Religious Terrorism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, extreme violence associated with religion has become a global problem, appearing in Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures. Religion is associated with this violence but is not the cause of it. In other words, religion is not the problem, but it is problematic, in two ways. One is the way that religious identities and ideologies have become part of a global rebellion against the European Enlightenment notion of a secular state. The other is the way that certain features of religious actions and images—such as the performance of religious ritual and the awesome notion of cosmic war—are appropriated by violent actors seeking to justify their savage attempts at power and cloak them in religious garb.