section_path: Society and culture/Religion and politics
section_name: Religion and politics
paragraph_text: Religion and politics
  
  Religious and political ideologies have been the cause of interpersonal violence throughout history. Ideologues often falsely accuse others of violence, such as the ancient blood libel against Jews, the medieval accusations of casting witchcraft spells against women, and modern accusations of satanic ritual abuse against day care center owners and others.
  
  Both supporters and opponents of the 21st-century War on Terrorism regard it largely as an ideological and religious war.
  
  Vittorio Bufacchi describes two different modern concepts of violence, one the "minimalist conception" of violence as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other the "comprehensive conception" which includes violations of rights, including a long list of human needs.
  
  Anti-capitalists say that capitalism is violent, that private property and profit survive only because police violence defends them, and that capitalist economies need war to expand. In this view, capitalism results in a form of structural violence that stems from inequality, environmental damage, and the exploitation of women and people of colour.
  
  Frantz Fanon critiqued the violence of colonialism and wrote about the counter violence of the "colonized victims."
  
  Throughout history, most religions and individuals like Mahatma Gandhi have preached that humans are capable of eliminating individual violence and organizing societies through purely nonviolent means. Gandhi himself once wrote: "A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy." Modern political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist varieties of voluntarism, mutualism, anarchism and libertarianism.
  
  Luther Seminary Old Testament scholar Terence E. Fretheim wrote about the Old Testament:
  
  For many people,... only physical violence truly qualifies as violence. But, certainly, violence is more than killing people, unless one includes all those words and actions that kill people slowly. The effect of limitation to a "killing fields" perspective is the widespread neglect of many other forms of violence. We must insist that violence also refers to that which is psychologically destructive, that which demeans, damages, or depersonalizes others. In view of these considerations, violence may be defined as follows: any action, verbal or nonverbal, oral or written, physical or psychical, active or passive, public or private, individual or institutional/societal, human or divine, in whatever degree of intensity, that abuses, violates, injures, or kills. Some of the most pervasive and most dangerous forms of violence are those that are often hidden from view (against women and children, especially); just beneath the surface in many of our homes, churches, and communities is abuse enough to freeze theblood. Moreover, many forms of systemic violence often slip past our attention because they are so much a part of the infrastructure of life (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism).