Silberman3

534 PSYCHOIOGY OF RELIGION AND APPLIED AREAS

leader, while 65% of Kerry voters said thar Bush’s religious faith makes him too close-minded. In evaluating Presidenr George W. Bush’s faith, some Democrats and Republi-cans criticized him for creating a faith-based presidency supported by his firm belief that he has a God-given mission, claiming thar his faith may be a source of overconfidence for him, making questioning and analysis of facts unnecessary in his eyes {Suskind, 2004).

Fifth, as implied above, in countries where democratic elections are held, religion can influence not only the wor!dviews of laypeople and their evaluations of their leaders, but also their voting behavior (Beit-Hallahmi &: Argyle, 1997; Religion and the 2004 Presi-dential Election, 2004). For example, Peres (1995) fotind a elear correlation between or-thodoxy, militarism, and nationalism among Israeli Jews, and Nelson (1988) reported that disaffiliation from religious denominarions was related to greater political liberalism among U.S. popularions between 1973 and 1985. These findings are consistent with find-ings regarding the 2000 presidential elections in the United States where religious people voted at a ratę of 62% for George W. Bush while only 31% of the least religious people yoted for him (Election Analysis: The Religious Vote, 2000). They are also consistent with the analysis of the finał voting resulrs of the U.S. 2004 presidential elections, which suggests that President Bush’s voters included a large group of morę traditional religious people: 78% of white Evangelicals or born-again Christians and morę than two thirds of Orthodox Jews voted for President Bush (Goodstein & Yardley, 2004).

A sixth way involves the influence of religion on the decisions of policymakers in na-tional and international arenas via constraints placed on them by widely held beliefs within the population they represent (Fox, 2000). In other words, even in autocratic gov-ernments, policymakers might be reluctant to make decisions that are inconsistent with basie religious beliefs that are deeply held by their constituents. Thus, both Jewish and Arab leaders have had to take into account the religious meaning systems of their popula-tions in making decisions regarding peace between Israe! and ics Arab neighbors, and Arab leaders sometimes take the religious values of their constituents into account in making decisions regarding their relations with the West (Fox, 2000). Leaders who make controversial decisions that are discrepant with strongly held religious values of the popu-lations that they are supposed to represent may pay not only by losing political power but also by losing their iives, as in the cases of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the former prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, who werc b'/th assassinated by religious exrremists (Young, 1995). In a morę recent example, the disengagement plan (a plan that would involve the evacuation of all Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and of additional settlers from the West Bank) of the prime minister of Israel, Arięl Sharon, has been artacked by some rabbis in the name of religion. Special attention wasgiven to influ-ential rabbis who, as part of their opposition to the plan, announced that soldiers in the Israeli army have an obligation to refuse to obey orders if they are asked to participate in this plan, which these rabbis perceive as an immora! plan that stands in direct contradic-tion to religious ruling. Their calls for disobedience in the name of religion have been viewed by some other rabbis and politicians as dangerous to the futurę of Israel (Ain, 2004).

Seventh, throughout history and in recent years, numerous acts of terrorism in the name of religion have been conducted with the aim of impacting national and international relations around the globe. While defining terrorism is challenging (Hoffman, 1998; Moghaddam, 2005), I follow those experts on terrorism who define terrorism as “an act or threat of violence against noncombatants with the objective of exacting re-venge, intimidation, or otherwise influencing an audience” (Stern, 2003, p. xx). Terror-ism in the name of religion, like any other act of terrorism, can be described as a war that is fundamentally psychological, a war that tries to create a crippling fear and psychologi-cal debilitation in the target community with the intention that this fear will be translated into pressure on governments to surrender to the terrorists’ demands, helping them to achieve their ideological, religious, social, or economical goals (Ganor, 2002; Levant, Barbanei, Sc DeLeon, 2004).

THE PROCESSES THROUGH WHICH RELIGION CAN FACILJTATE VlOLENCE, TERRORISM, AND PEACE

Religion, then, can influence national and international relations chrough severa! agents and venues by impacting the worldviews and behaviors of policymakers, their supporters, and their rivals, as well as the political culrure within which they function. Beyond shed-ding light on the agents and the venues that religion can influence, viewing religion as a uniąue system of meaning that centers on the sacred (Park, 2005, Chapter 16, this vol-ume; Pargament, 1997; Pargament et al., 2005; Silberman, 2005a, 2005b) can also illu-minate the psychological-sociological processes through which religion can influence national and international confhcts and their resolutions. In other words, it can shed light on how religion can motivate people to conduct both violent and peaceful activism on both national and international levels.

In generał, the meaning-making power of religion can encourage, at rimcs, mainte-nance of the political and social status quo by providing a sacred basis for the existing order, and by enabling people to increase their satisfaction with it (Durkheim, 1912/1954; Glock, 1973; Marx, 1848/1964; see Schwartz & Huismans, 1995, for a review). At other times religion can facilitate intense activism by sanctifying acts of resiscance or revolution (Lincoln, 1985; Marty & Appleby, 1991; Walzer, 1982), by offering both spiritual and nonspiritual rewards and punishments (Pargament, 1997; Silberman er al., 2001; Stern,

2003) , and by encouraging a sense of self-efficacy to bring about both self-change and world change (Fox, 1999; Silberman, 1999, 2004; see Silberman et al., 2005, for a re-view). While the above processes can facilitate both peaceful and vio!ent activism, the next section discusses processes that can facilitate either peaceful or violent nctivism.

Religion as a Fadlitałor of Violence and Terrorism

Religion when internalized as an individual or collective system of meaning can facilitate violent acrivism in a variety of ways. First, religions often conrain values and ideas that may facilitate prejudice, hostility, and violence by encouraging the consciousness of be-longing to a select and privileged community, and by emphasizing the “otherness” of those who are not following the terfets of the religion or those who belong to other religions (Appleby, 2000; Martin, 2005; Schwartz & Huismans, 1995; Wellman & Tokuno,

2004) . According to Allport (1966), religion includes the following three basie invitarions to bigotry: (1) the belief that one’s religion teaches absolute and exclusive truth may lead to derogating views of the teachings of other religions and philosophical formulations as being wrong and a threat to human salvation (Hunsberger & Jackson, 2005; Kimball, 2002); (2) the doctrine of election (e.g., the concepts of God's chosen people or of God’s country), which implies the inferiority of others because they have been rejected by God; and (3) theocracy (i.e., the view that a monarch rules by divine right, that the church is a