Religion and Political Violence

Sacred Protest in the Modern World

Jennifer L. Jefferis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415664554
• eBook ISBN: 9781135248307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book uses the theory of social movements and first-hand interviews to create a new analysis of religiously motivated political violence in the modern world.

Examining the movement to restore Sharia law to a dominant place in the Egyptian government, the movement to make abortion illegal in the United States, and the religious effort to secure territory in Israel, the author contends that religion becomes violent not because of ideology or political context alone, but because of the constantly evolving relationship between them.

The ebb and flow of opportunities for political access ensures that secularization and religion, although polar opposites, depend on each other to define themselves. As a result, while their respective degrees of influence will inevitably undulate over time, both will remain a part of the political process for some time. Thus, a full understanding of both is critical to a meaningful understanding of the political process. Much work has been done to understand secular social movements as part of the political process, and consequentially researchers now know a great deal about the motivations, resources and timing of secular social movements. Considerably less research has been done in the field of religious social movements and this book fills that gap in the literature.

This book will be of great interest to students of political violence, religion, sociology, and Politics and International Relations in general.

Jennifer Jefferis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Regent University, USA, and has a PhD in Political Science from Boston University.

Part I
Out of the arena
The changing place of religion in politics

1 Changing political landscapes

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has been tracking incidences of political violence since 1970. Their databases show that in the United States between 1970 and 1979 incidences where religion was the motivating cause for violence occurred only 2.8 percent of the time (when the causes were known). This stands in contrast to the period between 1980–1984 where religious motivations were behind 45.3 percent of the attacks, and 1985–1989 with 96.2 percent, and 1990–1995 with 95.8 percent.¹ This trend is also evident on a global scale. As was discussed earlier, the incidences of religiously motivated terrorism have increased from almost none in 1980 to over half of reported terrorist incidences in 1998.²

The introduction to this book described a recent rise in religiously motivated political violence and suggested that such a rise is puzzling in light of the dominance of secularization over most elements of society and the state in the twentieth century. As a discipline, political science has made significant advances toward explaining the development, timing and success of secular social movements, but there is still much left misunderstood about religious movements.

This chapter endeavors to explain the extent of the changes in religiously motivated social movements, the subsequent acts of political violence alluded to in the introduction to this study and the reasons for these changes. This chapter will argue that the advancements in secular social-movement theory can be equally valuable to the understanding of religious social movements, particularly in explaining their recent rise and subsequent methods.

The trend in increasing number of religiously motivated violent incidences is troubling for a number of reasons. In the first place, it is scholastically puzzling in light of the theories that have shaped society’s expectations about religion since the turn of the twentieth century. Sociological giants no less than Spencer,³ Marx,⁴ Durkheim,⁵ Freud⁶ and Weber,⁷ and more recently (though no less impressive), Berger,⁸ Wilson⁹ and Lenski,¹⁰ have all heralded the march of the industrialized world toward secularization and rationalization, the latter by association. Thus, the continued presence (and in some cases, dominance) of religion in political life is in itself a mystery to be solved.

But more disconcerting is the effect these secularization theories have on academia’s ability to understand this continuing phenomenon. Indeed, so much time has been spent discounting the future of religion that its surprising increase in importance must be met by a mad scramble to understand its significance. Yet this effort is also hindered by the lingering understanding of religion as aberrational. After all, if the trend toward secularization reflected a move toward rationalization, then does the re-emergence of religion not indicate a regression of some sort? This manner of thinking limits the tools for studying religion to those used to explain irrational or deviant behavior.

In this part of the book, it will be argued that the re-emergence of religion is not a rejection of rationality, but a predictable response to changing political circumstances. Indeed, as will be seen in the following pages, religious movements are currently following the path set by liberal, secular movements decades earlier. In fact, the success of secular liberal movements changed the political landscape such that religious movements were edged out of the political process. These religious movements then turned to opposition tactics in an attempt to reverse this trend.

