Luke Ford

During the Second World War, a printing press at Chicago Offset Printing Company ran two shifts a day producing a single image: Warner Sallman‘s Head of Christ. The 1940 painting showed Jesus in three-quarter profile against a dark ground, hair backlit, gaze lifted, rendered in the soft focus of a studio portrait. The Salvation Army and the YMCA handed pocket-sized versions to servicemen shipping overseas. Baptist bookstores sold lithographs across the South. After the war, laymen in Oklahoma and Indiana ran campaigns to place the picture in schools, courthouses, and living rooms. One Lutheran organizer in Illinois said America needed card-carrying Christians to answer the card-carrying Communists. By the end of the century the publishers counted more than 500 million reproductions. Art historians did not write about it. It was calendar art, drugstore art, the kind of picture that hung above the sofa in a farmhouse outside Anderson, Indiana, and it sat beneath the notice of the discipline.

In the early 1990s, a young art historian at Valparaiso University began soliciting letters about the picture. He placed notices in popular religious magazines and asked readers what Sallman’s images meant to them. The letters came in by the hundreds, 473 in the first wave, then more, until the file held over 500 responses. Widows wrote. Veterans wrote. Sunday school teachers wrote. A woman described looking up at the picture whenever loneliness or fear overtook her and feeling peace settle over her. Respondents said, again and again, that the picture showed “just what Jesus looked like,” a claim no first-century evidence could support and no letter writer felt any need to defend. The art historian read the letters at his desk at a Lutheran university on the flat land of northwest Indiana, an hour from Chicago, and understood that he was looking at the raw material of a different kind of scholarship. The question was not whether the painting was good. The question was what people did with it.

The art historian was David Morgan (b. 1957), and the letters became the foundation of a career that moved the study of religious images from a minor branch of art history to a central concern of religious studies. Over three decades Morgan has argued that religion is a lived practice mediated through objects, images, spaces, bodies, and habits of seeing, and that scholars who confine themselves to doctrine and text miss most of what religion is. He helped found the field now called material religion, co-founded its flagship journal, and trained a generation of scholars who study altars, amulets, church basements, and refrigerator magnets with the seriousness their fields once reserved for cathedrals.

Morgan came to religion through the studio, not the seminary. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in studio art from Concordia College in 1980, concentrating in sculpture. He learned what clay and steel resist and what they permit. A sculptor knows that material talks back. The insight stayed with him after he traded the studio for the seminar room, taking a master’s degree in art history at the University of Arizona in 1984 and a doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1990. Chicago in the 1980s put art historians in rooms with anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of religion, and the conversation in those rooms was turning against the old assumption that religion lived in creeds and could be read off the page. Morgan absorbed the turn and gave it a direction. If belief did not live only in texts, someone had to go find where it lived. He decided it lived, in part, in pictures.

He joined Valparaiso University in 1990 and stayed seventeen years, eventually holding the Duesenberg chair in Christianity and the Arts. Valparaiso suited the work. It was a church-related school in a region thick with the piety he studied, close enough to Anderson, Indiana, where the Church of God‘s publishing arm held the Sallman copyrights and Anderson University kept the original canvases. Morgan wrote the catalogue for a 1994 Sallman exhibition there. He has described a moment of revelation in front of the ubiquitous Head of Christ, when the picture stopped being an object of taste and became an object of study, and his attention shifted from fine art to mass culture, from the gallery to the archive.

The Sallman project matured into Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (1996), an edited volume that treated a commercial illustrator’s devotional portrait as a serious historical problem. Sallman (1892-1968) was a Chicago advertising artist, son of Scandinavian immigrants, a lifelong member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, who claimed the image came to him in a vision at two in the morning in January 1924. A teacher at Moody Bible Institute had urged him years earlier to paint a virile, manly Christ, since the available pictures ran effeminate. Sallman borrowed his composition from a nineteenth-century French painting by Léon Lhermitte (1844-1925), lit it like a celebrity headshot, and produced the most reproduced religious image in history. Morgan’s book examined the letters and showed that the picture’s power came from what believers did around it: prayed before it, carried it to war, hung it over deathbeds, passed it to grandchildren. The American Library Association named the book a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 1996. The prize mattered as a signal. The gatekeepers of academic legitimacy had accepted that drugstore Jesus belonged in the library.

Morgan built the theory in Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (1998). The book took up prayer cards, illustrated Bibles, calendars, and devotional prints, the whole inventory of cheap religious mass production, and argued that these objects did indispensable work in forming religious identity. Believers did not consume the images. They lived with them. An image acquired its sacredness through the social relationships that formed around it, through display and gift and inheritance and daily glance, and its power could not be located in the object alone or in the mind alone. The argument cut against both the art historian’s habit of ranking images by quality and the theologian’s habit of treating images as illustrations of prior ideas.

Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (1999) attacked the standard story head on. The standard story held that Protestantism was a religion of the word, iconophobic since the Reformation, its whitewashed churches proof that the ear had defeated the eye. Morgan showed that American Protestants embraced every printing technology the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offered, flooding the country with illustrated tracts, Sunday school cards, mission posters, panoramas, and portraits of Jesus. Protestant visual culture grew up alongside industrial capitalism and mass communication. The Association of American Publishers gave the book its annual award for scholarly publishing in religion and philosophy.

While the books appeared, Morgan worked inside a larger movement. In the late 1990s the Pew Charitable Trusts funded the Material History of American Religion Project at Vanderbilt, which gathered historians and art historians and told them to study religion through buildings, clothing, landscapes, and objects rather than through doctrine alone. Morgan became a leading participant, and the project’s signature volume, The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001), which he co-edited with Sally M. Promey, ranged from Catholic devotional objects to anti-Catholic political cartoons and became a foundation for the emerging field. In 2005 Morgan, Promey, and the British museum scholar Crispin Paine founded the journal Material Religion, which became the international venue for scholarship on the physical life of belief. Field-building of this kind rarely shows up in citation counts, but it decides what counts as knowledge. A subject without a journal is a hobby. A subject with a journal, a book series, conferences, and prizes is a field, and Morgan built or co-built each piece of that apparatus, later adding the Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion series as co-editor.

The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (2005) supplied the field’s most portable concept. Seeing, Morgan argued, is never a neutral act of the retina. Every community teaches its members how to look, and religious traditions cultivate habits of attention that determine what appears sacred, authoritative, or dangerous. The Catholic kneeling before an icon, the Protestant scanning a portrait of Jesus for accuracy, the tourist photographing both: each performs a learned way of seeing. The phrase “sacred gaze” gave scholars across traditions a tool, and researchers of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism took it up, which moved the field beyond its Protestant beginnings.

Duke University hired Morgan in 2008 as Professor of Religious Studies, with a secondary appointment in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. He has chaired the department twice, from 2013 to 2019 and again from 2023 to 2025, and twice directed graduate studies in the doctoral program in religion. The move marked the field’s arrival. A subject born in letters from Indiana widows now had a chair at a wealthy research university, doctoral students, and a place in the seminar rooms where the discipline decides its future.

The books kept coming. The Lure of Images (2007) traced religious media in America from tract illustration through photography, film, television, and the digital screen, arguing that religious traditions do not resist new media but seize them. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (2010) gathered fifteen scholars from around the world and pressed the field toward comparison across traditions. The Embodied Eye (2012) tied vision to feeling, arguing that images cultivate sympathy, fear, longing, and reverence, and that these emotional responses are learned in community rather than produced in the private psyche. The 2012 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham became The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity (2015), which argued that Catholicism and Protestantism since the sixteenth century have trained believers in rival ways of seeing the world, not merely rival doctrines about it.

Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (2018) took on the oldest story in the sociology of modernity, the story of disenchantment. Max Weber‘s heirs held that modernity drained the world of magic. Morgan looked around and saw national flags that men die for, family photographs that cannot be thrown away, brand logos that command devotion, and religious icons that weep. Images still enchant, he argued, because people organize attention, memory, and desire around them, and this enchantment defines modernity rather than surviving it as a residue. The argument gave him a way to talk about agency without mysticism. Images act because people act around them. Their power lives in the network, not the pigment. Here Morgan drew on Alfred Gell (1945-1997) on art and agency, Bruno Latour (1947-2022) on networks, Hans Belting (1935-2023) on the image before the era of art, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) on the body’s grip on the world, while keeping his own arguments tied to archives and letters.

The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions (2021) condensed three decades into a textbook, organizing the field around objects, bodies, spaces, sounds, scents, and technologies. Cambridge University Press is scheduled to publish The Visual Culture of Revelation: The Art of Seeing Things since the Middle Ages in 2026, tracing how Christians have trained themselves to see revelations from the medieval world to the digital screen.

The honors accumulated in the manner of a career the establishment has decided to keep: elected life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the learned society in Worcester whose membership rolls run back to 1812. He has curated exhibitions of Sallman’s art and written about what happens when a devotional object enters a museum, where the vitrine and the label transform a thing people prayed to into a thing people study. The transformation, he argues, obscures the practices that gave the object its life, and the museum becomes a laboratory for watching objects move between sacred, commercial, and aesthetic registers.

Morgan’s students now teach across North America and Europe, and his influence runs past Christianity into the study of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Indigenous traditions, and the secular icons of nationalism and consumer culture. His deepest claim remains the one he found in the letters. Belief is not assent to propositions. Belief is a disposition sedimented over time in body practices, in the hand that dusts the frame, the eye that finds the picture on the wall at three in the morning, the mother who packs a print of a fair-skinned, backlit Jesus into a son’s duffel bag. Religion happens where people and things meet. Morgan built a field by insisting that scholars go to that meeting place and watch, and by treating a farmhouse wall in Indiana as evidence worth the same care a connoisseur gives a Titian. The discipline resisted, then absorbed the point, then made him a chairman. That is how a field changes: one man reads five hundred letters that no one else wanted, and takes them at their word.

