Reconsidering Religious Radicalism: An Introduction to the Summer 2017 Issue

At an all-hands-on-deck meeting of National Security Staff in late February, newly arrived National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster reportedly told his staff that the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” is inaccurate and unhelpful. According to news reports of the meeting, McMaster argued that use of the phrase hampers U.S. counterterrorist cooperation with key Muslim-majority allies because ISIS and its ilk practice and preach a perversion of Islam (Perez 2017). In other words, terrorism is un-Islamic, not radically Islamic.

McMaster’s comments stood in sharp contrast to the views of his predecessor, Michael Flynn. Flynn has a well-documented history of statements highly critical of Muslims, drawing a direct, causal link between Islam and terrorism (see Danner 2017). In July 2016, while serving as an advisor to the Trump campaign, Flynn tweeted “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” sharing a video that presents a unnuanced, uncharitable, monolithic view of Islam and makes no mention of the complex calculus of factors that motivate terroristic violence. The following month Flynn gave a speech in Dallas where he claimed “Islam is a political ideology” and likened it to a “malignant cancer” that has “metastasized.”

Throughout the presidential campaign, Flynn and advisors who shared his views shaped the messaging and policy proposals of the future commander-in-chief. Trump routinely used the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” and berated Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for avoiding phrases that directly implicated the Islamic faith in acts of violence carried out by self-professed Muslims.

In December 2015, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on” (see Davidson 2015). In February 2016, Flynn joined the Trump campaign, and in July Trump tweeted an endorsement of Flynn’s book The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies.

Even though Flynn was forced to resign after only three weeks as National Security Advisor, it would appear that his views, rather than McMaster’s, continue to hold sway with President Trump. Indeed, the day after McMaster addressed the NSC staff for the first time, Trump promised the boisterous crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his administration will “keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country.”

Why Trump repeatedly invokes “hell” when discussing Islam, heaven only knows.

Trump’s use of the phrase “radical Islam” of course involves a political calculation but it also evidences assumptions about the nature of Islam, and perhaps of religion generally. It would seem that for Trump, “radical” groups like ISIS display, contra McMaster, not a perversion of Islam, but true Islam. Our English word “radical” is derived from the Latin radix, meaning “root.” For Trump, at the root of Islam is a dark, menacing, totalitarian ideology that clashes perpetually with Western civilization.

This assumption proves faulty for myriad reasons, not least for ignoring the fact that many violent extremists are not particularly pious or well-versed in Islamic doctrine or history—and that the vast majority of devout and learned Muslims are horrified by the actions of terrorists who claim their faith. Fear of Muslims is irrational.

While Trump’s views of Islam may be particularly salient and problematic, they are symptomatic of a broader problem: the widespread view that some or even all religions, if interpreted too literally or followed to intensely, invariably promote violence or are at least hostile to the pluralism that characterizes life in many societies today.

One hears traces of this viewpoint in academic discussions, policy debates, and public conversation, especially in the liberal West. Religion may not “poison everything,” as the late Christopher Hitchens argued, but devout, orthodox, theologically conservative, politically engaged, or in any other way “radical” expression of religion, is poisonous. Faith is okay as long as the faithful don’t take their beliefs, especially their moral and soteriological teachings, too seriously. As Richard John Neuhaus liked to quip, for many liberal critics “the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic.” To probe and problematize common assumptions about the relationship between religion and violence—or to take up Trump’s charge to “figure out what the hell is going on”— the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies (CIRIS) held a conference at Clare College, Cambridge in May 2016 on the theme of “Reconsidering Religious Radicalism.” We were delighted to partner with three other Cambridge-based organizations: Cambridge Interfaith Programme, the Woolf Institute, and the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics. The conference was made possible in part by the generous support of the School of Arts and Humanities at Cambridge University.

What brought all of our organizations together was a shared concern regarding the use of the term “radical” and the faulty and even harmful assumptions that often inform its usage. As several articles in this issue convincingly demonstrate, seemingly radical instantiations of Islam and other world religions do not invariably lead to discrimination and violence. Religious conservatives can be political liberals. Theological exclusivists can be social inclusivists—precisely because of, not in spite of, their theological convictions. One of our conference speakers, Usama Hasan, memorably went so far as to say “radicalism is good.”

There is certainly a danger in going too far in the opposite direction. We cannot fully exonerate religious ideas and institutions, divorcing them from the discussion about religion and discrimination, injustice, and violence. And it is not unproblematic when government officials, like McMaster, declare what constitutes a legitimate interpretation of an ancient, complex, diverse religious tradition.

Given the complexity of the subject at hand, our “RRR” conference was intentionally interdisciplinary, bringing together historians, theologians, ethicists, and social scientists. And recognizing that “religious radicalism” is not merely a challenge in the contemporary Muslim Middle East, we explored the contours of the topic across a variety of regions, religions, and time periods.