When seen in this way, there is no reason why the tools that allow for a better understanding of secular organizations cannot be used to facilitate one’s understanding of religious movements. The field of social-movements theory began with an assumption that only deviants became involved in protest, but advanced to recognize far more useful indicators of opposition. This same advancement has not occurred in the investigation of religiously motivated movements. In fact, consistent predictions (and empirical evidence) for the secularization of society have resulted in religious movements being viewed as aberrational. The consequence of this is that religious movements are perceived to be different from secular movements, and are most frequently explained using the variables that were limited to the earliest (and least informative) elements of social-movements theory.

The current research into the phenomenon of religious political activism is generally divided between those who study religion and those who study politics, with very little interaction between the two fields. Scholars of religion look primarily to religious texts to predict the behavior of religious adherents. The amount or type of violence within sacred texts is frequently identified as a predictor for violence committed by believers. Scholars of politics, in contrast, are frequently informed by secularization theory, and consequently attempt to explain religion as a front for other conditions. Both the anti-abortion movement in the United States and the Islamist movement in Egypt have frequently been identified as a consequence of unfavorable social and economic circumstances.

Scholars of religion had done much to clarify the theology that drives a movement, but are not able to explain the development, timing and success of religious movements in the political arena. Scholars of politics are frequently so puzzled by the presence of religion in politics at all that they focus on explaining the puzzle of the existence, rather than the elements that religious movements have in common with their secular counterparts. As a result there is little understanding about how the beliefs of a movement interact with the environmental conditions in which the movement operates to influence the political outcome.

This section will argue that the rise in religious movements can be best explained as a reaction to a perceived closing of a window of opportunity. While secularization had been marching across politics for decades, religion had long been afforded a parallel sphere of legitimacy. When decisive events occurred that dramatically challenged the ideology that had protected the separate sphere, religionists – even those of different theological backgrounds – rose up in a movement to prevent it.

Theories of social movements

Social-movements theory was originally predicated on the belief that only deviant individuals sought reform outside the existing political system.¹¹ The multiple centers of power were perceived to make the political process as a whole extensively permeable and thus open to efforts at reform from any sector, whether generated from the elites or the masses.¹² Social-movement theorists sought to understand the anomalies that produced deviant behavior. Most commonly, a sense of isolation, or other psychological feelings of inadequacy, were believed to prompt individuals to act in ways that undermined the existing structure.¹³

By the mid-1960s, academics began to doubt this interpretation, in part because of the recognition that even liberal democracies were not as permeable as had been previously imagined.¹⁴ Not only does this approach fail to consider the ubiquitous nature of deprivation in the face of less than occasional social uprising, it also ignores the data that proves that most activists were not among the dredges of society. Rather, they are well-educated, economically stable individuals.¹⁵ This forced the realization that it is not only “dysfunctional deviants” that seek political change. In fact, it is most commonly the well-educated, economically stable and politically active elites that headed and organized social movements.

These realizations turned the discussion from movement members to movement resources. Resources are seen as a finite entity, for which groups compete. When one group succeeds in obtaining a resource that was previously uncommitted to any cause, that resource is no longer accessible to other groups. The attainment of that resource can explain the difference between action and inaction.

But this still does not account for the way outside events influence the landscape of the political arena, causing openings to occur at random times. Social groups that are equipped to take advantage of these openings are able to develop into social movements. Kingdon uses the concept of a “policy window” to make the point.¹⁶ This window opens for a short time depending on factors external to political or social institutions.

This phenomenon is evident in the American feminist movement of the 1960s. The women’s movement rode into the public consciousness behind the more volatile issues of the day – including anti-war protests and the Civil Rights movement. But between 1965 and 1975, women’s issues were catapulted into public awareness, and politicians endeavored to close the newly revealed “gender gap.”¹⁷

Further, movement activists assimilated themselves into other areas of the socio-political arena, establishing a variety of organizations that dealt specifically with women’s issues including rape, abuse, gender equality, etc. The development of these organizations served as a breeding ground for later social developments.¹⁸ While it was the political opportunity afforded by the Civil Rights and anti-war movements that facilitated feminists’ entry into the arena, it was nonetheless the permeability of the institutions that allowed the changes they advocated to be implemented, as well as the ability of the institution to change which allowed these reforms to be maintained.

