A new film by Jenn Lindsay (GRS’18), Simulating Religious Violence, is about researchers who use computer models to predict doctrinal conflict. Photo courtesy of Jenn Lindsay

University News

A BU Filmmaker Captures a BU Researcher’s Quest against Religious Violence

Simulating Religious Violence has North American premiere at BU Tuesday

Wesley Wildman wears two academic hats: in humanities (a professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics at the School of Theology) and in computer science (a joint appointment with the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences). His work, his STH profile notes, seeks to make “headway on seemingly intractable social problems.” Yet he was as stunned as the rest of the country at the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, committed as retaliation for US wars in Muslim countries.

“We’d been studying religious extremism for some time,” Wildman says, speaking of the Center for Mind and Culture, the nonprofit research institute he directs. “What the Marathon bombings did was catalyze this awareness that so much of what we do as professors is not very effective” in predicting when violence can erupt. “If you work in the computational humanities, it can be difficult to actually have an effect on anything.”

His quest to help policymakers craft “better projections about what’s likely to happen” led him and an international team of researchers, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Wildman’s Center for Mind and Culture, on a three-year research project. Their goal: simulate, with computers, the conditions under which societies’ religious extremists might turn violent. As part of the work, Wildman recruited filmmaker Jenn Lindsay (GRS’18), an acquaintance from her time at BU studying for a doctorate of philosophy in the social science of religion. Lindsay shadowed the researchers from BU to Virginia, Norway, and refugee camps in Lesvos, Greece.

The resulting documentary, Simulating Religious Violence, will have its North American premiere November 19 at BU’s Center for Computing & Data Sciences, Room 1750. (The event is sold out, but the screening and a follow-up panel discussion will be livestreamed, starting at 5 p.m.) The following day, it will debut overseas at Italy’s Religion Today film festival. 

Wildman coauthored a book in June, Modeling Religion (Bloomsbury), about his and colleagues’ use of computers to study faith’s role in seismic cultural shifts dating all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution. 

“The sorts of things we discover from the computational simulation,” he says, “are the conditions under which extremism can lead to violence—where the tipping points are.” The size of opposing factions in a conflict is one clue: “when it’s close to 50-50, you have a much higher risk of religious extremism tipping over into violence.” 

That’s because vastly outnumbered factions tend not to risk annihilation by launching violence, though “it’s always possible for lone-wolf actors, on behalf of a small group which is feeling very oppressed, to act”—which makes those lone wolves, such as the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the Marathon bombings, much harder to predict than large-scale spasms of violence, Wildman says.

He can point to only one recent case of equally matched adversaries that has been tamped down: Nigeria, which has been plagued by clashes between Christians and Muslims.

“Thankfully, Nigeria so far has managed to stay fairly calm,” he says. “I have deep respect for Nigerian politics because of that.” But the nation is “in that risk territory, and all Nigerians know that. The computer models draw your attention to that type of situation.” 

Otherwise, he says, “we still haven’t hit that sweet spot where we can make solid predictions about things. We can draw attention to danger zones…but it doesn’t tell you what to do about it, really.” For that, he’d direct you to religion and other scholars, such as Jessica Stern, a research professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies, who interviews terrorists. “These folks understand why people get resentful, why they get angry, why they cross a personal threshold,” he says.

“We don’t need to be as afraid of computational methods and the humanities interacting as we are. Some humanities people are worried that the computational and science stuff is just taking over and wiping them out. [But] computational methods have become so good that they actually interact now with humanities in science in really creative ways,” Wildman says. “Actually, really beautiful ways. We validate the computational models we built against data sets” in sociology and anthropology, compiled by old-fashioned, qualitative field work.

Lindsay, who teaches sociology and communications at Rome’s John Cabot University, describes her film as “The Matrix meets Morgan Freeman’s The Story of God.” She began work on it in 2015 while studying for her BU doctorate. When Wildman asked her to become involved, she agreed, “without really knowing what computer simulation and modeling entail,” she says. “I’m always up for a challenge and the ever-elusive job in my creative field.” 

In this case, ignorance was bliss. “I had a ‘beginner’s mind’ approach to the subject,” Lindsay says, “which I think helped me ask the kind of questions that viewers totally unfamiliar with the subject would also have.” She spent three years filming the researchers, “determined to engage my visual medium in a way that would invite people into what I recognized as an ambitious and unusual endeavor on the part of these computer scientists and religion scholars.”

She says that “years of test audiences,” led to numerous reworkings of the film to make it accessible to viewers who didn’t necessarily have an interest in religion and technology.

“These days, we are collectively gripped by questions about how to manage advancing technologies of artificial intelligence and how to harness computational power for the common good,” Lindsay says. “Religion remains a pervasive social fact, forceful in its potential to determine social and collective identities, to drive impactful behavior, and to shape interpretations of our complex lives and societies.”

In the film, Wildman describes his researcher’s Holy Grail: “I want someone who was going to blow themselves up to decide not to blow themselves up, because they’ve got some other vision of the way life can be, or because they read an article that convinced them that there are other ways of protesting unjust situations.”

The premiere of Simulating Religious Violence is on Tuesday, November 19, beginning with a reception at 4 pm and followed by the screening at 5. After the screening, Wildman will moderate a panel discussion featuring Lindsay; F. LeRon Shults, a Norwegian professor of theology featured in the film; and three BU scholars who weren’t part of Wildman’s research, but are interested in religious violence and peacemaking: Yair Loir, a College of Arts & Sciences senior lecturer in comparative religion, Judaism, and Chinese philosophy; Nicolette Manglos-Weber, a School of Theology associate professor of religion and society; and James McCarty, an STH clinical assistant professor of religion and conflict transformation. The event’s sponsors are BU’s Center for Computing & Data Sciences, the School of Theology, and the College of Arts & Sciences religion department. STH will underwrite the screening as its fall 2024 Lowell Lecture series, its biannual talks by prominent people in theological studies.