On September 30, 1997, a professor from Santa Barbara sat in a visiting room at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California, across from a tall Egyptian with freckles and red hair. The other inmates called the prisoner Mahmud the Red. Mahmud Abouhalima (b. 1959) had been convicted for his part in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He was easy company. He swore in casual conversation. He liked Western women, and when the professor mentioned an upcoming trip to Denmark, Abouhalima warned him that Scandinavian women were beautiful and dangerous. He had married two European women himself, one after the other.
Then the conversation turned to religion in public life, and the professor watched the prisoner’s face change. The eyes glazed. The voice took on a new weight. Abouhalima told him that Americans were like sheep, that a war was underway between good and evil, religion and irreligion, and that the American government stood on the side of evil. Americans could not see the war because their media blinded them. The professor pressed him on why anyone bombs buildings. Abouhalima refused to discuss the World Trade Center, since his appeal was pending, but he was happy to discuss Oklahoma City. No one had accused him of that. The bombers had a reason, he said. They wanted to send a message: the government is the enemy. Then he sat back, smiled at the professor with satisfaction, and said, “and now you know.”
The professor was Mark Juergensmeyer (b. 1940), and the exchange became one of the most quoted moments in the modern study of religious violence. Four years later, after two planes struck the building Abouhalima had failed to bring down, everyone knew. Juergensmeyer’s book Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, published in 2000, became required reading in the ruins.
Juergensmeyer built his career on a simple wager. He bet that you could not understand religious violence from a distance, from datasets and news clippings and theory alone. You had to sit in the room. You had to let the militant talk until his world came into view, and then you had to describe that world without endorsing it and without flinching. Over five decades he sat in rooms with Hamas founders in Gaza, Sikh separatists in Delhi, an abortion clinic bomber in Maryland, Buddhist militants in Asia, and jihadi prisoners in California and Iraq. What he brought back changed how scholars, journalists, and governments talk about terror. His concepts, cosmic war, satanization, performance violence, entered the working vocabulary of a field.
He came from Carlinville, Illinois, a county-seat town in the corn and coal country between Springfield and St. Louis. He was born in 1940 into a pious Protestant family in the American Midwest, and his first education in cosmic war came under canvas. In summer, revival preachers set up tents outside town like a traveling carnival. The music was electric and the preaching was theater. Juergensmeyer remembered one preacher who worked the crowd in camouflage battle dress and growled at the Midwestern innocents that a war was underway, a real war, between truth and evil, and that every soul in the tent had to decide, that night, whether to be a victim or a victor. Some of them went forward to the altar. The boy from Carlinville went forward too. Decades later, sitting across from Abouhalima at Lompoc or listening to tapes of Sikh sermons from the Golden Temple, he recognized the voice. It was only a short stretch, he wrote, from the revival preachers of southern Illinois to Osama bin Laden (1957-2011). The difference was that bin Laden’s soldiers had real weapons and real targets.
Juergensmeyer took a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Illinois in 1962, then went east to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he earned an M.Div. in 1965 while studying international affairs across the street at Columbia. Union in those years carried the afterglow of Reinhold Niebuhr, and it trained men who took both God and politics seriously. Juergensmeyer never became a parish minister. He went west instead, to the University of California, Berkeley, and took an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science, finishing the doctorate in 1974. The sequence tells you what kind of scholar he became: philosophy for the questions, seminary for the inside of religious conviction, political science for power. He remained a churchgoing Protestant all his life, a detail that surprised his subjects. When Abouhalima called him a secularist, Juergensmeyer protested that he had been raised in the church, had attended seminary, still belonged to a congregation. The prisoner brushed it off: “no, Mr. Mark, you are a secularist.” Abouhalima said he had lived in Juergensmeyer’s world but Juergensmeyer had never lived in his. Juergensmeyer conceded, in print, that the prisoner had a point. His Christianity was at home in secular, multicultural modernity. Abouhalima’s Islam was at war with it.
Before terrorism, there was Punjab. Juergensmeyer lived in the Punjab for several years and made India the center of his early work. His first major book, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement Against Untouchability in Twentieth-Century Punjab (1982), studied the Ad Dharm movement, an effort by low-caste Punjabis to escape caste stigma by claiming a religion of their own. The book cut against the standard social-science reading of religion as a conservative force that blesses existing hierarchy. In Punjab, Juergensmeyer showed, religious identity worked as a lever. It gave despised communities dignity, organization, and political weight. He followed with Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith (1991), a study of a modern devotional movement centered on living gurus, which let him examine how a new faith builds authority and discipline while adapting to modern life. The method in both books became his signature. He took the believers’ world seriously from the inside, then set it in sociological and historical context from the outside.
From 1974 to 1989 he held a joint position in Berkeley, coordinating religious studies at the university while directing comparative religion programs at the Graduate Theological Union, the consortium of seminaries on the north side of campus. The location shaped him. He worked the seam between a great secular research university and a hillside of theological schools, and he refused the reductions native to each side. Against the social scientists, he insisted that religious claims were more than a mask for material interests. Against the theologians, he insisted that no faith floats free of history and power. In those same years he wrote Fighting with Gandhi (1984), later revised as Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution (2005), which read Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) as a strategist. Gandhian nonviolence, in Juergensmeyer’s telling, was a disciplined method of fighting, a way to confront an adversary hard while preserving his humanity. The Gandhi work matters for understanding everything that came after. Juergensmeyer never held that religion produces violence. He held that religion produces armies, and that the armies can march in more than one direction.
Then Punjab burned. Through the 1980s, Sikh militants seeking a separate state called Khalistan fought a dirty war with the Indian government, and Juergensmeyer watched people he knew and respected get swept into the killing. He took 1986 off to study the sermons of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947-1984), the preacher who had fortified the Golden Temple and died in the Indian Army’s assault on it, and to travel again through a region where he was trusted. Bhindranwale, on tape, sounded familiar. He looked out at young Sikh men with trimmed beards and slick pants and shiny shoes and told them they had strayed from the Guru, that the hour had come to decide. The evangelist in camouflage had said the same thing in Illinois. The difference, again, was the externalized enemy. For Bhindranwale the enemy wore a face, the face of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1917-1984), whom he described as an evil woman born in a house of Brahmans. Her bodyguards killed her months after the temple assault.
