Religion as "bad" ... 9/11/2001 ... anti-abortion activist ... anti-gay activist ... white supremacists ... and of course, radical muslims.
Even as easy answers go, the word
religion seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
There's certainly a religious aspect to the way young men are radicalized in the Middle East. But ignoring all the political resentment, cultural ideas about manhood and rebellion, and economic vested interests in the phenomenon of modern terrorism is just way too self-serving. Religion in American history is such a vast subject that simply blaming right-wing numbnuttery on religion is turning a blind eye to the function of religion in such episodes as abolition, the Social Gospel, the civil rights struggle, and women's suffrage. And if you're going to make it sound like the terms
radical and
muslim go together, you're pretending the docile, Westernized form of Islam practiced in the USA either doesn't exist or isn't True Islam.