Terror in the Mind of God, Fourth Edition: The Global Rise of Religious Violence by Mark Juergensmeyer

Author:Mark Juergensmeyer [Juergensmeyer, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Terrorism, Religion, Comparative Religion, Social Science, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9780520291355
Google: NaswDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0520291352
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN SYMBOLS BECOME DEADLY

But if religious images are meant to conquer violence, one must ask the obvious but difficult question: why and how are these symbolic presentations of violence occasionally linked to real acts of violence? They should prevent violent acts by allowing the human urges to conquer and control to be channeled into the harmless dramas of ritual. Yet we know that the opposite is often the case. The riotous rites of violence described by Natalie Davis and Stanley Tambiah in the texts cited earlier in this chapter and the abundant examples of religious terrorism referred to throughout this book have demonstrated that the violence related to religion has, at times, been savagely real.

The question of why images of cosmic struggle are translated into real acts of violence is complicated, since the line between symbolic and actual violence is thin. Symbols are sometimes more than just fictional representations of the real thing. Rites of sacrifice, for instance, often involve ritual killing, and feats of martyrdom lead to real deaths. This symbiosis between symbolic and real violence is profound and goes to the very heart of the religious imagination. It is a relationship that we will explore more fully in the next chapter.

For now, however, we can speculate on the conditions that make it likely for cosmic war to be located on a worldly stage. One way of doing this is to identify the aspects of religious thinking that link spiritual struggle with worldly conflict. It was this approach that I attempted several years ago when I was studying the rhetoric of religious violence in Sikhism. I came up with a list of several conditions, including the following, indicating when Sikhism—or any religious tradition—is susceptible to becoming associated with actual acts of violence: the cosmic struggle is understood to be occurring in this world rather than in a mythical setting; believers identify personally with the struggle; and the struggle is at a point of crisis in which individual action can make all the difference.56

In most of the cases discussed in this book, however, it is not religion that has led spiritual persons into violence but the other way around: violent situations have reached out for religious justification. The two approaches are not contradictory: extremism in religion can lead to violence at the same time that violent conflicts can cry out for religious validation. But it is the latter approach on which I wish to focus here.

Rather than beginning with religious images, then, this approach starts with real-life situations; rather than why religion leads to violence, the question is why real-world struggles involve religion. The following characteristics, based on the case studies in this book, indicate when a confrontation in the world is likely to take on the trappings of cosmic war:

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