ABSTRACT

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 socialmovements 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.