Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society) by Mark Juergensmeyer

Author:Mark Juergensmeyer [Juergensmeyer, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2003-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Symbolic War

“That was the most marvellous experience of my life,” explained Richard Butler, describing his first reaction to the Christian Identity theory of cosmic war. “The lights started turning on, bang-bang-bang,” Butler, the dean of the Identity movement, told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 1999.”35 Butler went on to say that the knowledge that “war had been going on for over six thousand years between the sons of Cain and the sons of God” was a cathartic experience for him, “opening up who we were, where we came from, and why we were there.” He added that this epiphany was “the greatest thrill” he ever had, and from this moment on he knew “what my mission was.”

“Wow, this is it,” Denver Parmenter exclaimed in similar terms as he related how he discovered Christian Identity teachings. He claimed that this view of ancient and continuing warfare led to a sudden stroke of awareness that provided him “the reason things are going wrong.”36 This grand scenario gave him a view of the world that he could participate in, thus helping him not only to understand his destiny but to control it.

Like the rituals provided by religious traditions, warfare is a participatory drama that exemplifies—and thus explains—the most profound aspects of life. It has great appeal, then, for people such as Butler and Parmenter who feel not only confused about what is going on in their lives but also buffeted by unseen forces. Parmenter was able to directly participate in this struggle by taking part in the plot to kill a Jewish radio talk show host whom Parmenter and his Identity colleagues thought was an agent of Satan.

The idea of warfare has long had an eerie and intimate relationship with religion. History is studded with overtly religious conflicts such as the Crusades, the Muslim conquests, and the Wars of Religion that dominated the politics of France in the sixteenth century. Although these have usually been characterized as wars in the name of religion rather than wars conducted in a religious way, historian Natalie Zemon Davis has uncovered what she calls “rites of violence” in her study of religious riots in sixteenth-century France. These constituted “a repertory of actions, derived from the Bible, from the liturgy, from the action of political authority, or from the traditions of popular folk practices, intended to purify the religious community and humiliate the enemy and thus make him less harmful.” Davis observed that the violence was “aimed at defined targets and selected from a repertory of traditional punishments and forms of destruction.”37 According to Davis, “even the extreme ways of defiling corpses—dragging bodies through the streets and throwing them to the dogs, dismembering genitalia and selling them in mock commerce—and desecrating religious objects” had what she called “perverse connections” with religious concepts of pollution and purification, heresy, and blasphemy.38

Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah showed how the same “rites of violence” were present in the religious riots of South Asia.39 In some instances innocent bystanders would be snatched up by a crowd and burned alive.

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