critique of literalization of scripture. Indeed, Tillich (1965) links literalizing tendencies in religion to demonization and characterizes it as a form of idolatry, or actually a betrayal of faith.
Samuel P. Huntington's early 1990s thesis that Cold War tensions would be replaced by wars based on a clash of civilizations, or cultures, that may start in and spread from unstable and volatile nation-states where culture = religion. Huntington identifies eight discrete "cultural paradigms" that by and large can be linked with specific geographical regions and that violence. War is most likely in "torn countries," or geographic locations where cultural paradigms are competing for hearts and minds and social and other goods (e.g., Western and multiple Islamic paradigms in the Middle East) and where religious zealotry overwhelms both nationalist ideology and ethnic identity. While not a torn country, the United States may be vulnerable because its geography is a setting for the encounter between cultures competing with each other, for competing cultures to attack the United States, or for U.S. extremists to attack the notion of competition. What Huntington said in 1993 about how civilization and culture crosses nation-state boundaries seems not only relevant but also prescient as of 2006:
In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. (Huntington, 1993, p. 33)
White (2003) cites terrorist expert Bruce Hoffman to the effect that religious terrorists are different from political/secular ones because they are not motivated by institutional change or, apparently, by conversion zeal, but by the imperative to destroy all who are not like them. Thus the demonization of non-Islam persons, institutions, countries, etc., that occurs in Islamic-fundamentalist groups. Furth...