When a suicide bomber detonates in a crowded marketplace, the condemnations from religious moderates arrive swiftly. This isn't real Islam, they insist. This isn't true Christianity. The extremists have hijacked a peaceful tradition, twisted sacred texts beyond recognition, betrayed the faith's authentic core. This narrative offers comfort. It absolves the tradition itself of responsibility. It locates the problem entirely in the psychology of disturbed individuals or the machinations of political actors exploiting religion for secular ends.

But this familiar deflection deserves scrutiny. The uncomfortable question is not whether extremists misinterpret religious texts—they certainly interpret selectively—but whether they are actually departing from the tradition's fundamental architecture, or merely following certain threads of it more consistently than moderates find comfortable. When we examine the shared epistemic foundations between moderates and extremists, a troubling picture emerges: mainstream religious belief may provide not just cover for extremism, but its essential ideological scaffolding.

This is not an argument that moderates secretly approve of violence. Most are genuinely horrified by it. The claim is structural rather than psychological. By defending certain core assumptions—about faith as a virtue, revelation as a source of moral knowledge, particular texts as divine communication—moderates make it extraordinarily difficult to challenge the very foundations on which extremists build. They have, in effect, conceded the epistemology while disputing only the conclusions. And in matters of faith, where evidence and reason are already marginalized, disagreements about conclusions become nearly impossible to adjudicate.

The most significant bridge between religious moderates and extremists is not theological content but epistemic method. Both groups accept that faith—belief without sufficient evidence, or even against evidence—constitutes a legitimate path to knowledge. Both grant special authority to ancient texts that, they agree, contain truths inaccessible through ordinary human inquiry. Both believe that certain propositions about the nature of reality, morality, and human purpose are best approached not through investigation but through submission to revealed wisdom.

Consider what moderates do not say when confronting extremism. They rarely argue: 'You should not believe things on faith.' They rarely say: 'Ancient texts should not be treated as authoritative on moral questions.' They do not typically suggest that the very idea of divine commands is epistemically suspect. Instead, they offer different interpretations of the same texts, alternative readings of the same tradition, competing claims about what God really wants. The game remains the same; only the moves differ.

This shared foundation creates an asymmetry that consistently favors the extremist. The moderate says: 'The Quran teaches peace.' The extremist quotes verses about slaying unbelievers. The moderate offers context and hermeneutics. The extremist asks: 'Why should your interpretation override mine?' Within a system that has already abandoned empirical verification as the standard for religious claims, there is no principled way to answer. Interpretive authority becomes a power struggle, not a truth-seeking exercise.

Religious moderates often hold that core doctrines—God's existence, the truth of revelation, the reality of the soul—are matters of faith, while practical applications should be tempered by reason and compassion. But this division is unstable. If faith can establish that God exists and has communicated with humanity, why can't faith also establish what God wants us to do? The extremist is merely extending the method the moderate has already endorsed. The moderate's objection—'that's not how faith should work'—rings hollow precisely because the moderate has foreclosed the tools needed to make such determinations objectively.

Furthermore, both moderates and extremists share metaphysical assumptions that underwrite violence in ways neither fully acknowledges. The belief in an afterlife, for instance, dramatically changes moral calculations. If death is merely a transition, if martyrdom promises eternal reward, if this life is but a brief prelude to infinite existence, then dying and killing for God becomes rational in ways it cannot be under a naturalistic worldview. Moderates who affirm the afterlife while condemning violence are providing the philosophical foundation while objecting to the structure built upon it.

Takeaway

When you accept faith as a valid method of knowing but dispute only the conclusions reached by faith, you have already lost the argument.

One of the most significant services moderates provide to extremism is ideological cover against criticism. When skeptics point out that certain religious doctrines—the inferiority of women, the wickedness of homosexuality, the divine mandate for territorial conquest—appear in authoritative texts, moderates rush to defend the tradition. They insist these passages don't mean what they plainly say. They invoke historical context, metaphorical reading, the primacy of love. But in doing so, they make it socially unacceptable to criticize the texts themselves.

This dynamic creates a peculiar double standard. Moderates expect—often demand—that their religion receive respect as a sacred category immune from the rough-and-tumble of ordinary intellectual discourse. They invoke Islamophobia or anti-Christian bigotry when critics point to genuinely problematic doctrines. Yet this blanket protection extends, inevitably, to the very doctrines that inspire violence. By treating all criticism of religion as potentially bigoted, moderates have made it extraordinarily difficult to isolate and challenge the specific ideas that underwrite extremism.

