ABSTRACT
The previous part of this book explored the puzzle of the continued advancement of religion in the United States and Egypt, despite the prevalence of secularization in the political arenas of both states. It was argued that the rise of religious social movements can be explained using a political-process approach to understand the impact of secularization on the twentieth-century political process in both Egypt and the United States, and that religious social movements developed in response to this continued secularization. While this argument is useful in predicting where and when religious movements might be likely to arise, it does not explain why organizations pursue the methods they do. In other words, if all religious organizations are reacting to the same threat of secularism, why do some organizations use violence while others do not? Previous efforts to answer this question center around two categories of variables: external influences on organizational behavior; and elements unique to the internal make up of the organization’s ideology. This chapter will begin with a discussion of these approaches and recognition of their explanatory limitations in light of the American and Egyptian cases. Specifically, we will discover that while variables in both categories are useful indicators of the timing of political violence, they are unable to explain how organizations with similar ideologies and objectives come to endorse such variant methods of action. To better explain this phenomenon, we will look at the ways in which an organization’s rhetoric changes the political process. This chapter aims to show that the religious rhetoric used to mobilize supporters serves to quicken the closing of the window of opportunity available to them, forcing religious movements to either move closer to the political center to preserve their waning influence, or further out to the fringes of the political arena to preserve the purity of their cause. This will be explored in light of the Christian Coalition and the Army of God in the first portion, and the Muslim Brethren and al Jama’a al Islamiyya in the second. It will become evident that the Christian Coalition, the Army of God, the Muslim Brethren and al Jama’a al Isamiyya are motivated by similar ideological interests. It will also be demonstrated that the Coalition and the Brotherhood both moved closer to the center of the political process by adopting rhetoric that allowed for a varied political base. By developing a rhetoric that was more encompassing than clear, they successfully
found themselves in positions to influence the future development of that process. However, in so doing, they were forced to give up some of the demands that had inspired their movement to begin with. In contrast, the Army of God and al Jama’a al Islamiyya maintained a rhetoric that emphasized the urgency of their cause and, in so doing, faced a window of opportunity closing more quickly, and as a result were thrust to the fringe of the political process.
