The political and scholarly debate has witnessed a profusion of books and articles on the relation between religion and violence, particularly following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Scholars like Mark Juergensmeyer have emphasized the instrumental and rational character of secular acts of violence as opposed to a religious violence marked by 'acts of deliberatively exaggerated violence' aimed at maximizing their 'savage nature' and 'meant purposely to elicit anger'. Critical scholars like William Cavanaugh, however, have challenge these types of accounts, arguing that attempts at differentiating secular from religious acts of violence respond to deep-seated assumptions and prejudices of Western societies and are ultimately 'unhelpful, misleading and mystifying'. This paper contends that this latter argument sits uneasily with the characterizations of the secular advanced by scholars such as Talal Asad or Charles Taylor who argue that the secular is an 'epistemic framework' concerning 'the whole context of understanding'. If this framework shapes our way of being, knowing and becoming, is it not possible to argue that it shapes also our way of understanding, experiencing and, most of all, producing violence? This paper will tackle this question and in particular whether non-essentialist notions of secular and religious violence may be possible and helpful to our understanding of contemporary forms of violence.
