Journal of Religion and Violence

This article compares the ideology of Hilltop Youth in Judea and Samaria to that of Salafi-Jihadis in the West. It first demonstrates that there are significant and far-reaching similarities between the two groups’ world views. It then explains why, despite profound ideological similarities, there are vast differences in the type of violent acts each group commits. The Hilltop Youth primarily commit acts of vandalism with few deliberate murders, while the Salafi-Jihadis in the West engage mainly in acts of murder. The article suggests that countervailing precepts within the Hilltop Youth’s religious thought currently may create a normative balance that restrains their violent conduct, specifically against their co-religionists. This normative balance accounts for the contemporary difference between their violent acts and those of Salafi-Jihadis in the West. As the article suggests, however, this normative balance has been recently challenged by Hilltop Youth who offered innovative legal interpretations that could pave legal way for specifically intra-Jewish violence.

This article explores a violent episode in Kenya’s late-colonial history in which a confrontation between police and members of an anti-colonial religious movement called Dini ya Msambwa resulted an estimated fifty deaths. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with survivors, I reconstruct the event—the “Kolloa Affray,” as it became known—before showing how its violence has been preserved and transformed in the historical theology and ritual practice of the Dini ya Roho Mafuta Pole ya Afrika, which claims to be a continuation of the Msambwa movement. For survivors of the violence itself, and for others who suffered communal punishment in its aftermath, it is an historical wrong for which the British government owes compensation. For the Mafuta Pole faithful, however, the death of Dini ya Msambwa’s leader Lukas Pkech at Kolowa becomes a kind of second crucifixion, “cancelling” the violence of the past and ushering in a new era of forgiveness and reconciliation. The simultaneous preservation and negation of this violent past in Mafuta Pole historical consciousness is shown through an analysis of its discursive, ritual, and memorial practices.

Sherry Ortner has recently described Marxian and Foucauldian inspired anthropological concerns for power, domination, and inequality as “dark anthropology.” In juxtaposition, Joel Robbins has challenged anthropologists to explore ideas of the good life, conceptions of value, and ethics in different ethnographic contexts; what he calls an “anthropology of the good.” Between these poles, this paper attempts an anthropology of the “good enough” to examine beliefs and practices that may partially, and counterintuitively, ground local conceptions of trust in the gray areas of social life. The phenomenon of “nightrunning” amongst the Bukusu of western Kenya, I argue, undergirds a noctural economy of lending and borrowing—rather than theft and victimhood—of reproductive potential; nightrunners remove their clothing at night to “bang their buttocks” against their neighbors’ closed doors and throw rocks at their roofs to prevent them from “sleeping,” a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Due to the way Bukusu understand nightrunners to be sterile unless they “run,” while annoying, they are nonetheless considered deserving of sympathy. Key here is that Bukusu do not necessarily see such seemingly absorptive nocturnal activity as witchcraft. While the identities of nightrunners are protected by the darkness of night—a chronotope which usually indexes witchcraft and political corruption—Bukusu claim that nightrunners are categorically people that one knows “in the light of day.” The paper explores how practices like nightrunning might help us rethink social intimacy and trust.

The concept of “apocalyptic terrorism” has become common in the study of terrorism since the turn of the millennium and some have made considerable claims about its analytical and practical utility. However, it raises substantial problems. Following a brief survey of the way that the idea has been employed, this paper identifies difficulties inherent in its current use. In addition to those of a definitional kind, these include the treatment of “apocalyptic” as a synonym for “religious”; the assumption that apocalyptic is always primary and totalizing; homogenizing claims about the character of apocalyptic radicalism; mistaken assumptions about the causes and character of apocalyptic violence; problematic cross-cultural and non-religious applications of the term “apocalyptic”; the neglect of hermeneutics; and the dearth of contributions by specialists in the study of religion. The argument concludes that there are good grounds for abandoning the notion of “apocalyptic terrorism” entirely, but given that this is unlikely, it should be employed far more cautiously, and a narrower, more tightly defined understanding of the concept should be advocated by those engaged in the study of terrorism.

Drawing on Russell McCutcheon’s (2003) redescription of the theological category of theodicy as a socio-political rhetoric that functions to conserve social interests, this article examines the way that American Christian Zionists employ theodicies to explain historical, contemporary, and anticipated acts of violence. It argues that violence is central to Christian Zionists’ conception of God’s revelation, and thus to their identity. Rather than requiring the intellectual wrangling often associated with religious explanations for why violence is inflicted on or by a certain group of people, Christian Zionists identify acts of violence as either God’s punishment for insufficient support for Israel, or as God’s vengeance upon those who wish to harm his chosen people. In any given context, Christian Zionists draw on acts of violence to reaffirm their truth claims, and to ensure their desired social order is maintained.

This article analyzes the Sanctuary Church in Pennsylvania, pastored by Reverend Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, son of the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon. It specifically addresses the church’s history and the theology that motivated “Pastor Sean,” as he is commonly called, to host a marriage blessing ceremony where attendees brought crowns and AR-15 rifles to church. It argues that this ceremony, and Moon’s theology itself, are extensions of the unique political, cultural, and legal battles increasingly common in the United States. It also explores the church’s critics who used the blessing ceremony as an opportunity to “save” the categories of Christianity and religion from being tainted by Moon’s martial theology.

This paper uses anti-LGBTQ bias within evangelical Christianity as a case study to explore how nationalist movements justify prejudicial positions through framing privileged groups as victims. Since Anita Bryant’s late 1970s crusade against what was dubbed the “homosexual agenda,” white evangelicals have led a national movement opposing LGBTQ rights in the United States. Through a commitment to ensuring sexual minorities are excluded from civil rights protections, white evangelicals have contributed to a cultural and legal landscape conducive to anti-LGBTQ structural violence. This opposition is most often understood as rooted in love, and not in bias or hate, as demonstrated during long-term ethnographic research among white evangelical churches in Colorado Springs. Engaging with theories of morality and nationalism, this article argues that most biased political movements understand their motivation as defending a moral order and not perpetuating bias. In this way they can justify structural violence against subordinated groups.

The ideology of white supremacy is alive and well in the U.S. This paper argues that those attempting to understand how white supremacy works should delve into recent justifications of anti-black violence rather than simply waiting to spot the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. Doing so requires scholars to disabuse themselves of taking for granted the descriptions of what may be characterized as a U.S. Christian-White imaginary and to observe the dynamic, discursive shifts that Jean-Franc̜ois Bayart calls “operational acts of identification.” Drawing on incidents from antebellum slavery to the Black Lives Matter era and beyond, it is argued that white people have long been able to justify anti-black violence by appealing to a biblicist “Negrophobia,” wherein black people are rendered as frightening, even demonic creatures that must be stopped for the good of God’s kingdom. This paper presents a critical history of violence in America that is representative of a devastatingly effective strategy that continues to fortify the functional primacy of whiteness despite popular rejections of racism.