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Terrorism, war and the problem of “religious violence”

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At the height of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” there was a tendency to ignore the economic, imperialist and nationalist aspects propelling the conflict and to speak exclusively of “Catholic” terrorism or “Protestant” terrorism. (H. Christoph / ullstein bild via Getty Images)

This is a slightly edited version of the Dianoia / IRCI Public Lecture on “Religion, War and Terrorism” presented by Professor Coady at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, on 15 October 2019.

“At this time, in this place, when it came to the political problems, which included bombs and guns and death and maiming, ordinary people said ‘their side did it’ or ‘our side did it’ or ‘their religion did it’ or ‘our religion did it’ or ‘they did it’ or ‘we did it’, when what was really meant was ‘defenders of the state did it’ or ‘renouncers of the state did it’ or ‘the state did it’.” (Anna Burns, in the voice of the central character of her novel, Milkman.)

There is a widespread belief — amounting almost to a cultural assumption in many influential circles — that assigns to religion an inherent tendency to violence. An extreme expression that encapsulates this and much else is in the subtitle to the American publication of Christopher Hitchens’s book, God is not Great. The subtitle was, “How Religion Poisons Everything.” This assumption sometimes carries with it the thought that religion is predominant, or even unique, in embodying the tendency to violence.

The history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has seen a great deal of terrorism that is widely and understandably viewed as principally religiously-inspired — and, in fact, principally inspired by one specific religion. Expressions like “Islamic terrorism” or “militant Islamic terrorism” have thus become familiar coinage in our time, especially in the discourse and public imagination of citizens in Western democracies. The attacks of 11 September 2001, along with a number of subsequent atrocities — most recently, the April 2019 Sri Lankan bombings — have contributed to producing or popularising this picture of religious violence as particularly concentrated upon Islam, and this focus is already partly loaded with a specific version of the assumption about religion that I want to subject to critical examination.

Religion and violence

Recently, the assumption of some sort of distinctive and intrinsic link between religion and violence, and its implications for such issues as terrorism, have come under scrutiny, most radically in William Cavanaugh’s important book, The Myth of Religious Violence. As he sees it, “religion” is a sort of pseudo-concept developed only after the Enlightenment in order to categorise phenomena separate from the rest of life and isolable as the frequently inherent cause of violence.

Against this, I have argued that Cavanaugh’s historical claims about the late emergence of the concept of “religion” are false, that abandoning the concept and hence showing the incoherence of the violence claims is unwarranted in spite of the real difficulties of definition. Yet, even were the concept of “religion” a late addition to our vocabulary, and even were it a “construction” used for various socio-political purposes inimical to particular faiths, it wouldn’t follow that it fails to mark out anything interesting and even valuable for contemporary discourse. I suppose the concept of “virtual reality” is unknown before the late- twentieth century, and may even have been coined with a dangerous bias against actual reality that should give us pause. Even so, the concept marks a significant phenomenon in our real lives that cannot be ignored and has obvious utility for analysing and discussing new technical and social developments — and may even illuminate past realities.

Indeed, I argue that it is possible to proceed with an investigation of claims about religion’s role in violence using some central paradigms and a form of flexible focal meaning that pay respect to less central examples. I shall take from Cavanaugh’s critique the insight — detachable from his conceptual pessimism — that religion cannot in general be considered as a factor in life quite isolated from a range of other human commitments and identifications, such as those due to political, social, sexual, racial and ideological outlooks. As well as his insight that the concept of “religion” has many complexities and ambiguities so that general claims about all religion should be taken with many pinches of salt.

