hat are the causes of religious intolerance? This is a question that still needs to be asked. There is evidence of increased anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Israel sentiment even today in Western Europe and at our universities. These same regions are also sources of Christophobia, the fear of Christianity, with which it is associated.

A recent example in the New York Times shows how such religious bigotry can start. In a column commenting on the Terry Schiavo euthanasia case, columnist Maureen Dowd concluded that "We are really in a theocracy." ``Theocracy'' for Dowd is a derogatory term, a code word for ``George W. Bush and the red-state Christians running the country." Paul Krugman, in an even more vitriolic anti-Christian column, said that ``liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line" may someday have to fear assassination from religious believers "unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists."

What did these ``extremists'' do? They carried signs protesting the state-sponsored killing of a severely mentally handicapped person. There was also a rumor that someone threatened Schiavo's husband. The New York Times used it as a platform to launch a verbal fusillade against Christianity. Read Krugman's article and substitute the word ``Jew'' for ``Christian,'' and you can see how even respectable newspapers can unwittingly inch ever closer to inflaming religious hatred and intolerance. Like the anti-Semitism of medieval Europe, the religious hatred in the New York Times and other bastions of liberalism today is based as much on fear of their political enemies as on differences in theological questions.

These cases of anti-Christian sentiment in the New York Times are not isolated phenomena. On the contrary, intolerance toward religion has become commonplace. Oddly, religious intolerance is most prevalent in this country among liberals and leftists, who once prided themselves in their tolerance toward alternative viewpoints.

David Katz points out that the brand of "new" anti-Semitism in modern-day Europe likewise cannot be blamed on the European Muslim populations, but is also based primarily on political disputes:

To the narrow minded individual the answer is a relatively trivial one. He exclaims, the State of Israel is the root of all new anti-Semitism. The treatment of "Palestinians" fuels the new fires of anti-Semitism. If only, the settlements did not exist. If only, Israel took a humanitarian and a more Jewish approach to dealing with the "Palestinians". Then and only then would anti-Semitism be a fear of the past. ... If our naive friend is right, anti-Semitism should be limited at most to the middle east and to Arabs, yet that is not the case.

Much of the literature on religious hatred concentrates on anti-Semitism, although the conclusions apply equally to Christophobia. In his famous book, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes, Bernard Lazare elaborated on the political explanation. Like most socialists, Lazare tended to explain everything in terms of economic class and class conflict. Lazare basically says in his book that during times when they were poor, Jews were hated because they were poor, and when they were rich they were hated because they were rich. This explanation, while probably true on some level, is also unsatisfying and unconvincing. Other theories about theological disputes, envy, scapegoating, etc., also mainly describe the phenomenon rather than explaining it.

Some of the modern-day anti-Semitism in Europe is a historical remnant of a time when religion was not just a belief system, but an ideology with enormous political power. In the light of Hitler, we tend to focus more exclusively on anti-Semitism and to forget that ideological conflicts between Protestants and Catholics led to hundreds of years of warfare in Europe. After 400 years, the political nature of the conflict has been mostly forgotten.

While anti-Semitism has been passed down intact from the Middle Ages through the Nazis, Communists, and now various conspiracy groups, Catholic-Protestant hatred has been largely replaced by a general hatred of Christianity by left-wing secularists. To explain this difference, we need an explanation in terms of the social psychology--the psychology of groups of people. No behavior occurs without some benefit for the individual who is acting, whether is it a tangible, social, or psychological benefit. For example, to an anti-Semite, some aspect of the existence of Jews may be a threat to his or her self-image or belief system. In addition, there must also be some benefit that the person will derive from singling out one group. This could be a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, perhaps individual inadequacy or a fear of failure of one's own culture. The "other" is then imbued with undesirable, malevolent features, and then hated. The hatred allows the person to feel better about him- or herself, secure in the knowledge that he or she is better than members of the hated group.