Notes

The Chicago Offset press operating around the clock during the Second World War, the Kriebel & Bates marketing campaign, and the testimony of believers all come from David Morgan’s own 1994 exhibition catalogue, as excerpted by the Sallman Collection: Warner Sallman Collection and Anderson University. The figure of 473 surviving letters and the paraphrased account of people writing because they were lonely or afraid also come from the Anderson University material.

The expression “card-carrying Christians” comes from Morgan’s own reporting in his article “The Face That’s Everywhere,” as cited here: En-Academic. The Salvation Army and YMCA wartime distribution campaigns, together with the postwar Oklahoma and Indiana evangelistic efforts, are documented at Head of Christ (Wikipedia).

The claim that the image represented “just what Jesus looked like,” the survey of more than 500 responses, and the Lilly Endowment’s support for the Sallman study come from The Jesus Question. One point is worth verifying. This source credits the Lilly Endowment with funding the Sallman project, while your source document credits the Pew Charitable Trusts with supporting the later Vanderbilt Material History project. Both may be correct, but Lilly’s role in the Sallman study should be confirmed before publication.

Morgan’s account of his “moment of revelation” on encountering Head of Christ and his resulting shift from the study of fine art toward mass-produced religious imagery comes from his interview with Duke University: Duke University. Although the site blocks automated retrieval, the relevant language appears in the interview.

The Moody Bible Institute instructor’s call for a “virile, manly Christ,” the influence of Léon Lhermitte’s painting, and the resemblance to celebrity portrait lighting are discussed at ArtWay.

Morgan’s degrees, honors, including the 1996 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book award and the 1999 Association of American Publishers award, his affiliation with Clare Hall, Cambridge, and election to the American Antiquarian Society are documented at Wikipedia. One chronological point deserves checking. Your document lists his department chairmanship as 2013-2016 and again from 2023-2025. Morgan’s own Duke profile instead lists 2013-2019 and 2023-2025: Duke Scholars. I followed his official profile.

The discussion of belief as a disposition gradually sedimented through embodied practices paraphrases Morgan’s introduction to Religion and Material Culture, available through his Academia.edu page: Academia.edu.

I added several pieces of self-evident background without separate citation. These include the flat landscape of northwest Indiana, the atmosphere of a Lutheran church-related college, the sculptor’s awareness that materials resist the artist’s intentions, the status of Head of Christ as a drugstore calendar image in the eyes of many mid-century art historians, and the image of a farmhouse outside Anderson as a representative setting. The account of Sallman’s two o’clock in the morning vision in January 1924 is documented in the Head of Christ Wikipedia entry.

The Frame Around the Frame: David Morgan’s Hero System

On a Saturday morning in Indiana an estate liquidator works through the house of a woman who died in March. In the bedroom, above where the headboard stood, a rectangle of unfaded wallpaper marks sixty years of shade. The picture that made the shadow sits in a cardboard box in the garage with the other frames, a dollar each. It is the face of Jesus in three-quarter profile, hair backlit, printed in Chicago sometime during the war. The liquidator has handled forty of them this year. “Nobody wants the religious stuff,” she says to her helper. “Take the frame, toss the print.” The woman who owned it looked at that face the last thing every night of her marriage, her widowhood, and her dying, and now it is a dollar, and the dollar is optimistic.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that the fear organizing human life is this scene. Death erases the person, and then, in a second wave the person foresees, it erases the traces. Against the terror men build hero systems, shared structures of meaning within which a life can count as significant, a contribution can register as durable, and death can be reframed as something other than the end. The unfaded rectangle on the wallpaper is the first terror. The box in the garage is the second, and it is the one that governs the career of David Morgan (b. 1957), the scholar who spent thirty years arguing that the dollar print held everything and who built a field so that someone, forever, will be paid to say so.

Morgan’s other terror shows earlier and wears different clothes. He began as a sculptor, a studio art degree from Concordia College in 1980, hands in the clay. Every art student meets the moment when the gap opens between what he can see and what he can make, and beyond it the harder arithmetic: the discipline of art keeps a short list, the list is nearly closed, and a Lutheran college sculptor in the upper Midwest will not be on it. The standard exits are teaching, commercial work, and quiet abandonment. Morgan took a fourth exit. He went to graduate school in art history, then to the University of Chicago, and he became a custodian of the list rather than a candidate for it. But art history ran its own list and its own terror. The discipline’s hero system belonged to the connoisseur, and a man who arrived from sculpture at Concordia by way of Arizona was starting far from the sanctuary. The two terrors met and produced the move that made his career. If he could not join the hierarchy of great objects, he could overturn the hierarchy. He found the most despised image in America, the drugstore Jesus, the picture his discipline used as the definition of what it did not study, and he declared it the most important religious artwork of the century, and then he spent three decades building the institutions that made the declaration true.

That is the shape of the hero system: the redeemer of the despised object. Its sacred values are attention, description, and the dignity of ordinary devotion, and each value means what it means only inside the system. Take attention first, because Morgan’s whole theory rests on it. In his account, an image becomes sacred through the attention organized around it, the daily glance, the family prayer, the dusting hand. But attention is a word that shatters on contact with other hero systems. To a hedge-fund quant, attention is the scarcest commodity in the economy, a thing to be harvested from other people by the millisecond and sold. To a hospice nurse, attention is presence at the bedside, the refusal to look away from a dying face, and it needs no object at all. To a Coptic villager in Upper Egypt, attention before the icon is not what makes the icon sacred; the icon is a window standing open to heaven whether anyone looks or not, and the suggestion that his gaze charges the image would strike him as backwards and mildly blasphemous. To a Reformed pastor in Grand Rapids, sustained attention to a picture of Christ is the precise Biblical definition of idolatry, the eye stealing what belongs to the ear. Morgan’s sense of attention, the social act that constitutes sacredness, is coherent only inside a hero system where the scholar stands outside all shrines and explains them. Inside the shrines, the word points elsewhere.

Or take seriousness, the value Morgan’s admirers name first. He took cheap pictures seriously. Within the academic hero system this is heroism of a recognizable kind: the raid across the tracks, the scholar who confers the discipline’s highest honor, sustained study, on objects the discipline held in contempt. The letters he solicited from believers in the early 1990s were, inside his system, evidence, and treating a widow’s testimony as evidence was the act of respect. But move the same letters into the widow’s own hero system and the seriousness inverts. She did not write to be studied. She wrote to witness. In her system, the picture is serious because it is true, because the face on the wall is the face that will meet her, and a professor who finds her devotion fascinating while bracketing the question of whether anyone is behind the face has not honored her; he has converted her testimony into his raw material. A Pentecostal grandmother in Alabama and a Haredi scribe bent over his parchment in Bnei Brak disagree about nearly everything, but they agree about this: seriousness about sacred things means submission to them, and a seriousness that studies without submitting is a polite name for unbelief. Morgan’s seriousness is real. It is also the seriousness of the collector, and the collected rarely get a vote.

The system’s third sacred value is description, the discipline of saying what people do with images while refusing to judge the doing. Morgan never ranks the Sallman head against Titian, never rules on whether the soldier’s foxhole prayer reached anyone, never calls the White Jesus controversy right or wrong. Within his hero system this restraint is the highest virtue, the mark that separates the scholar from the preacher and the critic. Here the subtraction story comes into view, because every hero system buys its coherence by subtracting something, and Morgan’s subtracts verdicts. The subtraction is enormously productive. It lets the believer read him and feel respected, the atheist read him and feel scientific, the curator read him and feel informed, and it built a journal, a book series, and a Duke chair on the ground where those readers overlap. But the price is that the system cannot answer the only questions its own archive screams. Is the widow’s peace a gift or a symptom? Should the picture hang in the courthouse? When the face was denounced in 2020 as a racial instrument, was the denunciation justice or profanation? Morgan’s system rules these questions out of order, and the ruling is not neutral. A man who spends his life demonstrating the power of sacred images while declining to say whether any of them tell the truth has taken a position; he has made the study of devotion his devotion, and description is its liturgy.

The rivals are many, and the essay should name several rather than pretend there is one. The nearest rival, the one Morgan actually fought, is the connoisseur’s hero system, art history as communion with masterpieces. In that system immortality flows through taste: the great objects are the durable dead, and the scholar earns his permanence by serving them, attributing them, protecting the canon that will carry his name in its footnotes. Morgan beat the connoisseurs on their own ground, took their prizes, and the victory has a Beckerian sting, because the connoisseur’s system and Morgan’s system offer the same wager with different chips. Both bet that objects outlast men and that the man who binds his name to the objects rides them out of death. The connoisseur binds himself to Titian. Morgan binds himself to the category, to material religion as such, which is the shrewder bet, since categories outlast even canons.

A second rival stands in the sanctuary: the confessional hero system, in all its warring versions. For the Coptic villager, the Alabama grandmother, the scribe, the picture or the scroll draws its power from God, and immortality is not a metaphor about influence but a scheduled event. Within that system Morgan is not a hero at all; he is a cataloguer at the wedding, useful perhaps, beside the point. A third rival does the opposite work: the reductionist’s system, the sociologist or neuroscientist for whom the widow’s peace is oxytocin and conditioning, and heroism means the courage to say so. Morgan’s refusal of verdicts protects him from this rival’s contempt at the cost of the rival’s clarity. And a fourth deserves naming because it holds the largest share of the world: the tribal and traditionalist hero system, in which the image on the wall is neither evidence nor window nor symptom but inheritance, the face the great-grandmother prayed to, and the duty is transmission. In that system the estate-sale box is a failure of the family, not a datum about symbolic charge, and the hero is the grandson who takes the print home. This system judges Morgan more gently than the believer does and more sharply than the connoisseur, since it can use his respect while noting that respect transmits nothing. A field is not a lineage. Doctoral students are not grandchildren, though they are the nearest thing the academy sells.

How much of this does Morgan see? More than most subjects of these essays. He is the rare scholar who wrote the critique of his own operation before anyone else could: his work on museums argues that the vitrine kills what it preserves, that labeling a devotional object transforms it into a specimen and hides the practices that made it live. Every word of that argument applies to his archive. The letters were testimonies; the file cabinet was a vitrine; the field he built is a museum with a hiring line. There is no evidence he has turned the argument on himself in print, and the omission is the system working as designed, because a hero system survives by exempting its own foundations from its method. He sees the sacred gaze everywhere except in the mirror of the seminar room, where a tribe of scholars assembles around charged objects called sources, feels the collective effervescence called a field, and defends its totems in peer review. He built that tribe. He is its founding ancestor, and founding ancestors do not audit the cult.

The hero’s shape, then: a sculptor who could not join the ranks of the makers and so became the man who decides what made things mean, the redeemer who saves despised objects by the only sacrament he administers, study, and who saved himself in the same motion, binding his name to a category durable enough to hold it. The unnamed rival is the widow herself, the woman whose letter he filed, whose hero system needs no journal and no chair, who never asked to be redeemed because within her system she already was, and whose picture went into the garage anyway. And the cost the ledger cannot price: a lifetime spent proving that images hold the feelings of the assembled, written by a man whose method requires him to stand outside every assembly, describing at full attention, believing at none, the frame around the frame, unfaded, and marking the wall.

The Charged Object: David Morgan Through Randall Collins

A woman in the Midwest writes a letter to an art historian she has never met. She tells him that when loneliness or fear overtakes her, she looks up at the picture of Jesus on her wall and peace settles over her. She is describing a face painted by a Chicago advertising man, printed by the hundred million, sold in dime stores, and she is describing it the way a physicist describes a battery. The picture holds something. She draws on it. It recharges.

Randall Collins (b. 1941) built a theory to explain what is in the battery. In Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), he argues that the basic unit of social life is the situation: bodies assembled, attention focused on a common object, a shared mood building through rhythmic entrainment until the participants feel something larger than themselves. Successful rituals produce four outputs. Members feel solidarity. Individuals walk away with emotional energy, the confidence and drive that carries them into the next encounter. The group’s feeling gets deposited in symbols, which become sacred objects. And the group generates standards of morality, defined as loyalty to those symbols, with anger reserved for anyone who profanes them. Collins took the scheme from Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), who found it in Aboriginal ceremony, and from Erving Goffman (1922-1982), who found it in elevators and cocktail parties. Collins’s addition is the chain. Rituals link. The emotional energy and the charged symbols from one encounter become the inputs of the next, and a life is a sequence of situations in which people spend and replenish their stock.

David Morgan spent thirty years assembling the evidence for this theory without using it. His core claim, repeated from Visual Piety through Images at Work, holds that religious images gain power through the social relationships and repeated practices organized around them. The picture over the sofa is sacred because the family prays before it, dusts it, inherits it, glances at it on the way to the kitchen. Power lives in the network, in Morgan’s phrase, and never in the pigment. Set that sentence beside Collins and the convergence is total. A sacred object, Collins writes, is a container for the feelings generated in assembly, a device for carrying group emotion across the dead time between gatherings. Morgan’s entire archive, the five hundred letters, the wartime wallet cards, the deathbed prints, documents the container in use. The Sallman correspondence reads like a file of Collins case studies mailed in from Indiana.

Convergence of this kind creates a problem for the essayist and an opportunity for the theory. The problem: an essay that walks Morgan’s findings through Collins’s vocabulary produces translation, and translation adds nothing. The opportunity: Collins built a causal engine, with inputs, outputs, and failure conditions, while Morgan built a descriptive practice. Morgan tells you that images acquire power through social life. Collins tells you which images will, how much, for how long, and why the power drains. Run Morgan’s material through the engine and three findings come out that Morgan describes but leaves untheorized.

Start with the question Morgan never answers. Why this picture? Sallman’s Head of Christ had competitors. Every publisher of devotional goods offered portraits of Jesus, many by better painters. Hundreds of images entered the market in the 1930s and 1940s, and nearly all of them died. One conquered the world. Morgan’s account explains the survivor’s power once it has survived: people prayed to it, so it became sacred. The account is circular at the decisive point, since the question is why people chose this image to pray to. Collins breaks the circle. A symbol’s charge depends on the intensity and frequency of the ritual encounters that feed it, and the Head of Christ won the distribution war before it won the devotion war. Kriebel and Bates made it their trademark and pushed it through Baptist bookstores, Sunday schools, and denominational magazines, placing it at the focus of attention in millions of already-assembled groups. A Sunday school class gazing at the same face every week is an interaction ritual with the picture at its center. The competitors never reached the focus of that many gatherings, so no group feeling was ever deposited in them, so they stayed what they began as, ink. The Sallman head compounded. Charge attracted display, display placed the image at the center of more assemblies, more assemblies added charge. Collins predicts winner-take-all outcomes in symbolic markets, since emotional investment flows toward objects already invested, and the devotional print market of mid-century America delivered a textbook case. The theory also predicts the death of symbols, which Morgan’s field rarely studies. An image starved of assemblies loses charge within a generation or two. The grandchildren who inherit the print but never sat in the rooms where it presided receive an heirloom, and an heirloom is a sacred object running on residual current. The letters Morgan collected in the early 1990s came disproportionately from the old. That demographic fact is the theory’s confirmation. The chain was thinning.

Second, the war. Morgan documents the wartime explosion of the image, the press at Chicago Offset running two shifts, the USO handing pocket versions to soldiers at the docks, and he explains it as media history, a story of publishers and campaigns. Collins explains why the campaigns worked. Ritual charge varies with the stakes of the assembly. Bodies gathered under mortal threat, attention locked on a common object, produce the most intense entrainment human beings experience, which is why combat units bond like no civilian group and why battle flags outrank all other national symbols. The soldier carrying the Sallman head into the Pacific carried it into the highest-intensity ritual conditions the century offered. The mother who packed it and the son who kept it were performing a linked ritual across an ocean, each knowing the other’s attention rested on the same face. Every foxhole prayer over the wallet card deposited feeling in the image at wartime rates of interest. The picture came home in 1945 charged beyond anything a peacetime Sunday school could have produced, and the postwar campaigns to hang it in schools and courthouses spent that accumulated energy. The Illinois Lutheran who wanted card-carrying Christians to answer card-carrying Communists understood the object’s function. He wanted the charge portable, distributed, ready. Morgan reports the man’s line as color. Collins reads it as a program: keep the symbol at the focus of assemblies or lose the solidarity it stores.

Third, and here the frame turns on its subject, Morgan’s own career is a demonstration of the theory he circled without entering. Collins applied his scheme to intellectuals in The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), arguing that ideas win not on merit alone but on the ritual density behind them. A thinker rises when he sits at the center of chains: face-to-face lineages linking him to prestigious teachers, conference circuits where attention focuses on his topic, journals that assemble the tribe on schedule, students who carry the charge outward. Morgan’s chains run textbook-clean. Chicago doctorate, which grafts him onto a high-prestige lineage. The Vanderbilt project of the late 1990s, which assembled the scattered scholars of religious stuff in one room on Pew’s money and let them entrain, discover their common mood, and leave with emotional energy and a shared enemy in text-bound religious studies. Then the institutionalization of the assembly: the journal Material Religion in 2005, which convenes the tribe quarterly; the Bloomsbury series; the conferences; the Duke chair with doctoral students to send out as missionaries. A journal is a ritual technology. It focuses the attention of a dispersed group on common objects at regular intervals, and its arrival converts a topic into a sacred object for scholars, complete with the moral output Collins predicts, since the field now polices contempt for popular devotion as a professional sin. Morgan did for cheap pictures of Jesus what Kriebel and Bates did for the picture: he won the distribution war. Other scholars had noticed devotional objects. Colleen McDannell published Material Christianity in 1995, a year before Morgan’s Sallman volume. The difference between a scattered insight and a field is the chain, and Morgan built the chain.

The frame also exposes what Morgan’s method cannot see. His evidence is letters, solicited testimony from believers describing their images at a distance of years. Collins insists the action sits in the situation, in the micro-rhythms of bodies and attention measurable in seconds, and testimony is what remains after the situation has cooled. The woman who feels peace when she looks at the picture reports the output. The inputs, the childhood rooms where the face presided over family prayer, the Sunday mornings of synchronized song under its gaze, lie behind the letter, unrecorded and mostly unremembered. Morgan’s archive documents charged objects and misses the charging. This is a limit, and an honest reckoning also runs the current the other way, since Collins’s own evidence for religious ritual leans on ethnographies of assembly and goes quiet between assemblies. The picture on the wall at three in the morning, the solitary glance that Morgan’s letters capture in the hundreds, sits awkwardly in a theory built on gathered bodies. Collins handles solitary ritual as replay, the individual rehearsing internalized group encounters, and the handling works, but Morgan’s archive is the better record of that mode, the vast devotional life conducted alone with an object between the rare hours of assembly. Each man holds half the circuit. Collins has the generator. Morgan has the battery in use.

One prediction falls out of the frame, and it concerns the image’s afterlife. In 2020 the Sallman head faced a profanation crisis, denounced as White Jesus, defended by its owners, removed from some sanctuaries. Collins holds that attacks on a symbol recharge it for the loyal, since defense of a profaned object is among the most intense rituals a group performs, while for the indifferent the attack merely accelerates the drain. The picture might now run on two divergent chains, charging in the shrinking assemblies that rally to it, dying into kitsch everywhere else, until the day it hangs in museums the way Morgan described, an object whose practices have been stripped, labeled, and lit, holding nothing but the historians’ attention. The woman who wrote the letter knew the difference. She was not looking at a painting.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, the scholarship of art historian and religious studies scholar David Morgan does not require a correction. It serves as a highly detailed field manual showing the exact physical apparatus human groups use to manufacture internal cohesion and survive.
Morgan, a professor at Duke University, is a founder of the critical study of material religion, known for books like The Sacred Gaze, The Embodied Eye, and Images at Work. He rejects the traditional academic view that religion is primarily about abstract doctrines or private intellectual beliefs. Instead, Morgan argues that religion is a sensory, physical practice. Groups use physical objects—images, clothing, architecture, mass-produced prints, and common somatic regimes—to assemble a unified social body, calibrate collective emotions, and sustain a shared life-world.
Mearsheimer’s framework in The Great Delusion provides the structural necessity for the physical technologies Morgan documents.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology places immense weight on the long human childhood, during which individuals undergo an intense value infusion from their primary social group. This process occurs long before critical reason develops, permanently embedding the individual within a specific culture or tribe.Morgan’s work describes the precise mechanical operation of this value infusion. In The Embodied Eye, he shows that a group does not socialize its young through abstract logical arguments. It does so by engaging the physical body. Uniform dress, shared imagery, and structured sensory habits are the material means used to forge a corporate identity.
The child does not logically deduce his allegiance; he absorbs it by looking at the same devotional images, sitting in the same structured pews, and performing the same physical rituals as his peers. Morgan’s material religion is the delivery device for the value infusions that Mearsheimer notes are critical to human formation.The Sacred Gaze and the Tribal PerimeterIn The Sacred Gaze, Morgan explores how visual culture acts as a way of mapping and navigating the world, establishing what a particular community regards as true, beautiful, or dangerous. This gaze determines how a group sees itself and how it views outsiders.
Under Mearsheimer’s lens, this visual mapping is a defensive measure required for survival in an uncertain world. Humans form distinct, cohesive societies to secure their collective existence against rivals.The shared visual framework Morgan describes operates as a boundary-enforcement tool. By dictating what is sacred and what is profane, the tribe builds a high-trust internal network. The “enchantment” of images that Morgan tracks in Images at Work is not an irrational aesthetic fluke; it is a tool used to anchor individual loyalty to the collective perimeter, ensuring that members prioritize the survival of the group above all else.
Mearsheimer’s critique of political liberalism centers on the claim that liberal elites treat human beings as autonomous, rational actors who can be governed by abstract, universal rules decoupled from cultural particulars.
Morgan’s entire academic project dismantles this hyper-rationalist assumption from an aesthetic and historical perspective. He demonstrates that even Protestantism—a tradition that often claimed to reject physical imagery in favor of pure, invisible faith—relied heavily on mass-produced pictures, family Bibles, and specific physical spaces to survive and scale in America.If Mearsheimer is right, Morgan’s research proves that there is no such thing as a group held together by raw reason or unmediated text. The moment a liberal or cosmopolitan movement attempts to organize a society around abstract principles, it must eventually develop its own material culture, distinct symbols, and physical rituals to maintain any degree of solidarity.
If Mearsheimer is right, David Morgan accurately identifies the real infrastructure of human belief. Humans do not inhabit a world of floating philosophical concepts. They are social, defensive animals who use physical matter to build the tribal containers they require to navigate an indifferent world.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, the foundational work of art historian and religious studies scholar David Morgan in visual culture and material religion serves as an exceptionally sophisticated academic strategy to redefine raw, zero-sum coalitional warfare as an intricate study of cognitive and aesthetic management.
Morgan achieved prominent standing in the academy through books like Visual Piety, The Sacred Gaze, and Images at Work. His core thesis is that religious imagery and material culture do not merely illustrate preexisting theological beliefs; they actively construct the social world. He argues that looking is an act of relationship-building, creating what he calls a sacred gaze—a culturally specific way of seeing that helps a community form shared identities, establish boundaries, and maintain a sense of cosmic order. To his peers, Morgan provided an objective, scholarly framework to explain why human groups invest immense emotional and physical resources into mass-produced devotional objects, images, and visual habits.
A Pinsofian analysis strips away this elegant, materialist framework. Human coalitions do not develop a sacred gaze or weaponize mass-produced imagery because they want to configure reality or engage in an aesthetic dialogue with the divine. They deploy visual culture as a highly functional tool for group dominance. Pictures of saints, specific flags, mandatory dress codes, and distinct public monuments function as coalitional badges. They signal internal commitment, police group compliance, and warn external rivals of a faction’s presence and collective strength. The production and defense of these visual markers are not exercises in cultural imagination; they are calculated moves to capture public spaces and protect social territory.
By framing this intense Darwinian fight for symbolic dominance as an exploration of visual piety and material agency, Morgan creates an ideal high-status mission statement for his own field. It positions the visual culture theorist as the elite technician who can decode the hidden, psychological scripts behind everyday human consumption. His framework provides university departments, editorial boards, and museum curators with a sophisticated platform to look down upon popular religious practices and political icons, analyzing them from a safe, analytical distance as complex taxonomic data rather than raw displays of group power.
Morgan did not discover a benign, interactive process of collective sense-making. He executed an effective academic strategy, using rigorous visual and historical analysis to climb to the peak of the university hierarchy, securing a prominent professorship at Duke University and anchoring the global study of material religion. His theories provide a beautiful map of the objects humans cling to, proving that treating a fierce coalitional struggle over public symbolism as a visual misunderstanding of material agency is the ultimate method to secure institutional authority.

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.

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.

The Great Delusion

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.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

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.

Karen Armstrong (b. November 14, 1944) has done more than any living writer to teach general readers how religions work. She holds no university chair. She commands no seminar room, supervises no doctoral students, and publishes in no peer-reviewed journals. Yet her books sell in the millions, appear in forty-five languages, and sit on the shelves of imams, rabbis, bishops, and atheists who agree on little else. Her career runs against the grain of the modern knowledge economy, where credentials gate the conversation. She lost her credentials early, in a single afternoon at Oxford, and built her authority from the wreckage.

She was born in Wildmoor, a village in Worcestershire, into a family of Irish Catholic descent. The family moved to Bromsgrove and then to Birmingham. English Catholics of that era occupied an ambiguous position. They belonged to the nation and stood apart from its established church, its public schools, its Oxbridge Anglicanism. The Irish inflection added a second layer of distance. A clever Catholic girl in the postwar Midlands had a narrow set of ladders available to her, and the church controlled most of them.

In September 1962, at seventeen, Armstrong entered the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching order founded in the nineteenth century by Cornelia Connelly (1809-1879). The timing carries weight. The Second Vatican Council opened the following month. Armstrong entered a convent formed by the old dispensation, weeks before the church began dismantling it. The novitiate she describes in her memoirs belongs to a vanished world: the great silence after night prayers, the reading of spiritual texts aloud at meals, the chapter of faults where a nun knelt and accused herself before her sisters. She has written that she was required to discipline her body with a small whip and to wear a spiked chain on her arm. When she spoke out of turn, a superior set her to work at a treadle sewing machine that held no needle, and she pedaled at nothing for two weeks. The exercise had a theological rationale. The will was the enemy. Obedience without purpose trained the will to die.

She has also insisted, against the expectations of readers who want a simple horror story, that the convent taught her to think. The order prized study. Her superiors sent her, still in the habit, to read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. The image deserves a moment: a professed nun crossing an Oxford quad in the late 1960s, past undergraduates in miniskirts, past the posters and the politics, on her way to tutorials on Milton. She lived in two centuries at once. In 1969, while still a student, she left the order. Seven years of formation ended with a dispensation from her vows and a suitcase. She was twenty-four and had never handled money, chosen her own clothes, or decided how to spend an evening.

She took a congratulatory first, the rare degree awarded when examiners find nothing to question, and began a doctorate on Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892). The university committee approved her topic. She wrote the thesis. Then an external examiner failed it on the ground that the topic was unsuitable. The verdict made no sense on its own terms, since the topic had been approved before she wrote a word, and colleagues urged her to appeal. She did not. Something in her, formed perhaps by years of practiced submission to authority, accepted the judgment and walked away. The academic career ended there, in 1973, before it began. Every book she later wrote came from outside the walls.

The 1970s were the worst decade of her life. She fainted in public, smelled odors no one else smelled, and lost stretches of time. Doctors read the symptoms as psychiatric and treated her accordingly, with drugs and with a stay in a mental hospital. In 1976 a neurologist gave the episodes their true name: temporal lobe epilepsy. She has described the diagnosis as a liberation. The visions and absences that she, her doctors, and her former superiors had read as hysteria, or as failed mysticism, had an organic source. The diagnosis also complicated her past. Some of the experiences she had once framed in religious terms were seizures. She declined to let the neurology settle the theology. The brain produces the experience, she came to argue, and the question of what the experience means remains open. She later served as vice-president of Epilepsy Action and spoke for patients whose condition still carries stigma.

That same year she took a job teaching English at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich, a fee-paying school in south London. By day she taught Shakespeare to the daughters of the professional classes. By night she wrote an account of her convent years. Through the Narrow Gate appeared in 1982 to strong reviews and made her, briefly, a scandal. Former nuns did not write such books. The genre of convent memoir existed mostly as Protestant polemic; here was an insider’s account, unsparing about the institution and tender toward the vocation, written by a woman who had loved what damaged her. The school let her go around the same period, her epilepsy a factor, and she found herself at thirty-eight with no husband, no pension, no institution, and one book.

Television saved her. In 1984 Channel 4 commissioned her to write and present The First Christian, a six-part documentary on Paul of Tarsus. The project sent her to Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Turkey to walk the ground Paul walked. She arrived a lapsed Catholic with a grudge against religion and a set of confident opinions about Judaism and Islam that she had absorbed without examination. The trip broke the opinions. In Jerusalem she saw the three monotheisms stacked in stone, the Western Wall beneath the Haram al-Sharif, the Via Dolorosa threading through the Muslim Quarter, each tradition praying over the ruins of the others. She heard the muezzin at dawn and watched Hasidic men run to prayer. She called the journey a breakthrough, and it set the program for the rest of her working life. The three faiths of Abraham could only be understood together, in their shared ground and shared history, and almost no one in the English-speaking world was writing about them that way for a general audience.

A decade of preparation followed, mostly in the reading room of the London Library, where she taught herself the scholarship of three traditions. She acknowledges two guides above the rest: Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), the Canadian scholar of comparative religion who argued that faith names a human orientation rather than a list of propositions, and Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), the Jesuit philosopher of insight. In 1993 she published A History of God, tracing four thousand years of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ideas about the divine. The book’s thesis sounds simple and lands hard: the idea of God has a history. Each generation makes the concept do new work, and when a version of God stops working, people quietly replace it while insisting nothing has changed. The book became an international bestseller and remains the most widely read introduction to comparative monotheism in English. It also fixed her method: wide synthesis of specialist scholarship, narrative drive, and a refusal to treat any tradition as the default from which the others deviate.

Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths followed in 1996, reconstructing the city’s history as a study in sanctity and possession. Each conqueror, she shows, arrived claiming to restore the city’s true meaning and left another layer of exclusion. No tradition, she concludes, holds an exclusive title to the city’s significance, a judgment that earned her critics in all three camps.

Then came September 11, 2001, and Armstrong became something no one plans to become: the person a frightened civilization calls to explain its enemy. She had published Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet in 1991 and Islam: A Short History in 2000, books that treated their subject with the sympathy she extended to every tradition. After the attacks, those books sold in enormous numbers. She addressed members of the United States Congress on three occasions, lectured at the State Department, and spoke at Davos. Her argument stayed constant under pressure. Islam contains fourteen centuries of law, philosophy, science, and art; the terrorists represent a modern political pathology dressed in religious language; and the roots of jihadism run through colonialism, failed states, and humiliated societies rather than through the Quran. Critics on the right called this apologetics. Muslim audiences, watching a former Catholic nun defend their prophet on Western television, received her as few Western writers have been received. Neither response changed her account.

Her second memoir, The Spiral Staircase (2004), returned to the years between the convent and the writing life and stands as her finest sustained piece of prose. The book takes its title from T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and its shape from her conviction that her life kept circling the same material, religion, at rising levels. She had tried to leave the subject. The subject declined to leave her.

The Great Transformation (2006) widened the canvas to the Axial Age, the period from roughly 900 to 200 BCE identified by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), when China, India, Israel, and Greece each produced revolutions in moral thought. Confucius (551-479 BCE), the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, and the Greek philosophers, working in ignorance of one another, converged on a common discovery: that the measure of religion lies in the surrender of ego and the practice of concern for others. The Golden Rule appears in every one of these traditions. Armstrong reads the convergence as the deepest fact about religion, deeper than any doctrine that divides the traditions from one another.

That reading hardened into a program. In February 2008 she won the TED Prize, which grants its recipient one hundred thousand dollars and a wish. Standing before an audience of technologists and entrepreneurs in Monterey, an English ex-nun in her sixties, she wished for a Charter for Compassion, drafted across faiths and published to the world. Thousands of people contributed language online; a council of thinkers from six traditions shaped the final text; and the Charter launched in November 2009. Hundreds of cities, schools, and institutions have since affirmed it. Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010) turned the Charter into a practice, modeled with a convert’s irony on Alcoholics Anonymous. Compassion, she argues there, works less like an emotion than like a craft. You train it the way you train scales on a piano, daily, against resistance, until the self’s claim to the center of the world loosens.

The same years produced her most contested intellectual argument. The Case for God (2009) contends that premodern theology rarely treated statements about God as literal descriptions. The classical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ran on apophatic theology, the discipline of unsaying, which holds that God exceeds every concept and that language about God gestures rather than describes. Aquinas and Maimonides, on her reading, would find both the modern fundamentalist and the modern atheist strangely alike: two parties who agree that religious language makes factual claims and disagree only about whether the claims are true. She pressed the argument against Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), and Sam Harris (b. 1967), whose books she treats as attacks on the crudest available version of belief. The New Atheists returned fire, and some scholars of religion joined them from a different direction, arguing that Armstrong’s apophatic past is selective, that ordinary believers across history have taken their doctrines as facts, and that her mystical consensus belongs to a learned elite she has mistaken for the tradition. The dispute remains open. Her position has not moved.

Fields of Blood (2014) took on the claim that religion causes war. Across nine hundred years of cases, from Assyrian conquest to the Crusades to modern jihadism, she argues that organized violence tracks states, empires, resources, and identity, and that religion supplies the vocabulary of conflicts whose engines lie elsewhere. Secular ideologies, she notes, produced the largest slaughters of the twentieth century without theological assistance. Reviewers split on schedule. The Lost Art of Scripture (2019) argued that sacred texts were composed for ritual performance and moral transformation, and that the silent, solitary, information-seeking reading practiced by moderns, believer and skeptic alike, misuses them. Sacred Nature (2022) extended the method to the environment, surveying Daoist, Confucian, and indigenous traditions in which nature commanded reverence, and proposing that the ecological crisis is at bottom a failure of that older imagination.

Her own position kept moving beneath the books. For years she called herself a freelance monotheist, worshipping wherever the door stood open. Later she dropped even that. “If anything, I’m a Confucian, I think,” she told an interviewer, an answer that summarizes her mature view: ritual, self-discipline, and concern for others constitute the religious life, and metaphysics can wait. She never married. She lives in London, in Islington, among her books.

The academy has never known where to put her. She reads no ancient languages at a scholarly level and works from secondary sources, synthesizing the labor of specialists into narratives the specialists could never write and would sometimes prefer unwritten. Historians fault her harmonizing habit, the way her comparative method sands the traditions until their shared compassion shows and their real quarrels fade. Conservative Catholics resent her portrait of the church; conservative Protestants reject her symbolic Bible; secular critics say she launders religion’s record. The honors came anyway: fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature in 2005, the British Academy‘s inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding in 2013, appointment as Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2015, the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2017, and honorary doctorates from universities that once had no place for her.

The shape of the career repays attention. An institution formed her, harmed her, and expelled her into a decade of illness and failure. A second institution, the university, approved her work and then destroyed it on a technicality she declined to fight. From these two rejections she built a third path, addressed over the heads of the gatekeepers to the millions of readers the gatekeepers do not serve. Her central claim, that religion is a practice of compassion rather than a system of propositions, restates her biography as theology. The doctrines failed her. The discipline remained. She has spent fifty years arguing that the discipline was the point all along, and a large part of the reading world, weary of the war between certainties, has taken her word for it.

Notes

The details of convent discipline, including the whip, the spiked chain, and two weeks of sewing with a needleless treadle machine, come from Karen Armstrong’s memoirs and are summarized in her Wikipedia entry, which cites a profile in The Guardian: Wikipedia. Rachel Cooke’s 2014 interview in The Guardian, published around the release of Fields of Blood, also discusses Armstrong’s years in the convent and her eventual epilepsy diagnosis.

Her appearances before the United States Congress, lectures at the State Department, participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and service as an ambassador for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations are documented in her standard publisher biography: Penguin Random House.

The chronology of the TED Prize and the Charter for Compassion, including the February 2008 award and the November 2009 launch of the Charter, is documented by the Charter for Compassion and Armstrong’s TED profile.

The remark, “If anything, I’m a Confucian, I think,” is quoted in the Wikipedia entry. Before publication, it would be worth locating the original interview from which the quotation is taken.

Her acknowledgment of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Bernard Lonergan appears in her memoir The Spiral Staircase.

Her service as a vice president of Epilepsy Action is documented by the organization.

Armstrong’s account of weeping with relief after receiving her epilepsy diagnosis appears in The Spiral Staircase. I described the diagnosis simply as a moment of liberation because I could not independently verify the exact wording of that passage.

I added several pieces of self-evident background without separate citation. These include the atmosphere of a pre-Vatican II novitiate, such as the Great Silence, refectory readings, and the chapter of faults, all of which are standard features of religious life and consistent with Armstrong’s memoirs. The Oxford quadrangle scene and the decade spent working in the London Library are my staging of documented facts. Armstrong was a nun at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and she describes years of self-directed study in London before 1993. I also referred to Islington as her neighborhood because it appears in several published profiles.

Karen Armstrong and the Field She Could Not Enter

An external examiner fails a doctoral thesis at Oxford in the early 1970s. The topic had been approved by the university’s own committee. The candidate does not appeal. On its face the episode is an academic misfortune, one of thousands, the kind of injury the university produces as routine byproduct. Read through Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), it is something else: an act of consecration refused, performed by an agent of the field on a candidate whose trajectory the field had no way to read. Everything Karen Armstrong later became follows from that refusal, and follows from it in ways Bourdieu’s theory predicts with uncomfortable accuracy.

Bourdieu describes social life as a set of fields, each a structured space of positions where agents compete for the capital the field recognizes. The academic field trades in credentials, citations, chairs, and the approval of peers. The journalistic field trades in audience, timeliness, and name recognition. The religious field trades in salvation goods and the authority to dispense them. Each field guards its borders, sets a price of entry, and reserves to itself the power of consecration, the power to declare who counts. Agents enter fields carrying a habitus, the durable set of dispositions laid down by their formation, which fits them for some games and unfits them for others. Capital earned in one field converts to another only at a rate of exchange, and the conversion is never free.

Armstrong’s habitus was formed in an institution that no longer exists. The Society of the Holy Child Jesus in 1962 belonged to the pre-conciliar church, a total institution that trained two dispositions in her at once and at maximum intensity: submission to authority and disciplined study. The needleless sewing machine taught the first. The dispatch to Oxford taught the second. Bourdieu insists that habitus outlives the conditions that produced it, and that when the field changes faster than the habitus, the agent suffers what he calls hysteresis, the drag of dispositions tuned to a vanished game. Armstrong is a textbook case twice over. The church reformed itself while she was inside, dissolving the world her formation fit. Then she carried the convent’s dispositions into fields that had never heard of them.

The walked-away thesis is the place to watch the habitus operate. Colleagues urged her to appeal a verdict that violated the field’s own rules. The appeal might have won. She submitted instead, and her own later account connects the submission to seven years of trained obedience. Bourdieu might add that the field colluded in the outcome. She entered the academic game with the wrong social capital, no patron invested in her survival, no network primed to contest the examiner, an ex-nun in her late twenties whose formation the dons could not place. The field expelled her at the moment of consecration, and the expulsion cost the field nothing. It never learned what it had discarded, because fields keep no accounts of the excluded.

What follows looks, in her memoirs, like a decade of drift: illness, misdiagnosis, a teaching job, a first book. Read as trajectory, it is capital conversion under duress. The convent had given her one asset the market could price, an insider’s knowledge of a closed institution, and Through the Narrow Gate converted it. The ex-nun’s story sold because the journalistic field pays for access to closed worlds, and she held a monopoly on hers. The book’s success bought her entry to broadcasting, and Channel 4’s commission for The First Christian completed the move. She now held a position in the field of cultural production at large, the field of general audiences, freelance commissions, and name recognition, the field Bourdieu calls large-scale production and opposes to the restricted field where academics write for one another.

Her mature career runs on a single sustained arbitrage between those two fields. The academic study of religion produces enormous stores of restricted capital: specialist monographs, contested findings, scholarship locked behind the field’s own language. The field’s structure forbids its members to convert that capital at scale. Specialization is the price of entry; the scholar who writes a four-thousand-year history of God across three traditions has, by the field’s internal accounting, stopped being a scholar. Synthesis reads as amateurism inside the border and as authority outside it. Armstrong, holding no position inside, paid no price. A History of God raids the restricted field, acknowledges its debts to Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Bernard Lonergan, and converts the haul into the largest-circulation account of comparative monotheism in English. The academy’s response, admiration braided with condescension, is what the theory predicts. She had done something the field’s own rules make impossible for its members, and the field could neither claim her nor dismiss her. Reviewers said she simplified. Readers made her the most consequential writer on religion of her generation. Both were describing the same conversion from opposite banks.

September 11, 2001 was a field event before it was anything else for her. The political and journalistic fields faced a sudden, desperate demand for a commodity almost no one held: the ability to explain Islam to a frightened Anglophone public in language that public could absorb. The academic field held the knowledge and could not deliver it; its members lacked the platform, the prose, and in many cases the will. Armstrong held the intersection. Islam: A Short History was already in print. Within months she was addressing Congress, lecturing at the State Department, appearing at Davos. Each appearance converted cultural capital into political and social capital at a rate available to perhaps three or four people alive. Bourdieu notes that crises revalue capital overnight, and that agents positioned at the border between fields capture the revaluation. She had spent fifteen years, without a plan, building the exact position the crisis would price highest.

The war with the New Atheists is best read as a border conflict over jurisdiction. Richard Dawkins arrived carrying massive capital from the scientific field and claimed the right to rule on religion’s truth, a raid across field lines that treated theology as failed biology. Armstrong’s counterattack in The Case for God is a position-taking in the strict Bourdieusian sense. Her apophatic argument, that classical theology never made the factual claims Dawkins refutes, redraws the border so that the scientist’s capital loses its purchasing power on religious ground. The quarrel enriched both parties, which is how such quarrels persist. Each side needed the other as foil; each book sold the other’s; and the combat confirmed the shared illusio, the belief that the question of religion is worth fighting over, without which neither position holds value. Scholars of religion, watching from the restricted field, complained that both combatants misrepresented the object. Their complaint changed nothing, because they held no position in the field where the fight occurred.

The Charter for Compassion completes the pattern with a move Bourdieu documents among the consecration-denied: when existing instances refuse to crown you, found your own. The TED Prize of 2008 marks the arrival of a new consecrating power, a Silicon Valley institution minting symbolic capital outside the old academies entirely, and Armstrong was among the first to grasp what its currency could buy. The Charter is an institution with her signature on it, a border-crossing entity that draws clergy, academics, mayors, and school boards into a structure whose founding capital is hers. She no longer petitions fields for recognition. She operates an instance that recognizes others.

Then the old instances came to her. The Royal Society of Literature in 2005, the British Academy’s inaugural prize in 2013, the OBE in 2015, Asturias in 2017. Bourdieu describes how fields absorb successful heresy: once an excluded trajectory accumulates capital the field can no longer ignore, consecration arrives late and functions as recapture. The honors declare that she was one of theirs after all, and the declaration serves the honoring institutions as much as it serves her. The Royal Society of Literature gains the luster of the best-known religion writer in the language. The British Academy, naming her the first winner of a prize for global cultural understanding, buys a share in a reputation the academy’s own field had refused to underwrite forty years earlier. The examiner’s verdict was never overturned. It was priced out.

One question remains for any Bourdieusian reading: does the agent see the game? Armstrong’s memoirs narrate her trajectory in vocational language, the spiral staircase, the calling that circled back, the discipline that turned out to be the point. Bourdieu might read that narration as the final and most necessary conversion, the transformation of necessity into virtue. She could not stay in the convent, could not enter the academy, could not stop writing about religion, and her mature doctrine, that religion is practice rather than proposition, that compassion outranks doctrine, that the outsider to every orthodoxy sees what the orthodox cannot, universalizes her own position into a theology. The excluded trajectory becomes the privileged vantage. What the field did to her becomes what religion means. Bourdieu calls this amor fati, the love of one’s fate, and he denies that it is hypocrisy. The habitus performs these strategies below the level of calculation. Nothing in the record suggests she plotted a single move. The convent trained a woman to submit and to study, the fields did the rest, and fifty years later the dispositions that once pedaled a needleless machine had produced twenty-five books, a global charter, and a form of authority that no field granted and every field now must count.

A limit. Field theory prices everything as capital and reads every position as strategy, and it has no column for the decade of seizures and misdiagnosis, the mental hospital, the years when the trajectory was suffering and nothing else. Armstrong’s own account keeps that decade at the center. Bourdieu’s cannot. The theory sees a conversion of assets where she records a woman on the floor of a rented room, smelling odors that were not there, waiting for a name for what was wrong with her. Both accounts are true. Only one of them can say what the machine with no needle cost.

Karen Armstrong and the Knowledge That Will Not Say Itself

Karen Armstrong’s mature theology can be stated in a sentence: religion is something you do, and moderns went wrong when they turned it into something you believe. Scripture, she argues, was composed for ritual performance and works on those who chant it, memorize it, and enact it. Compassion is a craft, trained daily like scales on a piano, until the ego’s grip loosens. Doctrine came last and mattered least; the practice was always the point. She has spent thirty years pressing this argument on the largest audience any writer on religion commands.

Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) has spent a career pressing on the same ground from the other side, and his work supplies the sharpest available test of hers. Turner’s subject is tacit knowledge, the skill and disposition that people carry and use without the ability to state it. He accepts that such knowledge exists. A cook, a violinist, and a priest each know things their sentences cannot contain. What Turner attacks is the inference that social theory built on this fact: the idea that behind shared behavior sits a shared hidden object, a practice, a tradition, a framework, a collective spirit, that gets transmitted from generation to generation like a parcel. Nothing transmits, Turner argues. Each learner builds her own habits from her own history of imitation, correction, and feedback. Two nuns trained in the same novitiate end up with similar dispositions because they underwent similar drills, and the similarity is the whole story. The shared essence that theorists posit behind the similarity explains nothing and cannot be found. What exists is individual habituation all the way down.

Read through Turner, Armstrong’s life divides into an acquisition and an articulation. The acquisition took seven years. The convent she entered in 1962 was a machine for producing tacit knowledge and little else: the great silence, custody of the eyes, the chapter of faults, obedience rehearsed past the point of reason at a sewing machine that held no needle. Nobody explained the system’s content, because the system’s content was the training. She emerged in 1969 with a set of dispositions, toward discipline, toward study, toward submission, toward a life organized around an absent center, and with almost no propositions she still believed. The articulation has taken five decades and twenty-five books. Her entire career is an attempt to say what the convent installed in her, and her mature doctrine, that religion is embodied practice which words can only gesture at, doubles as a report on the difficulty of the attempt.