Focussing on religious motivation obscures complex realities

To take the terrorist activities of contemporary Islamic fundamentalists as simply manifestations of “religion,” for instance, is to ignore the way that their religious commitments complement and intersect with political outlooks and grievances that would make perfect sense to non-religious people if only they took the trouble to examine them without the blinkered conviction that the cause of the violence is wholly religious. One who has made such an examination is Robert Pape, who has argued that close attention to the motives and background of suicide bombers from 1980 to 2003 (a total of 315 attacks, excluding those commissioned by states) strongly suggests that religion was seldom a significant factor in the motivations. (Pape subsequently upgraded his database, and by 2010 had examined over 2,000 cases of suicide bombing with similar conclusions.) As Pape summed up his initial findings up to 2003:

The data shows that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions … Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

Unsurprisingly, Pape’s work and methodology have attracted criticism — especially his strong claims about the unique role of foreign intervention and occupation in provoking terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, his basic claims about the relatively slight or secondary nature of the religious motivation in most of the suicide bombings he examined, compared to perfectly earthly motivations, give serious food for thought about the ready resort to religion as the cause of terrorist acts.

Similar scepticism about prevailing views regarding the predominant role of religious faith in generating contemporary suicide bombing and terrorism has been expressed by the anthropologist Scott Atran. In his book Talking to the Enemy, after extensive investigations, including many interviews with terrorists themselves, Atran concluded that, “Islam and religious ideology per se aren’t the principal causes of suicide bombing and terror in today’s world.”

Atran, who is himself an avowed atheist, thinks that the more important factors are bound up with the sense of identification with a peer group who have developed strong feelings of outrage at what they see as examples of cultural and political domination over those with whom they identify. Atran and other investigators have frequently remarked on how superficial the understanding of any version of Islamic religion is with most of the young men drawn to the violent struggle called “jihad.” This superficiality has been born out in examinations of the views of many Western-based recruits to Islamic State (ISIS) in the terrorist activities of this appalling group in Syria and Iraq.

A study of ISIS volunteers who returned to their original Western countries was carried out for the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism in 2017 and found that, despite claiming to protect Muslims, most of the returned fighters were “novices” in their religion and some did not know how to pray properly. The study by Professor Hamed el-Said of Manchester Metropolitan University, and terrorism expert Richard Barrett found that most of the would-be jihadists “lack any basic understanding of the true meaning of jihad or even the Islamic faith.”

These studies suggest four things that an undue focus on religion can obscure:

  1. 1.Religions have played no part in many extreme outbreaks of political violence.
  2. 2.Other ideologies including democracy have played a significant role in causing political violence, with or without religion in the mix.
  3. 3.The religion focus obscures mundane causes of political violence that are not particularly ideological.
  4. 4.Religions are very diverse phenomena both externally and internally.

Let me briefly comment on each these in turn.

1) Religions have played no significant part in many extreme outbreaks of violence

It is surely obvious that there have been many dreadful outbreaks of unjustified violence or terrorism the causal or motivational origins of which have nothing to do with religion. Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler and Stalin in our own era were responsible for staggering massacres, most of them palpably terrorist by the tactical definition, that cannot be attributed to their authors’ religious inclinations or that of their followers.

2) Other ideologies can play a significant role in promoting violence

Not only are there many outbreaks of political and other forms of violence that have little or nothing to do with religion, but as some of the conflicts cited above show, non-religious world-views, ideological outlooks, or what John Rawls called “comprehensive doctrines,” are sometimes themselves plausible candidates for causing or motivating widespread violence. They are often exempted from the odium heaped upon religious motivations in connection with violence and terrorism.

Most recently, of course, the shocking slaughter of 51 worshippers people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a right-wing neo-Nazi nationalist has tended to redress the balance — a balance that should already have been tilted away from religion by such other massacres motivated by neo-Nazi ideology, such as that of Anders Breivik in Norway.

Even those who admit that the bombings of German and Japanese cities, culminating in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were terrorist in nature do not talk of “democratic terrorism” or “democratic extremism,” though the defence of democracy and its values was an element in the motivation of the attacks. By contrast, at the height of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” there was a tendency to ignore the economic, imperialist and nationalist aspects propelling the conflict and to speak exclusively of “Catholic terrorism” or “Protestant terrorism” (as the quote from Anna Burns’s novel, with which I began, reminds us).

