ABSTRACT
‘Those who have the sin’ is how a Hutu man identified Tutsis, Tutsis who were singled out for extermination during the Rwandan genocide. The use of the words ‘the sin’ is telling, as it conveys that Tutsis are immanently wicked, marred in some deep way that only the religiously inflected word ‘sin’ can communicate. In this phrase, religion and genocide meet. The terms ‘genocide’ and ‘religion’ are both as charged as they are multivalent and misunderstood, for there is no consensus among scholars as to what these terms mean. Scholarly debates abound regarding the utility and exclusivity of their definitions, normative and prescriptive implications, and relationship to each other. Most definitions and categories are fraught with limitations, tainted with normative commitments, and subject to accusations of essentialization. Nonetheless, definitions and categories do help us think through complex ideas and clarify complex realities, with the caveat that we are mindful not to mistake these definitions and categories as identical to or capable of accounting entirely for the very phenomenon they seek to explain. We use definitions for ‘genocide’ and ‘religion’ no matter how contested, problematic, and open to revision they may be, because we find it useful. What is at stake in understanding these concepts goes far beyond academic battles over nomenclature, as regardless of how we choose to delineate ‘genocide’ and ‘religion’, these are not reified ideas but are phenomena that occur in our world and are of grave consequence. There is no doubt that society at large has an understanding of these terms, and if we allow this fact to be overwhelmed by scholastic disputes, we do so at our peril.
