Psychology of Religion Module

Religious Motivation and Justification for Compassion and Violence

It is well known historically that religion can be the springboard for love, acts of kindness and social compassion, but that it can also be used as a justification for evil deeds and violence. It has been one of the greatest forces in the history of human beings for positive and for negative ends. Let us briefly look at an example of each.

Osama Bin Laden led his al Queda fighters to destroy the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, resulting in several thousand deaths, bringing fear and terror world wide and an unprecedented international cooperation to inhibit such acts on a global scale. Although the goals themselves were apparently political, one of the stated justifications for them was religious.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) was one of this century’s most important figures in the United States. The son of a preacher, he received religious training himself, eventually being awarded a doctorate in theology from Boston University. As an African American minister in the South during the 1960s, King became actively involved in efforts to ease the plight of African Americans in such areas as housing, jobs, voting rights, equal access to education, and other civil rights issues. In the 1950s, he organized a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, as a way of protesting forced racial segregation in the city’s bus system. The boycott lasted 381 days, during which time his home was bombed, he received death threats, and he was jailed. At the end of it all, King’s efforts made an important difference: The United States Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to have forced segregation in public transportation in the city.

Martin Luther King, Jr., became a renowned civil rights leader who led marches, rallies, and legal actions to promote racial equality. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for these efforts. Among the most important of his teachings was the concept that people should be judged not by the color of their skin but rather by their character. In 1968, at the height of social upheaval in the 1960s, King was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. A hundred thousand people attended his funeral in Atlanta, Georgia. His birthday is now a national holiday.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a religiously motivated man. What was the nature of this religious motivation? Sometimes people use their religion as a means to an end. For King, religion might have been a motivational springboard for seeking greater social equality between people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Most people’s religious lives do not make the news headlines as dramatically as the above two examples. But most people’s lives are involved in or affected by religion or religious issues in one way or another. This chapter will help you understand the psychological processes that explain how this works.