As for the contemporary relevance of certain forms of democratic ideology to extreme political violence, we could cite the “neo-con” project of bringing democracy to the Middle East that played a part in the violent invasion of Iraq; and we should not ignore the democratic rhetoric of “defending our liberties” that surrounds “the war on terror” — a war that includes the resort to torture and drone attacks on Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere, which have killed so many innocent people as to come close to what I have called “neo-terrorism” and even, on occasions, outright terrorism.

3) There are more mundane causes of conflict that are not specifically ideological

Quite apart from obscuring the role of non-religious outlooks in the outbreak of violence, the focus on religion as a major cause of wars, terrorism and other forms of political violence obscures many of the more mundane and specific causes of violent conflict that political leaders and many of the rest of us find inconvenient to acknowledge. Such grievances may be relatively independent of ideology.

This is true even in those instances where there are issues of religion regularly invoked by the leaders of the campaigns of violence, and used to motivate their followers. Osama bin Laden’s various diatribes referring to “holy duties” and “Caliphates” also contain numerous claims about straightforward political grievances — such as Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and of the Israeli military’s policing and political persecution (as he saw it) of Palestinian people, claims about past and present Western support for Middle-eastern dictatorships and Western exploitation of Middle-eastern assets, such as oil, the United States’ historic deployment of troops throughout Arab lands and, more recently, the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A fascinating example of the way invocations of religious explanations can come to dominate and distort our understanding of violent outbreaks and obscure specific political motivation is to be found in Peter Wilson’s recent book, A History of the Thirty Years’ War. Wilson argues that this war, so often invoked as the archetypal “religious war” and the duration of which was caused by religious fanaticism, was “not primarily a religious war” at all. There were, of course, religious elements since it could hardly have been otherwise in seventeenth-century Europe where the Christian faith was an aspect of life integrated to varying degrees with other central aspects. But most contemporary observers, according to Wilson, “spoke of imperial, Bavarian, Swedish, or Bohemian troops, not Catholic or Protestant.” The war indeed began with a somewhat religious episode — the famous “defenestration” in Prague — but its real causes and ferocity and duration were not due, argues Wilson, to religious fanaticism but dynastic ambition and political fissure.

One reviewer summarised Wilson’s argument about causes of the length of the conflict in this way:

The empire's hundreds of small territories were cash poor. To fight, they assumed impossible debts, adulterated their coinages and triggered a ruinous inflation. Unpaid armies could be neither supplied nor disbanded. They thus remained in the field, nourished on plunder.

4) Religions are very diverse phenomena

Simple credos about a strong connection between religion and war/terrorism ignore too many distinctions between and within religions themselves. There are, and have been, all sorts of different religions with a great many different practices, ethical commitments and changes over the course of their histories. It may well be that some religions, or some versions of the same religion, are prone to spur their adherents towards violence where other religions or other versions of the same religion have no such tendency. This is an issue that needs to be resolved by detailed historical and sociological attention to the evidence.

Loose talk about “Islamic terrorism” needs just such attention, but, even if it could be shown that versions of Islam — such as Osama bin Laden’s or, even more plausibly, that of ISIS militants — had an inherent commitment to unjustified violence including terrorism, this might have little or no relevance, for instance, to the Sufi version of Islam, or to a great deal of mainstream Muslim believers, whether they profess Sunni or Shia or some other variant of the doctrine.

This is obvious enough to casual observation of Muslim citizens in various parts of the world, but evidence of it is available in the results of surveys such as the findings of a 2011 Gallup poll. This poll investigated attitudes towards attacks upon non-combatants in various groups across the world. It avoided the word “terrorism” or “terrorist” because of definitional problems, but they polled attitudes to attacks upon civilians, so their findings are clearly relevant, not only to the broad issue of violence, but specifically to terrorist acts as I have defined them. They found that “placing high importance on religion generally relates positively with rejecting violence.”

*

A crucial point that underlies these four considerations is that a primary factor in many outbreaks of violence is attachment to identity, and alarm at perceived threats to it. Religion certainly provides one focus for this attachment and alarm, but so do a great range of other things. Identity is closely related to power, self-respect and perceived cultural positioning, so that religion will often be appropriated to bolster or create culturally significant identities by those who have or want power, or are in need of group-based support.

