"Holy Hatred," a trendy report on religious conflicts around the world, illustrates a failure of method. James A. Haught, editor of the Charleston Gazette and its former religion reporter, states his purpose as showing how in the '90s " religion ... has taken the lead as the foremost contributing factor to hatred, war and terrorism." His method is to survey 25 countries in 237 pages, including maps and photographs drawing his horrors " From the international news wires of the Associated Press and the New York Times, and a few from other sources." The result is not a convincing explanation of why these horrors occur, but for the most part a mindless string of vignettes, selected for their luridness and shock value.
With the sole exception of non-fundamentalist branches of American Protestantism, he portrays religions here and abroad as dominated by fanaticism. While Haught may be innocent of prejudice, his writing is sometimes so simpleminded that it will undoubtedly cause laughter and possibly offense, especially to Muslims. He writes of Iran: " All the faithful bow five times daily toward Mecca. All dream of a heavenly paradise full of lovely Houri nymphs."
As the book jolts from Bosnia to Ulster to Sri Lanka, the reader is exhausted by news flashes relating religious massacres, murders, fire bombings and mutilations. After only a few pages, these disconnected atrocities become mind numbing. What readers wishing to understand current events look for particularly in books, as opposed to the electronic media or even newspapers, is analysis that connects or makes sense of the facts, that holds them in some structure. This is what is so consistently missing in Haught's easy-to-write and easy-to-throw-away book.
Instead of showing how religion relates to other factors - politics, economics, ethnicity, geography - to produce the horrors he cites, Haught simply assumes religion operates as a single cause. Thus, the war in Bosnia:
"Cities such as Sarajevo became known as bastions of tolerance where people of all faiths lived and worked together. But the divisions were lying dormant, like viruses lodged in tissue. After European communism collapsed, the viruses grew and Yugoslavia disintegrated in bloodshed."
At no time does Haught suggest that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's interest in a Greater Serbia lay behind his use of religion to wage the war. Or in his chapter on Iran, Haught fails to provide any background on the weakening of the Western-oriented middle class by the U.S.-inspired ouster of Premier Muhammad Mussadegh and installation of the Shah to explain the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It simply happens as a result of religious fanaticism. What Haught gives us is comic book history. Faces and gruesome incidents appear for no reason except his pet explanation - religion.
Journalists like Mr. Haught live in a world of daily flux in which yesterday's story is replaced by today's headline. Books can lengthen the timeline, and if they are well written and provide background and analysis, they may grant even a little eternity to a journalist. Books are to journalists what pyramids are to pharaohs. But " Holy Hatred" deserves less than the day of life given to most newspaper articles. It deserves never to be read at all.
Craig Eisendrath has been a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, HTC college dean and executive director of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard in history, and lectures on literature, foreign policy and religion.
"Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s," by James A. Haught. Illustrations/Photographs. 237 pages. New York: Prometheus Books. $21.95