Investigating Religious Terrorism and Ritualistic Crimes

Dawn Perlmutter. Investigating Religious Terrorism and Ritualistic Crimes. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2004.

Scholars of new religions have likely bumped up against religious and ritualistic crime. New religions, minority religions, marginalized religions, religions associated with minority populations, are often accused of religious violence and crime. The classic example of such accusations is the Satanic Panic in which alleged Satanic cults were accused the sexual molestation and kidnapping of children across the U.S. And some new religions have perpetrated crimes and committed murders. The two that immediately come to mind are murders and coerced suicides at Jonestown in 1978, and the subway gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo in 1995. Violence has also been perpetrated against new religious groups, such as the attack on the MOVE group in Philadelphia in 1985 and the attack on the Branch Davidian property in Waco, Texas in 1993.  

The Delphi, IN murder case recently brought this all back for me. In 2023, the defense team in the case released a 100+ page memorandum alleging that the murders were committed by a secret cult of Odinists who ritually sacrificed the victims to the god Odin. In a 2024 hearing, the defense brought in Dr Dawn Perlmutter as an expert witness to testify that the crime scene showed evidence of ritual sacrifice. Read my blog post about Dr, Perlmutter's testimony  here.

Dr Perlmutter's book Investigating Religious Terrorism and Ritualistic Crime aims to provide law enforcement officials and criminal investigators a handbook for identifying religiously-motivated crime and violence. Perlmutter has a background in art history and aesthetics, and has leveraged herself as an expert in symbolism, especially interpreting religious symbolism in ritualistic crime scenes - crimes that were committed by religious or cultic practitioners for religious reasons.

When I learned of her involvement in interpreting the Delphi crime scene for the defense, I read her book to try to better understand her perspective. 

Here is a quick summary of the book:

• In Chapter one, Perlmutter tries to define types of religious violence.
• Chapters 2-7 look at several categories of religious or cultic groups. There is a chapter each on Millennialism; Domestic religious terrorism most of which concerns white supremacist groups including Odinism; Islamic terrorism; Satanism; Vampirism; and Syncretic religions by which she means Afro-Caribbean religions like Santeria, Voodoo (her spelling), Brujeria, Palo Mayombe. 
• Chapters 8-10 look at crimes scenes to help investigators discover "clues" to the ritual activity of these various groups, and the symbolic analysis of crime scenes to formulate a "ritual homicide typology."

On pages 231-232, Dr Perlmutter turns her attention to religion scholars. She addresses the issue of religious scholars refuting claims of religiously-motivated ritual crime. Discussing a particular case in Mexico associated with Palo Mayombe she writes, "many scholars have published articles refusing to acknowledge the ritual murders as human sacrifice and relegate the deaths to a form of sadism.. . . Essentially it is difficult for even well-educated, good intentioned persons to recognize religious violence for what it is . . . these murders must be viewed in the context of the belief system they were perpetrated in." Then after describing the terrible spate of murders in the border region Jaurez and El Paso she writes "it is also quite feasible that another Mexican religious cult could be ritually murdering young women." (232)

It is true that many scholars of religion push back against these claims of religious and cultic violence. And for good reason, these claims are often spurious and made without good evidence - the lurid stories of ritual sacrifice and secret occult groups create a sort of vicarious interest that overrides rational and knowledgeable interpretations. The witch trials are a notorious example of this. Scholars who study actually study New Religious Movements are only too aware of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s in which completely false stories of suburban Satanic child-sacrificing cults spread throughout American popular culture with harmful consequences. For the Satanic Panic, you might read Dr, Sarah Hughes' American Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970-2000, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2021, or Dr Jeffrey S Victor's 1999 book Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. With the Satanic Panic in mind, one can see the similarities with Dr Perlmutter's approach in this book. 

So on one hand, I can take her perspective as a good reminder that religious scholars should be aware of the potential for violence in these religions that we study. At the same time, we should caution people to avoid over-interpretion and misinterpretation which might implicate whole religions as violent and criminal without sufficient warrant. 

Here are some of my problems with this book:

1) Sources: There are very few footnotesand citations and those that are given do not refer to reliable sources. Much of the information is sourced from the internet, not from reliable and scholarly sources. The book lacks academic rigor and quality sources.

2) Suspicion: The book casts suspicion over a broad swath of minority religions--which are not illegal or criminal but portrayed as if they are. This can lead to or exacerbate unhelpful and false conspiracy theories, Satanic panics, and witch hunts. An example from her book is the chapter on Satanic religious violence. She claims, without any sources, that "Satanism is widely practiced in Western society." She discusses several Satanic religious organizations, but then (very briefly) mentions that none of them have any recorded incidents of violence. The categories that have been associated with criminal and violent activity, "Self-Styled Satanists" and "Youth  Subculture Satanists," are the two areas she spends the least time on in the book.

3) Over-indication: The evidence for ritualistic crime presented in the book is so broad that someone could see it anywhere. If you are looking for it, you will find it, or think you have found it. For instance,  burning candles and candle magic, 268-78. On pages 274-278, she included photos of candles in a New York City botanica  - without any shred of association with criminal activity. Yet this is presented in a way to imply or cast suspicion on it. Perlmutter mentions that burning candles is "the most common form of religious worship" and says "it is important to emphasize that  . . . candles alone may not indicate criminal activity" - yest this is in a chapter in a book on religious crime! There is always the danger of criminalizing or casting criminal suspicion on behavior, religious or otherwise, of which "we" the mainstream culture disapproves, that is outside of mainstream social norms. The book gives the strong impression that the presence of certain symbols and practices indicates criminal activity, when that is not the case--casting suspicion on ritualistic or religious activity that is out outside of the usual secular and Christian mainstream. (269) There seems to be a slippery slope from "weird" to "criminal" that this book participates in. I mention a similar suspicion cast on Norse tattoos in Being Viking--not everyone who has a Valknut tattoo is a neo-Nazi, in fact most are not. But the suspicion remains, as we see in this Delphi case where suspicion is cast onto the shadowy menace of Odinism.

4) Saturation of Pop Culture: She writes "It is important to note that some ritualistic crimes are conducted by individuals who mimic media depictions of the occult but are not involved in any organized group or follow any established belief system" (235). There is so much cultish and occult aesthetic present in the culture, that it can be difficult to determine what it actually indicates. (I have written about the problem of the "witchy aesthetic" here.) I think that occult symbolism may be associated with crimes that are best explained in other ways. For instance, a Santa Muerte image may be associated with a crime that is best explained and investigated through the violent culture, economics, and rivalries of drug trafficking gangs.

Of course ritualistic crimes and religiously-motivated crimes take place. Being aware of the signs of these types of crimes could be helpful in investigating, understanding, and prosecuting those crimes.  But over-interpretation can be just as much of a problem. And this book contributes to that problem.

I think it would be better to read Catherine Wessigner's How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven's Gate  than this book. Hopefully scholars of new religions will have more than an internet, Google-search-level knowledge of their subject matter, which is basically what you will get from this book. A lot of the content was sourced from the internet. Much of the content in the book is just not particularly relevant to the actual social locations of religious violence. Religions that have perpetrated religious violence aren't thoroughly covered - Aum Shinrikyo (31-42) gets about ten pages with several pictures thrown in there - and almost nothing on Islamic-sourced violence - but then there are several chapters focused on other religions that have little to no association with violence. For instance, is it helpful and relevant to have a much longer discussion of Santeria (182-210) in a book about criminal religious activity? And several pages of Vodou Vèvè drawings as evidence of potential criminal activty when there is no actual connection to violence outside of the movies?