The papers in this session explore the complicated role religion plays in genocidal contexts. It can both perpetuate othering and violence as well as inspire people to rescue persecuted religious minorities. Ranging from how communities engage the complex emotions of fear and hope to how current political and ethnic entanglements serve to suppress altruistic religious behavior, the papers in this session examine how both the history and the collective memory of genocide influence how political communities draw upon religious ethics to address contemporary forms of political persection.
A large, quantitative study of a minority religion in post-genocide Rwanda contributes to the fields of religion and genocide. The Rwanda National Ethics Committee approved a nationwide online survey open to all baptized adult Jehovah’s Witnesses. The faith community is known for their nonviolent, neutral stance in political conflicts and is one of the fastest growing religions in Rwanda. Their congregations bring together converts from diverse backgrounds, including survivors who were targeted for genocide, rescuers who helped targeted persons, and perpetrators who were convicted of genocidal crimes. Findings from the spring 2023 survey show how these disparate groups differ in their perceived religious orientation, identity, support, and motivations to convert, depending on their gender, generation, and genocide situation.
In the 21st century, public consciousness of the Holocaust has grown enormously in the UK though a state-led memorial day, museum exhibitions, and various educational initiatives. The relationship between this phenomenon and Britain’s Muslim communities is complex, encompassing accusations of both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Through most of the 2000s, the Muslim Council of Britain boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day, provoking accusations of antisemitism and feeding a breakdown in its relationship with the government. Over the last decade, Holocaust education in schools has been used to bolster state anti-extremism policy, but given that such policy has been perceived as fostering distrust of Muslims, Holocaust memory is here implicated in a contested intersection of politics, identity, and memory. This paper outlines the dynamics at play in these controversies, but points to evidence of more nuanced relationships behind the headlines and ultimately argues against using memory of the Holocaust for British identity-construction.
Robert Braun’s 2017 empirical case study "Religious minorities and resistance to genocide: the collective rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust" presents results that demand further study, investigating the role religious networks play in cultivating individual and communal fear, and examining how fear is oriented and activated within systems. This comparative study aims to prompt insights into community, the emotion of fear and its relationship to virtuous action by bringing two accounts of fear into conversation. The practical, pastoral work of al Ghazali’s The Book of Fear and Hope and Aquinas’ categorizations of the passion and gift of fear within the Summa Theologiae provide insight into how fear and its complementary opposite, the virtue of hope, are shaped and guided through our active participation in community. Findings are brought into conversation with the warning signs we are seeing in the US context today.