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In the aftermath of that attack, government officials suggested that the "war on terrorism" would take "weeks or months." It will likely last for decades—perhaps most of the century, as did the struggle against Marxism in the last century. No matter the length and sacrifice involved, Christians have a unique and vital role to play in the historical drama that is unfolding.

Terrorism is "the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change." (I am indebted to Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism [Columbia University, 1998] for this definition and much of the following analysis.) It becomes "religious terrorism" when a religious ideal inspires or emboldens such actions.

Terrorism has a long history, but the advent of modern, international terrorism occurred on July 22, 1968, when a member group of the Palestine Liberation Organization hijacked an Israeli El Al commercial flight. It shows dramatically how terrorism is not "war" as its perpetrators claim. "For the first time," Hoffman says, "terrorists began to travel regularly from one country to another to carry out attacks. In addition, they also began to target innocent civilians from other countries who often had little if anything to do with the terrorists' cause or grievance, simply in order to endow their acts with the power to attract attention and publicity that attacks against their avowed enemies lacked. The intent was to shock and, by shocking, to stimulate worldwide fear and alarm."

In the 1990s, political terrorism was infused with spiritual energy. Though the first religious terrorist group did not appear until the 1980 Iranian revolution, by 1995, 26 of the 56 known terrorist groups worldwide were religiously motivated. And that has translated into increased violence: though identifiably religious terrorists have committed only 25 percent of the recorded incidents since 1995, they were responsible for 58 percent of the fatalities.

The Seriousness of the Threat
To be sure, no religion holds a corner on terrorism. Attacks have been perpetrated by the Catholic ira and its Protestant counterparts in Ireland, by the American Christian Patriots in the Oklahoma City bombing, and by the Aum Shinrikyo sect (a combination of Hinduism and Buddhism), which released nerve gas in a Tokyo subway in 1995. But clearly, at this juncture in history, Islamic militants pose the most serious threat to world peace. A few examples:

• February 1993: Sunni Muslims (Sunna is the largest branch of Islam) set off a bomb at the World Trade Center, attempting to topple one of the twin towers onto the other.
• July to October 1994: the Algerian Armed Islamic Group unleashes a wave of bombings in Metro trains, outdoor markets, cafes, schools, and popular tourist spots in France; 8 people die and more than 180 are wounded.
• June 1996: Muslim radicals opposed to the reigning al-Saud regime engineer a truck-bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; 19 die.
• February-March 1996: members of Hamas, a militant Palestinian group, conduct a series of suicide bombings that kill 60 in Israel, affecting the Israeli national elections.

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September (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45