From ABC News:

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and chil­dren, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Mon­day, Niger­ian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck car­ried dozens of bod­ies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved work­ers pulled ever-smaller bod­ies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to heaven.” As the grave filled, the griev­ing crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 peo­ple, most of them Chris­tians, were slaugh­tered on Sun­day, accord­ing to res­i­dents, aid groups and jour­nal­ists. The local gov­ern­ment gave a fig­ure more than twice that amount, but offered no casu­alty list or other infor­ma­tion to sub­stan­ti­ate it.

An Asso­ci­ated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them chil­dren, being buried in the mass grave in the vil­lage of Dogo Nahawa on Mon­day. Other vic­tims would be buried else­where. At a local morgue the bod­ies of chil­dren, includ­ing a diaper-clad tod­dler, were tan­gled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Oth­ers had sev­ered hands and feet.

Reli­gious vio­lence is not a new thing. Some of the most endur­ing images I have from my Jew­ish edu­ca­tion are descrip­tions of the vio­lence that has been per­pe­trated for cen­turies against Jews by Romans, Greeks, Chris­tians and, though per­haps less often, Mus­lims. One sub­text of those lessons was that the Jews, because we were so stead­fast in our reli­gious beliefs, because we refused to assim­i­late, have been made to suf­fer reli­gious per­se­cu­tion more than any other group; and, indeed, when I was younger, I often expe­ri­enced real cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance when I heard about reli­gious vio­lence that did not involve Jews. Over time, as my vision of the world and my place in it widened, that dis­so­nance dis­ap­peared. I came to under­stand as well that reli­gion was some­times merely the jus­ti­fy­ing veneer that one group would place over the vio­lence they wanted to do to another, a way of hid­ing their more polit­i­cal and mate­r­ial motivation.

The more I heard and read about reli­gious vio­lence, the more famil­iar the script­ing of it became – and it is remark­able how sim­i­lar the scripts are; how care­fully scripted the incite­ments to vio­lence are, if not the vio­lence itself, regard­less of the reli­gious denom­i­na­tions involved – and, even­tu­ally, the sto­ries I would hear left me feel­ing more numb than any­thing else. Yes, it was hor­ri­ble that peo­ple were killed, but, I would think, as long as reli­gion con­tained within it the pos­si­bil­ity for some­one to decide that he or she is fol­low­ing the one true path and that all those not on that path are morally and spir­i­tu­ally infe­rior and there­fore sus­pect, then the poten­tial for reli­gious vio­lence inhered in reli­gion, and there was no escap­ing it.

I con­tinue to believe that, I sup­pose, which is why I tend not to write about reli­gious vio­lence as such: I just don’t think there is all that much to say, or, rather, that I have much to say that would be use­ful. Still, this story, which has also been reported on Yahoo! News and other news out­lets – the New York Times puts the death toll at 500 – brought me up short. In part, this is because I have a very close friend from Nige­ria, and she has talked often about the ten­sion between Mus­lims and Chris­tians in her coun­try. Indeed, this mas­sacre is said to have been retal­i­a­tion for a sim­i­lar slaugh­ter of Mus­lims per­pe­trated by Chris­tians some time ago, and I can even imag­ine, from the way in which she talks about it, that my friend might have been among those Muslim-killing Chris­tians had she been in the coun­try and the cir­cum­stances been “right.” I feel, in other words, a per­sonal con­nec­tion to this story that I have rarely felt, not least because my friend might have been among those killed whether or not she had par­tic­i­pated in the prior massacre.

I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mis­trust, and hatred of the Mus­lims in Nige­ria ran until after our friend­ship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Niger­ian Mus­lims, not about peo­ple who fol­low Islam in gen­eral, and I believe her, and she tells sto­ries about her own expe­ri­ences in Nige­ria and the expe­ri­ences of the peo­ple she knows to jus­tify her­self. The fact that she makes this dis­tinc­tion, of course, sug­gests that the issues at stake are not really reli­gious, but the fact that they are expressed reli­giously – in terms of spir­i­tu­al­ity and moral­ity and the one true path to God – makes it hard, even just between the two of us, to get at what those stakes really are; and then I think about the way our inva­sion of Iraq and oust­ing of Sad­dam Hus­sein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats – check out this NPR inter­view with Deb­o­rah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sun­nis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Mid­dle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian strug­gle over the sta­tus of Jerusalem, which is so often played out in reli­gious terms. And when I think about how may more exam­ples I could list, I can­not help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, polit­i­cal; maybe the god or gods all these peo­ple fight over is just a way of not hav­ing to take respon­si­bil­ity for their own pol­i­tics, their own desire for power, their own inabil­ity to share, their own fear of every­thing that makes them vul­ner­a­ble; maybe the need to make your reli­gion the only true one is noth­ing more than fear and cow­ardice, and we all know how thin the line is between the cow­ard who cow­ers and the cow­ard who becomes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an under­grad­u­ate in fact, that I have known per­son­ally some­one who could place her or him­self so eas­ily, so firmly, so absolutely, on one side of this kind of divide and so thor­oughly for­get that the other side is also inhab­ited by peo­ple; and yet even as I write that, it would be dis­hon­est of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly reli­gious terms, in a way that denied the human­ity of the other side.

That we all have this capac­ity within us is by now a cliché, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in some­one who has become your friend? Because if you can­not accept it – which is not the same thing as approv­ing of it, or allow­ing it to go unchal­lenged – then there can no longer be a real friend­ship. This is the ques­tion that I am con­fronting.