Virginia Garrard-Burnett's admirable monograph focused on a particularly horrific period of Central American history through the lens of an especially heinous figure in that history, General Efraín Ríos Montt, asking this question: “In the end, was this a holy war?” Garrard-Burnett seeks to answer that question by deepening our understanding of Guatemala's plunge into genocidal darkness in the 1980s.

Garrard-Burnett beings her book by self-reflexively focusing on her reluctance to tell this harrowing story as an outsider, preferring that Guatemalans speak for themselves in this regard. Studying Guatemala since 1980, and being present in country when some of the terror campaigns were in full swing, Garrard-Burnett's desire is not to speak for Guatemalans, but to examine the significance of Ríos Montt's religious rhetoric in inciting both soldier and civilian to unspeakable violence against their neighbors. Adding to the growing body of literature on religion and political violence, Garrard-Burnett largely succeeds in telling the story and setting the context to why this genocide occurred.

Using a mix of sources such as unpublished documents from guerilla groups, church documents, State Department and U.S. intelligence sources, along with transcripts from Ríos Montt's weekly television addresses, Garrard-Burnett makes a convincing case that the rhetorical strategies deployed by Ríos Montt prepared many Guatemalans to ready themselves for the apocalyptic battle against those who were held responsible for Guatemala's perceived moral and spiritual descent into such a state that it required drastic measures to rid the society of its enemies.

The first two chapters explain the rise of the insurgency and counterinsurgency war campaigns. They chronicle the violence under Ríos Montt's regime and the beginnings of Ríos Montt's attempts to reclaim the moral, political, and spiritual authority to re-build a “New Guatemala,” which had been weakened throughout the regime of General Romeo Lucas García (1978–1982), had lost ground to the guerrilla insurgency and failed, as some military leaders saw it, to provide a cohesive campaign against the insurgency and descended into the mire of corruption.

Chapters 3 and 4 are Garrard-Burnett's anchor that fleshes out her analysis of Ríos Montt's Sunday “sermons.” Filtered through a lens of rigid Pentecostal and evangelical piety, Ríos Montt diagnosed the problems of Guatemala in terms of moral failure: failure of responsibility, failure to respect authority, and a failure to live up to their national character as unified people under God. Garrard-Burnett argues: “by his astute appropriation and inversion of symbols, language, and meaning, Ríos Montt managed to engineer not only consent but even enthusiasm for the state's ideological reconquest of its people” (84). Chapter 4 continues the analysis of influence of Pentecostalism on the genocidal campaign against the insurgents. Debunking the conventional wisdom that Ríos Montt waged a specific religious war on the Catholic Church, Garrard-Burnett finds little evidence for that claim, pointing out that the majority of priests killed in Guatemala died during Lucas García's regime, and that more likely, Catholics killed under Ríos Montt were killed not as targeted groups, but as part of the larger onslaught against any insurgent group—since by 1982–83, the strategy for battling the insurgency had changed from specific killings to wholesale massacres.

The final two chapters focus on the willful ignorance of a host of actors, who, for their own vested interests, chose to turn blindly to one of the most horrific human rights atrocities in recent memory. Blind to this genocide were U.S. politicians, Religious Right leaders, and Guatemalans themselves. Garrard-Burnett concludes that this sad period in Guatemala's often violent and difficult history was “only as successful as the Guatemalan public and the rest of the world allowed it to be” (176).

While Garrard-Burnett is a skilled and talented historian, pulling together sources to tell a very complicated and difficult story, my only wish is that as she analyzed Ríos Montt's televised speeches, she placed them more broadly in the analysis of religious rhetoric, especially the triumphalist scripts deployed by Pentecostals to signal their roles as “saviors” of civilization. As Ríos Montt placed himself in that prophetic role, so have countless other Pentecostals, whose premillenial eschatology coupled with biblical literalism have often served as bookends that enclose an already small hermeneutical circle. Though it may be an obvious conclusion Garrard-Burnett wants the reader to draw, Ríos Montt's denomination, Verbo, began in the U.S., and though it had largely become Guatemalan in character, its roots were very much in the colonial enterprise American Pentecostalism launched at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using religious rhetoric to demonize the Other, suggesting that one's political aspirations hold providential significance, and finally marrying that rhetoric to ruthless political goals is Ríos Montt's criminal legacy. Placing Pentecostalism's conflicted and often complicit missions history in context not only in Guatemala, but also in Central America, would have added one more layer of depth to an otherwise exceptionally good work.