Theory: The Dark Social Capital of Religious Radicals

Abstract

Like terrorism researchers, scholars of religion are inevitably confronted with a plethora of definitions and concepts claiming to describe the subject of research adequately. The complexity and diversity of how religious traditions and new religious movements manifest themselves individually and socially make defining religion a problematic endeavor. Principally, religious studies encompass four definitional approaches: experiential or affective (identification of religion by subjective experiences), substantive (identification of religion by genuine belief systems), polythetic (identification of features describing something as a religious phenomenon), and functional definitions (identification of religion by social functions, not beliefs) (Dawes and Maclaurin,.Dawes and Maclaurin (eds), A New Science of Religion, Routledge, New York and London, 2013, 14–16).