Exposing the ‘siren song of hate and extremism’? : Religious literacy and religiously motivated violence

As religiously motivated conflict increases globally, a widespread belief holds that knowledge of religion may reduce religious extremism. Yet, the relationship between religious literacy and conflict has remained largely untested. This thesis addresses this gap by translating the broad theoretical discourse on this relationship into a clear conceptual framework and empirically evaluating the impact of religious literacy on religiously motivated violence. It distinguishes between internal (knowledge of one’s own religion) and external religious literacy (knowledge of other religions), each hypothesized to reduce violence through distinct mechanisms. Drawing on religious education policy data and data on religiously motivated violence, the study compiles a panel dataset of 584 religious minority groups across 151 countries from 2000 to 2014 and applies a penalized maximum likelihood fixed-effects logistic regression. The findings show that neither form of religious literacy consistently reduces violence, though external literacy may have a delayed, context-specific effect in developing countries. These findings highlight the complexity of the relationship and point to several implications for future research and policy design in religious education and conflict prevention.