Scriptural legitimation and the mobilisation of support for religious violence: experimental evidence across three religions and seven countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In their attempts to mobilise supporters and justify their actions, violent religious extremists often refer to parts of scripture that legitimize violence against supposed enemies of the faith. Accounts of religious extremism are divided on whether such references to scripture have genuine motivating and mobilising power. We investigate whether references to legitimations of violence in religious scripture can raise support for religious violence by implementing a survey experiment among 8, 000 Christian, Muslim and Jewish believers in seven countries across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa. We find that priming individuals with isomorphic pro-violence quotes from Bible, Torah or Quran raises attitudinal support for religious violence significantly. Effect sizes are particularly large among those with a fundamentalist conception of their religion. Our results show that religious scripture can be effectively used to mobilise support for violence. The findings thus mark a counterpoint to theoretical arguments that question the causal role of religion and have important implications for de-radicalization policies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".