God’s sovereignty can be accomplished through nonviolent engagement in politics or by

withdrawing from politics and instead working to increase the societal power of religion. But,

as in the case of secular ideologies, this form of religious fundamentalism contains a violent

strain of thought.

What are the conditions under which religion becomes a source of political violence? As

in our earlier discussion, they include institutional, ideational, and individual factors. First,

one common factor is hostility to modernity. In this view, modern institutions such as states

and nations, capitalism, and political ideology have stripped the world of greater meaning and

driven people to alienation and despair. Indeed, political violence is often embraced by those

who initially enjoyed modernity but at some point turned away from its “corrupt” lifestyle.

This view has emerged in many different contexts but seems to be most powerful in societies

where modern institutions are foreign in nature and poorly grafted onto traditional structures

and values, and/or where modern institutions are under stress, often as a result of economic

challenges. This can often be seen in developing countries, which we will turn to in Chapter

10. At this border between traditional and modern institutions, the tension can be the

greatest, which may explain why proponents of religious violence are often urban and well-

educated individuals: such persons are frequently most deeply immersed in modernity and

may feel its contradictions most sharply.

A second factor is what the sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer calls “cosmic war.”11 In this

view, the modern world not only actively marginalizes, humiliates, and denigrates the views

of religious believers but also seeks to exterminate the believers outright. Those who hold this

view see themselves as soldiers in a struggle between the righteousness of faith and its

enemies (modernity), a war that transcends space and time. This perspective is often bound

up in conspiracy theories that point to shadowy forces in league to exterminate the good.

People holding these views can rationalize violence against civilians because they see the

conflict not in terms of civilians versus combatants but in terms of the guilty versus the

innocent: those who do not stand on the side of righteousness are by definition on the side of

evil. Scholars note that this dehumanization of the enemy is an important component in

justifying violence against civilians, since social or religious taboos against murder must be

overcome.

Third, religion as a source of political violence is often connected to messianic,

apocalyptic, and utopian beliefs. Although the forces of darkness (modernity) have gained the

upper hand, the role of the righteous is to usher in or restore the sovereignty of God on earth.

Violence is therefore not only acceptable but also a form of ritual, whether in the form of self-

sacrifice (martyrdom) or the sacrifice of others. ISIS propaganda is frequently couched in

these terms.

Religious groups or movements that resort to violence represent an extreme form of

fundamentalism since their path to violence requires them to reinterpret their faith in a way

that divorces it from its conventional foundations. These groups or movements thus tend to

break away from the mainstream faith and other fundamentalists, whom they accuse of

having lost their way, by presenting their radical alternatives as restorations of religious truth.

Most Muslim, Christian, and other fundamentalists would thus find many of these radical

views to be horrific and far removed from their views of faith.

what we have noted—hostility toward rival institutions, dehumanization, and utopian views—

can be found in modern political ideologies. We can see this in the bloody revolutions that

established communism in the Soviet Union and China. Even the French Revolution of 1789

that helped usher in the modern era was described by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1856 as akin to

a religious revolution directed toward “the regeneration of the human race” that “roused

passions such as the most violent political revolutions had been incapable of awakening . . .

able, like Islamism, to cover the earth with its soldiers, its apostles, and its martyrs.”12 Bearing

this in mind, we can consider some specific examples of how religion has intersected with

politics to generate political violence.

Within Al Qaeda, ISIS, and similar jihadist groups, individuals like Osama bin Laden

frequently have couched their violence in terms of a long global struggle against unbelievers.

Hence, when bin Laden referred to the West as “Crusaders” in his 1996 manifesto he was

reaching back to the battles between the Islamic and Christian worlds in the Middle Ages. In

the modern world, bin Laden argued, this crusade against Islam and its followers continues,

though the West’s conspiracies are often cloaked by international organizations like the

United Nations. In the September 11 attacks, we can see how the logic of cosmic war also fits

into a greater narrative. Al Qaeda carried out these attacks not simply to weaken the United

States but also to provoke a backlash that they believed would intensify the conflict between

the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds and would in turn lead to the overthrow of “un-Islamic”

regimes in the Middle East. Expanding on this idea, ISIS argued that this violence would

eventually culminate in a final apocalyptic battle with the West and the subsequent

restoration of an Islamic empire and golden age.

In these circumstances, even Muslim civilians are fair targets, whether in the United

States, Europe, or the Middle East. This position is justified because their “collaboration” with

the forces of evil means that they are not true Muslims and therefore can be killed, sacrificed

to the cause. Such justifications are commonly used by ISIS, which claims for itself the right to

“excommunicate” other Muslims, thus making them fair targets.

Such views have strong parallels to certain violent strains drawn from Christianity. In the

United States, some racist groups assert that Western Christianity has been corrupted and

weakened by a global Jewish conspiracy, and they seek to rebuild Western society on the basis

of a purified white race. One particularly important proponent of this ideology was William

Pierce, who died in 2002. Pierce, who held a Ph.D. in physics and was at one time a university

professor, formed the National Alliance, a white supremacist organization, in 1974. Pierce

departed from Christianity altogether as a faith tainted by its association with Judaism,

offering instead a “cosmotheist” faith that viewed whites as belonging to a superior

evolutionary track, on the road to unity with God. In his novel The Turner Diaries, Pierce

describes the creation of a dedicated underground that would attack symbols of American

authority, seize territory, and eventually launch a nuclear attack against the country itself.

This apocalypse would destroy the state, allowing the revolutionaries to exterminate all

nonwhites and those who do not accept the new order. This genocide would eventually

extend worldwide. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City

in 1995, which killed 168 people, was directly inspired by The Turner Diaries and Pierce’s