In a speech to the United Nations on September 29, 2015, President Obama acknowledged that military pressures will be insufficient to beat ISIS (also known as Daesh, ISIL, or the Islamic State): “Ideologies are not defeated with guns. They are defeated by better ideas—a more attractive and compelling vision.”

Unfortunately neither Obama nor any other Western leader has such a vision. They can’t allow themselves to understand that the selfishness and materialism built into the neoliberal worldview and embedded in the daily practices of global capitalism are precisely what people are protesting when they move toward various forms of religious or nationalist fundamentalisms.

The only way to defeat these fundamentalisms is to create what we at Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives call the Caring Society: Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth. This isn’t just a slogan, but a movement for...

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