One night in Delhi, in a back room of a gurdwara, Juergensmeyer got his interview with a Sikh martyr brigade. Six young men came in armed, faces wrapped in scarves. The room was tense. Then they sat, unwound the scarves, and Juergensmeyer felt a wave of astonishment. They were teenagers, seventeen or eighteen, and they looked like the undergraduates he had taught at Punjab University. Nothing in their manner was savage. They were courteous, bright, the sons of the privileged Jat farming caste, boys who in another season might have been winning prizes at soccer. He asked them the only question he had: why. The question puzzled them, because to them the answer was obvious. They told him they lived at a hinge of history, in a great conflict of good against evil and truth against untruth, and that they had a chance to make the difference. He came away convinced that the reward they fought for was the fight. Sikh theology promised no paradise of virgins. What the struggle offered was the experience of serving in a war that mattered absolutely, an experience ennobling, redemptive, and open to any village boy with a gun.
Out of Punjab came the comparative question that organized the rest of his career. Was this a Sikh story, an Indian story, or a global one? The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (1993), revised in 2008 as Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, gave his answer. The New York Times named the earlier book a notable book of the year. Its argument ran against the confident secularization story that still governed the social sciences. Modernization was supposed to shrink religion into private life. Juergensmeyer saw the opposite pattern from Punjab to Gaza to Tehran to the American militia belt. The secular nation-state, the Enlightenment’s proudest political invention, had promised unity, development, and civic equality, and across much of the postcolonial world it had delivered corruption, bureaucracy, and alienation. Where secular nationalism lost its moral authority, religion stood ready as an alternative ground of peoplehood, thick with history and heavy with sanction. Politics did not merely use religion. Politics got religionized. Social conflicts were recast in sacred terms, and political struggle became a redemptive personal act.
Terror in the Mind of God carried the argument into the charnel house. Juergensmeyer built the book from case studies and face-to-face interviews across traditions: Abouhalima at Lompoc; Mike Bray (b. 1952), the Lutheran pastor from Bowie, Maryland, who served prison time in connection with a string of abortion clinic bombings and defended the killing of abortion doctors over coffee in his kitchen; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (1937-2004), the quadriplegic founder of Hamas, interviewed in Gaza in the winter of 1989 into the 1990s; his colleague Abdel Aziz Rantisi (1947-2004), who told Juergensmeyer the bombings of Israeli civilians were self-chosen martyrdom and a moral lesson; Simranjit Singh Mann (b. 1945) and the Khalistanis; Buddhist militants in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Japan. Israeli missiles later killed Yassin and Rantisi within weeks of each other in 2004. Yassin told him the struggle was, in his words, “not about land or property; it’s about pride.” Juergensmeyer read the sheikh’s remark as a claim about selfhood, about men who felt their dignity and their world so threatened that only an absolute struggle could restore them.
The book’s central concept is cosmic war. A cosmic war is a worldly conflict reimagined as a battle beyond history, a fight between ultimate good and ultimate evil in which the combatant serves God’s side. Ordinary war permits bargaining, compromise, partial victory, and defeat. Cosmic war permits none of these. Time horizons stretch toward eternity; a struggle can be lost for a century and still be won. And since the enemy in a cosmic war is evil itself, negotiation becomes betrayal. Alongside the concept sits what Juergensmeyer calls satanization, the moral work that must be done before pious men can kill. The enemy is redescribed until he stops being a rival with interests and becomes a demon, an infidel, an agent of Satan, or, in Abouhalima’s idiom, a soulless body moving through the world already dead. Satanization is more than insult. It is moral engineering. It dismantles the inhibitions that keep ordinary believers from murder and lets the killer understand his act as defense, sacrifice, or duty. None of his subjects accepted the word terrorist. As Abouhalima put it from prison: “We’re not terrorists! We’re soldiers for God!”
The third concept, performance violence, may be the most cited. Terrorist acts, Juergensmeyer argued, are staged. They are theater performed at once for the enemy, for the faithful, for the wavering, and for the cameras. The 1993 and 2001 attacks made his case for him. The World Trade Center was the tallest symbol of American economic power in an age of globalization; the Pentagon was its military twin. No communiqué was needed. The targets were the message, and the message ran on CNN and Al Jazeera alike. Al Qaeda, he judged, was performing as much for the Muslim world as for the American one, demonstrating to its own potential recruits that a war was on and that the great power could bleed. The insight moved terrorism studies past narrow strategic models. An attack that gains no ground and wins no concession can still succeed as ritual, as drama, as proof to the believers that the cosmic war is real.
After September 11, Juergensmeyer became one of the interpreters the country reached for. He appeared on BBC, CNN, and NPR, and his line was steady and unfashionable in both directions. Take the religion in religious violence seriously, he said; the militants are not faking their faith, and poverty and madness explain little. And refuse the militants’ framing, he said; there is no clash of civilizations, and a government that declares a war on terror hands the holy warriors the cosmic script they wrote for themselves. The passions of religious war, he liked to point out, blow through like summer storms. He had walked Punjab villages in the early 1990s after the Khalistan insurgency collapsed, villages with a hurricane-swept look, and a former militant had told him the movement was over. Public support had drained away, and the feared gunmen the villagers called the boys had become boys again. Hamas’s popular support, he noted, sank whenever a negotiated peace looked possible. Northern Ireland wound down. The lesson he drew for governments: respond to terror without adopting the terrorist’s rhetoric, and the spiral can unwind.
