We need to Stop Pretending Religion Is Either Everything or Nothing in Violent Radicalisation

 

We need to Stop Pretending Religion Is Either Everything or Nothing in Violent Radicalisation

 

Adis Duderija

For two decades, policymakers and pundits have swung between two extremes when explaining violent radicalization: either religion explains everything—a sweeping “war of ideas” narrative—or religion explains nothing, reducing faith talk to camouflage for grievances or group dynamics. A recently published volume, Rethinking Religion and Radicalization, edited by Michele Grossman and H. A. Hellyer, dismantles both positions. Its message is clear: if we want realistic analysis and effective policy, we must take religious motivations seriously without making them exclusive causes.

The editors’ introduction sets the tone. Grossman and Hellyer urge readers to see religion not only as content—beliefs, rituals, identities—but also as social practice, affect, and political mobilisation. They frame religion as a system that seeks to “connect with the transcendent … and also make that transcendence immanent” in lived worlds (p. 4). Their conceptual triad—identification or affiliation; action or practice; experiences, beliefs and ideas—offers a richer lens than the reductive binaries that dominate policy discourse. They also flag a persistent “normative secular bias” (pp. 5, 15), which has fostered a “hermeneutics of suspicion” toward religious motivations, and highlight the growing prominence of far-right milieus that co-opt religious symbols to construct “transnational cultural-religious identities” (p. 12).

Among the standout contributions is Lorne Dawson’s essay in Section I. Dawson cautions against interpretive dichotomies that minimize religiosity’s role—”between the rational and irrational, public and private, political and religious, [and] social processes and ideology” (p. 18). His argument is not that religion causes terrorism, but that analysts must recognize “the sui generis nature of religious motivations” in radicalization processes (p. 18). Ignoring this dimension produces thin theories and brittle policies.

The chapter begins by naming the biases that distort our view. A religious normative bias insists that “real” religion is peaceful, so violent actors cannot be truly religious; a secular normative bias assumes religion is irrational or epiphenomenal, so the “real” drivers must lie elsewhere in psychology or politics. Both are comforting, and both are wrong. Social scientists cannot simply decree that a jihadist’s religiosity is insincere because it offends liberal norms, nor can they wave away the role of doctrine and transcendence because these are hard to operationalize. The fact that most terrorists are psychologically “normal,” and that many display scant formal theological training, does not invalidate the authenticity or salience of lived religion—the messy, aspirational, often inconsistent faith practice that motivates ordinary believers and zealots alike. (Some) media and pundits  may prefer tidy labels; reality is untidy.

This critique culminates in three interpretive mistakes the chapter dissects with care. First, researchers routinely equate limited religious literacy with limited religiosity. That confuses orthodoxy with piety. Across traditions, intense conviction and sacrificial action do not require doctrinal mastery; they require meaningful worldmaking. It is analytically unserious to treat a perpetrator’s thin scriptural exegesis as proof that his driving motives are “really” social or political. Second, analysts implicitly impose Western privatized models of religion—the post-Enlightenment separation of faith from politics—onto movements that explicitly reject that separation. If your conceptual toolbox presumes religion is interior, apolitical, and therapeutic, you will misread actors who experience it as totalizing, public, and juridical. Third, the field vacillates between ideology-only accounts (“bad ideas cause bad actions”) and social-psychology-only accounts (“group processes produce violence; ideas are post hoc rationalizations”). Both caricature the causal landscape. In practice, people radicalize through a reciprocal interplay of belief formation and behavioural alignment, nested within networks, rituals, and moral emotions. Ideas provide goals and justifications; groups provide belonging and pressure. You will not defeat one without understanding the other.

A more adequate approach recognises religious ideology as a collective action frame—a narrative scaffolding that dignifies grievances, names enemies, prescribes duties, and situates personal pain within a cosmic story. That story supplies ultimate meanings (salvation, martyrdom, sanctified justice) and non-negotiable obligations (“what God demands”), converting ambivalence into resolve. The chapter’s examples—foreign fighters consuming long religio-political tracts, lone actors steeped in textual traditions and digital subcultures—illustrate that moral seriousness, not mere nihilism, often animates violent actors. This is uncomfortable but clarifying. If you think they are only cynics or dupes, you will misjudge their staying power, underestimate their appeal, and design interventions that treat zeal as a misunderstanding rather than a commitment.

