Free Not in God's Name by Jonathan Sacks

letter, justice, retribution, vengeance, anger, flesh and death. The God of the New Testament is the God of faith, spirit, forgiveness, grace, forbearance, love and life. But this is pure Marcionism and, in Christian terms, heresy. The essence of Christianity as articulated by Paul and the Gospels is that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are the same God. His love is the same love. His justice is the same justice. His forgiveness is the same forgiveness. That is why the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon.
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    Dualism comes in many forms, not all of them dangerous. There is the Platonic dualism that differentiates sharply between mind and body, the spiritual and the physical. There is the theological dualism that sees two different supernatural forces at work in the universe. There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call
pathological dualism
that sees humanity itself as radically, ontologically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other: either one of the saved, the redeemed, the chosen, or a child of Satan, the devil’s disciple. Pathological dualism is not Gnosticism or Manichaeism, both of which are about the gods, not humankind. But it is not difficult to see how the one could lead to the other, because our views of the natural are shaped by our ideasof the supernatural. To understand how this works we must move from theology to psychology.
    A line of thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Melanie Klein have highlighted the processes of splitting and projection. The young child makes a sharp distinction between good objects and bad. Only after maturing is it capable of understanding that people – the mother, the self – can be both good and bad. But there are personality disorders and moments of stress in which this integrated understanding comes under strain or simply never develops. The child is unable to see people, including itself, as both. It may have desires that it is ashamed of and reluctant to acknowledge. What happens then is splitting – a sharp separation between good and bad – and projection, attributing the bad to someone else.
    The same can happen to groups. We saw in the last chapter how identity involves dividing the world into two: Us and Them, in-group and out-group, the people like us and the people not like us. Much empirical research has shown that we have a natural tendency to in-group bias. We think more favourably of Us and less favourably of Them. When bad things happen to our group, splitting and projection can occur here as well. The preservation of self-respect may lead us to project the bad onto another group. We are innocent. They are guilty. Good things are failing to happen because someone is preventing them from happening: the devil, Satan, the Prince of Darkness, the evil one, Lucifer, the infidel, the antichrist. It is not theology that is at work here but rather a basic structure of thought that is a legacy of early childhood. We are good. They are bad. And bad things are happening to us because someone bad is doing them.
    Consider theology again. Monotheism is not an easy faith. Recall the verse from Isaiah: ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil.’ How can God, who is all-good, create evil? That is the question of questions for the monotheistic mind. Abraham asked: ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ Moses asked, ‘Why have you done evil to this people?’
    The simplest answer is that the bad God does is a response to the bad we do. It is justice, punishment, retribution. That is how Jews coped with the crisis of defeat and exile: ‘Because of our sins we were exiled from our land.’ The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites