Mark Juergensmeyer - Comparative Studies of Rationalism, Religion, and Violence

Comparative Studies of Rationalism, Religion, and Violence

The role of religion in social vision was expanded and redirected during the 1980s, when he co-directed a multi-scholar collaborative project, the Berkeley-Harvard Program in the Comparative Study of Religion, which led to a series of books on the role of religion in the liberal arts and launched Juergensmeyer’s comparative studies of religion and society. His 1993 book, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, (revised and reissued in 2008 under the title, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State), was one of the first to explain the new social and political forces of the globalized post-Cold War World.

Beginning with an analysis of the militant Sikh movement in India, the book explained why religious activism erupted in the last decades of the 20th century. It focused on what it described as “a loss of faith in secular nationalism” due in part to the postcolonial collapse of confidence in Western models of nationalism and to the rise of globalization. In this milieu, religion provided both an alternative “ideology of order” and an image of “cosmic war”, which was a way of understanding social crises. This theory was first described in an article on "the logic of religious violence" published in 1987 and expanded in an essay, “sacrifice and cosmic war”, in a volume edited by Juergensmeyer in 1992, Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World.

The violent aspects of the religious challenges to the secular state—specifically acts of religious terrorism—constituted the subject of a subsequent book, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, published in 2000 and revised in 2003. The book explored the religious aspects of contemporary Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish, and Muslim acts of terrorism. It challenged the idea that terrorist acts were employed solely as a part of political strategy, and showed that religious terrorism is undertaken for symbolic as well as strategic reasons. It described terrorism as “the public performance of violence”, acts that reach out to particular audiences and adhere to grand scripts of cosmic war. A reviewer for The Journal of Conflict Studies said a "spate of books has been hastily written or rushed to publication since the infamous attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. . But this book is not one of the crowd. Terror in the Mind of God was prepared when terrorism studies barely interested the news media...and when those who studied the phenomenon were still suspected of an odd and unhealthful fascination with a laughable, lunatic fringe".

A section of the book entitled, “why guys throw bombs”, analyzed gender issues related to terrorism and explored the idea of performance violence as “symbolic empowerment”. The book also evaluated government responses to terrorist acts, concluding that militant retaliation is not only ineffective but also likely to enlarge the support for the activists and increase their resolve. The reviewer for Conflict Studies concluded the book "belongs in even the smallest collection on terrorism".

In 2006 Juergensmeyer presented a series of three lectures under the auspices of the Stafford Little endowment at Princeton University. The lectures, God and War, explored the intrinsic appeal of war to the religious imagination, and the enduring role of religion in warfare. It showed how the internal logic of war and religion were similar, and how they both expressed fundamental efforts to understand the chaos that threatens social and metaphysical order. The revised lectures are to be published as a book by Princeton University Press.