Importantly, the authors never reduce violence to scripture. They insist on a dialectic: word, thought, deed. Religious claims do not float free of context; they are embedded in networks, rituals, social ecologies, and macro-structures that channel who hears what, how often, and with which feedback. A charismatic preacher matters, but so do prison friendships, online enclaves, algorithmic reinforcement, and the rituals that fuse identity (“who we are”) with embodied practice (“what we do”). The upshot is not that religion is “the cause,” but that religion is causally consequential in distinctive ways—and that we must investigate those ways empirically rather than presuming them away.

What follows for policy? First, we need to do away with the lazy binaries. Stop treating “religion” and “politics” as mutually exclusive categories in radicalization analysis. Many movements collapse the distinction; our models must accommodate that collapse. Second, baseline religious literacy should be integral to P/CVE teams. Analysts who cannot parse the difference between quietist Salafism, activist Islamism, and Salafi-jihadism are condemned to overgeneralize, alienate communities, and misallocate scarce resources. Third, measure the interplay—not just belief prevalence, but how beliefs travel through specific social networks, with which ritual intensifiers and moral emotions (fusion, outrage, honor, shame), and how they authorize violence against out-groups. If your dashboard is all attitudinal surveys and none of the texture of transmission, you will miss the moments when posture becomes practice.

Fourth, interventions must be normatively serious. Offering “alternative narratives” that sound like marketing copy will not outcompete a worldview that promises cosmic significance and eternal reward. You need credible, theologically grounded counters—made by trusted religious authorities, not government spokespeople—to challenge justificatory premises. Pair those with social scaffolding (mentorship, belonging, status) that offers dignity without sacrificial violence. Fifth, resist the impulse to pathologize. Medicalizing radicalization (“they’re sick; treat them”) and vaporizing it into ideology (“they’re brainwashed; debunk them”) both evade agency. People make costly, purposive choices under uncertainty. Your task is to understand those choices well enough to alter the opportunity structure and the moral calculus.

The chapter also cautions against stochastic simplifications—the habit of labelling perpetrators “lone wolves,” as if radicalization were self-generated. Even solitary attackers are rarely self-radicalized; they are network-radicalized, often through online communities that supply identity, technique, and validation. Treating them as isolated aberrations blinds investigators to upstream ecosystems, weakens prevention, and reinforces pernicious double standards (white lone actor vs. Muslim conspirator). If radicalization is socially embedded, then platform governance, content moderation, and counter-enclave strategies become part of the P/CVE toolkit, alongside community partnerships and targeted off-ramps.

Critically, the chapter’s argument is not a plea for cultural determinism. It does not say scriptures “cause” bombs. It says that religion matters as religion—as a domain of meaning with its own grammar—and that ignoring that domain yields thin theories and brittle policies. A mature analysis will therefore triangulate: beliefs (what the actors say and study), belongings (who they bond with and how), and structures (which institutions and macro-dynamics amplify or dampen trajectories). When you see moral passion, do not rush to pathologize or trivialize it; analyse how it legitimates violence in particular communities, against particular out-groups, under particular conditions. Then design context-specific strategies that lower the moral and logistical feasibility of violence while respecting legitimate religious freedoms.

The conclusion is bracing and practical. We must start where the actors start: with their own accounts of why they act. That does not mean believing everything they say; it means testing their claims, not pre-emptively discarding them. Treat religious motivations with the same analytic seriousness you grant nationalist or revolutionary ones. Build mixed-methods research programs that can trace the dialectic of conviction and conduct from first contact to final act—from the podcast to the prayer circle to the procurement list. Equip analysts with the comparative religious literacy to avoid collapsing diverse traditions into a single threat profile. And in policy, abandon the performative “values campaigns” that confuse branding with persuasion; invest instead in trusted interlocutors, credible theological rebuttals, peer network disruption, and positive identity pathways that offer meaning without bloodshed.

In short we need to stop pretending religion is either everything or nothing. It is something—something distinctive—and our frameworks must reflect that. If we keep policing radicalization with models that erase the transcendent, we will continue to misunderstand the militants who live by it and misdesign the interventions meant to stop them. The cost of our conceptual comfort is analytical failure. The remedy is intellectual courage: to reconsider our biases, refine our categories, and do the empirical work that lets us see religion as believers do—powerfully, perilously, and, crucially, explainably.