Bigot: a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance
~Merriam Webster Online Dictionary
In the world we live in, the word “bigot” is almost always proceeded by the modifier “religious”. As in “The religious bigot who runs Chik-Fil-A doesn’t think gays should get married.”
Per media report, typical targets of bigotry are racial or ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals.
Undoubtedly Jon Krakauer, who is neither intolerantly religious nor (that I know of) prone to hatred of racial or ethnic minorities, women, or homosexuals would protest loudly to having the appellation “bigot” applied to himself.
Yet his writing in Under the Banner of Heaven makes clear that Krakauer is obstinately devoted to his own opinion and prejudice–and regards members of a certain group with hatred and intolerance.
Despite the book being a expose of various horrific crimes committed by those who call themselves “Mormon Fundamentalists”, the group that Krakauer is rabidly intolerant toward is not Mormons, per se.
Instead, he is determinedly anti-religious, and opposes all who hold religious beliefs.
Krakauer first reveals his bias in the prologue of his book, where he writes of a remorseless murderer:
“How could an apparently sane, avowedly pious man kill a blameless woman and her baby so viciously, without the barest flicker of emotion? Whence did he derive the moral justification? What filled him with such certitude? Any attempt to answer such questions must plumb those murky sectors of the heart and head that prompt most of us to believe in God–and compel an impassioned few, predictably, to carry that irrational belief to its logical end.”
~Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven (emphasis mine)
So Krakauer first considers belief in God to be an irrational belief, and second, believes that the logical end of belief in God is cruel inhumanity. He trots out the usual examples for evidence of his belief that religiosity is the most potent means of inciting evil: bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones. Of course, he need not explicitly mention the crusades. Everyone knows that those are a strong example for the evils of religion, such that allusion is all that is necessary.
Of course, Krakauer’s narrative misses that many of the greatest atrocities of the twenty-first century were committed not by religious zealots but by atheists and atheistic regimes. Consider Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler (although there is some evidence that Hitler was not technically atheist, since he participated in occultism and believed in some sort of spiritual world), Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, and Mao Zedong. Together, the regimes of these five men murdered over 75 million people.
By contrast, Krakauer’s list of five religious zealots (Osama bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Dan Lafferty) killed less than 5,000. Of course, one might argue that this is comparing apples to oranges since the atrocities promoted by individuals on Krakauer’s list were not necessarily murder (Koresh, for example, has no murders to his record unless you count the seventy-six people who died in the Waco raids as victims of Koresh himself–which is tenuous to say the least.) But every atrocity committed by these men (rape, molestation, poisoning, murder) was also a part of the atheistic regimes I mentioned.
So is it really true to say that “as a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane–as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout–there may be no more potent force than religion”? I think rational people considering 20th century atrocities have to disagree. Religious fervor has resulted in far fewer atrocities than antireligious fervor.
Krakauer is most certainly prejudiced against religion, and his analysis of the evils of religion are based not on an objective review of religion or of “evil” but on a selective reading of history to support his thesis.
