Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

Religion, of course, can be just as effective in promoting nonviolence and civil disobedience, as was the case with America’s civil rights movement or India’s movement for independence from Britain. But for movements that operate in societies where democratic institutions are either wholly absent or brutally repressed by the ruling regime, countries where legitimate opposition is simply not allowed, collective violence may be the sole means for a social movement to pursue its goals of radical social transformation, as Latin America’s Liberation Theology movement discovered. Developed by a handful of politically active priests throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Liberation Theology relied on familiar Christian symbols and metaphors (the Eucharist, the suffering of Christ, the coming of the Kingdom of God) to unite the impoverished and downtrodden of Latin America under a single collective identity and encourage them to rise up and challenge the accepted social order. By casting Jesus as a poor, illiterate revolutionary who fought the ruling powers of his time on behalf of the oppressed and marginalized, Liberation Theology sought to redefine the Gospel story in purely sociopolitical terms, as a means of fighting back against the ruthless, U.S.-backed regimes in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Yet when these regimes responded to the Liberation Theology movement with indiscriminate and unrestrained state-sanctioned violence, when soldiers began raping and...