This page is part of “Problems with Religions and Spiritual Traditions”.
While the page about Coercion talks about trying to change what people believe or how they behave, sometimes under the threat of violence, this page goes further: it talks about how some religions and religious people aim to destroy other people, or what they hold sacred, simply because they belong to a different religion or they have “offended” against one.
Religious wars
Many of the wars fought throughout history were fueled, at least in part, by religious motives — from the Crusades to the Thirty Years’ War to numerous conflicts still raging today. The zealotry and intolerance did not stay confined to individuals or communities: once wielded by rulers and institutions, they escalated into full-scale warfare, with each side convinced that its cause was sanctioned by the divine.
TBD: give examples
Persecution and genocide of religious minorities
At its most extreme, religious hatred leads to the mass killing and expulsion of entire communities.
Example: ISIS and the Yazidis
In August 2014, the Islamic State attacked the Yazidi religious minority in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, giving them the choice to “convert or be killed”. Thousands of Yazidis were killed, and thousands of women and girls were abducted and forced into sexual slavery. The UN Human Rights Office qualified this as genocide, citing “forced religious conversion and sexual slavery” as parts of the campaign.
Example: The Rohingya
In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalist movements led by monks, such as the 969 Movement and Ma Ba Tha, spread hatred against the Muslim Rohingya minority. In 2016–2017 the army carried out a campaign of killings, rape, and the burning of villages, and more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. The UN called it “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, and UN investigators called for Myanmar’s generals to be tried for genocide.
Killing “heretics” and “blasphemers”
Some believers do not try to persuade or even coerce those they consider heretics or blasphemers: they decide to simply kill them.
Example: The fatwa against Salman Rushdie
On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling on “all brave Muslims of the world” to kill the author Salman Rushdie and those involved in publishing his novel The Satanic Verses, which was deemed blasphemous. In 1991 the book’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death, and its Italian translator was stabbed and seriously wounded. In 2022, 33 years after the fatwa, Rushdie was stabbed ten times on stage in New York, and lost the sight in one eye.
Example: Charlie Hebdo and Samuel Paty
In January 2015, gunmen killed 12 people at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a teacher near Paris, showed some of these cartoons in a civics lesson on freedom of expression. After a false online campaign against him, he was beheaded outside his school.
What the scriptures say
Some scriptures command not only subjugating other peoples, but destroying them completely (see also Coercion).
Example: The Hebrew Bible and the Canaanites
Deuteronomy 20:16–17 commands the Israelites, regarding the cities of the Canaanite nations: “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them”.
Destroying other religions’ holy places
Religious intolerance can lead to setting fire to places of worship of other religions, and to the destruction of centuries-old religious artifacts and holy sites simply because they belong to a different religion.
Example: The Buddhas of Bamiyan
In March 2001, the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan — two giant statues, 38 and 55 meters high, carved into a cliff about 1,400 years earlier. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered their destruction so that “no one can worship or respect them in the future”, and later declared: “Muslims should be proud of smashing idols.”
Example: The Babri Masjid
On December 6, 1992, a rally of about 150,000 Hindu nationalists in Ayodhya, India, demolished the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque that they claimed stood on the birthplace of the god Rama. About 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the riots that followed. A government commission of inquiry found that the demolition was “neither spontaneous nor unplanned”.
Example: The Church of the Multiplication
In June 2015, young Jewish extremists set fire to the Church of the Multiplication at Tabgha, on the Sea of Galilee, which marks the traditional site of Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and fishes. On the wall they sprayed, in Hebrew, “false idols will be smashed” — a phrase taken from the Jewish prayer Aleinu.