The relations between the sexes provide a case in point. The fashioning of a male identity with often-dominant roles over against females has been a feature of history to which religion has certainly contributed, but it seems to be even more diverse and deeper sociologically than any religious influence. In some Islamic communities and in the fanatically militant groups waging “jihad” against the modern world, for instance, the punitive obsession with hiding women from view within the home, and in all-covering clothing, as well as denying them education and other cultural opportunities is arguably as much an exercise of male domination as of religious piety, whatever explicit appeals to interpretations of religious teaching or tradition may be made.

It is worth noting that the major religions, in terms of numbers of adherents, and many less popular religions contain a great deal of teaching about the importance of values like peace and charity. Peace is a complex concept with many interpretations and conceptions built around it over the ages. Without being an expert on comparative religion, I would conjecture that there are very few religions that don’t make the value of peace a significant part of their doctrine. Augustine, for instance, places it at the heart of his Christo-centric ethical system, along with love. It is true that, as with many other Christians and non-Christians, he thought it compatible with the idea of a just war in certain circumstances, though other Christians have thought that it required pacifism. Certainly, there is room for peace-makers and activists to build upon doctrines of peace within many religions

Does religion “cause” violence?

It may be argued against much of the above discussion that whatever success I might have in attenuating the idea that religious allegiance is inherently, uniquely or even merely commonly prone to producing violence, I have done nothing to dispel the accusation that on occasion religion may be the cause or the principal cause of particular outbreaks of terrorist acts or other acts of unjustified violence. Nor have I significantly damaged the claim that some specific forms or interpretations of religion may be inherently prone to violence. I want now to examine these propositions.

On the first objection, many will cite contemporary, or near contemporary, events frequently referred to (as we mentioned above) as “Islamic terrorism.” We have already seen reason for scepticism about this appellation with regard to the causes of much terrorism that is frequently given that label. But although we can often find that leaders of groups such as al-Qaeda cite as reasons for their campaigns alleged offences of a palpably political nature against groups or regions they identify with, it cannot be denied that they also employ strong religious rhetoric and appeals to religious interests in denouncing their enemies and exhorting their own followers.

This much I have already conceded, but the pressing question is whether such rhetoric, along with other considerations, means that, in those circumstances, religion is the cause or primary cause of such terrorist acts.

Obviously, a good deal turns on what we mean by “cause” — and much philosophical ink has been spilled on this topic. One favoured idea behind much ordinary thought about “cause” is that one event would not have occurred without the occurrence of the other antecedent event, or as the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume put it (in terms of objects rather than events): “where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.” This pregnant remark, though apparently in strong conflict with Hume’s official regularity theory of causation, has spawned a for-and-against industry of “counterfactual” theories, given momentum by David Lewis’s analysis of counterfactual propositions in terms of possible worlds.

Clearly, some idea along the lines of “if it wasn’t for X we wouldn’t have had Y” is at work when people talk of X causing Y, but it is a very patchy net in which to catch all that can be meant by such remarks. Usually, the X in question covers much more than one factor, or, to put it differently, if X is a single factor then it will seldom trigger Y without being conjoined with several other factors or conditions. So the possibility exists that, aside from those many cases where religion plays no role at all in producing terrorist acts, the religious factor when significant remains nonetheless merely one element conjoined with several others, and ignoring those others is fraught with risk, both intellectual and practical.

That said, there seem to be clearly cases in which religion has played a very prominent part in bringing about some significant episodes of terrorism, such as the various Christian crusades that were waged against parts of the Muslim world in the Middle Ages. More recently, of course, the religiously-loaded denunciations of infidels that have accompanied the ISIS massacres and enslavements of various groups regarded as hostile to the group’s religious outlook provide more evidence. The ISIS terrorist attacks upon the Yazidi sect, for instance, seem a primary case for religiously-caused terrorism. But even here, one must not thereby ignore secular aspects of the attacks such as the quest for political domination of an area, or the gaining of slaves, including sexual slaves.