We can see a similar principle at work in the decrease in violent acts by non-religious movements from 1980–1999. This decrease was due in part to the assimilation of the issues for which the secular movements mobilized: the state and social institutions. A more dramatic example of this assimilation process is the case of Bernadine Dorhn and Bill Ayers, former leaders in the Weatherman organization.

Dorhn and Ayers spent most of the 1970s advocating an armed revolution against capitalism in favor of socialism.¹⁹ They were responsible for bombing multiple government buildings including the Capital and the Pentagon in an effort to further their agenda. Dorhn and Ayers turned themselves in to the authorities in 1980, served less than a year in prison, and now both work as professors – Dorhn at the Northwestern University School of Law, and Ayers as a professor of education at the University of Chicago. Dorhn also serves as the director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center.

Ayers and Dorhn have remained committed to their cause, if not their method (although in a 2001 interview Ayers answered that he did not regret his role in the bombings, in fact he “felt we didn’t do enough”²⁰). And yet, they have been assimilated into society to the point where they are respected members of a relatively elite community. This level of acceptance would not be possible had the structures and norms with which they endeavored to overthrow capitalism not changed in response to their actions.²¹ Thus, the social and political revolutions that characterized the 1960s and 1970s succeeded in restructuring the political landscape to reflect their cause. This explains not only society’s acceptance of ex-activists, but also ex-activists’ acceptance of the new society, which may help to account for the decrease in non-religious violent action.

Limits to the current understanding of religious social movements

Just as the social-movement scholars used to believe that socio-psychological factors provide the impetus for deviant behavior, so do many current scholars seeking to explain forms of religious activism. The structural crises that have developed as a result of dramatic upheavals in the economic, social and political structures of modern society during the height of developmentalism are used to explain the advent of activism.²²

A number of missing elements that lead to deprivation-motivated protest have been identified. Because religion is more prevalent in agrarian and rural than post-industrialist societies, religion has been tied to the absence of human security. Religion in this context offers the reassurance that although events may prevent an individual from understanding or predicting what lies ahead, there still exists a higher power that not only understands, but a power that even controls such things.²³ Belief reduces the stress individuals feel and allows them to cope with everyday problems as they occur. Furthermore, the lack of predictability in their lives makes individuals crave the rigidity and predictability of religion. This argument is interesting because deprivation is examined on two levels. First, the economic deprivation on a national scale makes a state unable to alleviate challenges to individuals within its borders, and second, this then leads to deprivation of security on an individual scale.

This urbanization and economic-deprivation theory suggests that individuals are most likely to embrace extremism when they face economic hardship and social dislocation. Extremism offers resources, networks and a target – all of which lessen the ramifications of hardship and dislocation. Religion offers an appealingly rigid and predictable set of rules and a persuasive justification of hardship.

Other scholars make a similar argument from a slightly different perspective, suggesting that the legitimation crisis facing many regimes today (in light of the shift from a moral to an economic basis of legitimacy) increases political instability, which exacerbates economic, political and personal unpredictability.²⁴ And instability need not be relegated to the political realm. As populations shift into more urbanized settings, an individual’s susceptibility to the use of violence can rise. These individuals are unaccustomed to the social norms of the metropolis, and become socially isolated. They are then all the more susceptible to the messages being preached of radical Islam, which are a direct tie back to the values they knew from their rural beginnings.²⁵ Numerous Middle East scholars argue that as Arab states took strides toward Westernization, cleavages developed that left many Arabs feeling isolated.²⁶ Islam, and Islamic activism, provided these individuals with the means and a justification for seeking change.

Attempts to explain the religious elements of the anti-abortion movement are also almost exclusively limited to explanations of deprivation theory. Movement members are described as being motivated by a fear of modernity²⁷ and consequential threats to patriarchy, and the anti-abortion movement is argued to be an attempt to bring traditionalism and patriarchy back into social dominance.²⁸ The same reasoning is used to explain Islamic political violence.

Explanations that look to external variables to explain movement action serve a valuable function in shifting the debate about religious violence outside the constraint of religious exceptionalism. But they are still limited in what they can ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Out of the Arena: The Changing Place of Religion in Politics
• Part II: Definition, Development and Consequence: Opposition Movements in the United States and Egypt
• Part III: Exploring New Terrain: The Future of Religious Opposition in Israel
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography