Here's my question: when it comes to religiously motivated (or religiously justified/rationalized) terrorism, regardless of which major faith is involved, have there been any non-fundamentalist religiously motivated terrorists? Any in the XXth and XXIst Centuries? (And no, I'm not limiting this question to the US. Do non-fundamentalists do these things?)
Oh, yes. An example which is particularly salient to me right now: the IRA. On Sat I took a course for emergency response volunteers, and one of the things they noted to us was that we were never, ever, ever to "self-deploy" to the scene of a disaster, because the technique, premiered by the IRA, of setting off one bomb, waiting for the ambulance crews and firefighters to arrive, then setting off the other, to kill as many civilian first-responders as possible. Bombs being too obvious, they and other terrorist orgs moved on to creating crises which looked like accidents or natural disasters to "attract emergency resources" into a blast radius.
The IRA defines itself as nationalist and ethnic, not religious; they don't claim to be motivated by the dictates of their god. They clearly aren't fundamentalists.
But the ethnicity they are fighting for the ascendency of is, in the field, strongly, or even primarily, identified as that of Catholics as opposed to Protestants. It's about religion-as-culture instead of religion-as-belief-system.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting how the Protestant majority in this country terrorized the Catholic minority in ther early years of the 20th cen. I'm not sure it was that century or just over it into the previous that a group of Protestants here in Boston got themselves convinced that the local Ursuline convent (in Somerville, MA) was killing babies in the basement or some such, so showed up one night and burned it to the ground.
So, yeah, I don't think "fundamentalism" gets the whole of the rap. [Palm buffer too small for more examples.]
(I deleted the anonymous copy of this comment on the assumption that you posted it accidentally, once I noticed this copy.)
"religion-as-culture instead of religion-as-belief-system"
I had been thinking of the Troubles in Ireland as having been more political than religious, despite having been aware of the Protestant-vs-Catholic aspect. A good thing about exposing my ignorance: sometimes I get educated as a result. And as examples go, that's a pretty significant one, considering its duration.
"So, yeah, I don't think 'fundamentalism' gets the whole of the rap"
I thought it would, but didn't know. My first hypothesis is rebutted. Thank you. My secondary hypothesis, that even without being a necessary precondition fundamentalism makes terrorism more likely, I'm still wondering about.
The other examples of patterns of terror without an obvious religious-fundamentalism alignment that come to mind are systemic uses of violence by whites to keep PoC afraid (by organizations such as the KKK, and spontaneously arising out of the culture as a whole), and gay-bashing (amplified, I think, by vitriolic anti-gay preaching, but I suspect often carried out by not-especially-churchy types). OT1H, I think that the former stems (to the extent that it wasn't originally economic[1]) from a "racial purity" meme that can legitimately be characterized a racial/racist/racialist fundamentalism; and the second stems from pervasive gender-essentialist (gender fundamentalist) memes in our society -- I did observe that there are more kinds of fundamentalism than religious. OTOH, I'm waiting for the ref in the replay booth to tell me whether classifying those as fundamentalism-based is going to get me a moving-the-goalposts penalty. (In both of those cases I get the impression[2] that the religious justifications serve, rather than cause, the racialist/gender fundamentalism.)
I do see the same "it's all really simple, here are a few absolute and inflexible rules, and everyone who refuses to enforce these rules for me is evil" pattern in the cluster of racist memes that seems (to me) to be connected to acts of racist terrorism, and in patterns of gay-bashing, bombing gay bars, etc., so I'm inclined to call them instances of fundamentalism. I just need to make sure that I'm fitting my hypothesis to the world, not reinterpreting the world to fit my hypothesis.
[1] To some extent, early post-slavery terrorist and exploitative racists "had to" do things to keep African-Americans "in their [economic] place" to avoid having familiar economic structures come crashing down around their ears once [explicit] slavery was taken away. Replacing slavery-qua-slavery with systems that kept lots of African-Americans incarcerated and then using prison labour, and using racial terrorism to keep African-Americans from challenging those and other institutions effectively, allowed some of the preceding economic structures that had relied on slavery to persist. I don't think that's the whole story, but AFAICT it was a large factor, and made it harder for the other factors to fade out over time as they should have.
