Radicalism as religion

Radicalism as religion is Jenny’s way of understanding the fugitives’ political commitment as more than an ideology: it operates like a faith, with strict rules, absolute enemies, forbidden acts, and a promise that their survival carries meaning. The comparison exposes a tension at the heart of their flight. They claim to serve a just cause, yet they also long for judgment, hope for rescue by luck, and struggle to face their own responsibility.

A Faith with Rules and Enemies

Jenny sometimes compares radicalism to Catholicism: both appear to her as systems of strict observance and total explanation, organized around an absolute Satan and a hierarchy of sins. In the radicals’ moral order, surrender is among the gravest transgressions. This structure gives their political life the shape of religious devotion, defining not only what they should fight for but what they must never do.

The comparison is not simply a dismissal of their commitment. The fugitives believe it is their duty to devote themselves to revolution, particularly when resisting the mainstream leaves them morally isolated. Yet their marginal position has, in Jenny’s judgment, also bred moral wrong. They question whether people compromised by their own conduct can lead a good fight, while holding on to the distinction that they did not pull the trigger. Faith in the cause therefore coexists with uncertainty about their authority to serve it.

Risk, Judgment, and Self-Regard

Looking back, Jenny wonders whether the group repeatedly courted danger: at Dolly’s farm, during a rainstorm involving a truck and troopers, at an auto junkyard, and at a bar. Their precautions were incomplete. They drove at night and went into bars; they changed disguises but kept the same car. The contrast between apparent prudence and repeated exposure suggests an impulse they could not explain away as mere carelessness.

Jenny understands that impulse as a divided desire: they feared capture, yet also wanted to be caught through no fault of their own. A verdict might force them to confront what they had not fully faced about their crime. But their longing for a judgment was still centered on themselves. Their attempts to claim innocence, Jenny recognizes, arose from fear for themselves and horror at themselves; political conviction had not freed them from self-regard.

Luck as Providence

The fugitives also hope to be spared, interpreting survival as a possible sign from the gods. Jenny knows that sheer luck should have no place in a reasoned, just worldview: it sits uneasily with human equality, a liberation movement, and a radical’s ethical code. Yet going underground makes self-reinvention imaginable, and anyone who believes escape from unjust law can continue indefinitely is likely to rely on luck alongside political principle.

The contradiction is central to the idea. The fugitives are outlaws as well as soldiers, and their life depends on contingencies their stated politics cannot explain. Jenny’s reflection does not turn luck into justice; it shows how readily survival acquires the force of providence when people have staked their lives on remaining free.

Survival and Its Meaning

In the end, the fugitives reach the other side unscathed. One enemy after another has looked directly at them without recognizing them, strengthening their sense of being protected by an enchantment. Their escape can thus be read both as a material result of evasion and as confirmation, in their own imaginative world, that they have been spared for a reason.

That apparent confirmation remains morally unsettled. The same faith that gives their flight a larger meaning can shield them from fully confronting their actions; the same hope for judgment can be bound up with a wish to be absolved. Jenny’s account holds these impulses together rather than resolving them: radicalism supplies a sacred-seeming framework for resistance, while luck and self-concern reveal how fragile its claims to moral clarity have become.