God's Warriors

Religious violence remains an urgent problem for countries around the world. Despite this, scholars and analysts continue to struggle to understand the intersection of religion and violence and devise effective counterextremism policies.

God's Warriors offers a novel explanation for religious violence in the modern world, challenging a common assumption that such violence stems primarily from embattled, oppressed, and marginalized religious minority groups who seek to assert their rights vis-a-vis majorities. Instead, argues Nilay Saiya, religious violence most commonly arises from dominant and privileged religious majorities. When historically and culturally dominant faith traditions receive special treatment from the state in the form of social and legal privileges and rhetorical support from politicians, extremists from these majoritarian communities are emboldened to target minorities. The more states favor dominant religious communities and discriminate against minority ones, the more majoritarian violence they produce. This "paradox of privilege" results from a global crisis of political secularism afflicting much of the world today.

Drawing on examples from the world's major religious traditions--Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism--Saiya's theory reshapes our understanding of the sources of religious violence in our era and carries important policy implications for decisionmakers.