The Tsarnaev brothers’ violence is not just a religious phenomenon, but an American one.

Calling what happened in Boston “Islamic violence” is comforting, because it renders it immediately recognizable to post-9/11 minds, and locates the source of the violence outside of American society. A more unsettling but more accurate account of the Tsarnaev brothers would see them as merely the latest incarnation of a figure as old as the United States itself: the isolated individual lost in the social and cultural whirlwind that is secular American modernity, who sees salvation in the absolute moral clarity of an idiosyncratic collection of beliefs, and decides that he would rather resort to violence than countenance any concession to a complicated, ambiguous social reality.

William James, the American pioneer of the scholarly study of religion, would call Wieland’s behavior not religious violence, but “fanaticism.” In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James argued that, for the fanatic, “piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.” Where Nietzsche had observed and analyzed Christianity’s supposed preoccupation with the vengeance of the powerless against the powerful, James used this specific form of hostility, calledressentiment, to account for the violent inclinations we see from isolated pretenders to “saintliness” — people whose real faith is in the invulnerability of their self-made system of beliefs more than in any traditionally and communally observed God.

Fanaticism is not religion pushed too far. It is tribalism without a tribe. And it can be a particular risk with the geographical and cultural dislocation attending the American experience of immigration, whether for the Wielands of Saxony or the Tsarnaevs of Dagestan. Read Full article by clicking on  .http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/the-boston-bombing-made-in-the-usa/275510/

Posted by F. Sheikh