Ku Klux Klan And Religion

In today’s society, most actions of terrorist violence seem to have a religious motivation to them, but often the violent actions themselves go against the teachings of these religions and are rather an out of context generalisation of these teachings. For religions such as, Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism, they have been used multiple times as a powerful source of motivation to terrorist violence, in events such as the crusades and gunpowder plot, and also from terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Islamist extremism. By looking at these events and cross referencing with the teachings of the religions they correlate to, it can be seen that religion is always used as an excuse to promote one religion or as a misconception of religious …show more content…
There were three waves of groups of the Ku Klux Klan, the first from 1865 - 1872, the second from 1915 – 1944, and the third from 1946 and is still active now (Maclean, 1994, pp.XI-XII). The Klan is most known for their oppression towards African Americans, however this was the key goal of the first wave, and while the second and third wave still oppress African Americans, as well as immigrants and other people of colour, it was no longer their primary goal, and instead they turned to religious motivation, specifically an anti-Catholic motivation fuelled through Christian and more specifically Protestant beliefs. Unlike Islamist extremist groups such as ISIS that uses the Quran as justification for their terrorist violence, the Ku Klux Klan did not so much directly use the bible, rather than use their faith as a whole in the excuse that it is simple better than Catholicism or Judaism and that those religions were the enemy. Leonard Moore’s book Citizen Klansmen highlights this use of Protestant faith by the Ku Klux Klan as political motivation to assert their religious dominance throughout America, by establishing that, ”many recruitment pamphlets…with warnings about the Catholic “menace” and the need to “reestablish and maintain” the United States as a “Protestant country”.” (1991, pp.19). However, not only was the Ku Klux Klan using religious terrorism as a base for anti-Catholicism and for religious supremacy, they also did use religious Protestant teachings. It was not uncommon for at KKK rallies and meetings for there to be burning of crosses, known as the fiery cross, and for Christian and Protestant prayers to be said and hymns to be sung. “The Klan’s cross burnings in the 1920s were invariably constrained by a strict Christian ritual. The