This special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs offers some of the best papers from the conference:

Nicholas Adams points out that suspicions about religious groups, and the legal measures to control their influence that accompanies such suspicions, has a long history. Adams points to three headings under which we might understand our anxieties about religious radicalism, arguing that we must pay more attention to systems of classification, to questions of scale, and to the temporal horizons of the measures proposed in response.

Aidan Cottrell-Boyce notes that the desire to promote religious conformity often emboldens groups that are defined by an attitude of “resistance.” He argues that such “resistance identities” create a catalyst through which the hegemonic majority becomes more belligerent towards—and more fearful of—the minority, whilst the minority becomes more heartened by—and more attached to—their modes of resistance. Those groups that are characterized by resistance identities, in short, are difficult to corral into conformity. Cottrell-Boyce identifies and describes two scenarios, one historical (early modern Puritans) and one contemporary (Salafist-Jihadists), within which this dynamic has played out, highlighting the utility of Uncertainty-Identity theory in exploring the gestation of these identities and behaviors.

Ben Fulford explores the accounts of religious identity offered by John Locke and Yale theologian Hans Frei, arguing that Frei’s analysis suggests that it is when a religious community is most radical—by returning to renew itself from its roots—that it may have most to offer to a pluralistic, secular society. In contrast stands the approach of contemporary Western nations where the state, informed by Locke, pressures religious communities to moderate the particularities and complexities of their traditions in order to present their conformity to liberal democracy and values. Such domestication, Fulford argues, may well subvert the capacities of religious communities and individuals to draw creatively on the resources of their traditions in order to participate constructively in political life in ways that we might not anticipate.

Erin Hughes interrogates religious radicalism by examining Iraq’s Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac population from the Iraq War through the rise of the Islamic State. Taking the perspective of those persecuted suggests the terminology of religious radicalism is wanting. Affirming ISIS’s actions as religiously motivated genocide and terrorism, Hughes suggests ISIS’s terror is equally a national movement. To render the term sociologically useful in the current Iraqi context, Hughes suggests we can understand ISIS’s religious radicalism as a manifestation of nationalism.

Göran Larsson analyzes how two contrasting and diametrically different Muslim voices conceptualize “the apostate.” He compares a short article published in the ISIS magazine Dabiq to a text by Sheikh Mohammad al-Yaqoubi entitled Refuting ISIS: A Rebuttal of Its Religious and Ideological Foundations. By emphasizing the intractability of such theological arguments, Larsson concludes that while the scholarly study of religions has a responsibility to analyze who is speaking and who is silenced and under what circumstances particular opinions are being voiced, academics have good scientific and practical reasons to shy away from making evaluations or judgements about who has God on his or her side.

Focusing on the context of the German Islam Conference—Germany’s first government initiative promoting dialogue between German government representatives and German Muslims—Tobias Müller traces the influence of categories like “radicalization” and “extremism” in the creation of the Conference and how this has led to the enshrining of a problematic language of differentiation. Müller argues that this has created a selection bias in the government’s engagement with the Islamic community in Germany which itself perpetuates certain dilemmas haunting government policy, including the reiteration of Islam as both problem and solution and the reproduction of cultural differences the German Islam Conference purportedly seeks to overcome.

Matthew Rowley’s paper opens by comparing John Winthrop and Roger Williams. Though both were fervent Christians, Williams was led to political pluralism, while Winthrop endorsed political exclusivism. Rowley argues that it was the different content of their theologies, not the similar radicalism that characterized their religious conviction, that determined the very different political and social views. Rowley suggests that greater attention to Williams’ theology in relation to his politics evidences the complex relationship between beliefs and coercion and indicates that solutions to today’s problems might lie in the discovery, recovery, or re-articulation of robust faith.

Ryan Williams begins by noting an important discrepancy in public policy concerning Islamic extremism. Whereas some recent counter-terrorism policies and practices emphasize distrust, Williams argues for an expanded, sociologically informed conceptual framework for thinking about security and insecurity. He highlights emerging best practices among European prison and probation practitioners, built on trust-building, equality, and goals oriented to contributing to the well-being of individuals as citizens.

Taken together this package of articles convincingly demonstrates that maligning all religion as poison or a particular religion as a cancer is profoundly inaccurate and unhelpful. Faith is complex. Even in its seemingly most “radical” forms, faith can be and often has been a powerful force for freedom and toleration. These articles thus present an important challenge to popular yet problematic assumptions about the relationship between religion and violence—a scholarly project that, in the current political environment, is a radical act.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judd Birdsall

Judd Birdsall is the Managing Director of the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies (CIRIS) at Clare College, Cambridge, and the Executive Director of the Transatlantic Policy Network on Religion and Diplomacy. He is also an editorial fellow and frequent contributor at The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

Drew Collins

Drew Collins is an Associate Research Scholar at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and a Lecturer of Divinity and Humanities at Yale University.