The doctrine restates Turner’s problem with striking fidelity. When Armstrong says that faith named a disposition before it named an assent, she is distinguishing tacit from explicit knowledge. When she says the meaning of a ritual exists only in its performance, she matches his account of skill. When she compares religion to driving or dancing, activities ruined by mid-performance analysis, she borrows the standard examples of the tacit knowledge literature, which descend from Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), the tradition’s founder and Turner’s constant sparring partner. She arrived at these positions from a convent and a library rather than from philosophy of social science, which makes the convergence more telling. She found by autobiography what Turner found by analysis: the load-bearing part of religion does not survive translation into statements.

Then the frame turns on her, and the turn is where the essay’s work gets done. Turner’s skepticism about shared tacit objects cuts through the center of Armstrong’s project. Her most famous claims posit exactly such objects. All the great traditions, she argues, converge on compassion; the Axial Age sages of China, India, Israel, and Greece discovered the same moral core; beneath the doctrinal quarrels of the faiths runs a common practical wisdom. Each claim treats similar outputs as evidence of a shared hidden essence. Turner’s reply would be short. Similar creatures under similar pressures develop similar habits. Human beings everywhere raise children, face death, and manage aggression inside small groups, and their moral trainings show family resemblances for that reason. Nothing further is shared. The common core of religion that Armstrong reports finding is a theorist’s object of the kind Turner spent The Social Theory of Practices dismantling: posited because the resemblance seems to demand a cause, invisible on inspection, and doing no explanatory work the training histories cannot do alone.

Her apophatic argument faces the same difficulty at closer range. In The Case for God she contends that premodern believers held their doctrines as symbols, that the literal reading is a modern invention, and that classical faith was a practiced knowledge which understood its own language as gesture. The claim is an assertion about the tacit contents of millions of vanished minds. Turner’s work is a sustained warning against such assertions. We possess the premoderns’ sentences and their rituals; their inner grasp of either is closed to us, and the historical record that survives, catechisms, inquisitions, wars fought over single words, suggests that plenty of them treated the propositions as facts worth killing for. Armstrong needs the premodern believer to have known, tacitly, what she now argues explicitly. The need is visible, and the evidence cannot reach it.

Her own case supplies the frame’s most intimate illustration. Through her twenties she experienced visions, absences, and smells that were not there, and she articulated them in the only vocabulary her training supplied: mystical experience, spiritual failure, the stirrings and withdrawals of God. In 1976 a neurologist renamed them temporal lobe epilepsy. The episode shows training reaching below description into perception. The convent had not merely given her words for her seizures; it had shaped what having them was like. She drew the right Turner-flavored conclusion, that the neural account and the religious account describe the same events under different trainings, and declined to let either cancel the other. Few of her readers notice that this episode quietly undermines the authority of all first-person religious testimony, including the testimony her books rely on when they report what practitioners know.

Now the question the frame exists to ask. Can her books work? By her own account, religious knowledge lives in practice and dies in paraphrase. Her medium is paraphrase. A reader finishes A History of God on a commuter train holding several hundred pages of explicit propositions about traditions whose knowledge, the author insists, was never propositional. The reader has acquired opinions. The nun had acquired a discipline. Between the two stands everything Turner says cannot be crossed by prose: the drills, the correction, the years. Armstrong’s mass audience buys the description of tacit religion and mistakes possession of the description for acquaintance with the thing, an error her theory predicts and her sales depend on. The Charter for Compassion sharpens the point. Cities and school boards affirm a document, an act of explicit assent, the signing of a statement, which is the exact species of religious act her whole corpus ranks lowest. Signatures accumulate. Dispositions do not follow from signatures.

She knows this, and the knowledge shows in Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, her one attempt to write pedagogy rather than description. The book borrows its architecture from Alcoholics Anonymous, and the borrowing is diagnostic, because AA works through meetings, sponsors, confession before witnesses, and daily repetition, an apparatus of embodied correction with a text attached. Armstrong ships the text without the apparatus. Turner’s account says the recipe never contains the skill; the skill grows in the doing, under feedback, in a body. A reader alone with the twelve steps holds instructions for a training no one is administering. The convent had the apparatus and lacked the theory. The books have the theory and lack the apparatus. She has spent her career on the wrong side of her own argument, and the career’s scale measures how many people want the description of a formation they will never undergo.

A defense is available to her, and honesty requires stating it. She might answer that her books never claim to transmit religion; they claim to remove an obstacle. The modern reader, fundamentalist or atheist, approaches the traditions convinced that religion is a set of factual claims, and the conviction blocks practice before it can begin. Her writing clears the ground. It cannot install the discipline, and it can retire the misunderstanding that makes the discipline look absurd. On this reading her work is propaedeutic, a long argument for putting the book down and doing something, and its success is unmeasurable by definition, since it succeeds in lives she never sees. The defense is coherent. It is also convenient, and it leaves her in the position of a swimming instructor whose students never touch water, publishing volume after volume on the feel of the stroke.

The convent trained her in seven years. She has spent fifty telling readers what the training knew. The telling made her famous, and by the account she herself gives, the knowledge stayed behind in the novitiate, in the silence, in the hands on the machine, in the one place words never reached it.

The Hero Who Empties Herself: Karen Armstrong’s Hero System

Two terrors bracket Karen Armstrong’s life, and they arrive in the wrong order. Most people meet the fear of death before the fear of ego-death. Armstrong met them reversed. At seventeen she walked into an institution engineered to kill the self while keeping the body alive: the silence, the surveillance, the kneeling accusation of oneself before the assembled sisters, the superiors who read her letters and named her faults. She has written that she felt her personality coming apart under the treatment, and she stayed seven years. Then she walked out into the second terror, the ordinary one. By her late thirties she had no order, no faith, no husband, no child, no doctorate, no post, and a neurological condition that had cost her a teaching job. She stood a fair chance of dying without leaving a mark of any kind. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built his account of human character on the claim that we cannot bear that prospect, that every culture is a hero system, a shared drama that promises its members significance beyond the grave, and that a person stripped of her hero system will construct another or break. Armstrong constructed another. Its genius is that it answers both terrors with a single move. She made a heroism out of the emptying of the self, and the emptying made her name.

Watch the system operate before naming its parts. Monterey, February 2008. The TED conference: lanyards on lariats, first names only, venture capital in fleece, an audience whose own hero system runs on scale, disruption, and the dream of code that outlives its coder. Onto this stage walks a sixty-three-year-old English ex-nun, and the room gives her its full attention, because she has come to claim her prize and spend her wish. The wish is a charter. She tells them that every tradition arrives at the Golden Rule, that compassion means dethroning yourself from the center of your world and putting another there, and that she wants their help to make this the common creed of a divided planet. The engineers applaud a doctrine of ego-death, and no one onstage or off remarks that the doctrine is being announced by a woman collecting a hundred thousand dollars and a global platform for having articulated it. The contradiction is the hero system in miniature. The self dethroned from the center of her world sits, that afternoon, at the center of the room.

Becker teaches that a hero system runs on sacred values, and that a sacred value is never a dictionary word. It takes its meaning from the drama it serves. Compassion is Armstrong’s crown value, and inside her system it means a discipline of self-transcendence, practiced daily against the ego’s resistance, which delivers the practitioner from the prison of self-concern and joins her to an ancient company stretching back through the Axial sages. The word does different work everywhere else. A hospice nurse on a night shift in Akron practices compassion with her hands, turning a dying man to prevent sores, and needs no cosmology to dignify the work; her hero system is competence and the shift completed, and Armstrong’s talk of ego-dethronement might strike her as a lot of frame for a bed bath. A Salafi teacher in Birmingham, twenty minutes from the streets where Armstrong grew up, holds that mercy flows from submission to God’s command and from nowhere else, so that compassion detached from revealed law is sentiment, unanchored and unsafe; in his drama the compassionate hero obeys first. An effective altruist in Berkeley reduces the word to arithmetic, lives saved per dollar, and regards Armstrong’s inner training as consumption disguised as ethics: while she practices dethroning her ego, the mosquitoes are biting. A settler in Samaria and a fourth-generation union man in Youngstown, who agree on nothing else, both order compassion concentrically, family before community before nation before stranger, and hear in Armstrong’s universal compassion the dissolution of every loyalty that makes a people. Their hero system, the tribal, national, and traditionalist one, is old, coherent, and unembarrassed, and it reads her creed as treason to the near for the sake of the far. Same word in every mouth. Five dramas, five meanings, and each drama makes its meaning feel like the obvious one, which is the deepest thing Becker knew.

Her second sacred value is unknowing. Armstrong holds certainty to be the primal religious error, the idol, the mark that unites the fundamentalist and the militant atheist in a single modern family. Inside her system the hero is the one who can stand in the cloud, practice toward a God beyond concepts, and hold her tradition lightly. Step outside the system and the value inverts. For the confessional believer, certainty is fidelity. The martyrs did not die for a symbol of ultimate concern; they died because the propositions were true, and unknowing is what the comfortable call their exhaustion. For a research chemist, certainty is earned, one assay at a time, and her cultivated cloud looks like surrender dressed as depth. For a convert who rebuilt a broken life on the fixed points of law and observance, certainty is load-bearing; take it away and the house falls. Armstrong’s third value, practice, splits the same way. She means scales on the piano, ritual repetitions that retrain the heart toward gentleness. A drill instructor at Parris Island means the identical thing, repetition until the body obeys before the mind consents, and his repetitions train young men to close with and destroy the enemy. Practice is a technology. Every hero system loads its own cargo.

