Moral Purity and Persecution in History

Moore brings a lifetime of penetrating insights into the sociological mindset necessary to create "the moral approval for cruelty" to bear in this amazing work. It is easy to say that his research is shoddy due to the small number of examples he brings into play in the book, but that is simply because he is deliberately taking an approach whereby he leaves out the most obvious and overused examples and focuses on the ones that most people do not know about. He is providing a model and an insight that come from a lifetime of research--he leaves it up to the reader to apply these to the majority of history, and to the world at large.Christians will almost certainly like this book no more than they would like S. Dennis Ford's Sins of Omission, but it's important to be able to see the darker side of religion. We speak about how we must "never let the Holocaust happen again," but how long did it take European Jews, the very persecuted people of 1940s Europe, to turn around and turn the Palestinian people into their own subhuman subclass? How long did it take American pundits to call for forcible conversion of Islamic nations after 9/11? The lessons of this book should not be so easily dismissed...

Although I hope that Moore's assessment of monotheism is flawed, he demonstrates an accute understanding of how group conflict emerges. He carefully shows the importance of the ritualized, pure "self", in opposition to the heathen impure "other." Given the circumstances of the NYC and DC attacks, we must ask ourselves if Moore is right or not.

The author does a fine job of convincing us that moral zealotry and persecution, including torture and murder as well as mere reputation smearing, are typically the work of those with a sense of the pure and the impure. The chapter on the deterioration of tolerance in China is especially helpful here. Mao and his moral dogmas were the catalyst. Prior to that, a Confucian tolerance reigned. The chapter on the French Revolution shows convincingly that the purists can be revolutionary, as any walk across campus today can reveal. The author is not interested in the zealots on campus these days, but instead aims his big guns at political tyrannies such as Communism and Fascism.