His institutional life tracked his intellectual one. From 1989 to 1993 he served as founding dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. In 1993 he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, into a campus whose religious studies department Ninian Smart (1927-2001) had made famous, and there he built a second field. He founded UCSB’s Global and International Studies program and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, arguing that globalization could not be reduced to markets and technology, that religion, migration, media, and violence crossed borders too and needed their own field of study. His edited volumes, The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions, Thinking Globally, and The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (2018), gave the young discipline its reference shelf. With Craig Calhoun (b. 1952) and Jonathan VanAntwerpen he co-edited Rethinking Secularism (2011), which treated secularism as a contingent political formation with a history rather than the neutral endpoint of progress. The honors accumulated: the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2003, the Silver Medal of Spain’s Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in 2004, the presidency of the American Academy of Religion, honorary doctorates from Lehigh, Roskilde in Denmark, and Dayalbagh in India, fellowships from the Wilson Center, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.
He kept working the problem from new angles into his eighties. God in the Tumult of the Global Square (2015), with Dinah Griego and John Soboslai, examined religion in global civil society. God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (2020) pressed his darkest thesis, that war is the central image in the worldview of nearly every violent religious movement, and that religion and warfare feed each other because both construct alternative realities that give death meaning. When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (2022) reversed the field’s usual question, studying how movements such as ISIS in Iraq, Islamists in Mindanao, and the Sikh insurgency lost their sacred charge. In April 2025, at eighty-four, he published Why God Needs War and War Needs God with Oxford University Press, a revised and re-prefaced version of the meditation, opening with Patriarch Kirill blessing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a conflict of metaphysical significance and with Yahya Sinwar (1962-2024) casting himself as a new Saladin. He retired to emeritus status in 2021 but hardly slowed. Interviewers over the years found him in a home office perched on a cliff above the Pacific; his blog, Religion and Social Change in a Global World, still carries commentary on Gaza, Ukraine, American authoritarianism, and, in a recent entry, a photograph of his sister-in-law feeding a goat at his Santa Barbara ranch. He has written or edited some thirty books and more than three hundred articles.
The criticism of his work follows predictable lines, and he has heard all of it. Political scientists of a rational-choice bent say he overweights symbol and drama and underweights strategy, organization, and money; groups such as Hamas, they note, calibrate violence to negotiations with a precision that looks more like chess than liturgy. Historians complain that cosmic war stretches to cover movements whose situations differ sharply, flattening Sikh separatists, Christian militias, and Salafi jihadists into one type. Some secular critics think he grants religion too much causal force; some believers think he chains their faith to its worst practitioners. His fieldwork draws a subtler objection: a handful of prison interviews, conducted through translators, with men performing for a Western professor, may reveal less than the vivid anecdotes suggest, and Juergensmeyer himself has conceded that a deeper study might have required knowing Arabic, Punjabi, Hebrew, and Burmese and staying longer in every place. The objections have weight. They also measure the size of the target. Before Juergensmeyer, the academic mainstream treated religious violence as either aberration or camouflage. After him, the field had to reckon with militants as religious actors whose faith did explanatory work.
His durable contribution is a discipline of attention. He listened to killers describe their moral universe, reconstructed that universe with care, and returned with a warning addressed to both sides of the war on terror. To the militants’ apologists he said that the violence was real, patterned, and sanctified, and could not be explained away as politics in costume. To the counterterrorists he said that the surest way to feed a cosmic war is to fight one. The boy who answered the altar call in a revival tent in southern Illinois spent his career studying men who answered the same call with rifles, and he never pretended the two summonses came from different places in the human heart. That refusal, to exoticize the holy warrior or to excuse him, is why his books remain on the syllabus, and why, a generation after a prisoner in Lompoc smiled and told him that now he knew, the knowing still runs through Juergensmeyer’s terms.
Notes
The Lompoc scenes, the revival tent preacher in camouflage, the Delhi gurdwara martyr brigade, the Bhindranwale sermon material, and the visit to a Punjab village after the conflict, where a resident remarks that “the movement is over,” all come from Mark Juergensmeyer’s own 2004 lecture, “From Bhindranwale to Bin Laden”: eScholarship. This is the richest single source for the narrative scenes, and because it is Juergensmeyer’s own account, the dialogue is based on his published recollections. One chronological point is worth noting. His interview footnote dates the meeting with Mahmud Abouhalima to September 30, 1997. Other sources refer to August 1997 and mention two meetings. I followed Juergensmeyer’s own footnoted date for the opening scene.
The exchange in which Abouhalima tells Juergensmeyer, “You are a secularist,” together with Juergensmeyer’s later acknowledgment that Abouhalima had a point, comes from his 2015 article, “Entering the Mindset of Violent Religious Activists,” published in Religions: MDPI.
The declaration, “We’re not terrorists! We’re soldiers for God!” is quoted from Terror in the Mind of God and is reproduced here: Goodreads.
The quotation from Sheikh Ahmed Yassin expressing pride and the discussion of Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi’s “moral lesson” come from WebSage and America magazine.
The description of Juergensmeyer’s cliff-top home office comes from his interview with The Immanent Frame: The Immanent Frame.
Information about his ranch, the photograph with his goat, his 2025 book, his discussion of Patriarch Kirill and Yahya Sinwar, and his current blogging activity comes from his own website: Juergensmeyer.org and About Mark Juergensmeyer.
Details of the 2025 Oxford edition of Why God Needs War and War Needs God come from Oxford University Press: Oxford University Press.
Under your standing permission, I added a few pieces of self-evident background without separate citation. These include describing Carlinville as corn and coal country between Springfield and St. Louis, reflecting its actual geography, referring to the lingering influence of Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary in the early 1960s, since Juergensmeyer arrived only a year after Niebuhr’s retirement, and mentioning Michael Bray’s kitchen-table hospitality and his location in Bowie, Maryland. The hospitality is a familiar element of Juergensmeyer’s account in Terror in the Mind of God, though it would be worth checking against your copy before publication.
Mark Juergensmeyer: The Man Who Interviewed the Holy Warriors
On September 30, 1997, a professor from Santa Barbara sat in a visiting room at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California, across from a tall Egyptian with freckles and red hair. The other inmates called the prisoner Mahmud the Red. Mahmud Abouhalima (b. 1959) had been convicted for his part in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He was easy company. He swore in casual conversation. He liked Western women, and when the professor mentioned an upcoming trip to Denmark, Abouhalima warned him that Scandinavian women were beautiful and dangerous. He had married two European women himself, one after the other.
