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“Jihadism in Comparative Perspective: Psychological Themes in Religiously Motivated Terrorism.” This chapter has two goals: first, to describe salient psychological-religious themes found in the statements of contemporary jidhadists and compare them to those of other world religions and, second, to use these descriptions to elaborate some of the most significant psychological-religious motifs characterizing contemporary religiously motivated terrorism. These motifs form the basis for the analysis carried out in the remainder of the book: the next two chapters provide additional illustrations from two disparate religious traditions, the fifth chapter provides a psychological analysis and commentary on them, and the final chapter discusses what they tell us about religion.

“The Divine Terrorist: Religion and Violence in American Apocalyptic Christianity.” Through an analysis of the psychological-religious themes found in the popular novels the Left Behind series, this chapter examines the connections between Christian theology and violence in American apocalyptic Christianity. The analysis reveals many important commonalities between the outlook found in the Left Behind series and that of religiously motivated terrorists from around the world. The expression of some of these themes in the rise of the religious right is also pointed out, and the violent potential of American apocalyptic Christianity is explored.

Few topics in religious studies capture, on the one hand, the ambiguities and challenges of the discipline and, on the other, its contemporary indispensability as successfully as the intersection of religion and violence does. For its ability to highlight the problem of defining religion, for underscoring religion’s inseparability from power and politics, for pointing out the contested and internally plural nature of all religious traditions and identities, for suggesting the religious functions of popular culture, and for revealing the historical mutability of religious expression and identity, religious violence flags many of the distinctive and defining questions addressed by the discipline. For those very reasons it is also an excellent topic for initiating students into the practices of religious studies and cultivating a heightened appreciation for the nuances and complexities that characterize religion in all of its historical manifestations.

In 1998 the local devotees of the Cristo Aparecido held their Franciscan priests hostage over a dispute about the Cristo. Seeking to modernize local Roman Catholic faith, these parish priests criticized devotion to the Cristo and withheld their support from ritual celebrations of the image. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the national government body empowered to protect the art historical legacy of the nation, intervened on behalf of local devotees and lay leaders to defend traditional celebration of the image. For local believers, the Cristo symbolizes their collective identity and the vulnerability of their own, embattled faith.

This Chapter reflects on the alleged special association between religion in general and violence – an association rebutted by both authors under review, David Martin (in Religion and Power: No logos without mythos) and Karen Armstrong (in Fields of Blood: Religion and the history of violence). It was first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 December 2014, under the heading “Poplars in the marsh”. These two very different authors also agree that violent resistance is an inevitable response to policies that oppress large populations. The Chapter goes on to consider briefly the exorbitant reworking of Wahhabism that underpins the so-called Islamic State (Isis), and finally the obstacles that beset all attempts to found non-violent movements.

This chapter looks at how obeah can transform commonsense conceptions of the relationship between religion and violence. It focuses on the role of obeah in protests against police brutality following the police shooting of three people at the author’s field site in southern Trinidad. Scholars have interpreted obeah’s association with harm as an artifact of Caribbean people’s internalization of colonial stigmas against obeah. Yet, this same association with harming force was the very reason obeah was so important during the protests against the police shootings. This justice-making, potentially harming force was just as evident in the eighteenth-century slave rebellions that first led to obeah’s criminalization as it was in the protests against the police shootings. In arguing that obeah cannot be separated from harm, the goal of this chapter is not to make obeah exceptional or to downplay the negative effects of this association. Yet purifying obeah of harm can reinscribe the very ideas of good religion (and bad magic) that formed the rationale for obeah’s criminalization in the first place. Instead of making obeah into “good” religion, this chapter questions the idea that religion can be completely separate from harm in the first place.

The condemnation of “animal sacrifice” continues to undergird religious intolerance across the globe. Why have fervent meat-eaters been so concerned about a relatively small number of animals killed under ritualized conditions of purity that seek to minimize their suffering? The answer in this chapter is that attitudes toward “animal sacrifice” are more concerned with the moral and racial limits of religion than with animal welfare. These attitudes foreground how religion is a race-making project in Western modernity, which has taken shape through the projection of violence onto not-religion. The story of liberal secularism presents itself as the separation of moral religion from instrumental force, whether in separations of religion and magic or church and state. Yet this supposed deritualization of killing has authorized violent rites of intolerance and celebrations of state violence. In Trinidad, the daily violence of the security state against lower-class populations can even occasion moral praise. It is not the scale of violence or the species killed that determines which acts are legitimate, but distinctions of religion, class, and race. In this chapter I show how intergenerational disavowals of obeah and animal sacrifice by Hindus and Christians employ these distinctions to separate tolerable religion from intolerable not-religion.

