In purely religious battles waged in divine time and with heavenly rewards, there is no need to compromise goals. There is also no need to contend with society’s laws and limitations when one is obeying a higher authority. In spiritualizing violence, religion gives the act of violence remarkable power.

Ironically, the reverse is also true: terrorism can empower religion. Although sporadic acts of terrorism do not lead to the establishment of new religious states, they make the political potency of religious ideology impossible to ignore. The first wave of religious activism, from the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978 to the emergence of Hamas during the Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s, focused on religious nationalism and the vision of individual religious states. Now religious activism has an increasingly global vision. The Christian militia, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo, and the Al Qaeda network all target what they regard as a repressive and secular form of global culture and control.

Part of the attraction of religious ideologies is that they are so personal. They impart a sense of redemption and dignity to those who uphold them, often men who feel marginalized from public life. One can view their efforts to demonize their enemies and embrace ideas of cosmic war as attempts at ennoblement and empowerment. Such efforts would be poignant if they were not so horribly destructive.

Yet they are not just personal acts. These violent efforts of symbolic empowerment have an effect beyond whatever personal satisfaction and feelings of potency they impart to those who support and conduct them. The very act of killing on behalf of a moral code is a political statement. Such acts break the state’s monopoly on morally sanctioned killing. By putting the right to take life in their own hands, the perpetrators of religious violence make a daring claim of power on behalf of the powerless—a basis of legitimacy for public order other than that on which the secular state relies.

Coincidence of Globalization and Modernization

These recent acts of religious violence are occurring in a way different from the various forms of holy warfare that have occurred throughout history. They are responses to a contemporary theme in the world’s political and social life: globalization. The World Trade Center symbolized bin Laden’s hatred of two aspects of secular government—a certain kind of modernization and a certain kind of globalization— even though the Al Qaeda network was itself both modern and transnational. Its members were often highly sophisticated and technically skilled professionals, and its organization was composed of followers of various nationalities who moved effortlessly from place to place with no obvious nationalist agenda or allegiance. In a sense, they were not opposed to modernity and globalization, so long as it fit their own design. But they loathed the Western-style modernity that they perceived secular globalization was forcing upon them.

Some 23 years earlier, during the Islamic revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini rallied the masses with the similar notion that the United States was forcing its economic exploitation, political institutions, and secular culture on an unknowing Islamic society. The Ayatollah accused urban Iranians of having succumbed to “Westoxification”—an inebriation with Western culture and ideas. The many strident movements of religious nationalism that have erupted around the world in the more than two decades following the Iranian revolution have echoed this cry. This anti-Westernism has at heart an opposition to a certain kind of modernism that is secular, individualistic, and skeptical. Yet, in a curious way, by accepting the modern notion of the nation-state and adopting the technological and financial instruments of modern society, many of these movements of religious nationalism have claimed a kind of modernity on their own behalf.

Religious politics could be regarded as an opportunistic infection that has set in at the present weakened stage of the secular nation-state. Globalization has crippled secular nationalism and the nation-state in several ways. It has weakened them economically, not only through the global reach of transnational businesses, but also by the transnational nature of their labor supply, currency, and financial instruments. Globalization has eroded their sense of national identity and unity through the expansion of media and communications, technology, and popular culture, and through the unchallenged military power of the United States. Some of the most intense movements for ethnic and religious nationalism have arisen in states where local leaders have felt exploited by the global economy, unable to gain military leverage against what they regard as corrupt leaders promoted by the United States, and invaded by images of US popular culture on television, the Internet, and motion pictures.

Other aspects of globalization—the emergence of multicultural societies through global diasporas of peoples and cultures and the suggestion that global military and political control might fashion a “new world order”—has also elicited fear. Bin Laden and other Islamic activists have exploited this specter, and it has caused many concerned citizens in the Islamic world to see the US military response to the September 11 attacks as an imperialistic venture and a bully’s crusade, rather than the righteous wrath of an injured victim. When US leaders included the invasion and occupation of Iraq as part of its “war against terror,” the operation was commonly portrayed in the Muslim world as a ploy for the United States to expand its global reach.

This image of a sinister US role in creating a new world order of globalization is also feared in some quarters of the West. Within the United States, for example, the Christian Identity movement and Christian militia organizations have been alarmed over what they imagine to be a massive global conspiracy of liberal US politicians and the United Nations to control the world. Timothy McVeigh’s favorite book, The Turner Diaries, is based on the premise that the United States has already unwittingly succumbed to a conspiracy of global control from which it needs to be liberated through terrorist actions and guerilla bands. In Japan, a similar conspiracy theory motivated leaders of the Aum Shinrikyo religious movement to predict a catastrophic World War III, and attempted to simulate Armageddon with their 1995 nerve gas attack in a Tokyo subway train.