Religion and increased ferocity

Another important claim about religion in a good deal of academic literature on terrorism is that, even if it is often too simplistic to claim a sole or critical role for some forms of religion in terrorist activity, the appeal to religion when it does occur serves to make for more sustained and vicious resort to terrorism than is the case with predominantly non-religious motivations. The idea is that religious doctrines appealing to the support of an omnipotent God and perhaps the rewards of an afterlife make for an “absolutist” commitment to unrestrained violence that is unique to religious outlooks.

Mark Juergensmeyer, for instance, seeking a middle path between the view that religion does cause terrorism and the view that it does not, argues that religion is at least a problematic factor in the mix of motivations because of the divine dimension it brings to conflict. As he puts it:

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 that demonize opponents and cast the conflict in transhistorical terms.

There are three claims about religion tied together in Juergensmeyer’s comment and they are distinct but related. The first concerns the role of absolutism; the second the justification of violence; and the third is the demonisation of opponents. I shall examine them in turn, but with an eye to the relations between them.

Absolutism and fanaticism

The idea of religion’s “absolutism” has a great vogue, but its widespread acceptance is inversely proportional to its clarity. What is often meant, though seldom explained, is something epistemological to the effect that the religious hold their beliefs with more certainty and conviction than the non-religious, and that they are wrong to do so.

Depending on the beliefs in question, this is, or ought to be, plainly false. Many atheists and agnostics have just as firm a conviction, as any religious, in their beliefs that rape is a great wrong to the victim, that democracy is preferable to tyranny, that slavery is evil, that friendship is a great good and much else — including, for some, that religion is dangerous and full of false beliefs. And, as the philosopher G.E. Moore famously argued, there are a range of obvious truths (evident, as he believed, to common sense) on which nearly everyone is adamant, such as the facts that all my readers have each one, and only one, head, that none of us was born yesterday, that fire burns, that logical reasoning is mostly better than guesswork and so on. These and many moral convictions are too commonplace to require much notice, but nonetheless, they are facts on which absolute conviction is necessary to ordinary life, and even more significantly to the very existence of reasonable doubt, since for doubt to be reasonable it must have a firm foundation. Baseless doubt is just neurotic.

Moreover, deep and firm (“absolutist”) moral convictions among some religious people constituted one central reason why the ghastly business of the slave trade in the West was eventually outlawed. The influence of crude versions of ethical and factual relativism upon popular culture, often fostered by some postmodernist simplicities filtering down from the academy, can obscure these realities. What is really possible to extract from the sloppy allegations of absolutism is a genuine worry about fanaticism.

Fanaticism is an intellectual and moral vice, though there is some complexity in assessing its nature. It can be a mere term of abuse, the application of which tends to be more in the eye of the beholder than anchored to clear criteria. In this it is much like the application of “stubborn” whereby your behaviour evokes that adjective and my own identical actions evoke instead (from me) the description “resolute.”

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Nonetheless, although we should be cautious in throwing the term around, there is a real phenomenon of fanaticism and it is a disturbing one. The Oxford Shorter Dictionary defines it in terms of “an excessive zeal or enthusiasm, especially for an extreme cause” and it mentions religion and politics as areas where the term is commonly in play. The two key qualifiers here are “excessive” and “extreme,” and their application is clearly open to debatable judgement in context. Is someone who shows uncommon enthusiasm for abolishing the practice of enslaving women for prostitution a fanatic? Both “excessive” and “extreme” express negative evaluations, one on a disproportionate degree of enthusiasm or dedication and the other on the wrongness or dubiousness of a cause. Unusual acts of singular dedication may make many of us who lead cosy and regular lives feel uncomfortable, but they are not thereby fanatical in this pejorative sense. Father Damien de Veuster’s selfless life of service to the leper colony on the island of Moloka’i was a dedicated commitment that is not for everyone, but it is not thereby fanatical. British politicians thought Mahatma Gandhi a fanatic for his campaign of non-violent resistance to imperial rule in India, but that expresses their bias rather than an objective judgement of his cause and methods.

