Barry Cooper argues that a characteristic of modern terrorism is the rise of “new political religions” that claim to be engaged in spiritual conflicts that transcend the political realm and that involve waging spiritual warfare in order to realize an idealized spiritual kingdom on this earth. Thus, in order to understand contemporary terrorism, Cooper states, one must look at the “spirituality that terrorists experience as central to their own activities” (p. 7), while recognizing that religious terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and Japan's Aum Shinrikyô, do not operate within the frameworks of cost-benefit analysis that political terror groups have generally espoused (p. 55). He further contends that religious terrorists groups are on a continuous treadmill of violence that is self-generating and will never cease (p. 12), leading him to advocate extreme measures (negotiation not being one of them) to counteract it. Here he seems not to consider that similar arguments were once advanced to suggest that political terrorists were equally bound up in a cycle of violence from which they could not escape, yet there are many examples (the African National Congress and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example) that have disproved such perceptions.

In considering that religious terrorists are “spiritually disordered” (p. 25) and hence incapable of rational discussion, Cooper's analysis draws heavily on the work of Eric Voegelin and his concept of pneumopathology, defined as a state in which someone “arbitrarily denies the reality of one or another of the world in order to fantasize about an imaginary world” (p. 42). For Cooper, religious terrorists from Aum to Al-Qaeda manifest this characteristic when they advocate the immanent realization of the kingdom of God in this world: since such visions are irrational, unrealizable, and counter to the “commonsense” world that is clearly focused around pragmatic, political principles, their proponents are drawn to violence as both an expression of their spiritual disorder and as a way out of the impasse that their irrational thinking has produced.

The problem with this view is that Cooper displays little understanding of the nature of religion and of religious worldviews, which are invariably framed around idealized visions of the world now and to come as they “ought to be.” People who espouse religious worldviews—from contemporary Christians in the United States who think that the second coming might be near, to the devotees of Aum, who believed that they were on a mission to transform the world—often do think that such achievements are possible. While Cooper assumes that “rationally” they cannot believe such things, he offers no concrete evidence on this score. How, for instance, does he know that members of Aum knew that their visions of world transformation were “impossible”? Has he talked to them—or is he just assuming that because he thinks their visions were irrational, they too must realize it? As someone who studied Aum, I can only say that the members I interviewed in depth consistently and genuinely expressed the belief that the world was facing apocalypse and that they had a mission to transform it and build a new spiritual realm—just as have numerous other millennialists from other traditions over the centuries.

Cooper's problems of interpretive understanding are also displayed in such statements as “Normal people, living in a shared, commonsensical world, do not believe in magic” (p. 25). This remark takes no notice of the academic literature on “magic” showing that magic has its own “logic” and is often widely accepted in cultural contexts by people who are clearly “normal” within their cultures and share in commonsensical views of the world within them. Studies in Japan and other places have shown, indeed, that beliefs in magic may increase as societies become more focused on the “rationalization” of mass education, production, economic development, and political pragmatism, and that people may increasingly develop a fascination with the magical as a personalized counterbalance to the rationalizations that they experience in their public, work, and business lives. In such contexts, this fascination with magic can therefore be seen as both normal and a product of a particular form of common sense.

The author's notion of a shared commonsensical world, which runs through the book as an alternative (highly westernized) worldview that confronts religious terror, is itself highly problematic, in that he assumes there is one such entity, when, of course, depending on cultural perceptions, there may be many competing “commonsensical” views on hand at any time. To give one example: Recently a British newspaper printed on its front page the headline “How can 59,921,463 people be so dumb?” This comment on the U.S. election reflected what many in Europe would have regarded as a commonsensical view about the U.S. election, while, of course, the United States delivered its own commonsensical, and very different, view at the ballot. Cooper appears never to consider (to twist the phrase about one person's belief being another's superstition) that what is commonsensical to one group may be highly irrational to another.

Such conceptual problems are compounded by Cooper's selective readings of the religions he addresses, as well as by basic errors in his research. The latter are exemplified by numerous mistakes on Aum, whose 1994 sarin attack in Matsumoto he erroneously calls a “dress rehearsal for the Tokyo attack” (p. 60). It was not; the two had different motivations, modes of delivery, physical environments, timescales of preparation, and target groups. Other errors here include the statement that there are “200,000 registered cults” in Japan (p. 63), which fundamentally misapprehends the religious situation, in which there are some 200,000 legally registered religious institutions in Japan, the vast majority of them individual Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines from the mainstream traditions. By contrast there are perhaps a few hundred new religions and “cults.”

