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Following the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 and the massacres of the Israeli population, many media outlets (including social media) have been awkwardly avoiding the topic of religion or have given it a wide berth. In fact, it is not difficult to call a spade a spade:
Hamas is an Islamic terrorist organization with the chartered religiously-motivated goal of wiping out Israel as a Jewish state.
The incompatibility of various supernaturalisms in this region has long been a deeply rooted cause of conflict. In this sense, religion (in this specific case: Islam) is not a negligible feature that is carried along as a harmless spiritual accessory and only leads to violence when misused — even if Islamic is carefully modified to Islamist in order to draw a distinction between a political and a non-political variety. Religion only serves as a camouflage to assert power-political or economic interests, some believe, as if this motivational separation actually existed.
Of course, power politics is the main driver. What else could it be? But it is an integral part of organized religion, which is not a cloak or camouflage, but its ideological core and essence.
As man-made, invented belief systems consisting of commandments and prohibitions that aim to regulate coexistence, the supposedly non-political part of a religion is always just a tool for asserting power. Undemocratically legitimized by supernatural stories, legends and fairy tales that, by definition, are completely unscientific and defy proof. The beliefs are absolute and their interpretation is in the hands of authoritarian religious leaders. Religion and a fundamentalist view of the world are inextricably linked.
Normalization
The benevolent narrative tends to imply the opposite, that there is an ethically acceptable religion in the 21st century that is being harnessed and thus abused by fundamentalists for dishonest purposes. Sometimes accompanied by the naïve idea that terrorists are hiding behind a deviant religiosity. But why should they go to such lengths? Especially if they have to assume that they will then be reprimanded by religious authorities? But they are not.
Let’s get Occam’s Razor out of our mental necessaire and turn to the obvious explanation:
There is no such thing as an apolitical religion. Islam is inherently political, just as Catholicism is inherently political. No two blotting papers fit between Islam and Islamism, between Catholicism and Catholism. And Judaism is no different, of course. That is not fundamentally reprehensible. But religion is not just any old cultural association that is willing or able to adapt its statutes ethically to the social mainstream.
So-called fundamentalism corresponds to the essence of the (three great Abrahamic) religions; the normalization of these illiberal ideologies takes place at the margins, where religion is controlled, tamed but also privileged by the state: in laicist Turkey (incidentally, a perversion of the term laicism), in Israel, in the concordats with the Holy See, in the cooperative models of republic and religion in otherwise largely secular, liberal democracies. These are the actual extreme, i.e. outer fringes of religion that have distanced themselves from the fundamental core.
It is the alliances between republics and religions that normalize unscientific theories about the world, anachronistic social ideas and much more that is harmful via the school system, legal regulations and interpretative sovereignty in society.
Religious fundamentalism is a pleonasm. It is a linguistic and unfortunately successful attempt to trivialize religion and disguise its essence by changing its perspective. There is no such thing as a non-fundamentalist religion. What is referred to as such in Europe is at best spiritual agnosticism and the subsidized cultivation of tradition.
What can be done?
The damage caused by religion in the world is enormous. Terrorism, war, social division, oppression of women, homosexuals, atheists and apostates and much more are often motivated by religion. It is necessary to name the cause of the evil and end the trivialization of religious ideas by ending the state’s cooperation with organized religion.
As long as the political claims of organized religion are honored, the separation of their violent roots will not succeed.
