While much about what prompted Chesser’s transformation remains a mystery, he illustrates a growing phenomenon in the United States: young converts who embrace the most extreme interpretation of Islam.
Of the nearly 200 U.S. citizens arrested in the past nine years for terrorism-related activity, 20 to 25 percent have been converts, said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. More than a quarter have been arrested in the past 20 months. The center provided The Washington Post with saved copies of Chesser’s postings, most no longer available on the Web.
“Many of these converts are basically white kids from the suburbs” in search of a community, said Segal, whose group has produced numerous papers on those arrested, including Chesser. They are overwhelmingly male, frequently in their 20s and eager to “become something more than they are, or be part of something greater,” he said.
Their militancy is not a product of the alienation that has sometimes prompted Muslim-born young people in the United States and elsewhere to embrace extremism, particularly in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Eric Hoffer wrote a classic book about this sort of phenomenon many years ago, called [b]True Believers[/b], or something like that. Hoffer was an agnostic philospher who regarded zealous Christians as driven by the same sort of psychological compulsions as Adam Chesser seems to have been (by this account). I haven’t read the book in many years, but Hoffer’s skeptical thesis has stuck with me. As is often the case, even unbelievers can catch on to things that believers fail to perceive.
Anyway, the desperate search to find meaning and purpose in the often empty, pointless lives of many Americans shows the ineradicable hunger for significance that is built into us humans and the sheer futility of merely pursuing hedonistic pleasures or materialistic gain. Deep down, I think we all want to be part of a cause that’s greater than ourselves.
Unfortunately, Chesser chose the wrong cause.
David Handy+
In one of Susan Howatch’s CofE novels, an Archdeacon is sent out to a village church to investigate a Vicar’s outrageously heretical sermons.
What he finds is not so much a committed heretic as a despairing man trying to light a fire under a somnolent congregation.
As a friend once said, “When I get bored, I get stupid.”
NRA. “Deep down, I think we all want to be part of a cause that’s greater than ourselves.” You’re right but why not Christianity? I think one of the problems is that the church has lost its appeal to many men, young men in particular. It has become so feminized, so into personal relationships with a warm and fuzzy Jesus that it no longer speaks to men.
Bill, here in the UK the phenomenon is women who convert, many of them not for marriage but because they feel that Islam gives a structure to their lives and a respect that they need, ie both self-respect and in the eyes of others. Ironic that just as Christians abandon traditional morality (and are called bigots by others if they keep to the tradition) there are women who feel energised by the structures and strictures of Islam.