The A-Z of Believing: X is for Xenophobia

Blind faith can lead to bigotry, division and hatred. Ed Kessler, head of the Woolf Institute, presents the 24th part in a series on belief and scepticism

Saturday 26 January 2019 14:13 GMT
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Religious people must confess: we are far from being the honourable exception
Religious people must confess: we are far from being the honourable exception

What is the cause of xenophobia, especially the religious variety? It arises from fanaticism, shaped by dogmatism, grounded in fundamentalism.

Namely, the unshakeable conviction that, in your sacred text, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and even Buddhist; or in the secular world, the economic theories of Karl Marx or Milton Friedman, the political ideologies of communism, socialism and capitalism; you possess the whole truth and nothing but the truth, with the reassuring consequence that your side is always right and the opposing side invariably and inevitably wrong.

And what are the symptoms? Self-righteousness and arrogance; intransigence and refusal to compromise; a tendency to lecture rather than to listen; to brandish slogans rather than engage in thought; to distrust the democratic process of rational persuasion; or to demonise those who dare to disagree with you and ridicule them as heretics; a readiness to resort to verbal abuse and physical aggression and more generally that prideful obduracy, which the Bible calls the “hardening of the heart”.

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