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 Christians in America saw the religiosity of Timothy McVeigh as anti-Christian, even anti-religious, despite the strong Christian subtext of the novel, See Andrew Macdonald [pseudonym for William Pierce], The Turner Diaries (Hillsboro: National Vanguard, 1978). Though religion can be a problematic partner in confrontation, it also holds the potential of providing a higher vision of human interaction than is portrayed in the bloody encounters of the present.

Supporters of Christian militia movements, for instance, describe their “aha” experience when they discover the worldview of the Christian Identity totalizing ideology that helps 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. The Problem With Religion. The news magazine The Economist observes that “religious people are getting more vocal in all sorts of fields, including business. 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.” In his calculation, the struggles of God can endure for eons. Is this the fault of religion? Outside of the Punjab, elsewhere in India, there was a rise of Hindu political violence, and in Kashmir there were Muslim activists.

I realized that unlike the internal spiritual war that most Protestant Christian revival preachers proclaimed in my midwestern rural youth, Bhindranwale’s war had an external dimension. There has been Christian terrorism in the U.S. and Ireland; Buddhist terrorism in Japan; Muslim terrorism in Indonesia, North Africa, and the Middle East; Jewish terrorism in the U.S. and Israel; and Hindu terrorism in India. One stumbling block is that religion means vastly different things to different people. In many lands, predominant religions have become symbols of patriotic and racial identities. TO SAY that religion is the principal cause of all conflict implies that there would be few wars if religion did not exist. But even in this case the use of the term “fundamentalism” allows for the defenders of religion to take comfort in the notion that their kind of nonfundamentalist religion is exempt from violence or other extreme forms of public behavior. Thousands were killed yearly in terrorist acts on the part of the Sikh militants and violent encounters with the Indian police. American Christianity’s White-Supremacy Problem. It is good to be assured that there are religious resources for peace to be tapped, even as we know that religion provides the ammunition for some of our generation’s most lethal acts. Those people whom we might think of as terrorists regarded themselves as soldiers in what they imagined to be sacred battles. As the seemingly endless series of vicious attacks associated with religion around the world reveal, religion has returned with a vengeance from its banishment from public life by the European Enlightenment. Sunni Islamic ideologies accompanied nationalist movements in Iran, Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and in Israel violent activists were motivated by Messianic Judaism. solutions to problems. Christianity was merged with nationalism in Ireland and formed the ideologies of anti-state militia in the United States.

Those people whom we might think of as terrorists regarded themselves as soldiers in what they imagined to be sacred battles. 10 facts about religion in America.

Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). It, by imagining them to be satanic powers. Has its mask been ripped off and its murky side exposed—or has its innocence been abused? The. Is religion only an innocent victim that is misused by a small number of extremists? It provides, —religious merit, redemption, the promise of heavenly luxuries—to those who struggle in conflicts that otherwise have only social benefits.

In these cases they do not explain away the religious motives of the violent activists, but they deny that these extreme religious groups represent the normative traditions.

The image of cosmic war is a potent force. Kaveny asked if there is a solution to this religion problem. 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. 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. In a curious way, then, the solution to religious violence is not more violence but more religion.

Does it make any sense that an almighty, all-wise, loving Creator would have anything to do with divisive and bloodguilty religions?

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. In a recent report referred to in the preceding article, a group of historians noted that “religion is more likely to be a cause of war when religion and the state authorities become closely allied or intertwined.” And therein lies another undeniable reality: Religion has been, and is to this day, tightly interlocked with political and military entities. 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.” In his calculation, the struggles of God can endure for eons. He referenced historian Bernard Lewis’. Hence my own answer to the question is a variation of answers c) and d), none of the above and all of the above: religion is not the problem, but the involvement of religion in public life is often problematic. 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. This absolutism makes compromise difficult to fathom and holds out the promise of, through divine intervention.

A sacred war that is waged in a godly span of time need not be won immediately, however. To understand how religion was related to these grievances, I turned to the speeches of the fallen martyr, Bhindranwale. I call such notions of warfare “cosmic” because they are larger than life.

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. Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (1993). It isn’t an easy question to answer, however. What I expected to find was an example of how religion was used by a wily politician. 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. Much of the violence in contemporary life that is perceived as terrorism around the world is directly related to the absolutism of conflict. (Spring 2004). The demonization of enemies allows those who regard themselves as soldiers for God to kill with no moral impunity. These grievances were not religious. It problematizes a conflict through its abiding absolutism, its justification of violence, and its ultimate images of warfare that demonize opponents and cast the conflict in transhistorical terms. Recently, however, “Islam” and “fundamentalism” are 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. It is good to be assured that there are religious resources for peace to be tapped, even as we know that religion provides the ammunition for some of our generation’s most lethal acts.

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 the World Trade Center. But in all cases there was a common ideological component: the perception that the modern idea of secular nationalism was insufficient in moral, political, and social terms.

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