Krista Tippet on Religious Extremism, with a focus on Islam (from Speaking of Faith)

I recently ready Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett, wrote my key takeaways from the book for the subscribers of my Future of Conflict series.

(Another blog post with all the quotes I pulled out from the book.)

Here’s an insight from Chapter 4 Speaking of Faith (by Krista Tippet of podcast fame).

The chapter deals with the role of religion in political life, addresses religious fundamentalism, and what we can “do about it”.

One of my main takeaways is that many of us on the secular side of things (whether we identify as “spiritual” or not) dismiss the role religion plays so much that we forget how impactful it is for a majority of people. The end result in this behavior is excluding moderate (and presumably positive) religious voices from the mainstream conversation and institutions.

This is bad because it’s much harder to exclude the extremist voices, so they end up dominating.

Her prescription is along the lines of “embrace moderates”, “give people room to grow”, “positive reinforcement”.

Representative Quotes

On how Islam is particularly NOT suited to people (like Islamic extremists) pulling out quotes to prove their point:

Here is the most important point Muslims have pressed home to me: the Qur’an is not meant to be read as words on a page and merely intellectually appropriated. The Qur’an is aurally and inwardly digested. The word Qur’an means “recitation,” but even that word is inadequate. The Qur’an’s intrinsic beauty forms an essential part of its mystery and its message.

Wielding isolated Bible verses to make a point—”proof-texting”—is an irritating but well-worn practice in the part of the Christian world in which I grew up. It is a new phenomenon in Islam. After 9/11, non-Muslims couldn’t know the strangeness and violence in the act of ripping and pronouncing verses of the Qur’an out of context.

The importance of creating space and grasping the whole of a religious tradition, not demonizing it:

I don’t examine the great virtues of Islam in order to excuse cancers that have grown at its heart in our time, such as terrorist and sectarian violence and a virulent anti-Semitism. But in order to imagine a future in which those malignancies are not definitive, we must see Islam in the sweep of its history and theology.

Eboo Patel on why we create opportunities for young people to feel powerful:

Young people want to impact the world. They want their footprint on Earth, and they’re going to do it somehow. And if the only way that they get a chance to do that is by destroying things, then we shouldn’t be surprised if that’s the path they take.

So when people say to me, “Oh, Eboo, you know, you run this sweet little organization called the Interfaith Youth Core, and you do such nice things, you bring kids together,”

I say, “Yeah, you know, there’s another youth organization out there. It’s called Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda’s been built over the past twenty-five years with lots of money and with lots of strategy and with lots of ideas of how you recruit young people and get them to think that this is the best way they can impact the world.

And finally! The missing link between religious extremism, white supremacy, gang violence, and life coaching.

(aka the modern roots of fundamentalism)

From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, before fundamentalism had become a household word, the religious historian Martin Marty directed a groundbreaking study of fundamentalisms in twenty-three religions around the world.

Fundamentalism is never “old-time religion,” he says. It is a modern phenomenon—by which he, as a historian, means roughly the last two hundred years.

It is always reactive, born when there is an assault on values that people have and are uncertain about. And around the world in our time, he says, people are having trouble with identity—what do I believe, whom do I trust, who trusts me?

And what to about extremism? For me this applies to white supremacy or gangbanging just as well as religious fundamentalism:

As the specter of the fundamentalist religious identity of Al Qaeda has come to overshadow international affairs and identities, Marty has this advice:

Don’t lump the faithful and fundamentalists together in any tradition.
Don’t demonize any group of religious people as an enemy.

There is great diversity whenever large numbers of human beings are involved. Do all that you can to help them show their varieties and make it easier for them to be diverse.

Make it easier for moderates in all of these movements to be moderates.

In my language: Make it easier for them to escape the clutches of the conflict entrepreneurs.

As much as we want to, we cannot and should ignore religion:

The reasoned and moderate Muslim center will not be secular, nor will the Christian, Hindu, Mormon, or Jewish center. Developing eyes and ears for moderation does not mean denying the importance of religion in human life. It means inviting and enabling the devout to bring the best of their tradition to bear in the world.

and how ignoring moderates killed the Oslo peace process:

They helped me see anew why we in the West need to learn to bracket religion in rather than out of our view of the world. My Palestinian and Israeli conversation partners these past years, good people all, don’t agree on much. But they have told me with one voice that the Oslo peace process failed in part because it attempted to bracket out religious instincts on all sides of the conflict. This only succeeded in marginalizing moderate religious voices.

Religious extremists insert themselves into the process in the Holy Land and elsewhere whether they are invited or not. To regret and ignore the volatile role of religion in the contemporary world will get us nowhere

And finally, Krista quotes De Toqueville on how religious feelings, outside of the political process, were once essential in the USA:

Religion in America takes no part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere, faith and religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of Republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation into every rank of society.

Why is this the case? Well, I haven’t read Democracy in America in a long time. But since he’s NOT talking about politicizing religious values, he must be talking about religion as the moral foundation for democracy, religious values in social life, and moral values as a check on individualism (á la Moral Tribes). That’s just a guess though.