Eric Rudolph is, pure and simply, a terrorist.

Rudolph is suspected of having planted a bomb in a backpack at the Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta. One person was killed and 111 were injured.
Two years later, Rudolph was charged with that attack and implicated in three others: the 1997 bombings of a gay nightclub in Atlanta and a building north of Atlanta that housed an abortion clinic; and the 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham. An off-duty police officer was killed and a nurse severely injured in the latter attack.
A Florida native who moved to western North Carolina in 1981, Rudolph was believed to adhere to the teachings of Christian Identity, a white supremacist sect that is anti-gay, anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner. Some of the four bombs he is charged with planting included messages from the shadowy “Army of God.”

Is his religion a factor. I don't believe it is. I think he was just bred racist and a homophobe, but the media will play up his conservative Christian views.