This is not to deny that religions, like many other outlooks, have been involved in fanaticism, but fanaticism is a common risk of the implementation of belief systems generally, as is evident in the zealous prosecution of their cause by many free-market enthusiasts in the recent history of capitalism, not to mention the even more dangerous fanaticisms sometimes involved in nineteenth-century imperialism and twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Some forms of fanaticism do not involve bad causes, but rather a distorted pursuit of good ones and here they are connected in complex ways with the phenomenon of moralism I have explored elsewhere — in particular, what I have labelled the moralism of misplaced emphasis. So, it may be that someone has grasped an important moral truth or non-moral value but proceeds to implement it with little or no regard for other truths or values that should be held in balance with it. Someone who is fanatical about physical fitness, for instance, may institute a regime of exercise for themselves, or more alarmingly for others, that pays no heed to such values as relaxation, convivial time spent with friends, or education.

Avoiding fanaticism does not involve a total retreat from conviction but holding the right convictions in the right way. The Australian painter Sheila Bowen seemed aware of this when she worried: “The difficulty is to avoid the perils of fanaticism as well as the paralysis that comes of seeing both sides at once.” And G.K. Chesterton, who perhaps had rather too many firm convictions, was nonetheless right about vacuous talk of an “open mind” when he vividly remarked:

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise it is more akin to a sewer, taking in all things equally.

But surely, it will be said, fanaticism is a more likely feature of outlooks that claim the authority of God for their beliefs and practices than those without such recourse? Juergensmeyer relies upon this proposition for his claim about absolutism, but also for his insistence that religion uniquely imposes an image of cosmic war between those fighting a spiritual battle against mere worldly opponents. Even Louise Richardson, who is one of the more nuanced commentators on terrorism, and who argues that the picture of religion as the cause of terrorist acts is simplistic and mistaken — including the case of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism — nonetheless insists that the religious elements in some forms of terrorism produce certain distinctive features such as reluctance to compromise or negotiate. Such terrorist groups, she says, exhibit a tendency “to be more fanatical, more willing to inflict mass casualties, and better able to enact unassailable commitment from their adherents.”

Again, this raises the question of the necessity of theism for religion, but leaving that aside, it does seem plausible that people who are confident in the Almighty’s support would be spurred to perhaps excessive determination in their pursuit of objectives they regard as divinely endorsed. Certainly, the non-fanatical Father Damien attributed his steadfast dedication to the welfare of the lepers on the island of Moloka’i to his conviction that God had had guided him to this role. So if people wrongly think God wants them to pursue some evil path they may do so with determined energy.

It must, I think, be readily agreed that the invocation of God’s support has often been a spur to fanaticism. But two considerations somewhat soften the force of this argument.

First, utilising God in an unworthy cause is a form of blasphemy which should be condemned on religious grounds. From within Christianity, to take one example, there is plenty of scope to caution against the invocation of God on behalf of our determined pursuit of objectives that cause unjustified harm to others. And indeed, this has often enough happened in the history of Christianity, as with the denunciations by many courageous Spanish theologians of the conquistadors who pillaged in the newly discovered Americas in the sixteenth century and of the theological reasons often used by the invaders and their political sponsors for the violent conquest. The invaders claimed a right to violent conquests because the natives they sought to dispossess and plunder were pagans and hence had no political legitimacy to their land and its treasures. Among the objectors to this were the Spanish Dominicans, Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas and the Thomist theologian, Antonio de Montesinos. Montesinos denounced the genocidal activities of the gold-crazed Spanish colonists, and publicly preached against:

the cruelty and tyranny that you practice on these innocent people. Tell me: by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do you wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully on their own lands … where you have consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations.