The author's errors are even worse when it comes to Islam, where he draws on a few selective perceptions of a complex tradition to compare the Islamic historical paradigm unfavorably with Christian and Jewish experience. He argues that Christianity from the outset recognized two spheres of existence (the political and the religious, that is, Caesar's and God's) (p. 79), and thus forged a practical understanding of the political realities of the world and developed the capacity to envision its ideals as things not realizable in the world. In other words, he posits that Christianity was grounded in a rationality that enabled it to deal with setbacks and to get on with living in the world. He portrays Judaism in similar terms. By contrast, Islam's initial successes, which fused the religious and the political orders, meant that it failed to develop a sense of pragmatic reality in separating out the things of Caesar from those of God. The result has been a failure to adjust to political realities—a failure that, in Cooper's terms, means that a dominant Islamic paradigm, whenever crises occur, is to return to an original impulse to “succeed” through religiously based activism founded in an irrational ideological fusion of the political and the religious. In portraying Islam thus, Cooper effectively dispenses with the need to analyze actual political problems and historical realities: Whether it is Chechnya, Bosnia, or the Palestinians, it seems, the problem is one of Islamic failures to keep religious visions out of the world of political realities. Such an approach, of course, provides a rationalization for powers outside the Muslim world to avoid dealing with actual political problems that Muslims might face: The problem remains located within the Muslim world and its inability to deal with the commonsense world.

This highly partial portrayal ignores the continuing attempts within Islam to deal with visions of the past while seeking ways to deal with the realities of the present, and makes no attempt to examine Muslim opinion, save at its extremist edges. Any scholar aware of the complexities of religious traditions will be readily aware of how impractical it is to typify or stereotype them in such monolithic terms, just as they will realize how skewed is Cooper's portrayal of Christianity and Judaism. Any instances where his thesis on these traditions might be disproved are conveniently ignored, so that, for example, there is no mention of the repeated cases throughout history—such as medieval Christian millennialism—where these traditions have actively sought religious-political fusions and the realizations of idealized spiritual kingdoms in this world.

This inherent bias in New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism is painfully evident, too, in his concluding chapter. Here, Cooper contrasts the slaughter brought about by religious terrorists with the ethical and rational actions of Western powers and makes the staggering claim that “avoiding the ethical irrationality of slaughtering non-combatants on such a large scale is central to the way Westerners conduct war” (p. 175). Such acts as the blanket bombing by the United States in Cambodia and Vietnam, and the Allied bombing of Dresden and Tokyo (the latter causing more than 100,000 civilian deaths), are testimony to the ludicrous and jaundiced nature of such arguments. Likewise, when one looks at recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq, one seriously wonders about the author's description of the war against Al Qaeda as “systematic, high tech, rational, calm, and lethal” (p. 180).

In this final chapter, Cooper propounds a strategy for counteracting terror groups. This does not say much new in practical terms (monitor their e-mails, disrupt their cash flows, cut off their supplies, and kill those we can identify), while advocating breaches of civil rights “with the tools of police, judge, jury and executioner all combined in a single action” (p. 181). In other words, the “morally compelling narratives against terrorism” (p. 183) that he speaks of are to be reinforced with strategies that throw moral values out the window while promoting the abandonment of liberal values as a means of defending them. One commonsensical British experience relating to terrorism, in connection with the IRA in the 1970s, suggests that when such values are set aside, not only do breaches of justice occur but also is more hostility generated, leading to more recruits for terror groups. On that count, the “commonsensical” approach advocated by Cooper may not be so founded in common sense after all.

This approach assumes without question—just as did Aum's—that the world is divided into good and evil, but Cooper seems oblivious to the fact that in criticizing religious extremists for their irrational positing of a conflict of good and evil between spiritual and secular values, he does the same thing, with the roles reversed. Such myopic perspectives are hardly helpful in advancing our understanding of religious terrorism. One looks in vain for any serious insights into the actual thinking of those who use the language of religious justification for their heinous deeds, or into any understanding of why they do so. Sophisticated analysis of religious terrorism requires more than the simple assumption that “they” are irrational and spiritually disordered, while “we” are good, rational, and guided by common sense and can hence crush them by whatever means we choose. One can get such views from the average tabloid newspaper. Academic analysis demands more than this sort of simplistic thinking, which provides no means of understanding modern religious terrorism, and hence offers no potential for thinking about solutions to this grave modern dilemma.