The Argument that Religion Does Cause Terrorism

Avalos’ book, Fighting Words, posits that religious terrorism is indeed caused by religion. Or, rather, that religion creates an imaginary supply of sacred resources over which humans contend. Avalos regards all forms of social and political conflict to be contests over scarce resources. The ones who do not have the scarce resources want them, and the ones that have them want to keep them. In the case of religious conflict, the scarce resources are things that religion specifically supplies: the favor of God, blessings, and salvation. By definition, these are things that are not equally bestowed on everyone and must be earned and protected. When Rabbi Meir Kahane challenged Jews to restore God’s honor, it was God’s favor to the Jews that he wished to restore. Hence, an ordinary battle is a conflict to earn the highest heavenly rewards.

From Avalos’ point of view, moreover, the necessity of violence is often built into the very structure of religious commitment. The act of atonement in Christianity, the sense of revenge in Judaism, the martial triumphalism of Islam, all require violent acts to fulfill their religious images of the world. And in each case, the result of violence is to bring the benefits of the scarce resources of spiritual blessings to the grateful perpetrator of the religious violence.

Avalos’ position is controversial even in the academic community. Many observers have pointed out that current religious conflicts are seldom about religion per se – they are about national territory, political leadership, and socioeconomic control, cast in a religious light. Within the wider public, there is perhaps even less support for the notion that religion in general leads directly to violent acts. Despite the rise of religious violence in recent years, most people still regard religion – at least in the case of their own religion – as something benign. This attitude is prevalent even among members of religious communities from which violence has originated. Most Muslims regard Islam as a religion of peace, and Christians and Jews regard their own religions in the same way. Most of the faithful in these religions refuse to believe that their own beliefs could have led to violence.

Yet when one looks outside one’s faith, it is easier to blame religion. In the current climate of Muslim political violence, a significant sector of the American and European public assumes that Islam is part of the problem. Despite the cautionary words of President George W. Bush imploring Americans not to blame Islam for September 11, a certain Islamophobia has crept into public conversation.

The implication of this point of view is the unfortunate notion that the whole of Islam has supported acts of terrorism. The inevitable attachment of Islam to terrorism in the ubiquitous phrase “Islamic terrorism” is one example of this habit of thinking. Another is the vaunting of jihad to a place of supreme Islamic importance – as if all Muslims agreed with the militarized usage of the term by unauthorized extremist groups. The most strident expositions of this way of thinking are found in assertions of Christian televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell that the Prophet himself was a kind of terrorist. More moderate forms are the attempts by political commentators and some scholars to explain – as if there was need for it – why Islam is so political. Even Connecticut’s liberal Senator Christopher Dodd, in a television interview in November 2003, cautioned Americans not to expect too much tolerance from Islam, given its propensity for ideological control over public life. He referenced a recent book by historian Bernard Lewis for this point of view, a book that he recommended to the viewers.²

The assumption of those who hold this “Islam is the problem” position is that the Muslim relationship to politics is peculiar. But this is not true. Most traditional societies have had a close tie between political leadership and religious authority, and religion often plays a role in undergirding the moral authority of public life. In Judaism, the Davidic line of kingship is anointed by God; in Hinduism, the kings are thought to uphold divine order through the white umbrella of dharma; in Christianity, the political history of Europe is rife with contesting and sometimes merging lines of authority between church and state. Violent Jewish, Hindu, and Christian activists in recent years have all, like their Muslim counterparts, looked to traditional religious patterns of politicized religion to justify their own militant stance.

The public life of contemporary America is no exception. It is one in which religion is very much involved with politics and politics with religion. The evangelical professions of faith of President Bush and advisors such as former Attorney General John Ashcroft fuel the impression that U.S. foreign policy has a triumphant agenda of global Christendom. This characterization of religion’s hand in U.S. politics is often exaggerated by foreign observers in Europe and the Middle East, but the Christian rhetoric of American political leaders is undeniable and lends credibility to such a view.

