Violence

Religious traditions are largely nonviolent; yet every religious history leaves a trail of blood and a legacy of swords. Images of violence are a part of sacred iconography, symbolism, and mythology; and in every religious tradition, real acts of social violence are conducted in ways that are thought to be legitimized by divine will. These various images and acts of destruction can be collectively described as “religious violence,” though in many cases the religious ideas and practices that are associated with them are not narrowly theological. Apart from ritual sacrifice, real acts of violence are seldom intrinsic to any specific religious experience—wars are often justified in the name of religion, for instance, when the primary purpose is to extend political power. In this entry, religious violence refers to any symbolic or real act of violence that is associated with religion, even tangentially.

Because violence in both real and symbolic forms is found in all religious traditions, it can be regarded as a common feature of the religious imagination. Almost every tradition, for example, has some practice of sacrifice and some notion of cosmic war, a grand moral struggle that underlies all reality and can be used to justify acts of real warfare.

This suggests that religious violence is global, and global in several ways. First, the instances of both symbolic and real expressions of religious violence are universal; every religious tradition manifests it. Second, religious violence is transnational, in that religious movements that are involved in violent encounters are active transnationally, from the Christian crusades to the 20th-century Muslim movements of global jihad. And third, religious violence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is often a response to globalization; it is related to the movements of social protest against the cultural homogenization of global society. This entry will explore the tradition of religious violence in each religious tradition, relating it to current movements of social change in the global era, and then briefly review the ways in which religious violence has been a subject of scholarly analysis.