The study of religion and violence has largely centered on established traditions, given the long history of religiously inspired wars, crusades, witch-hunts, and persecutions around the world. Contemporary cases include, for example, Protestant-Catholic violence in Northern Ireland, Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Middle East, and Hindu-Muslim violence in India. The appearance of a cohort of new religious movements, popularly called cults, in the early 1970s triggered renewed scholarly and public policy concern with the religion-violence connection. There were ongoing, largely unfounded allegations of impending violence by new religious groups during the early 1970s. However, it was the 1978 conflict between the Peoples Temple and its opponents, resulting in the deaths of 914 individuals in Jonestown, Guyana, that raised scholarly and public policy concerns about potential violent episodes involving new religions.

The Peoples Temple episode was followed by four incidents during the 1990s: the...