Even more troubling are strands of Christian theocracy that have emerged among extreme groups in the United States. Some employ violence in their opposition to secular society and their hatred of a globalized culture and economy. A neo-Calvinist theology of a religious state lies behind the bombing of abortion clinics and the shooting of abortion clinic staff by Lutheran and Presbyterian activists in Maryland and Florida. The Christian Identity philosophy of race war and a government enshrining a White Christian supremacy lie behind Eric Robert Rudolph’s attack on the Atlanta Olympic park, other bombings of gay bars and abortion clinics, the killing of a Denver radio talk-show host, an assault on a Jewish day care center in Los Angeles, and many other incidents – including Ruby Ridge – perpetrated by Christian militia in recent years. The Christian Cosmotheism espoused by William Pierce and embraced by Timothy McVeigh was the ideological justification for McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. In fact, there have been more attacks – far more, in fact – by Christian terrorist groups on American soil in the last fifteen years than Muslim ones. Aside from September 11 and the 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, almost all of the other terrorist acts are Christian.

Yet somehow, despite evidence to the contrary, the American public labels Islam as a terrorist religion rather than Christianity. The arguments that agree – or disagree – with this position often get mired in the tedious task of dredging up scriptural or historical examples to show the political and militant side of Islam (or, contrarily, of other religions like Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism). Then opponents will challenge the utility of those examples, and the debate goes on. The arguments would not be necessary, however, if one did not assume that religion is responsible for acts of public violence in the first place.

The Argument that Religion Does not Cause Terrorism

This position – that religion is not the problem – is taken by observers on the other side of the public discussion over religion after September 11. In some cases, they see religion as an innocent victim; in other cases, they see it as simply irrelevant. In Dying to Win, Robert Pape argues that religion is not the motive in most acts of suicide bombing.³ Looking at a broad swath of cases of suicide activists in recent years, Pape concludes that they are not motivated by a blind religious fervor as much as a calculated political attempt. The primary motive is to defend territory. Pape accurately points out that until 2003, the most suicide bombings were conducted not by a religious group, but by a secular ethnic movement: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

Pape bases his conclusions on an analysis of the database maintained by the Chicago Project of Suicide Terrorism. He provides a demographic profile of over 460 men and women – though they are mostly men. They are not, he argues, “mainly poor, uneducated, immature religious zealots or social losers,”⁴ as they have sometimes been portrayed. What they have in common is the sense that their territory or culture has been invaded by an alien power that cannot easily be overthrown. In this desperate situation of social survival, they turn to the simplest and most direct form of militant engagement: using their own bodies as bombs. Contrary to the perception of many, suicide bombers are not religious loners, but are usually part of large militant organizations with well-honed strategies aimed at ousting foreign control from what they consider their own territory. The concessions made to such organizations in the past by the governments who have been opposed to them have given the organizations behind suicide bombings the confidence that their strategies work and are worth repeating.

Little is said about religion in Pape’s book. The implication is that religious motives are, basically, beside the point. For this reason, there is no attempt to explain the extraordinarily ubiquitous role of religion in violent movements around the world, from Sikh activists in India to Christian militia in Idaho, and Muslim jihadis from Morocco to Bali. Nor is there any attempt to explain what difference religion makes when it enters into a conflict and religionizes the struggle, as both Muslim and Jewish extremists did in the Israel-Palestine dispute – a conflict that, prior to the 1990s, was largely a secular struggle over territorial control. One is left with the impression that, although Pape’s study is useful in reminding us that acts of violence are about real things such as the defense of culture and territory, it still does not explain why religion has become such a forceful and difficult vehicle for framing these concerns in recent years.

Nonetheless, appreciation for Pape’s position has been widespread, in part because it appears to contradict the U.S. administration’s position that Islamic militants are opposed to freedom. Pape argues that, to the contrary, freedom is precisely what they are fighting for. Moreover, his arguments buttress the position of two other quite different camps: religious defenders who are eager to distance religion from the violent acts with which religion has recently been associated, and secular analysts who have always thought that secular factors – particularly economic and political concerns – are the main ingredients of social conflict.

