.he White House and President Obama continued to bend over backward this week at a White House summit on combating violent extremism to avoid language that might suggest the broader Islamic world is culpable for the conduct of its most violent and fundamentalist adherents. “No religion is responsible for terrorism,” the President declared. “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.” Yet his first statement and his last are not credible. Few would argue that religion over the millennia has been the rationale for countless episodes of terrorism, and all major religions have their own history of war and violence that we would now would label as terrorist. The President’s comment that “No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism” echoes the old NRA trope Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and, while true, ignores the role of religion and faith as defining human motivations. The sectarian nature of religious faith revolves around each community’s search for truth, often complicated by a fervent commitment to their own interpretations of ancient scripture. Thus, one community’s essential truth might inevitably be viewed as another community’s “perversion.”