New Forms of Religious Violence. Five Key ideas for Understanding Religious Violence in the Empires

Cinco ideas claves para entender la violencia religiosa de los Imperios

Abstract

The aim of this work—which takes the form of an essay but draws on current literature on the religious phenomenon surrounding Trump’s presidency—is to shed light on and better understand the role of US imperial theology and to analyse the religious violence it engenders. To achieve this, it takes as its starting point current US imperialism and existing forms of capitalism, investigating how these geopolitical forces require and create an imperial theology that seeks to justify their presence and actions as signs of God. This theology, based on biblical fundamentalism and racist fanaticism, generates religious violence on a scale never seen before. These pseudo-religious narratives are the basic building blocks used by right-wing and far-right political movements, which seek to build a Christian religious democracy, operating through their political messiahs, such as Trump. One of the outcomes of this analysis is what is termed ‘fake Christianity’. A Christianity as false as the images the American president constructs with artificial intelligence.