Reviewed for the Globe and Mail, Toronto, ON. September 12th, 2003.

TERROR IN THE NAME OF GOD: Why Religious Militants Kill, by Jessica Stern. Ecco Books/ Harper Collins: New York, NY. 2003. 368 pages. Hardcover. $39.95 Cdn.ISBN 0-06-050532-X.

Reviewed by: Wayne A. Holst

Those who support the current US administration's views about a global American empire; the demonization of terrorists and major efforts to hunt down and eradicate them will not suffer Jessica Stern gladly.

Those who are inclined to discount all religion because of its inherent dangers and destructive excesses won't likely benefit much from reading her either.

Terrorism and religion can be a deadly mix. We have come to assume that the response to violence is more violence and that not all who declare faith in God are god human beings.

Stern, on a quest part spiritual and part academically focused on terrorism, decided to listen to and come to know some religious terrorists first hand. She wanted to learn why evil for them has become banal and why they see nothing wrong with killing in the name of God and political expediency.

She determined that to empathise with evildoers is not the same as to sympathise with those whose skewed moral distinctions allow ends to justify means.

The author is a prominent U.S. lecturer who teaches courses on themes related to her book Terror in the Name of God at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She researches, interviews, and writes about terrorists to better understand what makes them tick. She has discovered common terrorist thought and behaviour patterns, the world over.

Stern would like to rid humanity of all terror in the name of God but she concludes that will not happen as a result of military force. She has long sought an innovative antidote to religious terrorism; that deadly concoction, that oxymoron of sorts. To find some answers, she combines spiritual breadth, psychological depth and forensic scholarly vigor.

Her primary recommendation seems, at first hearing, to be almost naive. She proposes that we must view evil differently.

"Any creative encounter with evil," she learns from author Kathleen Norris (Cloister Walk) "requires that we not distance ourselves from it by simply demonizing those who commit evil acts. In order to write about evil, a writer has to try to comprehend it, from the inside out..."

Elaine Pagels (Adam, Eve and the Serpent) has explored the development of Satan, that classic religious characterization of evil, with his roots in the Hebrew Bible. From Pagels Stern learned that the evolving image of Satan served "to confirm for Christians their own identification with God and to demonize their opponents - first other Jews, then pagans, and later dissident Christians called heretics..."

Satan, our shadow side, exists within each of us too and can readily be projected on to our adversaries. Satan provides a moral and religious way of explaining why"we"are God's people and"they"are God's enemies. This approach has long proven highly effective in Western history. It helped to consolidate Christian groups against real or perceived enemies and justified hatred; even mass slaughter. This approach has caught on so that now true believer religious terrorists exist in all faith traditions.

Stern considers that kind of true believer thinking to be outmoded. It is far too dangerous in today's world. But to deflate its destructive power and reduce its influence we need to better understand why a terrorist would kill and how that kind of thinking could be transformed.

The book has two parts. The first deals with grievances that precipitate holy war. These include such things as alienation, humiliation and a selective reading of history. The second describes holy war organizations that provide inspirational leadership, attract outstanding commanders and lone-wolf avengers. The ultimate organization is, of course, Al Qaeda, and its elusive leadership, as well as its networks, franchises, and freelancers.

Stern extensively recounts casual interviews with religious terrorists in her book. For example, she visited domestic save-the-babies killer Rev. Paul Hill on death row in Florida (who was just recently executed by lethal injection). She traveled to interview Fazlur Rahman Khalil, leader of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideem in Pakistan. This group is a member of the International Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders. Khalil considers Osama bin Laden a personal friend. The visit with this terrorist became more human when, on the spur of the moment, he invited Stern to dinner at his home where she met and conversed extensively with Khalil's charming wife who spoke fluent English.

Some will praise Stern for providing keen insight into the nature of violent religion, but criticize her for offering little by way of innovative policies and programs.

She does conclude her book rather benignly: "We need to respond," she says, " - not just with guns - but by seeking to create confusion, conflict, and competition among terrorists and between terrorists and their sponsors and sympathizers. We should encourage the condemnation of extremist interpretations of religion by peace-loving practitioners."

This is hardly a strategy of realpolitik as we have known it. But then, that confirms a key purpose of her book. The current politics of reality are beginning to wear thin. The time seems right to consider other approaches such as Stern's that advocate disarming penetration of the defenses of fear and loathing wherever they exist.

"Religious terrorism is more than a threat to national security," she says. "It is psychological and spiritual warfare, requiring a psychologically and spiritually informed response. We cannot hope to develop such a response without analyzing the terrorists' methods, including skillful marketing of grievances as spiritual complaints and targeted charitable giving to generate support... "

We need to understand that religious terrorists aim not only to frighten their victims in a physical sense, but also to spread among them a kind of spiritual dread. Terrorists end up shifting their own existential dread of cultural and spiritual defeat onto their victims.

In other words, Stern advises that we take another look at what constitutes evil and come to know the heart of darkness itself so that we can begin to see it transformed into its opposite.

As the second anniversary of 9/11 passes Stern offers a thought-provoking investigation into the causes of this tragedy and others like it. She demonstrates why it can easily happen again and what might be done to prevent it from recurring. Her summary proposals, though presented in a more philosophical than strategic fashion, are nonetheless revolutionary at their core and far-reaching in terms of their possibilities.

She fears the long-term risks of military action, American use of the death penalty, the unequal distribution of wealth between the industrialized West and the developing world, excessive consumerism and social atomization. She hopes that others will enhance her basic theories and expand upon her ground-breaking research.

Stern initiates a process for ultimately defeating religious terrorism that does not rehearse past clichés about how the world must be changed to make way for American-styled democracy. Instead, she begins sketching a new road map by describing how America and the West must first begin to revamp its own thinking.

Reviewer's Bio: Wayne A. Holst is a parish educator at St. Davids United Church, Calgary. He has taught religion and culture at the University of Calgary.