Review: Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, From Christian Militias to

When, in the years following the end of the Cold War, it gradually emerged that terrorism for religious ends rather than violence linked to nationalist or revolutionary movements was to become the principal preoccupation of security services around the globe, Mark Juergensmeyer was hardly surprised. A decade and a half ago, his first major book was already warning that the legitimacy of secular nationalism was being undermined by a “religious nationalism” that aspired to establish religious societies within specific states while simultaneously appealing to a broader, transnational community (The New Cold War: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State). Then, shortly before the attacks of September 11, 2001 opened the floodgates for a deluge of studies of terrorism, Juergensmeyer had drawn together a series of case studies and interviews to advance the theory that seemingly inexplicable acts of religiously connected violence could be understood by seeing them in the context of “cosmic war” wherein the perpetrators viewed themselves as symbolic participants in a metaphysical struggle between the forces of good and evil, thus deriving personal meaning and creating social order by transcending the conventionalities of this world (Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence). Now, in his new volume, Juergensmeyer comes full circle, integrating new ethnographic data from different geographic and cultural settings into the conceptual framework erected in his earlier writings.

Based on both his study of recent developments and his many interviews with religious political activists ranging from the late Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to an unnamed bhikkhu (fully ordained Buddhist monk) in Sri Lanka, Juergensmeyer sees a “global rebellion” underway against the notion that the modern nation-state — with its secular political ideology, religiously neutral national identity, and origins in a specific historical context of the post-Enlightenment Christian West — has any claim to being the exclusively legitimate organizing principle for social and political order. While Juergensmeyer holds up the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran as paradigmatic insofar as religiously motivated actors showed it was possible to establish a state regime where religion plays a leading role in a country's governance, he also sees kindred spirits to the revolutionary Iranian mullahs in the Middle East's Sunni extremists and Zionist militants, as well as among the charismatic new religious movements of Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South Asian Islamist insurgents, Hindu nationalists, Sikh separatists, and Buddhist rebels, and right-wing Christian organizations found in Europe and North America. Despite the fact that each of these groups encounters a different set of local issues, they share in common a loss of faith in the capacity of the secular state to provide the moral, political, economic, and social resources their communities required when faced with globalization's impact on both their collective lives and personal selves.

Even if they all believed that secular nationalism had let them down, how was it that these widely disparate individuals turned to religion to justify their protests? Juergensmeyer explains that although the sense of social malaise is not necessarily a religious problem, religion does provide a ready response in the form of “an ideology of empowerment and protest” with religious images and themes “marshaled to resist what [is] imagined to be the enemies of traditional culture and identity” (254), thus raising the confrontation to a whole new level:

For one thing religion personalizes the conflict. It provides personal rewards — religious merit, redemption, the promise of heavenly luxuries — to those who struggle in conflicts that otherwise have only social benefits. It also provides vehicles of social mobilization that embrace vast numbers of supporters who otherwise would not be mobilized around social or political issues. In many cases, it provides an organizational network of local churches, mosques, temples, and religious associations from which patterns of leadership and support may be tapped. It gives the legitimacy of moral righteousness in political encounter. Even more important, it provides justification for violence that challenges the state's monopoly on morally sanctioned killing. Using Max Weber's dictum that the state's authority is always rooted in its capacity to enforce its power through the use of socially approved bloodshed … religion is the only other entity that can give moral sanction for violence; it is therefore at least potentially revolutionary (254–255).

Juergensmeyer concludes his book by shifting from the descriptive to the prescriptive, offering a series of recommendations on how to respond to the current state of affairs. First, since states facing extremist violence may themselves be lacking in the legitimacy necessary to muster resistance to it, he argues that more moderate forms of religion can help by providing support. Second, religiously inspired actors can and should be brought into the political process since “in general, when religious movements turn to electoral politics, they abandon violent tactics, and if they are banned the level of violence rises again” (258). Third, and perhaps most controversially, modern secular polities need to welcome religion's influence in the public square: “If religion were a more vital force in Western societies in ways that were seen as facilitating public life and promoting the common welfare, perhaps it would be easier to accept religion's public presence in other parts of the world” (261).

Notwithstanding the generically conventional conclusions as well as several simplistic interpretations of cases drawn from regions outside the Middle East and South Asia where the author did most of his field work (for example, the analysis of the Somali Islamic Courts is especially problematic as not a single source is referenced in the entire section), on the whole Global Rebellion is a welcome contribution to the literature, furnishing both academics and policymakers with a balanced account of the enduring power of religion as a political ideology and, hence, an indispensable element for understanding the geopolitical dynamics at work in the new century.