Religious Extremism

Religious extremism is the conviction that a religious claim authorises coercion — that unbelief, heresy or apostasy justifies force against the person who holds it. The distinguishing mark is not the intensity of belief but the collapse of the distinction between persuading a soul and compelling a body. A monk who fasts for forty days is devout. A man who burns his neighbour’s house for praying differently is an extremist, and the difference between them is not a matter of degree.

Conservatives hold that this distinction has to be maintained in both directions. Against secular critics who treat religious conviction as such as the danger, conservatives argue that the twentieth century’s largest slaughters were carried out by regimes hostile to religion. Against those who excuse violence done in God’s name, they argue that a settled political order cannot grant any doctrine, religious or secular, a licence over the lives of citizens.

Key Takeaways

• The European settlement that ended the wars of religion — Augsburg 1555, Westphalia 1648, the Toleration Act 1689 — was reached by exhaustion, and conservatives treat it as hard-won rather than natural.
• John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) supplied the argument that belief cannot be coerced because assent is not subject to the will.
• Conservatives distinguish religion from political ideology carrying religious form, following Eric Voegelin’s account of modern mass movements as substitute faiths.
• The state’s business is conduct — incitement, financing, violence — not the policing of doctrine or of private belief.
• The main opposing analysis, associated with Robert Pape, holds that most religiously framed terrorism has strategic and territorial causes rather than doctrinal ones.

History And Context

Europe learned the subject the expensive way. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 settled the German conflict on the principle that the ruler’s religion determined the territory’s, which ended fighting without granting anyone conscience. France went through eight civil wars between 1562 and 1598; the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre began in Paris on 24 August 1572 and spread to the provinces, killing thousands of Huguenots. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted limited toleration, and Louis XIV revoked it in 1685, driving perhaps 200,000 Protestants out of France.

The Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1648, killed a share of the German population that no European conflict matched until the twentieth century. The Peace of Westphalia, signed at Münster and Osnabrück in October 1648, did not establish religious liberty in the modern sense, but it settled that confessional difference would no longer be a standing cause of war between states. England reached its own accommodation through the Toleration Act 1689, passed the same year Locke published his letter arguing that the magistrate’s power extends to civil interests and not to the care of souls, since force can produce conformity but not belief.¹

The modern chapter has different roots. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan al-Banna in Ismailia in 1928, in reaction to colonial rule and to the abolition of the caliphate four years earlier. The Iranian revolution of 1979 produced the first modern state governed on a claim of clerical authority, and the seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca in November of that same year signalled a rejectionist current within Sunni Islam. The attacks of 11 September 2001 and the declaration of a caliphate by the Islamic State in June 2014 belong to that lineage. Religiously framed violence is not confined to one tradition: Aum Shinrikyo released sarin on the Tokyo subway on 20 March 1995, Baruch Goldstein killed 29 worshippers at Hebron on 25 February 1994, and Anders Breivik justified his 2011 murders in part by an account of Christian civilisation.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives begin by refusing the equation of faith with fanaticism. Burke’s argument against the French revolutionaries was directed at what he later called an armed doctrine: a set of abstract propositions held with certainty and carried across borders by force.² The quarrel, on his account, was not with France as a country but with a creed under arms. The form is what matters, not the content. Eric Voegelin developed the point, reading modern totalitarian movements as attempts to bring about final redemption inside history, with the apparatus of faith transferred to a political programme.³ On that reading Jacobinism, Bolshevism and jihadism are variations on one structure, and a policy that treats only the religious version as dangerous has misdiagnosed the problem.

The second conservative commitment is to the settlement itself. Freedom of religion, in the Western tradition, is not a concession extracted from religion by secularism; it grew from Christian arguments about conscience and from the practical discovery that persecution multiplies martyrs. Conservatives defend that settlement against erosion from either side — against theocratic claims to state power, and against the secularist claim that religious reasoning must be excluded from public argument. Both positions deny citizens the right to bring their deepest convictions into political life on equal terms.

Third, conservatives insist the state’s remit is conduct. Incitement, financing, weapons training, coercion within families: these are matters for the criminal law and the security services, and enforcing them requires no view about the truth of anyone’s theology. Screening beliefs, by contrast, produces surveillance of the pious majority who commit no offence and drives the small dangerous minority further from view. Preachers who recruit for violence are prosecutable on the same principle that applies to any other incitement.

Fourth, conservatives emphasise that religious communities themselves are the effective agents of containment. Established congregations, seminaries with genuine authority and inherited structures of scholarship discipline the freelance radical far more efficiently than a government programme. Where those structures have collapsed, self-appointed authorities fill the space. Conservatives therefore treat the health of mediating religious institutions as a security question rather than a private one.

Differing Positions

The strongest empirical challenge comes from Robert Pape, whose survey of every suicide attack between 1980 and 2003 found the campaigns concentrated among groups seeking to remove foreign forces from territory they regarded as their own, with the Tamil Tigers — a secular organisation — the leading practitioner in that period.⁴ On this account religion supplies the vocabulary and the recruitment network while occupation supplies the cause, and counter-terrorism aimed at doctrine treats the wrong variable.

A second position, argued by writers in the New Atheist current, runs the opposite way: scriptural texts contain specific commands, believers who act on them are reading correctly, and the moderate believer is the anomaly rather than the norm. Conservatives regard this as poor history, since it cannot explain why the same texts sustained centuries of quiet practice, but it presses a real question about the relationship between doctrine and conduct.

A third holds that “extremism” is a term of political convenience, applied to the violence of the weak and withheld from the violence of states. Its proponents point to counter-radicalisation programmes that flagged schoolchildren, and argue that the category expands to cover dissent whenever a government finds that useful.

References

1. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), trans. William Popple.
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J. Dodsley, 1790); the phrase “armed doctrine” is from Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796).
3. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (University of Chicago Press, 1952).
4. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005).