The chapter begins by introducing the case with the help of vignettes from the field. After setting the stage for the empirical puzzle, it goes on to the theoretical framework and situates the research question in the broader debates on religion and conflict, paying specific attention to religion’s role as a conflict resolution tool. It then ties these debates to the sociological literature on identity formation and ethnic boundary making and introduces the fourfold typology of religious and ethnic identities in the Kurdish conflict. To elaborate on the structural changes that have brought about these identity categories it turns to Bourdieusian field theory, discusses briefly the emergence of an autonomous religious field under the AKP, and familiarizes the reader with the actors in the political and religious fields in Turkey.

This epilogue examines the central themes of the Bible in the Civil War, including confidence in clear analogies between biblical texts and the war; faith in the war’s redemptive outcome, which, for many in the North, charged the United States with a divine mission in the world; and above all, reverence for the sacred sacrifice of the dead, whose blood had “consecrated” the nation. Through all the death and injury, endless debates over slavery, defenses of secession, and patriotism, the Bible was a constant reference. The American Civil War may not have been “a war of religion,” James McPherson wrote, but we should not forget “the degree to which it was a religious war.” In a similar way, the American Civil War was not primarily a war over the Bible, but it was a biblical war for many Americans.

Chapter 6 deals with interactions with the religious other, namely Jains, outside the courts and most significantly at temples. The chapter highlights the ambiguity in Harihara’s depictions of Jains, who are presented as utterly alien to Śaiva dispositions but also intimately close in terms of daily living. Harihara’s rendering of the wholly other is complicated by the text’s implicit admittance of the intimate presence of the wholly other in the mundane life of most Śaivas—at temples, in marketplaces, and even in the domestic sphere through interreligious marriages. Thus, Chapter 6 reads the aggressive alienation of Jains in the Ragaḷegaḷu stories against the text’s silent admittance in a social reality made of some amount of religious coexistence.

The chapter addresses the question in how far herem texts have inspired and shaped war and violent behaviour in the real world. It briefly reviews passages in Ambrose and Augustine that arguably constitute patristic antecedents to later violent readings. This review is followed by a detailed treatment of the reception of herem texts during the medieval crusades, which draws on crusading chronicles, songs, poems, epics, and sermons; then by briefer sections on the medieval inquisition, the Spanish conquest of the New World, the ‘Christian holy war’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors, and colonial wars in North America. The chapter demonstrates that the OT generally and herem texts specifically provided narratives, categories, and labels by which Christians understood themselves and their ‘enemies’. Herem texts were sometimes used to justify massacres ex post facto; at the same time, it cannot be demonstrated that they shaped the planning or execution of mass slaughters.

This chapter reviews more recent examples of the reception of herem texts and demonstrates that many if not all of the ancient and medieval approaches to reading herem as Christian scripture continue to have their adepts in modern times: largely uncritical readings (K. Barth), devotional–allegorical interpretations, and violent uses. Many of the moral criticisms also continue to be restated (M. Tindal). Responses to these criticisms sometimes follow a traditional, divine command ethics structure (R. Swinburne) or attempts are made to combine a divine command ethics with the concepts of accommodation and progressive revelation (E. Stump). Yet other approaches bring to bear the categories of myth, metaphor and hyperbole (D. Earl, W. Moberly, N. MacDonald, K. Lawson Younger, N. Wolterstorff). Perhaps the most significant innovation of the modern period is the combination of historical–critical research with an attempt to read herem as Christian scripture (E. Seibert, P. Jenkins).

This chapter provides a brief analytical summary of the various interpretative options proposed in the book. The reception of herem texts within the OT and the NT, as well as in the earliest Christian period, was largely uncritical. Pagan writers, too, rarely criticized these texts. Beginning with Marcion, readers whose moral compass was shaped by the accounts of Jesus and the writings of Paul began to raise moral concerns about OT warfare texts. The response of ecclesial authors was largely twofold: either to focus on a figurative reading of these texts in light of the NT or to resort to divine command theory to reframe the ethical assessment of the texts. A third, relatively rare reception of herem texts was one that justified massacres and other real-world violence. This chapter analyses the respective strengths and weaknesses of each approach and briefly presents the hermeneutical options available to readers today.