A text by André Jacob in The duty of July 17 was indignant about the instrumentalization of Christianity in the American electoral campaign, against a backdrop of political violence. Another text, the following day, signed by Jean Baillargeon, denounced political violence in the name of God. However, it must be emphasized that this instrumentalization is the work of believers as much as of atheists.
The idea of God or the name of God will always be a useful resource for those who want to justify political violence and give reason for it. There is Hamas, the Jews and the far-right Christians, and their warrior God, but also non-believers who have no use for God, like Trump and Netanyahu, except to instrumentalize him in the service of their will to power or their ideology.
God is not the source of this violence. “To believe that God can order men to commit atrocious acts of injustice and cruelty is the greatest error one can commit against him,” wrote in his Letter to a religious man French philosopher Simone Weil, who experienced God’s love in her own flesh. History is littered with this misunderstanding.
But the total absence of reference to God in politics, if that were even possible, would not change anything. Political violence has a bright future ahead of it, with or without God. As yesterday, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, today Putin and Xi Jinping and the neo-fascists have other ideological tools in hand. The way forward is rather that of the testimony of faith and resistance that counteract this disfigurement of the notion of God, and stands against the disfigurement of the human.
Let us think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero and Desmond Tutu, and so many others, known and anonymous, for whom God is a source of solidarity, mutual aid, compassion, peace and heroic resistance against injustice and evil. Just as atheism, to return to Simone Weil, can be in this sense “a purification of the notion of God” (Gravity and grace). The media here, however, are unfortunately not in the habit of reporting on this kind of testimony, even though it is flourishing. This would allow us to collectively form another idea of God. A non-believer may be indifferent to it, but he must be able to judge with full knowledge of the facts.
For a Christian like me, Trump’s political project is the antithesis of the Gospel, and to make him an envoy of God is an aberration and a scandal. Likewise the barbarity committed by Hamas on October 7, and that of an even darker scale of the Israeli government which continues before our horrified eyes. All this in the name of God! What a scandal! I was in Chile when Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt organized by the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front in 1986. I remember the indignation of the Christian communities, when the dictatorship had seen it as a sign of divine protection.
It is up to all of us to enter into combat against any disfigurement of humanity, which should also be for believers a disfigurement of God. Peace comes at this price. Because political violence has its foundation above all in the instrumentalization of the human, which is in the air of technological times. It has everything to do with what anthropologists call the violence of the sacred. This is characterized by the instrumentalization of human beings in the name of an absolute truth that demands the sacrifice of their life or their dignity and freedom on the altar of its implacable logic, which ensures order in the service of power and the enrichment of an elite.
To quote the Gospel, which denounces its mechanics: “The Law is made for the human being and not the human being for the Law.” This violence is not only present in religions, far from it; it is also found in the perverted forms of politics and economics and also accommodates itself very well to reason and science.
It is against this human instrumentalization that we must fight. Against everything that makes humans a simple means to an end – that we can thus sacrifice at will, humiliate, torture, massacre, debase, enslave, make invisible, dehumanize or make superfluous, without a second thought. Whether it is in the name of God or of some idol called Nation, Democracy, Science, Profit, Ideology, it does not matter.