Fundamentalist violence: political violence and political religion in modern conflict

Abstract

There is more to modern ‘political religions’ than political ritual and religious semantics as is normally assumed with regard to National Socialism and other totalitarian regimes. Ideologies and political style do matter, but they do not provide the answer as to how ‘dead certainty’ was achieved about the ultimate mission. The terror of the revolutionary ‘furies’ and the ‘sacrifice’ of national revivalism provide a historical trajectory for the proposition that in the modern world it is not the violence religion, but the religion that is in the violence. Fundamentalist violence ‐ from the Holocaust to the attacks of 11 September 2001 ‐ must therefore be seen as the touchstone for an economy of the sacred in a secularised world. Thus, the ‘morality of violence’ (Sorel) feeds into acts of political terrorism and genocide not just by way of legitimation but also as a proof of the transcendent quality of political violence itself.