Then the conversation turned to religion in public life, and the professor watched the prisoner’s face change. The eyes glazed. The voice took on a new weight. Abouhalima told him that Americans were like sheep, that a war was underway between good and evil, religion and irreligion, and that the American government stood on the side of evil. Americans could not see the war because their media blinded them. The professor pressed him on why anyone bombs buildings. Abouhalima refused to discuss the World Trade Center, since his appeal was pending, but he was happy to discuss Oklahoma City. No one had accused him of that. The bombers had a reason, he said. They wanted to send a message: the government is the enemy. Then he sat back, smiled at the professor with satisfaction, and said, “and now you know.”
The professor was Mark Juergensmeyer, and the exchange became one of the most quoted moments in the modern study of religious violence. Four years later, after two planes struck the building Abouhalima had failed to bring down, everyone knew. Juergensmeyer’s book Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, published in 2000, became required reading in the ruins.
Juergensmeyer built his career on a simple wager. He bet that you could not understand religious violence from a distance, from datasets and news clippings and theory alone. You had to sit in the room. You had to let the militant talk until his world came into view, and then you had to describe that world without endorsing it and without flinching. Over five decades he sat in rooms with Hamas founders in Gaza, Sikh separatists in Delhi, an abortion clinic bomber in Maryland, Buddhist militants in Asia, and jihadi prisoners in California and Iraq. What he brought back changed how scholars, journalists, and governments talk about terror. His concepts, cosmic war, satanization, performance violence, entered the working vocabulary of a field.
He came from Carlinville, Illinois, a county-seat town in the corn and coal country between Springfield and St. Louis. He was born in 1940 into a pious Protestant family in the American Midwest, and his first education in cosmic war came under canvas. In summer, revival preachers set up tents outside town like a traveling carnival. The music was electric and the preaching was theater. Juergensmeyer remembered one preacher who worked the crowd in camouflage battle dress and growled at the Midwestern innocents that a war was underway, a real war, between truth and evil, and that every soul in the tent had to decide, that night, whether to be a victim or a victor. Some of them went forward to the altar. The boy from Carlinville went forward too. Decades later, sitting across from Abouhalima at Lompoc or listening to tapes of Sikh sermons from the Golden Temple, he recognized the voice. It was only a short stretch, he wrote, from the revival preachers of southern Illinois to Osama bin Laden (1957-2011). The difference was that bin Laden’s soldiers had real weapons and real targets.
Juergensmeyer took a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Illinois in 1962, then went east to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he earned an M.Div. in 1965 while studying international affairs across the street at Columbia. Union in those years carried the afterglow of Reinhold Niebuhr, and it trained men who took both God and politics seriously. Juergensmeyer never became a parish minister. He went west instead, to the University of California, Berkeley, and took an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science, finishing the doctorate in 1974. The sequence tells you what kind of scholar he became: philosophy for the questions, seminary for the inside of religious conviction, political science for power. He remained a churchgoing Protestant all his life, a detail that surprised his subjects. When Abouhalima called him a secularist, Juergensmeyer protested that he had been raised in the church, had attended seminary, still belonged to a congregation. The prisoner brushed it off: “no, Mr. Mark, you are a secularist.” Abouhalima said he had lived in Juergensmeyer’s world but Juergensmeyer had never lived in his. Juergensmeyer conceded, in print, that the prisoner had a point. His Christianity was at home in secular, multicultural modernity. Abouhalima’s Islam was at war with it.
Before terrorism, there was Punjab. Juergensmeyer lived in the Punjab for several years and made India the center of his early work. His first major book, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement Against Untouchability in Twentieth-Century Punjab (1982), studied the Ad Dharm movement, an effort by low-caste Punjabis to escape caste stigma by claiming a religion of their own. The book cut against the standard social-science reading of religion as a conservative force that blesses existing hierarchy. In Punjab, Juergensmeyer showed, religious identity worked as a lever. It gave despised communities dignity, organization, and political weight. He followed with Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith (1991), a study of a modern devotional movement centered on living gurus, which let him examine how a new faith builds authority and discipline while adapting to modern life. The method in both books became his signature. He took the believers’ world seriously from the inside, then set it in sociological and historical context from the outside.
From 1974 to 1989 he held a joint position in Berkeley, coordinating religious studies at the university while directing comparative religion programs at the Graduate Theological Union, the consortium of seminaries on the north side of campus. The location shaped him. He worked the seam between a great secular research university and a hillside of theological schools, and he refused the reductions native to each side. Against the social scientists, he insisted that religious claims were more than a mask for material interests. Against the theologians, he insisted that no faith floats free of history and power. In those same years he wrote Fighting with Gandhi (1984), later revised as Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution (2005), which read Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) as a strategist. Gandhian nonviolence, in Juergensmeyer’s telling, was a disciplined method of fighting, a way to confront an adversary hard while preserving his humanity. The Gandhi work matters for understanding everything that came after. Juergensmeyer never held that religion produces violence. He held that religion produces armies, and that the armies can march in more than one direction.
Then Punjab burned. Through the 1980s, Sikh militants seeking a separate state called Khalistan fought a dirty war with the Indian government, and Juergensmeyer watched people he knew and respected get swept into the killing. He took 1986 off to study the sermons of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947-1984), the preacher who had fortified the Golden Temple and died in the Indian Army’s assault on it, and to travel again through a region where he was trusted. Bhindranwale, on tape, sounded familiar. He looked out at young Sikh men with trimmed beards and slick pants and shiny shoes and told them they had strayed from the Guru, that the hour had come to decide. The evangelist in camouflage had said the same thing in Illinois. The difference, again, was the externalized enemy. For Bhindranwale the enemy wore a face, the face of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1917-1984), whom he described as an evil woman born in a house of Brahmans. Her bodyguards killed her months after the temple assault.