This secular perspective is the one that lies behind the phrase “the use of religion for political purposes.” When this phrase is employed, religion is dismissed of any culpability in creating an atmosphere of violence. A U.S. State Department official once told me that religion was being “used” throughout the Middle East, masking problems that were essentially economic in nature. He assured me that if jobs were to be had by unemployed Egyptians and Palestinians, the problem of religious politics in these impoverished societies would quickly vanish. From his point of view, it was unthinkable that religious activists would actually be motivated by religion, or at least by ideological views of the world that were framed in religious language. Similarly, Michael Sells’ study of the role of Christian symbolism in resurgent Serbian nationalism, The Bridge Betrayed, was ridiculed by a reviewer for The Economist who saw the conflict as purely a matter of secular nationalism in which religion played no role.⁵ The assumption of the reviewer, like that of the State Department official with whom I spoke, was that religion was the dependent variable: a rhetorical gloss over the real issues that were invariably economic or political.

From the perspectives of Pape and the State Department economist, religion is essentially irrelevant to the motivations of terrorism. Religious defenders agree, and take this point of view a step further. They state that religion is not just neutral about violence, it is opposed to it – and thus it is an innocent victim of political activists. In some cases, these religious defenders do not deny that there may be religious elements in the motives of violent activists, but they claim that these extreme religious groups do not represent the normative traditions. Most Buddhist leaders in Japan, for instance, distanced themselves from what they regarded as the pseudo-Buddhism of the Aum Shinrikyo sect that was implicated in the nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subways. Most Muslims refused to believe that fellow members of their faith could have been responsible for anything as atrocious as the September 11 attacks – and hence the popular conspiracy theory in the Muslim world that somehow the Israeli secret police had plotted the terrible deed. Most Christians in America saw the religiosity of Timothy McVeigh as anti-Christian, even anti-religious, and refused to describe him as a Christian terrorist, despite the strong Christian subtext of the novel, The Turner Diaries, which McVeigh regarded as his Bible.⁶

Some scholars have come to the defense of religion in a similar way, by characterizing the religion of activists groups as deviant from the religious norm and therefore uncharacteristic of true religion. This is essentially the stance that Bruce Lawrence takes in defending Islam in Shattering the Myth.⁷ The term “fundamentalism” – applied not just to Christianity but to a whole host of religious traditions – is another way of excusing “normal” religion and isolating religion’s problems to a deviant form of the species. It is used sometimes to suggest an almost viral spread of an odd and dangerous mutation of religion that, if left on its own, naturally leads to violence, autocracy, and other extremes. Fortunately, so this line of thinking goes, normal religion is exempt. Recently, however, “Islam” and “fundamentalism” have been tied together so frequently in public conversation that the term has become a way of condemning all of Islam as a deviant branch of religion. But even in this case, the use of the term “fundamentalism” allows for the defenders of other religions to take comfort in the notion that their kind of nonfundamentalist religion is exempt from violence or other extreme forms of public behavior.

These various points of view present us with two, or perhaps three or four, different answers to the question: Is religion a cause of terrorism? Avalos says yes; religion, in general, is a cause of terrorism.⁸ The Islamophobes say yes; Islam, in particular, is a problem. Pape says no; religion is irrelevant to the fight to defend territory.⁹ Other religious defenders say no: ordinary religion is innocent of violence, but some odd forms of religion might contribute to it.

The Argument that Religion Is not the Problem, but it Is Problematic

It seems to me that it is not necessary to have to make one choice among these options. As anyone who has ever taken a multiple-choice test knows, there is a dilemma when presented with such absolute differences. The most accurate responses are often to be found in the gray categories: c) none of the above, or d) all of the above. In the case of the question regarding the involvement of religion in contemporary public life, the answer is not simply a matter of peculiar religion gone bad or of good religion being used by bad people. We know that there are strata of religious imagination that deal with all sides and moods of human existence: the peace and the perversity, the tranquility, and the terror.

In my own studies of cases of religious violence, I have found that religious language and ideas play important roles, though not necessarily the initial ones. The conditions of conflict that lead to tension are usually economic and social in character; often, as Pape discusses, a defense of territory or culture that is perceived to be under control by an outside power.¹⁰ At some point in the conflict, however, usually at a time of frustration and desperation, the political contest becomes religionized. Then what was primarily a secular struggle takes on the aura of sacred conflict. This creates a whole new set of problems.