The subtraction story comes next, because every hero system of her type requires one. Armstrong tells her life as a shedding. She subtracted the convent, then the church, then Christianity, then monotheism, then, in her last self-descriptions, membership of any kind, until nothing remained except the compassionate core that all the traditions share. The story presents her position as a remainder, what is left when illusion boils off, and a remainder needs no defense, since it is simply what is true. Becker forbids the move. Nobody lives on remainders. The claim to stand outside every hero system is the throne room of a particular hero system, the interfaith universalist one, in which the highest status belongs to the person who sees through all the faiths to their common heart, and Armstrong occupies its summit. Her books historicize everything. God has a history, Jerusalem has a history, scripture, fundamentalism, and the Buddha have histories. Compassion alone arrives in her pages without one, discovered by the Axial sages the way Cavendish discovered hydrogen, the single value exempt from the method. Becker would put his finger there. The exempt value is never an oversight. It is the altar. A hero system can historicize every god except the one it worships.

Now the rival, developed rather than listed, because her system’s shape shows best against the road she refused. Somewhere in England an old sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus is still alive who entered when Armstrong entered, knelt at the same chapter of faults, and stayed. She took the reforms as they came, put off the old habit, taught forty years of girls, nursed the sisters who aged ahead of her, and now prays in a house with too many empty rooms. Suppose she reads Through the Narrow Gate. She recognizes every corridor. And her verdict, delivered to a niece over tea, might run close to this: Karen told the truth about the buildings and missed the point of the life. We were never trying to destroy ourselves. We were making a gift of ourselves, and a gift hurts. She left before the gift was complete, and she has spent fifty years explaining the novitiate to people who will never understand it, and been paid for it, and called that compassion. The sister’s hero system and Armstrong’s grew from one root and one training. In the sister’s drama, the heroine is hidden, her sacrifice sealed inside the vow, her significance banked entirely with God, unrecorded on earth by design. In Armstrong’s drama the heroine’s self-emptying is published in forty-five languages. Becker names the difference without mocking either woman. Both are immortality projects. One deposits its treasure in heaven and requires that heaven exist. The other deposits its treasure in the culture, in print runs and charters and prizes, and requires only that the culture remember. Armstrong’s system is the sister’s system with the metaphysics removed and the audience installed where God used to sit.

Other rivals ring her, and her books engage them by name. The New Atheist hero system makes a heroism of disenchantment, the unflinching man staring down a godless sky, truth as the last nobility; Becker would note that it promises its own immortality, the scientist’s name on the finding, and that its combat with Armstrong fed both systems, each side’s courage requiring the other’s error. The confessional systems, Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Salafi, evangelical, hold that one drama is true and the others are rehearsals or corruptions, and from inside any of them Armstrong’s harmonizing looks like the flattening of everything that made the drama worth dying in. The tribal and traditionalist system, already met, ranks the transmission of a particular inheritance above every universal, and its adherents might observe that Armstrong, childless and unaffiliated, preaches a compassion that costs her no loyalty because she kept none. Each rival can describe her more sharply than she describes herself, which is the usual arrangement between hero systems, since each one’s vision is clearest at the edges of its neighbors.

How much does she see? More than most subjects of this series. Armstrong is half a Beckerian by trade. Her life’s argument, that conceptions of God rise and fall as human needs change, that religions are things people build to make their suffering mean, sits a short step from the full claim that religions are death-denial made social. She has looked at every tradition on earth and seen the scaffolding. What she has never published is the same look turned on the Charter, the prizes, the shelf of books with her name down the spines, the entire visible apparatus by which a woman who preaches self-forgetting has arranged to be remembered. Her memoirs come near it. She writes of ambition with distaste, of her hunger for the doctorate as a wrong turning, of learning to want nothing, and the account of learning to want nothing runs to two volumes with her photograph on the covers. Becker would not call this hypocrisy, and this series does not either. He taught that the hero system is worn on the inside, that the one drama a person cannot watch is her own, and that the more total the dedication, the more invisible the stage. By that standard her sincerity is beyond question and beside the point. She wants the ego dethroned. The want is the throne.

The hero is a woman who answered the terror of self-annihilation by seizing the controls of it, who turned the convent’s assault on her ego into a voluntary discipline she could administer to herself and recommend to the world, and who built from that discipline a significance no order could expel her from. The rival she never names is the sister who stayed, the hidden life running quietly alongside hers like an unlit parallel road, whose wager, that a self given away in secret is seen and kept by God, would, if it paid, make every book Armstrong wrote a long consolation for the loss of the real thing. And the cost her ledger cannot price sits in the Islington flat among the books: the decade of seizures endured alone, the marriage never made, the child never had, the near loves traded, year over year, for the love of the far, by the world’s foremost teacher of compassion, who put the whole race at the center of her world and kept the room around her empty.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, the vast historical scholarship and global activism of Karen Armstrong present a profound misreading of why religion exists and how human societies function.
Armstrong, a prominent historian of religion and author of A History of God, Fields of Blood, and Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, argues that the core of all major religious traditions is the golden rule and the cultivation of universal compassion. In her work, particularly with her global initiative, the Charter for Compassion, she contends that the dogmatic, violent, and exclusionary aspects of religion are distortions of an underlying, transcendent truth. To Armstrong, if human beings can look past external dogmas and embrace the fundamental empathetic core of their faiths, they can build a more peaceful, unified world.
Mearsheimer’s framework in The Great Delusion breaks down this compassionate universalism, reinterpreting Armstrong’s insights through the cold reality of group survival.
The Armstrong views religious chauvinism and fundamentalism as historical deviations or psychological regressions from the true essence of faith. Mearsheimer’s anthropology counters that these rigid boundaries are not deviations; they are the primary reason religion exists.
Humans are fundamentally social and tribal creatures who organize into distinct groups to ensure their survival in an uncertain world. The long human childhood requires an intense value infusion from the primary micro-society to create cohesion and internal trust. Religion is the most powerful tool ever devised to execute this value infusion. The specific dogmas, rituals, and creation myths that Armstrong seeks to minimize are the exact devices a tribe uses to police its parameters and distinguish between members and outsiders. A completely borderless, universalist religion would fail to provide the local security and distinct collective identity that human nature requires.
In Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Armstrong argues that agrarian states historically scapegoated religion, co-opting it to justify the structural violence and warfare necessary to maintain their empires. She asserts that religion itself is not inherently violent.
Under Mearsheimer’s lens, this distinction is an illusion. Moral codes and religious frameworks do not exist in a vacuum of abstract reason or pure empathy. They are generated by specific societies to serve their own cohesion and relative power. Internal solidarity exists precisely to maintain group strength so the collective can navigate external competition. A tribe does not need state manipulation to turn its religion into a defensive weapon; the primary drive for survival in an anarchic system dictates that a group will always use its shared sacred narrative to justify securing its perimeter and competing for vital resources against rival groups.
Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion seeks to institutionalize empathy on a global scale, encouraging people to extend their moral concern to all of humanity.
Mearsheimer’s realism notes that the capacity to prioritize abstract, global empathy is a secondary phenomenon that only emerges within highly secure, wealthy environments. The ability to advocate for a borderless family of man requires an artificial zone of abundance secured by a dominant power. The moment security fractures, resources shrink, or an existential threat emerges, the luxury of universalist sentiment vanishes. The tribe instantly reasserts its hard boundaries, and the human engine defaults to prioritizing the in-group above all else.
If Mearsheimer is right, Armstrong’s work brilliantly documents the beautiful, internal aspirations of human spirituality during periods of peace, but it misreads the external structural requirements of human survival. Humans do not build lasting societies through global empathy; they build them by binding themselves to a specific tribe to survive a dangerous world.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, the entire literary and activist career of Karen Armstrong represents the ultimate secular temple built atop the misunderstanding myth. Armstrong has built an immense global brand by framing religious fundamentalism and sectarian violence not as fierce coalitional dogfights, but as bad reading habits and a tragic loss of historical perspective.
In bestsellers like A History of God, The Battle for God, and her global initiative The Charter for Compassion, Armstrong argues that ancient religious traditions were never meant to be taken literally. She claims that early humans understood scripture as mythos—psychological metaphors meant to help people look inward and cultivate compassion—rather than logos, which deals with hard, scientific facts. For Armstrong, modern fundamentalism, terrorism, and aggressive atheism are all products of the same basic intellectual error: a historical brain-fart where people forgot how to read ancient texts properly. If we can just educate people about this misunderstanding and remind them of the shared “Golden Rule” at the heart of every faith, global harmony can be achieved.
A Pinsofian analysis completely dismantles this gentle, high-status framework. Religious communities, both ancient and modern, do not enforce rigid dogmas, fight over holy sites, or execute heretics because they suffer from a literary misunderstanding. They do it because religious orthodoxy is a highly effective, functional tool for group survival and dominance. Strict, literal beliefs and shared mythologies serve as powerful coalitional badges. They signal deep ingroup loyalty, police internal compliance, and mobilize human primates to outcompete rival coalitions for finite resources, land, and political authority. The actors running these factions are not confused by hermeneutics; they are playing a zero-sum game to win.
By framing this intense Darwinian competition as a treatable case of historical amnesia, Armstrong creates a brilliant mission statement for the modern cosmopolitan elite. Her work provides international forums, university circles, and educated readers with a sophisticated platform to look down upon sectarian conflicts from a position of absolute moral and intellectual superiority. Adherents can tell themselves that while the unwashed masses are down in the mud fighting over “misunderstood” dogmas, they possess the superior rationality needed to see the universal, compassionate core of all human spirituality.
Armstrong did not uncover a fixable error in the history of human belief. She executed a highly successful status strategy within the global attention economy. Converting complex religious history into a high-prestige plea for universal empathy earned her the TED Prize, multi-million-dollar book deals, and a dominant position as a global public intellectual. Her work functions as an exceptionally useful apparatus to secure personal prominence, proving that preaching a universal compassion that ignores basic evolutionary incentives is the ultimate way to capture elite authority.