Americans explain minority terror via religion despite the tiny perpetrator share

Evidence

The realization that anti-Muslim attitudes are embedded in larger social and political processes than the fear of Islam begs the question of why has American society resorted to religion as an explanation for acts of terror committed by a very small portion of the world’s vast Muslim population, thereby stigmatizing American Muslims to the point that large number of Americans are willing to tolerate discriminatory profiling of Muslims and to deny American Muslims their constitutional rights to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and to build places of worship. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 261

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The question itself—why a society reads small-scale violence through the religion of a nearly billion-person population—is the load-bearing inversion motivating the whole chapter; dense enough to sit with.
• QUESTION: The chapter stakes itself on answering why religion became the preferred explanatory lens; flag to track how subsequent pages answer it.
• XREF: connects to: Nearly three-quarters of US terrorism convictions relied on perceived ideology, not criminal acts — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 585