While the horrific scenes of the invasion and occupation of the US Capitol building played out on television, I happened to be doing a radio interview for my recent book on religious terrorism (Juergensmeyer 2020). The reporter asked if there were similarities between the Trump-incited rioters and the terrorists I have studied. I quickly responded “yes.” It is true that the reasons for religious-inspired insurrections around the world are specific to their contexts—supporters of al Qaeda are not the same as militant Buddhists in Myanmar. Yet there are some striking similarities among the cosmic battles imagined in the apocalyptic scenarios that propel movements of religious of religious violence. This includes ISIS, Christian militia groups, Jewish extremists, and Hindu and Sikh militants. They all bear some common characteristics, and QAnon shares many similarities with them. To begin with, QAnon bears some relationship to religion. To be sure, the conspiracy theory at the heart of QAnon belief is this-worldly. It includes the notion that there is a secret design among liberal politicians and media figures to take over the world for their evil purposes, among which is ritual leeching the blood of innocent children for empowerment.

Through the examination of QAnon as a religious apocalyptic “digital cult,” this paper integrates individual psychological models regarding the espousal of conspiracy beliefs with sociological and anthropological models of religious cultism, particularly in the context of destructive and violent cults. This integrative model purports to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the extravagant irrationality of the QAnon belief-system with the otherwise normative demographics of its adherents and distinguish—as scholars of religion often do—between the creed, the practice, and the social identity aspects of the movement. Cultic studies (adapted to the digital age) are leveraged to discern the functions that different strata of adherents provide to the movement, and elucidate the mechanisms by which they coexist, collaborate, and avoid splitting along organizational or ideological fault-lines. The model also draws upon studies of apocalyptic cults and violent radicalization to caution against counter-productive over-generalization, over-sensationalizing, and over-pathologizing of QAnon believers.

The following is a meditation upon a particular nationalist use and performance of Theravada Buddhism. It explores some of the interconnections and interdependencies between religion, identity politics and political violence in Thailand, an exemplary Buddhist nation. Anti-government demonstrators, ‘communists’ in the 1970’s, Muslims in 2004 and ‘Red Shirts’ in 2010, were killed in the name of defending sacred Thai institutions of Nation, Religion and Monarchy. Is Buddhism implicated in such political violence? If so, how does a spiritual practice prohibiting the taking of life lend itself to justifying killing? This article suggests that Buddhism is translated, qua transformed and betrayed, by the Thai State and politics. Buddhist truth, in the thrall of nationalist ideology in times of emergency and national insecurity, can legitimate ‘states of exception’, which suspend the law and moral constraint, making it permissible to kill impureenemies in defense and with good intentions.

The main focus of this paper is to interrogate the security challenges that the radical Islamic sect Boko Haram has posed to the Nigerian nation, and how the government has responded to these challenges. Although many positions have been articulated with regard to how best to tackle the insurgency, the thrust ofthis article, however, is to argue that instead of the “normal politics” of security, the government needs to invoke the doctrine of “emergency politics,” which involves the full concentration of state apparatuses in order to restore peace and order. It is the contention of this article that it is only after this measure has beentaken that the fundamental causes can be adequately addressed, through a well-focused program of re-absorption.

This article analyses a particular kind of Catholic scholarship, that of the Jesuit Journal La Civiltà Cattolica, and its discourse on Islamic terrorism in the twenty-first century. While numerous secular political studies have been published on Islamic terrorism since the attacks of 9/11, little attention has been paid to the scholarly debate that has emerged among Catholic intellectuals on this issue. The examination focuses on the works of three La Civiltà Cattolica writers,namely Edomnd Farahian S.J., Giovanni Sale S.J. and Enrico Cattaneo S.J. as well as the discourse of prominent Catholic religious leaders, including the newly elected Pope Francis. The non-violent strategy for countering Islamic terrorism proposed by the contemporary Catholic Church, and echoed by the Jesuits, is framed as a new “soft-counterterrorism” approach based on interreligious dialogue and the creation of bonds of friendship. The article also considers the debate currently taking place among religious scholars on the Catholic Church’s position towards Islam as well as new insights into the need for the West torediscover its Christian roots before engaging with Islam.

For new religious movements, is the absence of evidence of the potential for violence ever sufficient evidence of its absence? This article examines the process through which Chen Tao was inaccurately portrayed as potentially suicidal by the news media. After a review of the group’s cosmology and migration fromTaiwan to the United States, it describes the group’s interactions with news media personnel at several key points between the mid-1990s and the 2010s. The article then marshals the scholarship treating minority religions, inwardly-directed violence, and the media to understand why this happened to Chen Tao. From early on, journalists consistently wove rumors about and interpretations of group members’ acts and statements into a narrative of risk that, while unsupported by evidence, resonated with a pre-existing “suicide cult” topos in reporting.

As the turn of the millennium approached, the year 1999 turning into 2000, several religious enthusiasts popped up in Jerusalem and were frequently noted in the daily press. Among these were, to mention a few, Brother David from the House of Prayer congregation, Brother Salomon from the Temple Group and members of Monte Kim Miller’s Concerned Christians, an American, Denver-based congregation (not to be confused with the anti-Mormon group that bears the same name but has no relationship to Monte Kim Miller). According to news reports, members of Miller’s group were believed to have in mind committingmass suicide in the streets of Jerusalem; as well as plans to provoke bloodshed by attacking policemen in Jerusalem and to plot attacks in the Old City. Members of the group were also accused of plotting violent acts near religious centers, the Temple Mount being one possible location. As a result, the group’s members were arrested and deported from Israel.

