Shedding Light on Violence in the Name of God

The toughest question we can ask about religion is whether a faith that offers a message of love and peace bears some responsibility when one of its true believers is inspired to commit an act of violence in the name of God. That’s the question that Mark Juergensmeyer dares to ask--and answer--in “Terror in the Mind of God,” a study of religious violence in the contemporary world.

“Religion,” he writes, “is not innocent.”

As presented by the author, acts such as the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York by Islamic extremists--and the bombing of abortion clinics in Alabama and Georgia by their Christian counterparts--are only the most immediate examples of an affliction that can be observed all over the world and in virtually every religious community.

“Although some observers try to explain away religion’s recent ties to violence as an aberration,” argues Juergensmeyer, “I look for explanations in the current forces of geopolitics and in a strain of violence that may be found at the deepest levels of the religious imagination.”

Juergensmeyer is a sociologist, not a theologian or a historian of religion, and he approaches his subject from a purely secular stance. And yet, significantly, it is the spiritual essence of religion that seems to be the catalyst for a certain kind of terrorism that can be found on the fringes of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other faiths.

Religion alone does not turn true believers into bomb-throwers, or so Juergensmeyer contends. It is only when “religion becomes fused with violent expressions of social aspirations, personal pride and movements for political change” that religious fundamentalists are inspired to carry out acts of terrorism. Still, Juergensmeyer is a sociologist who finds himself drawn into theological concerns.

To weigh the motives of abortion clinic bombers, as one of many examples from various faiths, the author reminds us that two of the disciples of Jesus were Zealots, a party of anti-Roman militants, and he ponders the Augustinian concept of the “just war.” In doing so, he bumps into the terrible irony that is the beating heart of his book: Christian theology, like so many other faiths, is capable of holding two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, such as Jesus’ statements “Love your enemies” and “I have come not to bring peace but a sword” in Matthew.

To his credit, Juergensmeyer is entirely evenhanded in his treatment of religious violence. Thus, for example, he introduces us to Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and he explains how Amir had fallen under the influence of a few militant rabbis who argued that an obscure point of Jewish law justified the assassination of Rabin: “The principle morally obligates a Jew to halt someone who presents ‘a mortal danger’ to Jews,” explains Juergensmeyer. “Such a danger, Amir reasoned, was created by Rabin in allowing the Palestinian Authority to expand on the West Bank.”

The same sort of logic is found in the self-justification of Islamic terrorists. “Islam is mercy,” said Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the men now serving a life sentence for the World Trade Center bombing, in a prison interview with Juergensmeyer. Yet, when asked why he would devote himself to religious violence, he affirmed that “It is my job to go wherever there is oppression and injustice and fight it.”

“Terror in the Mind of God,” however, is not restricted to examining extremism in the three Bible-based religions. The author finds additional examples in the Sikhs who assassinated Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, and the Buddhist-Hindu sect whose members released nerve gas in a Tokyo subway in 1995. All of these atrocities, however, share what the author calls “the logic of religious violence” and, quoting novelist Don DeLillo, “the language of being noticed.” In other words, he argues, the “creations of terror” go beyond mere politics and are intended as a kind of public morality play that points to some higher religious truth--a “cosmic war” between right and wrong, an apocalyptic clash between order and chaos.

“The very adjectives used to describe acts of religious terrorism--symbolic, dramatic, theatrical--suggest that we look at them not as tactics but as performance violence,” he concludes. “Public ritual has traditionally been the province of religion, and this is one of the reasons that performance violence comes so naturally to activists from a religious background.”

“Terror in the Mind of God” is an unsettling book but also a courageous one. No one who truly cares about matters of faith can afford to ignore the dangers that lurk within religious extremism, and Juergensmeyer is ultimately serving the highest aspirations of organized religion when he insists on shedding light on the darker corners of human belief and human conduct.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to Book Review, is the author of “Moses: A Life.”