ISIS and the Psychology of Terror

Last week I published an essay on The Table, the online blog of Biola’s Center for Christian Thought. The essay takes up a theme I began awhile ago on this blog: the relation between theology, death anxiety, and terror management theory. I’ve been surprised at how little TMT has been engaged for gaining understanding about the violence that swirls around us. I admit it’s a bit challenging to critique forms of religion from within the practice of religion. But it is necessary for us to do that today, whether we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or whatever. We are all prone to destructive uses of religion.

Here’s a paragraph from that essay:

The Buffer of Religion

Through the development of culture, human beings provide ourselves all sorts of avenues for attaining significance, for achieving a level of self-confidence or self-esteem, which functions as a buffer against the otherwise overwhelming death anxiety haunting us just under the surface. We develop cultural and religious worldviews to buffer against that anxiety. We construct immortality projects and create immortality ideologies, which persuade us of the enduring significance of our lives—enduring beyond the limits of physical death.5 For the vast majority of us, the immortality projects we join or adopt are mostly harmless, and some can be rather productive. Religion is, of course, the most common and prominent of our immortality projects.And this is not to say, by the way, that all religions and their content are false, it is simply to argue that they do perform this function. But religion, particularly when it becomes religious ideology—a hardened, dogmatic system of belief that has a primarily anxiety-denying and worldview-defending mechanism, can be a particularly insidious medium through which death anxiety is buffered.

You can hop over to The Table to read the essay in full.

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