God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare

by Mark Juergensmeyer

For decades, Mark Juergensmeyer has been studying the rise of religious violence around the world, including groups like ISIS and Christian militias that have been involved in acts of terrorism. Over the years he came to realize that war is the central image in the worldview of virtually every religious movement engaged in violent acts. Behind the moral justification of using violence are images of great confrontations of war on a transcendent scale.

God at War explores the dark attraction between religion and warfare. Virtually every religious tradition leaves behind it a bloody trail of stories, legends, and images of war, and most wars call upon the divine for blessings in battle. This book finds the connection between religion and warfare in the alternative realities created in the human imagination in response to crises both personal and social. Based on the author's thirty years of field work interviewing activists involved in religious-related terrorist movements around the world, this book explains why desperate social conflict leads to images of war, and why invariably God is thought to be engaged in battle.

Genres: Religion

120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Mark Juergensmeyer is a professor of sociology and global studies, affiliate professor of religious studies, and the Kundan Kaur Kapany professor of global and Sikh Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the founding director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, and is a pioneer in the field of global studies, focusing on global religion, religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics. He has published more than three hundred articles and twenty books, including the revised and expanded fourth edition of Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press, 2017).

Reviews

[Thomas Ray]

God at War, 2020, Mark Juergensmeyer

The 2025 edition, /Why God Needs War and War Needs God/, has this new preface: https://juergensmeyer.org/why-god-nee...

Here's the table of contents: https://global.oup.com/academic/produ...

https://search.worldcat.org/title/112... is worldcat's list of libraries with a (soft or hard) copy.

More by Mark Juergensmeyer and friends: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...


"We're not terrorists! We're soldiers for God!" --Mahmud Abouhalima, failed World Trade Center bomber, Mark Juergensmeyer interviewed in prison in 1997. p. 35.

We're good--they're evil. p. 40. You're either for us or against us. pp. 42, 85. Ultimately the righteous will prevail, for cosmic war is God's war. And God cannot lose. This is how Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi, political head of Hamas, described the struggle against Israel. Juergensmeyer interviewed in 1998. pp. 79-80, 83.

pp. 91-92 "Go ahead, soldier. Kill your brother. It is your duty. You cannot hurt the soul." /Bhagavad-Gita/

Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) left a position at Union Theological Seminary in New York, returned to Germany, and conspired against Hitler. He was executed. p. 49. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, /Letters and Papers from Prison/ and /The Cost of Discipleship/.

p. 88 /Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist/, Reinhold Niebur, 1940. /Moral Man and Immoral Society/, 1932. With Hitler and Stalin, sometimes you shouldn't turn the other cheek.

p. 92 Every fight is on some level an encounter between differing "angles of vision" illuminating the same truth. Gandhi, in /Young India/, Sept. 32, 1926. Juergensmeyer, /Gandhi's Way/, 2005.

p. 65 "The problem lies not in the multifaceted activity we call 'religion' but in the violence embedded in our human nature and the nature of the state". -- Karen Armstrong, /Fields of Blood/

"Do I look like a terrorist?"-- Buddhist terrorist Ashin Wirathu, Juergensmeyer interviewed in 2015. "I wanted to tell him he looked like most of the terrorists I had interviewed, which is to say totally banal." p. 36.

Appeals for real-war recruits are like ads for war video games. p. 34. The excitement and power of being part of something important p. 35.

/Man, the State and War/, Kenneth Waltz, 1959:
Why did Bush declare "war on terror?" ["I'm a war president." Gave him support & power. Cheney's Haliburton could sop up government contracts.]

/On War/, 1832, Karl von Clausewitz (b. 1780). Violence to impose one's will. p. 31. Absolute war--total destruction, no compromise, no quarter, no surrender--vs. limited war, "the continuation of politics by other means." Erich Ludendorff, /Total War/ (/Der Totale Krieg/), 1936--include WWI, targeting civilians too. pp. 30-32, 79.

Kennedy's "best and brightest" (as David Halberstam called them) thought limited action in Vietnam sensible. They sold it as a great moral conflict with no easy retreat. They created a war not worth the cost with no easy retreat as, Juergensmeyer says, war mindset had infected public consciousness. p. 32

Robert Bellah, /Religion in Human Evolution/, 2011.

Wilfred Cantwell, /The Meaning and End of Religion/, 1963.

/War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning/. --Chris Hedges, 2002.






"War! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again!"--Edwin Starr

Our long nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over:
https://politics.theonion.com/bush-ou...

A strange game. The only way to win is not to play. --Wargames movie

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“meditation” is apt - this is a short, cogently argued work about the relationship between war and religion, both serving as worldviews that help individuals to make sense of chaos and craft narratives of meaning.

[Cain S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5

[Carlos Jordan-Keller · Rating 2 out of 5]

i liked this book at first and then it started to lose me…not bad i just wasn’t really paying too much attention to it