Religion and Radicalism: The Puritanism in All Revolutions

The role of ideas and their relationship with reality is one of the most vexed questions in social and historical inquiry, if it is even a legitimate distinction at all. Perhaps the most vexed—and becoming more so, it seems—are religious ideas. And today perhaps the most contentious religious ideas of all are radical religious ideas. Religious radicalism poses problems for all scholars, depending on their own beliefs. The approach long adopted by secular scholars—often involving a lingering Marxist pedigree—has the merit of connecting religious ideas to the realities of what people experience in this world, rather than treating them as otherworldly abstractions. This involves reinterpreting religious radicalism in terms of the grievances expressed by secular radicalism. This can be fruitful, though it risks belittling the religious ideas themselves, and in practice it often descends into implausible suggestions that radical religion—including today's terror—results from "deprivation," "poverty," "alienation," and other clichés suggesting that terrorists are expressing some larger social injustice. This carries an indirect but important element of truth (as I hope to show). But simplistic formulas for cause-and-effect into which this often degenerates are easily refuted by pointing to the affluent backgrounds of many terrorists, the presence of greater squalor elsewhere without terrorism, and so forth.¹

Traditional scholars, including religious ones, reply that ideas, religious or otherwise, are important in themselves and that radical religion has a "reality" of its own. This approach takes ideas more seriously and on their own terms but risks abstracting the ideas from mundane life. These scholars are often so leery of lapsing into secular or quasi-Marxist "determinism" that they are reluctant to see any connection between these ideas and ideologies and the underlying realities of the world. These scholars often propose confronting militants with a "war of ideas."² This makes sense, but to be effective we must know not simply what ideas we are confronting but also what conditions make them appealing and plausible.

Some secular, left-leaning scholars seem to have abandoned their older materialistic assumptions and accepted the traditionalists' principle that ideas—religious ideas at least—do have a reality of their own. The older insistence—associated with Marx himself and Lenin—that religious discontents necessarily reflect more tangible underlying "real" discontents" is now seemingly discarded and religion rendered a deus ex machina that emerges without explanation and serves no rational purpose. Here religion becomes an impenetrable given, implying that religions exist only to create (for some dysfunctional reason) intolerance, bigotry, and violence.³

It is ironic perhaps that the older Marxist approach was predicated on a progressive view of history suggesting that, as socialism expanded and ameliorated the discontents expressed by religion, those beliefs were destined for history's "dustbin." Liberal formulations included the once-fashionable "secularization thesis," suggesting an inexorable decline and disappearance of religion, at least from public life.⁴ After religious faith not only stubbornly continued to exist but also to reassert itself politically, the discrediting of that thesis seems to have demanded a theory rationalizing a more proactive effort to encourage the decline of religious belief.⁵ The resulting outpouring of books and articles with phrases like "religious violence" and "religion and violence"⁶ have tended to drown out voices trying to understand this connection within larger contexts of social conditions, economic problems, political conflicts, and so forth.⁷

The ongoing displacement on the left of socialist with sexual politics also seems to have reinforced the willingness to discard the niceties of Marxist epistemology and to target religious belief in particular as an unnecessary impediment to sexual freedom and gender equality.⁸

In response, traditionalist and religious scholars have had little to say and often seem to tag along with this trend. They welcome the renewed attention to religion, and some seem willing to call attention to the violence created by religions other than their own. The fact that not all religions are equally violent or that secular ideologies—often indistinguishable from radical religions and blending into them at the margins—are equally or more violent does get mentioned...