Second, some despoilers with non-religious ideologies have had as much fanatical drive as any religious enthusiasts when it comes to spectacular resorts to violent persecution, as the history of the twentieth century illustrates abundantly. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, as already noted, did well enough in the fanaticism stakes without resort to divine assistance. And when it comes to opposition to negotiation and compromise, the Allied powers in the Second World War were as adamantly opposed to negotiation and compromise to end the war with the Axis powers as any religiously inspired group. They ruthlessly pursued “unconditional surrender” and were happy to destroy by “terror bombing” — as Churchill himself called it — vast swathes of civilian-occupied cities in Germany and Japan in defence of liberal democracy. Nor were the leaders and many followers of Nazi Germany and Japan lacking in fanatical pursuit of their war aims, even when virtually certain defeat was looming, and their commitment to vicious tactics was as great as any sanctioned by religious zeal.

It seems that support from whatever it is that you regard as the highest value or sanction — be it History, Ethnicity, Science, the Proletariat, the Nation, Democratic Liberty, the Super Race or Manifest Destiny — will do to drive unrelentingly some fanatical enterprise, especially where it coheres with the usual human instincts for power, glory and riches.

Juergensmeyer emphasises the way that religious commitments can instil apparently unrealistic expectations for victory and commitment to endless struggle. He cites a conversation he had with Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the late leader of the political wing of Hamas, in which Rantisi replied to his insistence that Palestinian military efforts could never defeat the military might of Israel by saying that Palestine had previously been occupied for 200 years and his comrades could now endure at least as long. Juergensmeyer attributes this conviction to confidence in God’s support, but he doesn’t quote Rantisi invoking God, and confidence in the power to prevail in the long term can come from many sources and has sustained secular revolutionary movements of all sorts — notably, in the twentieth century those inspired by Marxism.

In fact, much of the argument about the special motivational power of religion displays a common contemporary mindset among intellectuals that finds idealism and confidence about the future difficult to sustain or even comprehend. But this may itself be a symptom of cultural malaise rather than a form of maturity. In any case, there have been many non-religious people who have remained firm in their ethical commitments and endeavours even where the odds against success were high.

No doubt some of the British citizens and their leaders who persisted resolutely against overwhelming odds in the military and political struggle against the Nazi war machine in the early years of the Second World War were sustained by religious motives, but many others drew upon secular resources of hope and conviction. A less edifying example is provided by the fanatical prosecution on both sides of the attritional trench warfare of the First World War; in this conflict, the uncompromising dedication of the military and political leadership may have had a touch of religiosity about it for some, but the primary drivers seem to have been a mix of imperialist and nationalist instinct and ideology.

Demonisation and extreme brutality

Juergensmeyer also urges a close connection between religious outlooks and the demonisation of the enemy — but, once more, the First World War had plenty of that on both sides, without a strong religious element. Both Germans and Britons were predominantly Christian and what differences of religious doctrine were involved played no part in the causes of the war. Nonetheless, vilification of “the Hun” persisted in British propaganda, in a way parallel to that by which ISIS more recently vilified and “demonised” the enemy infidel.

Another claim by Juergensmeyer, echoed by others in the academic terrorist literature, is that religious convictions also lead to the endorsement of more extreme and immoral violent measures than would otherwise be the case. Religious warriors have certainly behaved in morally atrocious ways, as in the medieval Crusades where gross violations of widely accepted norms against atrocity were common as when in 1099 Western Catholic crusaders massacred Muslims and Jews, not sparing “the elderly, the women or the sick.” But, again, as I suggested in the discussion of absolutism, the existence of immoral ferocity in violent conflict is not the sole province of those with religious commitments. As Diarmaid MacCulloch commented in the course of discussing and denouncing the violent horrors committed by religious people, “It is true that those who have rejected traditional forms of religion, including Hitler and Stalin, have perpetrated atrocities as heinous as those committed in the name of a god or gods.”

A more recent example is the way in which the moral prohibition on and deep repugnance against torture was so rapidly abandoned in the West by some military and security practitioners with the support of many secular “liberal” intellectuals. The “war on terror” provided the context for this, and in many places the resort to hitherto unthinkable practices gained widespread popular endorsement. No hint of religious motivation here, but plenty of democratic and self-protective ferocity in the name of civic duty and national emergency.

