Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization by Hans G. Kippenberg (review)

The study of new religions intersects with the broader study of religion in the analysis of the links between religion and violence, furnishing both case studies and theoretical ideas to that broader pursuit. In this volume, Hans Kippenberg, who earlier published a translation and analysis of the "Spiritual Manual" of the September 11 hijackers with Tilman Seidensticker (The 9/11 Handbook, 2006), takes up the question of the relations between religion and violence through the consideration of eight case studies. Kippenberg's focus is on various forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, particularly in the contemporary "Middle East."

In addition to two introductory chapters and a conclusion, Kippenberg devotes nuanced and detailed single chapter case studies to the Branch Davidians and Peoples Temple in the United States, the Iranian revolution, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the wars conducted by the contemporary state of Israel, the fight for a Muslim Palestine, the American evangelical understanding of the role of Israel/Palestine in the scenario of the end times, the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent U.S. War on Terror. Readers of this journal will likely be most familiar with the materials in the chapter on Peoples Temple and the Branch Davidians. While there is little surprising in that chapter, Kippenberg does put those events in a broader context, not least as he shows how the use of terms like "cult," "fundamentalism," and "terrorism" can exacerbate conflicts.

Kippenberg wants to devise "a new paradigm for research" (vii) that moves away from broad assertions that religions are either a major source of global conflicts because of their intolerance, or that any contribution of the world's religions to violence represents a corruption of their universally irenic motives. He endorses an interactionist view of the production of violent actions that embeds religious groups and individual actors within their social contexts. He sees violence arising out of the tensions "between faith communities, on the one hand, and governmental, legal, and economic structures, on the other" (38). Accordingly, he asserts that religious violence rarely has its origins in conflicts that are purely religious. Although he does not directly argue that violence constitutes a form of worship, Kippenberg does show how religious commitments can solidify the ethic of commitment that violent actors adopt.

Following Max Weber, Kippenberg insists that there is an important difference between the motives of an actor and an act's significance, and, at the same time, that the "only possible source of an understanding of religious action is the meaning that the actors ascribe to it" (14). With those assertions he aims to close off the possibility that the violent actions that individuals understand as religious can be dismissed by observers as "un-Christian" or "un-Islamic."

This volume is worth the attention of anyone interested in the intersections of religion and violence.