New York, October 19, 2022 — As Americans get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving and gather with loved ones, those around the world are being persecuted because of their beliefs. It’s happening to the Yazidis in Iraq, the Rohingya in Myanmar and Uyghur Muslims in China. In RELIGICIDE: Confronting the Roots of Anti-Religious Violence (Post Hill Press; November 22, 2022; ISBN-13: 978-1637581018; Hardcover), co-authors and activists Georgette Bennett and Jerry White give a name to this insidious strand of violence and propose a global initiative and set of policies to identify it, respond to it and prevent it.
“We call it religicide,” Bennett and White declare. “Absent a name, and absent appropriate laws and methods for dealing with religicide, it continues unabated, unrecognized and unprosecuted.”
In the book, Bennett and White detail:
– How religicide operates through forms of persecution that destroy a group of believers’ sacred heritage, culture and hope.
– How religicide leads to rising rates of traumatic stress, depression, poverty and suicide.
– How religicide is fueled by government propaganda and hate speech, often supported by twisted or weaponized passages from religious texts.
– Emerging forms of tech-assisted religicide, exemplified by China’s surveillance of devout Buddhist communities in Tibet.
– Gaps in the protection of religion and belief under national and international laws, and how freedom of religion sometimes clashes with freedom of expression.
Beyond calling attention to this escalating human rights crisis, RELIGICIDE provides an action plan to reverse religicide with an integrated top-down, bottom-up and middle-out approach, relying on collaboration among diverse faith groups, international organizations, public officials, and businesses and community leaders.
About the Authors
Georgette F. Bennett is an award-winning sociologist and criminologist, widely published author, popular lecturer and former broadcast journalist for NBC News. She is the founder of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the go-to organization for combatting religious prejudice, and the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees.
She served on the US State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group tasked with developing recommendations to engage religious leaders in conflict mitigation. Among many other honors, she was awarded a 2020 AARP Purpose Prize and named one of Forbes’ 50 over 50 Women of Impact in 2021.
Jerry White is an activist and entrepreneur known for leading high-impact campaigns, three of which led to international treaties: the Mine Ban Treaty, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Cluster Munitions Ban. As co-founder of Landmine Survivors Network, he worked with Diana, Princess of Wales, to help thousands of war victims find peer support and job training, and shares in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. He served as US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State to launch the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. An amputee landmine survivor himself, he is the author of I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis. White teaches at the University of Virginia. After completing this book, he assumed the position of Executive Director of the United Religions Initiative
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
