Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

Like Israel’s Jewish cosmic warriors, these Christian cosmic warriors believe that the Jews must rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in order to usher in the return of the Messiah. Of course, as Christians, they believe that the Messiah is Jesus Christ and that when he returns to earth the Jews will have to either convert to Christianity or be damned. But remarkably, the last act of this cosmic drama seems not to matter much to either the Jews or the Christians in this messianic coalition. That is because what binds these two very different religious communities together under a single, transnational, collective identity is not a shared theology but a common cosmic worldview and, more important, a common cosmic foe.