One night in Delhi, in a back room of a gurdwara, Juergensmeyer got his interview with a Sikh martyr brigade. Six young men came in armed, faces wrapped in scarves. The room was tense. Then they sat, unwound the scarves, and Juergensmeyer felt a wave of astonishment. They were teenagers, seventeen or eighteen, and they looked like the undergraduates he had taught at Punjab University. Nothing in their manner was savage. They were courteous, bright, the sons of the privileged Jat farming caste, boys who in another season might have been winning prizes at soccer. He asked them the only question he had: why. The question puzzled them, because to them the answer was obvious. They told him they lived at a hinge of history, in a great conflict of good against evil and truth against untruth, and that they had a chance to make the difference. He came away convinced that the reward they fought for was the fight. Sikh theology promised no paradise of virgins. What the struggle offered was the experience of serving in a war that mattered absolutely, an experience ennobling, redemptive, and open to any village boy with a gun.
Out of Punjab came the comparative question that organized the rest of his career. Was this a Sikh story, an Indian story, or a global one? The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (1993), revised in 2008 as Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, gave his answer. The New York Times named the earlier book a notable book of the year. Its argument ran against the confident secularization story that still governed the social sciences. Modernization was supposed to shrink religion into private life. Juergensmeyer saw the opposite pattern from Punjab to Gaza to Tehran to the American militia belt. The secular nation-state, the Enlightenment’s proudest political invention, had promised unity, development, and civic equality, and across much of the postcolonial world it had delivered corruption, bureaucracy, and alienation. Where secular nationalism lost its moral authority, religion stood ready as an alternative ground of peoplehood, thick with history and heavy with sanction. Politics did not merely use religion. Politics got religionized. Social conflicts were recast in sacred terms, and political struggle became a redemptive personal act.
Terror in the Mind of God carried the argument into the charnel house. Juergensmeyer built the book from case studies and face-to-face interviews across traditions: Abouhalima at Lompoc; Mike Bray (b. 1952), the Lutheran pastor from Bowie, Maryland, who served prison time in connection with a string of abortion clinic bombings and defended the killing of abortion doctors over coffee in his kitchen; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (1937-2004), the quadriplegic founder of Hamas, interviewed in Gaza in the winter of 1989 into the 1990s; his colleague Abdel Aziz Rantisi (1947-2004), who told Juergensmeyer the bombings of Israeli civilians were self-chosen martyrdom and a moral lesson; Simranjit Singh Mann (b. 1945) and the Khalistanis; Buddhist militants in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Japan. Israeli missiles later killed Yassin and Rantisi within weeks of each other in 2004. Yassin told him the struggle was, in his words, “not about land or property; it’s about pride.” Juergensmeyer read the sheikh’s remark as a claim about selfhood, about men who felt their dignity and their world so threatened that only an absolute struggle could restore them.
The book’s central concept is cosmic war. A cosmic war is a worldly conflict reimagined as a battle beyond history, a fight between ultimate good and ultimate evil in which the combatant serves God’s side. Ordinary war permits bargaining, compromise, partial victory, and defeat. Cosmic war permits none of these. Time horizons stretch toward eternity; a struggle can be lost for a century and still be won. And since the enemy in a cosmic war is evil itself, negotiation becomes betrayal. Alongside the concept sits what Juergensmeyer calls satanization, the moral work that must be done before pious men can kill. The enemy is redescribed until he stops being a rival with interests and becomes a demon, an infidel, an agent of Satan, or, in Abouhalima’s idiom, a soulless body moving through the world already dead. Satanization is more than insult. It is moral engineering. It dismantles the inhibitions that keep ordinary believers from murder and lets the killer understand his act as defense, sacrifice, or duty. None of his subjects accepted the word terrorist. As Abouhalima put it from prison: “We’re not terrorists! We’re soldiers for God!”
The third concept, performance violence, may be the most cited. Terrorist acts, Juergensmeyer argued, are staged. They are theater performed at once for the enemy, for the faithful, for the wavering, and for the cameras. The 1993 and 2001 attacks made his case for him. The World Trade Center was the tallest symbol of American economic power in an age of globalization; the Pentagon was its military twin. No communiqué was needed. The targets were the message, and the message ran on CNN and Al Jazeera alike. Al Qaeda, he judged, was performing as much for the Muslim world as for the American one, demonstrating to its own potential recruits that a war was on and that the great power could bleed. The insight moved terrorism studies past narrow strategic models. An attack that gains no ground and wins no concession can still succeed as ritual, as drama, as proof to the believers that the cosmic war is real.
After September 11, Juergensmeyer became one of the interpreters the country reached for. He appeared on BBC, CNN, and NPR, and his line was steady and unfashionable in both directions. Take the religion in religious violence seriously, he said; the militants are not faking their faith, and poverty and madness explain little. And refuse the militants’ framing, he said; there is no clash of civilizations, and a government that declares a war on terror hands the holy warriors the cosmic script they wrote for themselves. The passions of religious war, he liked to point out, blow through like summer storms. He had walked Punjab villages in the early 1990s after the Khalistan insurgency collapsed, villages with a hurricane-swept look, and a former militant had told him the movement was over. Public support had drained away, and the feared gunmen the villagers called the boys had become boys again. Hamas’s popular support, he noted, sank whenever a negotiated peace looked possible. Northern Ireland wound down. The lesson he drew for governments: respond to terror without adopting the terrorist’s rhetoric, and the spiral can unwind.
His institutional life tracked his intellectual one. From 1989 to 1993 he served as founding dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. In 1993 he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, into a campus whose religious studies department Ninian Smart (1927-2001) had made famous, and there he built a second field. He founded UCSB’s Global and International Studies program and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, arguing that globalization could not be reduced to markets and technology, that religion, migration, media, and violence crossed borders too and needed their own field of study. His edited volumes, The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions, Thinking Globally, and The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (2018), gave the young discipline its reference shelf. With Craig Calhoun (b. 1952) and Jonathan VanAntwerpen he co-edited Rethinking Secularism (2011), which treated secularism as a contingent political formation with a history rather than the neutral endpoint of progress. The honors accumulated: the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2003, the Silver Medal of Spain’s Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in 2004, the presidency of the American Academy of Religion, honorary doctorates from Lehigh, Roskilde in Denmark, and Dayalbagh in India, fellowships from the Wilson Center, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.