[2] Subject to the usual "not an historian nor an anthropologist" gaps in my knowledge, of course.
(no subject)
Oh, yes. An example which is particularly salient to me right now: the IRA. On Sat I took a course for emergency response volunteers, and one of the things they noted to us was that we were never, ever, ever to "self-deploy" to the scene of a disaster, because the technique, premiered by the IRA, of setting off one bomb, waiting for the ambulance crews and firefighters to arrive, then setting off the other, to kill as many civilian first-responders as possible. Bombs being too obvious, they and other terrorist orgs moved on to creating crises which looked like accidents or natural disasters to "attract emergency resources" into a blast radius.
The IRA defines itself as nationalist and ethnic, not religious; they don't claim to be motivated by the dictates of their god. They clearly aren't fundamentalists.
But the ethnicity they are fighting for the ascendency of is, in the field, strongly, or even primarily, identified as that of Catholics as opposed to Protestants. It's about religion-as-culture instead of religion-as-belief-system.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting how the Protestant majority in this country terrorized the Catholic minority in ther early years of the 20th cen. I'm not sure it was that century or just over it into the previous that a group of Protestants here in Boston got themselves convinced that the local Ursuline convent (in Somerville, MA) was killing babies in the basement or some such, so showed up one night and burned it to the ground.
So, yeah, I don't think "fundamentalism" gets the whole of the rap. [Palm buffer too small for more examples.]
(no subject)
"religion-as-culture instead of religion-as-belief-system"
I had been thinking of the Troubles in Ireland as having been more political than religious, despite having been aware of the Protestant-vs-Catholic aspect. A good thing about exposing my ignorance: sometimes I get educated as a result. And as examples go, that's a pretty significant one, considering its duration.
"So, yeah, I don't think 'fundamentalism' gets the whole of the rap"
I thought it would, but didn't know. My first hypothesis is rebutted. Thank you. My secondary hypothesis, that even without being a necessary precondition fundamentalism makes terrorism more likely, I'm still wondering about.
The other examples of patterns of terror without an obvious religious-fundamentalism alignment that come to mind are systemic uses of violence by whites to keep PoC afraid (by organizations such as the KKK, and spontaneously arising out of the culture as a whole), and gay-bashing (amplified, I think, by vitriolic anti-gay preaching, but I suspect often carried out by not-especially-churchy types). OT1H, I think that the former stems (to the extent that it wasn't originally economic[1]) from a "racial purity" meme that can legitimately be characterized a racial/racist/racialist fundamentalism; and the second stems from pervasive gender-essentialist (gender fundamentalist) memes in our society -- I did observe that there are more kinds of fundamentalism than religious. OTOH, I'm waiting for the ref in the replay booth to tell me whether classifying those as fundamentalism-based is going to get me a moving-the-goalposts penalty. (In both of those cases I get the impression[2] that the religious justifications serve, rather than cause, the racialist/gender fundamentalism.)
I do see the same "it's all really simple, here are a few absolute and inflexible rules, and everyone who refuses to enforce these rules for me is evil" pattern in the cluster of racist memes that seems (to me) to be connected to acts of racist terrorism, and in patterns of gay-bashing, bombing gay bars, etc., so I'm inclined to call them instances of fundamentalism. I just need to make sure that I'm fitting my hypothesis to the world, not reinterpreting the world to fit my hypothesis.
[1] To some extent, early post-slavery terrorist and exploitative racists "had to" do things to keep African-Americans "in their [economic] place" to avoid having familiar economic structures come crashing down around their ears once [explicit] slavery was taken away. Replacing slavery-qua-slavery with systems that kept lots of African-Americans incarcerated and then using prison labour, and using racial terrorism to keep African-Americans from challenging those and other institutions effectively, allowed some of the preceding economic structures that had relied on slavery to persist. I don't think that's the whole story, but AFAICT it was a large factor, and made it harder for the other factors to fade out over time as they should have.
[2] Subject to the usual "not an historian nor an anthropologist" gaps in my knowledge, of course.