Unfortunately, much of the early work on anti-Semitism among social psychologists suffers from an unscientific attitude and consists primarily of political polemics masquerading as dispassionate analysis. As a result, their theories do not adequately explain the phenomenon. For example, Altemeyer and Pratto maintained that anti-Semitism can be explained by a personality trait called "right-wing authoritarianism" that is associated with a social dominance orientation, hierarchical social viewpoint, and social prejudice. This theory fails to explain or even recognize the existence of "left-wing authoritarianism", the existence of which was clearly attested in the Soviet Union and Red China, and reached its purest form in Pol Pot's Cambodia. This philosophical bias showed that their "findings" were in fact mostly political in nature.

Theodor Adorno et al. in the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality similarly characterized anti-Semitic personalities as sick, paranoid and suffering from feelings of personal inadequacy. These value-laden viewpoints are also dismissed by social psychologists today. The approach of Adorno and others is too narrow because it fails to account for the anti-Semitism and anti-Christian attitudes on the Left, associating anti-Semitism exclusively with Nazism. Many psychologists have even tried to psychoanalyze Hitler from the comfortable distance of their ivy-league lounge chairs using features of Hitler's early attempts as an artist, or his military strategy, to divine clues about the origins of his anti-Semitic and anti-Christian beliefs. Yet their conclusion, that Hitler is evil, is inevitably pre-ordained, rendering their analyses a parody of the scientific method.

Some psychologists have taken the view that religious hatred exists to simplify the worldview of the person, and thus makes it easier for the haters to re-order their subjective world as they see fit. This viewpoint fits in well with a deep need of some commentators to demonize heretical points of view by calling the practitioners, in effect, "stupid". In fact, the desire to simplify one's worldview is probably a common feature of all mental activity. It is simply impossible to understand the world without making generalizations; and as John J. Ray points out, the need to explain incompatible "facts" such as a supposed existence of a conspiracy between a Jewish Wall Street Stockbroker Cabal and a Jewish Stalinist Dictator Cabal actually makes the anti-Semitic worldview more complex rather than simplifying anything. Someone who adopts a conspiracy theory that defies common sense may or may not be stupid, but calling them stupid sheds no light on their motivations.

The modern view is that of the "outgroup homogeneity effect" in which members of a clearly-identifiable group are regarded as more similar to each other than members of an "ingroup", that is, one's own self-identified group. As such, the members of the outgroup are more easily viewed as expendable and interchangeable. Much of what is commonly called "prejudice" is actually favoritism and positive feelings toward members of the ingroup. Thus, any ideology (such as religion or a political ideology) that promotes social cohesion and group identity runs the risk of promoting hatred of outsiders. The hatred will only become manifest, however, if the outsiders are perceived as a threat to that social cohesion. This threat could be a threat to the individuals' self-image, or to one of the core tenets of the ideology, thereby threatening the raison d'etre of the group; or the threat could be an economic threat or a physical threat such as the perception of high rates of intergroup crime.

The outgroup homogeneity effect, unlike the earlier theories, also explains Christophobia. Radical secularists frequently stereotype Christians by attributing to them undesirable aspects of social class and lifestyle. The purpose is to depersonalize their political opponents, making it easier to make vitriolic attacks without the need to make any specific, falsifiable statement. The shared enmity also serves to increase ingroup cohesion.

Members of an outgroup can be a threat to a person's self-image simply by holding an opinion that says that some critical element of the person's identity or beliefs is wrong. For example, if you believed that people like yourself, with purple hair and green stripes, are superior, then the existence of a person with green hair with purple stripes who happens to be smarter than you would be a threat to your self-image. If you are convinced that your belief in some theological point or some political tenet is what makes you a decent human being, then a group of people who dispute that canon of belief become a threat.

All of the above is just a long-winded way of saying that people always struggle for power and control of each other. Religious hatred is not about religion or ethnicity, but power. If religions provide power, people will fight and kill each other for it. If a group is seen to lack power, people who have less power than they feel they deserve will kill members of that group, or encourage others to do so, in order to feel more powerful. Today, newspapers like the New York Times and others are drifting toward advocacy of a new type of religious hatred: conflict between secularists and Christians. In view of the tragic history of past religious conflicts, they are playing with fire.