Religious and Spiritual Perspectives on Terrorism

This entry will cover the religious connections and justifications for terroristic violence as they exist in major world belief systems. The primary focus is on the monotheistic systems (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but dualistic systems, such as Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism are also discussed.

Religion and violence have been closely linked since the beginnings of recorded history. In general, prior to the rise of the monotheistic faiths, that link has presupposed that the god of a given group would fight on the group's behalf. Victory in battle was seen as validation of a god's potency, as well as reason to abandon the belief or worship of the defeated deity. Examples of this type of religion-violence connection are legion, stemming from the great empires of the ancient world, such as the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Hellenistic kingdoms, and the Roman Empire. The most common form of attack against religious institutions on the part of these empires would be the ritual temple desecration, in which a victorious or defiant enemy would defile the sanctities of its opponent's belief system. This desecration would have a dual effect: It would demonstrate the absolute impotence or worthlessness of the sanctuary or pantheon in question, and it would present a challenge that could not be ignored by those adhering to that sanctuary or pantheon. (Additionally, as temples served as banks during this period, it usually gained the attacker large amounts of ready cash.) Forms of ritual desecration or even terror would more than occasionally cause a total capitulation on the part of those adhering to the desecrated sanctuary's pantheon.

[Page 507]With the rise of the monotheistic religions, however, this paradigm was no longer necessarily operative. During the period of the destruction of the First Temple (586 bce) by the Babylonian Empire (cf. II Kings 25), the Jews were among the first who did not accept that the destruction of their sanctuary did not mean the defeat of their god, as described in 2 Chronicles 36:15–19. Instead, the Jewish chroniclers of the Bible proclaimed that God himself was responsible for the destruction of the sanctuary in Jerusalem because of the misdeeds of the people. It was through this mechanism that the Jews, and beyond them the two larger monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Islam, began to distinguish between sanctuary and deity—the sanctuary could be destroyed, but the divinity survived.