Justifications of violence

I have dealt with Juergensmeyer’s first and third claims and, since they overlap somewhat, so has my treatment of them. His second claim is rather different and needs some unpacking, though on one construal my response to it echoes responses to his first and third claims. The second claim is that religion is particularly problematic with respect to terrorism because of “its justification of violence.” This raises difficulties of interpretation since, in the first place, there is widespread acceptance beyond religious circles that violence can be justified in certain circumstances. Hence, the idea that religions have offered justifications for violence shows in itself nothing distinctive about religion. Indeed, only complete pacifists reject all justifications for violence.

On another interpretation, it may be that Juergensmeyer means that religions offer unsatisfactory justifications for political violence like terrorism or war. The restriction to political violence is plausible because terrorism, for instance, is the topic of his discussion. But some religions, for instance, the Quakers, offer no justifications for any form of political violence, and others offer justifications for some forms of political violence in some circumstances, but not in others. The questions then are whether the justifications they offer for violence in some circumstances are morally and intellectually respectable, and also whether they are distinctive, or similar to respectable justifications offered by the non-religious.

These questions can’t be answered by some comprehensive reference to religions as such, but must be treated on a case-by-case basis. In Christianity, for instance, some of the early Christians were pacifists, and then a just war doctrine was developed, and later influenced a common justificatory currency with secular Western thinkers and the fashioning of international law.

There are two important features to note about this complex tradition in the West. The first is that it always placed restrictions on the right to go to war, and that these restrictions became more stringent over the course of the development; the second is that the tradition, although it arose within Christianity, always relied upon an appeal to common reasoning, or in its later manifestations, what was called “natural law.” That tradition was certainly at times polluted by the concept of “Holy War” but the later medieval theorists gradually removed religious war from the scope of just war and with it the idea that some pursuit of supernatural ends sanctioned the use of otherwise immoral means, such as slaughtering children.

In modern times, many Christians have been adamant about the stringency of the restrictions. So, for instance, religious people within the Allied countries were among the few who criticised the devastating tactics of their own leadership in the area bombing campaigns aimed at the slaughter of civilians and wholesale destruction of German and Japanese cities. The Anglican Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, repeatedly condemned the bombing in speeches in the House of Lords and elsewhere during the war, and the American Jesuit priest John C. Ford in 1944 wrote an article in stern condemnation of the practice in1944. Ford’s article marked an influential moment in the later development of aspects of the Catholic peace movement, especially with regard to nuclear deterrence.

The importance of caution

It has not been my intention to downplay the evil involved in the use of religion to support resort to terrorist acts, nor excuse in any way those avowedly religious people who have been moved too often by their understanding of faith to condone or perpetrate terrorist acts. I have been concerned rather to highlight confusions and misleading implications of common talk about religious war and terrorism, particularly the ways in which non-religious aspects and factors involved in the causation and motivation of terrorist acts can be obscured by the concentration upon religious affiliation and rhetoric surrounding some terrorist perpetrators. This tendency is reinforced when the perpetrators are foreign or can be cast as foreign to the home culture.

The idea that religion — or some particular religion — is inherently prone to violence can also impede understanding of the cautionary attitudes to violence or outright rejection of it within the religion in question. Even when religions countenance “justified” violence they usually put restrictions on the justifications that can apply, as we have seen is the case with versions of the just war tradition within Christianity. Those cautionary attitudes, where they exist, can be cited and deployed against the use of religion for terrorist purposes.

Governments have increasingly acknowledged this option but have often been reluctant to commit serious resources to foster the deployment, and in some cases have made their acknowledgement and efforts seem heavily condescending. A particularly condescending and potentially counter-productive such effort was that of Australia’s former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, in a national security address on 23 February 2015. Abbott first accused Australian Muslim leaders of not speaking out enough against terrorism, and then added: “I’ve often heard western leaders describe Islam as a religion of peace. I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often, and mean it.”

The entirely gratuitous “and mean it” was not only offensive and unsupported by evidence of insincerity, it could only impede efforts at sympathetic engagement with the Muslim community to help combat what inclinations to terrorist activity existed in a section of that community.

C.A.J. (Tony) Coady is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Honorary Fellow in the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy and the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University, and Honorary Fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Oxford.

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