Since the 1980s, I have studied a variety of cases of contemporary religious activism. I started with the situation involving the Sikhs in the Punjab, a region in which I have lived for some years and know fairly well. I have also observed the rise of Hindu political violence and the Muslim separatist movement in Kashmir, the Buddhist anti-government protests in Sri Lanka, the Aum Shinrikyo movement in Japan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and militant Messianic Jewish movements in Israel, as well as the Christian militia in the United States, Catholic and Protestant militants in Northern Ireland; and Sunni jihadi movements in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

I found in all of these cases an interesting replication of a central thesis. Though each group was responding to its own set of local social, economic, and political factors, there was a common ideological component: the perception that the modern idea of secular nationalism was insufficient in moral, political, and social terms. In many examples, the effects of globalization were in the background, as global economic and communications systems undercut the distinctiveness of nation-state identities. In some cases, the hatred of the global system was overt, as in the American Christian militia’s hatred of the “new world order” and the Al-Qaeda network’s targeting of the World Trade Center. Thus the motivating “cause” – if such a term can be used – was the sense of a loss of identity and control in the modern world.

This sense of social malaise is not necessarily a religious problem, but it is one for which ideologies, both secular-nationalist and religious-transnational, provide ready responses. Hence, in each of the cases I examined, religion became the ideology of protest. Particular religious images and themes were marshaled to resist what were imagined to be the enemies of traditional culture and identities: the global secular systems and their secular nation-state supporters.

There were other similarities among these cases. In each example, those who embraced radical anti-state religious ideologies felt personally upset with what they regarded as the oppression of the secular state. They experienced this oppression as an assault on their pride and identity, and felt humiliated as a result. The failures of the state, though economic, political, and cultural, were often experienced in personal ways as humiliation and alienation, as a loss of selfhood.

It is understandable, then, that the men (and they were usually men) who experienced this loss of pride and identity would lash out in violence – the way that men often do when they are frustrated. Such expressions of power are meant to, at least symbolically, regain their sense of manhood. In each case, however, the activists challenged these feelings of violence through images of collective violence borrowed from their religious traditions: the idea of cosmic war.

The idea of cosmic war was a remarkably consistent feature of all of these cases. Those people whom we might think of as terrorists regarded themselves as soldiers in what they imagined to be sacred battles. I call such notions of warfare “cosmic” because they are larger than life. They evoke great battles of the legendary past, and they relate to metaphysical conflicts between good and evil. Notions of cosmic war are intimately personal but can also be translated to the social plane. Ultimately, though, they transcend human experience. Often, activists employ images of sacred warfare that are found in every religious tradition – such as the battles in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the epics of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the Islamic idea of jihad. What makes religious violence particularly savage and relentless is that its perpetrators have placed such religious images of divine struggle – cosmic war – in the service of worldly political battles. For this reason, acts of religious terror serve not only as tactics in a political strategy, but also as evocations of a much larger spiritual confrontation.

This brings us back to the question of whether religion is the problem. In looking at the variety of cases, from the Palestinian Hamas movement to al-Qaeda and the Christian militia, it was clear to me that, in most cases, there were real grievances – economic and social tensions that were experienced by large numbers of people. These grievances were not religious; they were not aimed at religious differences or issues of doctrine and belief. They were issues of social identity and meaningful participation in public life that, in other contexts, were expressed through Marxist and nationalist ideologies. But in this present moment of late modernity, these secular concerns have been expressed through rebellious religious ideologies. The grievances – the sense of alienation, marginalization, and social frustration – are often articulated in religious terms and seen through religious images, and the protest against them is organized by religious leaders through the medium of religious institutions. Thus, religion is not the initial problem; but the fact that religion is the medium through which these issues are expressed is problematic.