He kept working the problem from new angles into his eighties. God in the Tumult of the Global Square (2015), with Dinah Griego and John Soboslai, examined religion in global civil society. God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (2020) pressed his darkest thesis, that war is the central image in the worldview of nearly every violent religious movement, and that religion and warfare feed each other because both construct alternative realities that give death meaning. When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (2022) reversed the field’s usual question, studying how movements such as ISIS in Iraq, Islamists in Mindanao, and the Sikh insurgency lost their sacred charge. In April 2025, at eighty-four, he published Why God Needs War and War Needs God with Oxford University Press, a revised and re-prefaced version of the meditation, opening with Patriarch Kirill blessing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a conflict of metaphysical significance and with Yahya Sinwar (1962-2024) casting himself as a new Saladin. He retired to emeritus status in 2021 but hardly slowed. Interviewers over the years found him in a home office perched on a cliff above the Pacific; his blog, Religion and Social Change in a Global World, still carries commentary on Gaza, Ukraine, American authoritarianism, and, in a recent entry, a photograph of his sister-in-law feeding a goat at his Santa Barbara ranch. He has written or edited some thirty books and more than three hundred articles.
The criticism of his work follows predictable lines, and he has heard all of it. Political scientists of a rational-choice bent say he overweights symbol and drama and underweights strategy, organization, and money; groups such as Hamas, they note, calibrate violence to negotiations with a precision that looks more like chess than liturgy. Historians complain that cosmic war stretches to cover movements whose situations differ sharply, flattening Sikh separatists, Christian militias, and Salafi jihadists into one type. Some secular critics think he grants religion too much causal force; some believers think he chains their faith to its worst practitioners. His fieldwork draws a subtler objection: a handful of prison interviews, conducted through translators, with men performing for a Western professor, may reveal less than the vivid anecdotes suggest, and Juergensmeyer himself has conceded that a deeper study might have required knowing Arabic, Punjabi, Hebrew, and Burmese and staying longer in every place. The objections have weight. They also measure the size of the target. Before Juergensmeyer, the academic mainstream treated religious violence as either aberration or camouflage. After him, the field had to reckon with militants as religious actors whose faith did explanatory work.
His durable contribution is a discipline of attention. He listened to killers describe their moral universe, reconstructed that universe with care, and returned with a warning addressed to both sides of the war on terror. To the militants’ apologists he said that the violence was real, patterned, and sanctified, and could not be explained away as politics in costume. To the counterterrorists he said that the surest way to feed a cosmic war is to fight one. The boy who answered the altar call in a revival tent in southern Illinois spent his career studying men who answered the same call with rifles, and he never pretended the two summonses came from different places in the human heart. That refusal, to exoticize the holy warrior or to excuse him, is why his books remain on the syllabus, and why, a generation after a prisoner in Lompoc smiled and told him that now he knew, the knowing still runs through Juergensmeyer’s terms.
The Cartographer of Holy War: Mark Juergensmeyer’s Hero System
The boy went forward at the altar call. This is the fact to hold onto. In a canvas tent outside Carlinville, Illinois, sometime in the early 1950s, a revival preacher in camouflage told a crowd of farm families that a war was underway between good and evil and that every soul present had to choose a side that night. The music swelled. The pressure in the tent was enormous. Mark Juergensmeyer (b. 1940), a pious Protestant boy of the American Midwest, walked down the sawdust aisle and gave himself to the Lord.
Two terrors grow from that night, and his life’s work answers both.
The first terror is that the preacher was right. There is a war. It runs beneath the visible world, and the worst death a man can die is the deserter’s death, the death of the one who heard the summons and went home to supper. Every serious religion keeps this terror in stock. Juergensmeyer spent fifty years interviewing men who had organized their lives around it, and he never once described them as alien. He kept saying the opposite. The distance between the revival preachers of southern Illinois and Osama bin Laden (1957-2011), he wrote, is short.
The second terror is that the preacher was wrong. Then the tears and the trembling and the decision were theater over nothing, and the boy walked back up the aisle into the flat world that Mahmud Abouhalima (b. 1959) would describe to him forty years later in a prison visiting room: a world of secular people moving like dead bodies, pens without ink. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) called this the default condition, the creature’s knowledge that it will die and rot and be forgotten unless some system of heroism converts its little life into permanent significance. The tent offered one conversion rate. The question was what a man does when he can no longer accept the tent’s terms and cannot bear the flatness either.
Juergensmeyer’s answer was to enlist in the war as its cartographer. He went to the front, every front, Amritsar and Gaza and Lompoc and Belfast, and he mapped the combatants’ heaven and hell without firing a shot for either. The role solves both terrors in one stroke. Against the flat world, his life acquires the highest stakes available: he handles the live ammunition of ultimate meaning, sits knee to knee with men who kill for God, walks into rooms that intelligence agencies cannot enter. Against the tent, he keeps his hands unbloodied and his mind unowned. He gets the soldier’s proximity without the soldier’s guilt and the skeptic’s independence without the skeptic’s emptiness. It is an elegant hero system, among the most elegant the modern academy has produced, and it made him the man the BBC called when the towers fell.
Every hero system tells a subtraction story, an account of what remains when you strip the costumes away, and the subtraction story always flatters the teller. Juergensmeyer’s is method. He presents himself as the man with nothing on: no ideology, no side, no self in the frame. He said as much in describing his interviews. He tries to keep himself out of the picture so the militant’s world can fill it. Just listening. But a man who has subtracted himself from every drama has starred in a drama of subtraction. The claim to stand outside all hero systems is the signature move of a particular hero system, the interpreter’s, and it carries its own promise of immortality: the combatants will die, their causes will curdle, their movements will pass like summer storms, and the map will remain. Terror in the mind of God, catalogued for the ages by the calm man from Santa Barbara.
Watch the system at work in its principal theater, the prison visiting room at Lompoc, September 1997. Two hero systems face each other across a table, and each has cast the other as a supporting player.
