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“Today I swung my front door wide open and placed my Remington 870 right in the doorway. I gave it 4 shells and left it alone and went about my business… Well, after about an hour, I checked on the gun. It was still sitting there, right where I had left it. It hadn’t killed anyone.”
It’s not that simple, of course, but a similar analogy could be made regarding Radicalisation and religion: “I left my religion on the porch. No one got beheaded.” Very droll perhaps, but it does highlight that while radicalisation and religion are closely related, they are not inseparable. Relative to each other, radicalisation is a process and religion is a narrative.
Radicalisation is a process of emotional disintegration that affects those with low self worth and a poor sense of identity. It feeds on a sense of discrimination that escalates through frustration to feelings of victimisation and humiliation. Personal snubs and slights mix with discussions, arguments and news events to raise these feelings to an acute level, culminating in a rejection of co-operative problem solving, a profound sense of alienation—from both others and the self—and openness to indoctrination by a narrative of retribution and restitution.
That’s where religion—or another, similar narrative—fits in. For religion is not the only option. Dylann Roof, the Charleston gunman, was radicalised by race. In 1930s Germany, an entire population disaffected by military and economic failures, and humiliated by the Versailles Treaty, was radicalised by Hitler’s Nazi Party with a message of inherent superiority and violent entitlement. And in May 2014 Elliot Rodger killed six people and then himself at a Californian university campus over his inability to find sex partners. Rodger was radicalised by sex.
Rodger’s autobiography, My Twisted World, posted online shortly before his suicidal killing spree, leaves no doubt that he was radicalised. Rodger’s emotional journey perfectly follows the pattern above and, like both ISIS and the Nazis, contained elements of unrecognised superiority and justifications for retribution. Rodger was both apolitical and non-religious, but there was a racial element to his radicalisation: although half-Asian, he loathed fully Asian men. Conversely, Dylann Roof had an issue with sex, telling his (mostly female) victims that “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”
Both race and sex were structural components of Nazi radicalisation. While the racial aspect of Nazi ideology is well known, the sexual aspect less so. It was fully deconstructed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism in Berlin in 1932 before fleeing the country. He argued that the almost sadistically strict upbringing of German children was the soil in which Nazism took root: “Wherever we encounter authoritarian and moralistic suppression of childhood and adolescent sexuality… we can infer with certainty that there are strong authoritarian-dictatorial tendencies in the social development.”
The reverse inference—that wherever we find “strong authoritarian-dictatorial tendencies” we will also find “suppression of childhood and adolescent sexuality” can also be made, specifically in the case of ISIS. It is no coincidence that some of the families reported as going to Syria—such as the Dawood sisters—come from the conservative end of the UK’s Muslim community. Deeply patriarchal families raise adults with a profound shame of sex who have trouble negotiating sexual consent because sex feels illicit. Hence ISIS mandates that women unquestioningly satisfy their husbands’ demands. The appeal to male Jihadist wannabes is obvious but the appeal to ‘Syria girls’ less so. While they must submit to their husbands’ advances, they are freed from any moral qualms by ISIS’ inflexible doctrine.
The insistence that religion and radicalisation are conjoined not only risks alienating moderate Muslims but also blinds us to any other factors involved. A quick crosscheck of these four narratives—religion, race, politics and sex—reveals the latter is the only element common to all the examples surveyed here. This suggests that a longing for physical, moral and mental purity, a compass-straight path through the shifting sands of life, is central to radicalisation. This can be seen in the cries for racial purity of Dylann Roof and the Nazis, the doctrinal purity of ISIS and the sexual purity envisaged in Elliot Rodger’s My Twisted World, a world where no one has sex and procreation happens artificially. Radicals are alienated not just from co-operative society but also from their own bodies and emotions. It is this terrain, not the Syrian Desert, where the battle over radicalisation will be won or lost.
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