Consider how we approach dangerous ideas in other domains. We do not hesitate to critique political ideologies that promote authoritarianism. We subject economic theories to empirical scrutiny. We challenge philosophical positions with counter-arguments. But religion has been granted a special exemption from intellectual accountability. And moderates police this exemption vigorously. The moment someone suggests that Islam might have a structural problem with violence, or that Christianity's history of persecution reflects something in its doctrine, moderates object that one mustn't generalize, mustn't blame a whole tradition, mustn't engage in prejudice.

The practical effect is that reformers within religious traditions—those who genuinely want to excise dangerous elements—find themselves caught between hostile camps. Extremists condemn them as heretics departing from authentic faith. Moderates condemn critics who might be their natural allies as bigots. The space for genuine doctrinal reform collapses. It becomes nearly impossible to say: 'This text is morally barbaric and should be repudiated' because moderates have already insisted the text is sacred, just misunderstood.

This shielding function operates even when moderates personally disagree with extremist interpretations. Their defense of religion as such, their insistence that faith deserves respect and criticism should be measured, creates the conceptual environment in which extremism flourishes. The extremist can always claim that attacks on his position are attacks on religion itself—and moderates have primed everyone to view such attacks as illegitimate.

Takeaway

Demanding respect for religion as a sacred category inevitably protects the specific doctrines within religion that inspire violence.

An optimistic view holds that religious traditions can evolve, shedding dangerous elements while retaining valuable core commitments. History offers some evidence: Christianity largely abandoned burning heretics, Judaism reinterpreted animal sacrifice, many Islamic scholars reject armed jihad. If traditions can change, perhaps moderates are not enablers but agents of gradual improvement, pulling their faiths toward moral progress.

But this optimism must contend with a structural problem. Religious traditions claim to possess timeless truths revealed by an eternal God. This claim is not incidental to their identity—it is constitutive of their authority. A Christianity that admits it was simply wrong about homosexuality for two thousand years, or an Islam that acknowledges its prophet made moral errors, has undermined the very foundation of its epistemic claims. If the tradition was wrong about that, why should we trust it about anything? Progressive revelation offers no escape, since it requires admitting that earlier revelations were inadequate.

The most successful religious reforms have therefore worked not by explicitly repudiating doctrine but by quietly ignoring it. Few modern Christians have formally renounced the biblical endorsements of slavery; they simply don't mention them. Liberal Muslims rarely engage with problematic hadith; they change the subject. This strategy works for maintaining community cohesion, but it does nothing to defuse the textual time bombs that extremists detonate. The uncomfortable passages remain, waiting for anyone willing to read them literally.

Genuine reform would require something far more radical: an acknowledgment that scripture is a human product, reflecting the moral limitations of its authors and their era. This is precisely what most moderates refuse to say. They want to preserve the divine authority of their texts while discounting the specific commands that embarrass them. But this is an unstable equilibrium. Either the texts carry divine authority, in which case their troubling commands demand explanation, or they are human documents, in which case their authority dissolves.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the kind of reform that would genuinely prevent extremism—a reform that treats religious texts as historically contingent documents open to moral criticism—is the kind of reform that moderates resist most strenuously. They want to have their sacred texts and critique them too. But this intellectual dishonesty leaves the foundations of extremism intact while merely disputing the superstructure.

Takeaway

Reforms that merely reinterpret problematic texts leave those texts available for anyone willing to read them more literally.

None of this implies that religious moderates bear direct moral responsibility for extremist violence. The bomber alone is responsible for the bombing. But responsibility and causation are different categories. Understanding why religious violence persists requires examining not just the psychology of extremists but the ideological environment that sustains them. That environment is maintained, in significant part, by moderates who defend the very assumptions that make extremism possible.

The path forward is not to condemn moderates but to invite them into a more honest conversation. Can they acknowledge that faith is not a reliable path to knowledge? Can they treat their texts as human products, open to moral criticism? Can they stop demanding that religion receive special protection from intellectual scrutiny? These questions are uncomfortable, but they identify what genuine reform would require.

Until moderates are willing to challenge the epistemic foundations they share with extremists—rather than merely disputing interpretations—they will continue, inadvertently, to provide the ideological cover that extremism requires to flourish.