Abouhalima believes he is the missionary. Before him sits everything he indicts, an educated, decent, blind American, and the prisoner works on him the way the tent preacher worked on the farm boys. You are like sheep, he tells him. There is a war and you cannot see it. When Juergensmeyer protests that he is a churchgoing Christian, a seminary man, Abouhalima waves it off: you are a secularist, I have lived your world and you have never lived mine. The prisoner’s heroism requires this audience. A holy warrior locked in a federal cage has one weapon left, witness, and God has delivered him a professor who will carry the witness out through the metal detectors and print it.
Juergensmeyer believes he is the scientist. Before him sits the rarest of specimens, a cosmic warrior willing to talk, and every glazed look and every threat is data. His heroism requires this subject. A scholar of religious violence with no violent believers in his notebooks is a musicologist who has never heard music.
So each man mines the other, and each goes home enlarged. Abouhalima gets his message sent. Juergensmeyer gets his book. The book wins the Grawemeyer Award. Neither man is wrong about what happened in the room, and neither man’s account can survive inside the other’s. This is Becker’s point about heroism, that it is a closed accounting system, and the visiting room at Lompoc held two sets of books.
Now take the sacred words one at a time, because the words are where hero systems hide, and the same word buys different immortality in different economies.
Start with war, the word Juergensmeyer built his career on. In his system, war is an image, the master metaphor of the religious imagination, a template that turns political grievance into transcendent drama. War is the thing to be seen through. The scholar’s victory is dissolution: name the cosmic war as imagination and the spell weakens. In Abouhalima’s system the same word is a fact, the deepest fact, and naming it is sanity; the man who says there is no war is the casualty. For a Gold Star mother in Ohio, war is the thing that took her son, and it must have meant something, because if the war was theater then the boy died for a stage set, and she cannot live in that sentence. For a game theorist at RAND, war is bargaining failure, a region on a curve, and the professor’s talk of sacred drama is noise in the model. For a Kurdish peshmerga veteran, war is the rent his people pay every generation for the right to exist, and there is nothing cosmic about it; it comes with the address. And for the tribalist, the nationalist, the traditionalist, a hero system as old and as legitimate as any in this essay, war is sometimes the price of keeping a particular people and its covenant alive, and a man who counsels the tribe to avoid the enemy’s framing may sound like a man grading essays during a rocket attack. Juergensmeyer’s celebrated counsel after September 11, respond to terror without adopting the terrorist’s cosmic script, is wisdom inside his system and something close to disarmament inside several others.
Take understanding, his supreme value, the act around which his economy of significance turns. In his system, understanding redeems. To enter the mind of the killer and return with a coherent map is the highest service a scholar can render, and the value is self-evident, the way courage is self-evident to a Marine. Step outside the system and the self-evidence dies. For a counterterrorism analyst at Langley, understanding is an input; the map of Abouhalima’s moral universe is useful insofar as it predicts the next target, and the professor’s tenderness toward his subjects’ coherence is a rounding error. For the brother of a man crushed in the World Trade Center garage in 1993, understanding is an obscenity, a courtesy extended to the murderer that no one extends to the dead; the killer gets a listener, a book, a legacy, and the victim gets a name misspelled in a footnote. For a haredi yeshiva student in Bnei Brak, a lifetime spent mastering the inner world of murderers is a lifetime of attention stolen from Torah, brilliance spent cataloguing darkness when the same hours might have been spent on light. For a Pentecostal deacon in Alabama, the project is worse than wasteful, it is dangerous, because you do not study the devil, you resist him, and the man who sits with demons long enough to find them coherent has already lost the first skirmish. Juergensmeyer might answer every one of these voices with patience and evidence. But the answer persuades only inside the temple where understanding is the sacrament.
Take peace. In his system peace is the storm passing, the return of ordinary politics, Punjab villages in the early 1990s where the feared gunmen the locals called the boys became boys again. Peace is what the world looks like when cosmic war loses its charge, and his late book When God Stops Fighting (2022) is, in Beckerian terms, his eschatology, his picture of heaven: a world where every holy war ends in exhaustion and interpretation, where the interpreter’s patient method is vindicated by history. For a Border Police sergeant at a Jerusalem checkpoint, peace is a duty roster, a Tuesday without incident, maintained by the vigilance the professor’s storm theory says might one day be unnecessary. For the Hamas recruiter, peace on the enemy’s terms is defeat wearing perfume, and the twenty percent poll numbers Juergensmeyer cites as proof that terror dissipates are, inside the recruiter’s system, proof of how much work remains. For an ICU nurse on a night shift, peace is a ward at three in the morning with every monitor quiet, and it needs no theory at all. The word is the same. The heaven it names is different in every mouth.
Take religion, the ground he stands on. In Juergensmeyer’s system, religion is the deepest human archive of meaning and the mother of armies, a force the secular academy ignored at its peril, and he is its gamekeeper. He holds the forest in trust: against the reductionists who call it a mask for interests, against the theologians who fence it off from history, against the New Atheists who call it a virus, against the State Department men who thought it would evaporate under development grants. The gamekeeper’s authority depends on the forest staying wild and staying his. Notice what this means. Every religious resurgence, every suicide bombing, every patriarch blessing an invasion confirms his jurisdiction. He is one of the few men alive for whom the persistence of holy war is a professional reassurance, and it might be asked, in a whisper, whether the boy from the tent ever wanted the war to end.
How much of this does he see? More than most subjects of these essays. He printed Abouhalima’s verdict against himself and conceded the prisoner was right, that his Christianity was the kind that lives at ease inside secular modernity, which is to say a Christianity the tent preacher might not have recognized as enlisted. He listed his method’s weaknesses without being forced to, the translators, the short stays, the handful of interviews. He warned his own government against cosmic thinking with real courage when cosmic thinking was the national mood. The self-awareness runs deep and then stops at the load-bearing wall. He does not see, or does not say, that the storm doctrine is a creed and a comfort, a guarantee that his side wins without fighting, and that it rests on a sample of endings while the wars that do not end, the ones that grind on for generations, sit outside the frame. He does not see that standing above all cosmic wars is itself a cosmic position, the interpreter enthroned over the combatants, and that from the ground, from the checkpoint or the shiva house, the throne looks less like neutrality than like altitude. And he does not reckon the strangest debt of all: that his lifelong case for taking the militants seriously as religious men, sincere, coherent, transformed, is also the last surviving argument of the boy in the tent, who needed it to be true that the summons was real, even if the wrong men answered it.
