Religion and Exterminatory Fantasies

Openly proclaimed wishes, or expectations, for the elimination of out-groups or even most of humanity are found in many religious traditions. Offering a theoretical framework for explaining exterminatory fantasies is hampered by a natural reaction of shock and helped by observers’ conscious empathy and compassion. One obvious origin of exterminatory fantasies is the conscious and unconscious compensation, as well as sadistic pleasure, we seek following personal failure. Such fantasies in religious traditions seek to offer compensation following collective defeats. Most individuals and groups believe in being chosen in some way, and this belief must co-exist with a reality of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Identity is tied to self-esteem, and so any failure or intimation of inferiority will cause fantasies of superiority to appear. Narratives of triumph known to us from reading the Hebrew Bible, such as the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan, were invented and adopted following the Judean defeat by Babylonian forces in 586 BCE. Those who have been defeated seek not only compensation, but revenge. They want to see their victimizers not only humiliated but decimated and totally exterminated. In addition to invented narratives of past glories, celebrated in religious and national traditions, narratives of much greater future triumphs nourish believers’ imagination as part of apocalyptic teachings. The Hebrew Bible described the real defeats as punishment for disobeying Jehovah. This is the starting point for apocalyptic dreams, which portray the stage of perfect harmony between the one God and his followers. The birth of a new world involves exterminating nonbelievers following the Day of Judgment. The just and pure believers will then be free to dominate the cosmos in which death and heresy will not exist. This will be the triumph of true justice. Such fantasies promise real compensation and full revenge. How central are exterminatory fantasies to the thinking of the believers? Most of the time they are marginal, while part of the official doctrine. In times of personal or collective crisis, some believers may decide to step into the apocalyptic stream, with terrible consequences in most cases.