This essay was inspired by the gang-rape of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi, India, on December 16, 2012. Thirteen days later she died in a Singapore hospital from injuries caused by insertion of an iron rod by her six attackers. The authors first analyze the remarks of politicians and religious leaders that invoked religious- nationalist ideals to diminish the responsibility of the attackers, to exonerate traditional Hindu ways of life, and to blame the victim. The essay next examines cultural and religious contexts of gang-rape, in particular, the positive and negative images of women in traditional Hindu mythologies and scriptures.Theories about why some men rape and why some rapists mutilate the genitalia of their victims are considered. The essay includes results of interviews and surveys of Indians in India carried out during the summer of 2013. Questions focused on religious issues such as the extent to which the mentality that women transgressing traditional limits are responsible for what happens to them fosters a rape-tolerant atmosphere. The authors conclude that parts of the sacredtradition can be useful for enhancing the status and safety of women in India today, while other, clearly misogynistic parts must be recognized, critiqued, and rejected.

This summary essay looks at what the essays in this special issue have in common. It concludes that these are all instances of what might be called symbolic empowerment related to religious violence. Though the violence is real enough in each of these cases, the role of religion in relation to it is often indirect. These are cases not only where religion justifies violence but also where violence empowers religion. The use of religious language, symbols, and authority to justify violent acts gives religious spokespersons an aura of authority that gives them a symbolical power.

The Mai-Mai soldiers comprise a rebel militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who believe that applying magical potions to their bodies and wearing leaves around their heads makes them invisible. Although they previously believed sex would diminish their magical powers, in 2002 they began to claim sexual intercourse strengthens the magic. With this theological change, they began to rape both foreign and Congolese women ritualistically and violently, making the rapes much more than weapons of war. The Mai-Mai’s alienation from and discontent with society has created a power struggle between two sets of collective identities (Mai-Mai vs. un-Mai-Mai) that are at odds over authority, legitimacy, and resources. This article focuses on how both religion and violence have been sharpened in the Mai-Mai’s collective struggles against hegemonic entities, while considering the limitations created by the lack of ethnographic research. This article proposes that violence should not be studied in terms of seemingly static and essentialized religion through which the perpetrators viewthe world, but in terms of socio-political and religious disenchantments that herald theological changes and innovations to seemingly established religions in each specific case.

Even though Sufism (Islamic mysticism) is often characterized in Western scholarship and discourse as an esoteric, tolerant, non-violent dimension of Islam, historically some Sufis have practiced and justified violence as an ethical form of struggle in the world. This essay analyzes the representations of violence in the fifteenth-century Book of Jihād by the Moroccan Sufi Muḥammad ibn Yaggabsh al-Tāzī (d. 1505), which advocates defensive jihād against Portuguese imperial expansion in Morocco. In particular, it focuses on the way in which al-Tāzī’s text stages violence for a popular audience while it simultaneously promotescommunal transformation through a rhetoric of love, where righteous fighters become God’s lovers. Furthermore, the essay examines the role of Jesus as a defender of the Muslim community in the Book of Jihād, and explores the physical, legal, and religious boundaries that al-Tāzī’s portrayals of violence help cross and inscribe. Finally, this article reflects on the implications of the broader tradition of politically engaged Sufism upon the aforementioned reductionistportrayals of Sufis as fundamentally opposed to violence.

Over sixty thousand Americans were sterilized in states that enacted sterilization laws during the first four decades of the twentieth century. American eugenicists supported these laws as part of a negative eugenics crusade to purify the white racial body. Many modernist Protestant ministers also publicly advocated these laws, endorsing them as an effective means for eliminating white degeneracy, enhancing the presence of God in the life of the race, and advancing God’s kingdom on earth. Drawing from pro-eugenic sermons and other writings by modernist ministers, this essay explores the role that modernist Protestantism played in publicly sanctifying the biopolitical violence of sterilization and in shaping a popular religious discourse that bolstered negative eugenic initiatives.The first section of the essay broadly contextualizes modernist Protestantism as an evolutionary discourse of Christian civilization. The second sketches the development of modernist evolutionary theologies during the nineteenth century. The third focuses on Protestant ministerial support for negative eugenics during the 1920s, demonstrating how modernists popularized sterilization as part of an evolutionary struggle against degeneracy and for the kingdom of God. The essay concludes by arguing that modernist Protestantism was an important religious discourse through which negative eugenic thought and practice found popular expression.

Contemporary discussions of the link between religion and violence are plagued by the contested nature of the terms. This essay summarizes some problems of definition and scope for those terms, and then introduces the four studies and postscript that follow. The four studies theorize and contextualize violent acts and religious rhetoric in today’s India and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the 1920s United States, and in fifteenth century Morocco. The postscript identifies a theme common to the four essays, which is the capacity of violent rhetoric and acts to empower religious pundits in the public sphere.