The hero is the ferryman. He crosses the river between the secular shore and the sacred one, both directions, all his life, carrying notebooks instead of cargo, and his significance depends on the river staying unbridged, because a bridged river needs no ferryman. His unnamed rival is the man who stays on one shore and acts, the guard, the soldier, the prosecutor, the mourner who refuses to understand, everyone whose vocation is to stop the killer rather than to know him, and whose ledger counts prevented funerals instead of published pages; the ferryman’s books never quite explain what the guard is supposed to do with them at the wire at two in the morning. And the cost that his ledger cannot price is the boy he left mid-river. Fifty years of granting killers the dignity of coherence trains a man to watch every altar call, including his own, from the back row with a notebook, and the pew in Santa Barbara where the professor still sits on Sunday holds a man who once walked sawdust toward the front of a tent, weeping, certain, unwatched by any observer, least of all himself. That boy paid for the career. No page of the three hundred articles and thirty books records what he got back.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, then man is fundamentally a tribal creature whose identity and actions are dictated by deep group allegiances rather than individualist, liberal rationality.
If Mearsheimer’s social anthropology is correct, it serves as an empirical validation and structural explanation for Juergensmeyer’s extensive body of work on religious nationalism and global violence.
Mearsheimer argues that political liberalism fails because it treats people as lone wolves or atomistic actors who can be governed by universal codes of human rights and detached reason. Instead, he posits that humans are social beings embedded in groups that shape their moral codes long before critical faculties develop.
This mirrors the central finding in Juergensmeyer’s The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (republished as Global Rebellion). Juergensmeyer argues that the Western, secular model of the nation-state, which is rooted in individualist Enlightenment liberalism, has failed to provide a compelling sense of shared identity and moral purpose in large parts of the world. When secular nationalism loses its legitimacy, man reverts to his primary social grouping. For many, that grouping is religious. The resurgence of religious nationalism is not an irrational anomaly; it is the natural consequence of man’s tribal core reclaiming authority over the atomistic void of liberal secularism.
In Terror in the Mind of God, Juergensmeyer introduces the concept of “cosmic war” — an overarching spiritual struggle between good and evil that elevates earthly political conflicts into metaphysical battles.
Mearsheimer notes that individuals develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Juergensmeyer’s work explains the engine behind that willingness when the group is defined by faith. When a political conflict is framed as a cosmic war, the defense of the tribe becomes an absolute moral imperative. Secular, liberal reasoning fails to comprehend why an individual might engage in “performance violence” or choose self-sacrifice. Mearsheimer’s framework provides the answer: intense early childhood socialization and innate sentiments create a value infusion that restricts personal choice. The defense of the collective identity supersedes individual self-preservation.
Mearsheimer contends that the liberal pursuit of universal human rights motivates ambitious, interventionist foreign policies that ultimately end in disaster because they ignore the stubborn realities of local tribalism and nationalism.
Juergensmeyer’s field research among militant religious movements globally illustrates the precise localized blowback Mearsheimer predicts. The globalization of Western liberal values is frequently perceived by non-Western societies not as a liberation of the individual, but as an aggressive assault on their organic social structures. The rise of religious violence, in Juergensmeyer’s analysis, is a defensive reaction by communities attempting to protect their collective identity and moral order from being dissolved by secular globalization.
If David Pinsof is right, the foundational research of sociologist and scholar of religion Mark Juergensmeyer on religious violence represents a highly sophisticated academic effort to redefine raw, zero-sum coalitional warfare as an intricate theatrical performance and psychological misunderstanding.
Juergensmeyer achieved global renown through books like Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence and Global Rebellion. His core thesis is that religious terrorism is fundamentally a performance piece. He argues that acts of violence are symbolic statements—theatrical events designed to dramatize a deeper, metaphysical struggle he terms cosmic war. According to Juergensmeyer, religious militants are trapped in an imaginative script, treating real-world political conflicts as epic, timeless battles between absolute good and absolute evil. To the policy and academic elite, his work provided an elegant framework to explain why human groups commit horrific violence for seemingly non-negotiable, unearthly rewards.
A Pinsofian analysis strips away this performance-art framework. Militants, insurgents, and religious nationalists do not blow up buildings or execute rivals because they are captivated by an imaginative script or suffering from a metaphysical misunderstanding. They deploy violence as a highly functional, rational weapon to secure finite resources, capture the coercive apparatus of the state, and dominate rival coalitions. Acts of terror function as powerful coalitional signals. They demonstrate group capacity, enforce internal alignment, deter outsiders, and shift the local balance of power. The actors running these networks understand their immediate incentives perfectly. They are not acting out a cosmic drama; they are playing a lethal game for earthly dominance.
By framing this intense Darwinian competition as a collection of theatrical gestures and ideological delusions, Juergensmeyer creates an ideal high-status mission statement for his own guild. It positions the secular social scientist as the elite analyst who stands outside the conflict, possessing the superior rationality required to deconstruct the militants’ symbolic language. This framework provides university departments, global policy forums, and security institutes with a sophisticated platform to look down upon religious factions, treating their existential struggles as data points in a performance theory lesson rather than raw fights for power and survival.
Juergensmeyer did not discover a unique, symbolic engine driving human conflict. He executed a highly successful academic strategy, converting the study of violence into high-prestige currency within elite institutions, securing a prominent professorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and anchoring the global discussion on religious nationalism. His theories provide a beautiful map of the rhetoric militants use, proving that defining a fierce coalitional battle as a theatrical misunderstanding of reality is the ultimate method to secure institutional authority.
