolving belief systems. An example can be seen in the writings of Zongmi, a ninth-century scholar trained in the Confucian classics who became an influential Buddhist monk. When asked by one of his students whether Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were the same or different teachings, he replied: “For those of great wisdom, they are the same. On the other hand, for those with little capacity they are different. Enlightenment and illusion depends solely on the capacity of man and not on the difference of teaching.” The public shared this eclectic appreciation of religious wisdom. Even today, in a typical Taoist temple, along with a central image of Lao-tzu, you might find images of a Christian saint, a Confucian sage, and the Buddha, among other deities.

    Buddhism gradually spread into China from India, reaching its zenith during the Tang dynasty (618–907), when it became an integral part of the Chinese cultural and political system. Toward the end of the Tang dynasty, a backlash occurred. A nationalistic movement arose against foreign influences on Chinese thought, focusing its offensive on Buddhism. By that time, the Buddhist religion had achieved enormous power, with its monasteries enjoying vast wealth. The Chinese government turned on Buddhism in an attack so severe that it is known as the “Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution.” The Buddhist priesthood was purged of uneducated monks; estates and precious metals were confiscated from monasteries; and, finally, 260,000 monks had their tax-free religious status taken away from them. What is notable about this persecution is its contrast with the monotheistic experience: no executions, no tortures, no burning at the stake. While no persecution of religion is to be endorsed, this episode is most remarkable for its restraint, in contrast to the ruthless slaughter and mayhem associated with monotheistic persecutions.

    When the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci founded the first Christian ministry in China in the late sixteenth century, he looked for areas of overlap between Christianity and traditional Confucian beliefs. When the Chinese referred vaguely to the heavens as a spiritual force, he deduced that they were referring to the Christian God; when they discussed the spirits that survived after death, he interpreted this as the Christian soul. This inclusive approach did not last long. Eventually, the Pope expressly forbade missionaries to show any tolerance for traditional Chinese practices such as paying homage to Confucius or honoring the ancestors. The response of the Kangxi emperor, considered one of the greatest emperors of China, illustrates the gulf between Chinese harmonization of religious thought and monotheistic intolerance:

Reading this proclamation, I have concluded that the Westerners are petty indeed. It is impossible to reason with them because they do not understand larger issues as we understand them in China…. To judge from this proclamation, their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never seen a document which contains so much nonsense.

One reason for the Kangxi emperor's self-assurance was that China had developed a coherent and systematic cosmology that didn't need an omniscient God for the source of meaning in the universe. While the Western world endured the tortuous conflicts of Christian dualism, the Chinese, in their eclectic way, were absorbing new Buddhist concepts into their own homegrown Taoist and Confucian traditions. The synthesis they created out of these three traditions—one that holds surprising correspondences with many findings of modern science—is the subject of the next chapter.

(This article is an excerpt from Jeremy Lent's masterly work, The Patterning Instinct. The purpose of reproducing this excerpt from his book is purely for the educational purpose and to encourage critical thinking regarding theology. We do no, by any means, intend to infringe the intellectual property of the book. Rather, we intend to promote the idea of the author and salute his endeavour. More about the author and the book can be accessed by clicking the aforementioned links.)

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