What Religion Brings to a Violent Conflict

What is problematic about the religious expression of antimodernism, anti-Americanism and antiglobalization is that it brings new aspects to conflicts that were not a part of them. For one thing, religion personalizes the conflict. It provides personal rewards – religious merit, redemption, the promise of heavenly luxuries – to those who struggle in conflicts that, otherwise, have only social benefits. It also provides vehicles of social mobilization that embrace vast numbers of supporters who, otherwise, would not be mobilized around social or political issues. In many cases, it provides an organizational network of local churches, mosques, temples, and religious associations into which patterns of leadership and support may be tapped. It gives the legitimacy of moral justification to political encounters. Even more importantly, it provides justification for violence that challenges the state’s monopoly on morally sanctioned killing. Using Max Weber’s dictum that the state’s authority is always rooted in the social approval of the state to enforce its power through the use of bloodshed – in police authority, punishment, and armed defense – religion is the only other entity that can give moral sanction for violence and is therefore inherently potentially revolutionary (at least).¹¹

Religion also provides the image of cosmic war, which adds further complications to a conflict that has become baptized with religious authority. The notion of cosmic war gives an all-encompassing world-view to those who embrace it. Supporters of Christian militia movements, for instance, have described their “aha” experience, when they discovered the world-view of the Christian Identity totalizing ideology that helped them make sense of the modern world, their increasingly peripheral role in it, and the dramatic actions they can take to set the world right. It gives them roles as religious soldiers who can literally fight back against the forces of evil.

The image of cosmic war is a potent force. When the template of spiritual battle is implanted on to a worldly opposition, it dramatically changes the perception of the conflict by those engaged in it, and it vastly alters the way that the struggle is waged. It absolutizes the conflict into extreme opposing positions and demonizes opponents by imagining them to be satanic powers. This absolutism makes compromise difficult to fathom, and holds out the promise of total victory through divine intervention. A sacred war that is waged in a godly span of time need not be won immediately, however. The time line of sacred struggle is vast; perhaps even eternal.

I once had the occasion to point out the futility (in secular military terms) of the Islamic struggle in Palestine to Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the late leader of the political wing of the Hamas movement. It seemed to me that Israel’s military force was such that a Palestinian military effort could never succeed. Dr. Rantisi assured me that “Palestine was occupied before, for two hundred years.” He explained that he and his Palestinian comrades “can wait again – at least that long.”¹² In his calculations, the struggles of God can endure for eons. Ultimately, however, they know they will succeed.

So, religion can be a problematic aspect of contemporary social conflict, even if it is not the problem, in the sense of the root cause of discontent. Much of the violence in contemporary life around the world that is perceived as terrorism is directly related to the absolutism of conflict. The demonization of enemies allows those who regard themselves as soldiers for God to kill with no moral impunity. Quite the opposite – they feel that their acts will give them spiritual rewards.

Curiously, the same kind of thinking has crept into some of the responses to terrorism. The “war on terrorism” that was launched by the U.S. Government after September 11 is a case in point. To the degree that the war references are metaphorical and meant to imply an all-out effort in the manner of previous administrations’ “war on drugs” and “war on poverty,” it is an understandable and appropriate response. The September 11 attacks were, after all, hideous acts that deeply scarred the American consciousness, and one could certainly understand that a responsible government would want to wage an all-out effort to hunt down those culpable and bring them to justice.

But among some who espouse a “war on terrorism,” the militant language is more than metaphor. God’s blessing is imagined to be bestowed on a view of confrontation that is, like cosmic war, all-encompassing, absolutizing, and demonizing. What is problematic about this view is that it brings impatience with moderate solutions that require the slow procedures of systems of justice. It demands instead the quick and violent responses of war that lend simplicity to the confrontation and a sense of divine certainty to its resolution. Alas, such a position can fuel the fires of retaliation, leading to more acts of terrorism, instead of fewer.

The role of religion in this literal “war on terrorism” is, in a curious way, similar to religion’s role in the cosmic war imagined by those perpetrating terrorism. In both cases, religion is a problematic partner of political confrontation. Religion brings more to conflict than simply a repository of symbols and the aura of divine support. It problematizes a conflict through its abiding absolutism, its justification for violence, and its ultimate images of warfare, which demonize opponents and cast conflict in transhistorical terms.