Exploring the now-tired question of whether religion causes violence, Hans Kippenberg's Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization offers an insightful and fresh perspective using a historically detailed sociology. Through the case study of eight various conflicts, including Jonestown and the Adventist community in Waco, Texas, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the “redemptive wars” in Israel and of course, the Al-Qaeda network, he demonstrates that religions tend not to have a “theory of violence” but rather are responsive to specific political contexts which then become violent.

Kippenberg details how understanding “religious violence” requires attention not only to political context but to how theological contexts are woven into political reality by religious communities. This is not a small distinction. Kippenberg's project encourages sociologists (and political scientists and others) to pay more attention to the theologies, religious beliefs, and practices that animate contemporary conflicts. For example, he traces the genealogy of the term “cult,” a word that since the 1970's has been used primarily to dismiss non-Christian religions with which majorities disagree. The creation of the category “cult,” he argues, has resulted in a non-engagement with groups so named, which has then jeopardized the stability of political relations with them.

Perhaps the most compelling example that Kippenberg details in this regard is the David Koresh case and the Waco massacre. Kippenberg recounts how Koresh was working to understand the crisis with the government through the biblical Revelation of John. Koresh had informed his lawyers that he would leave the site with his followers as soon as he had written down his interpretation of the seven seals of the Revelation of John. He asked his lawyer to forward his letter to scholars James Tabor and Philip Arnold, well-known scholars in biblical exegesis. Tabor and Arnold had already offered to help the FBI and wanted to gain insight into Koresh's interpretation and his willingness to surrender. The FBI refused the offer, which it viewed as a delaying tactic. Janet Reno was unaware of the request when she made the fateful decision for forcible eviction. Kippenberg argues that “the authorities regarded Koresh's long-winded explanation and hour-long sermons as “bible babble. They held that a religion that comes into conflict with the law cannot possibly be genuine. In this way, the law enforcement officers failed to realize that they themselves were playing a role in Koresh's apocalyptic drama …” (52).

Throughout the remaining case studies, Kippenberg tries to demonstrate how infrequently violence is a religious principle. Rather, he strives to show (as Mark Juergensmeyer has) that when violence is used against fundamentalist groups or they believe that their existence is threatened, their attitude to violence changes, and they then are willing to employ violence to protect religious identity and/or community. In other words, “believers had recourse to violence only when the threat to the religious ordering of their community also entailed a threat to its social ordering … the biblical paradigm of violence was applied when the obligatory nature of the community's values had to be defended against foes.” (11). Nonetheless, Kippenberg does not deny that there is a link between monotheism and violence; rather he names the link “contingent: it is neither necessary nor impossible. It depends on the current situation of a faith community” (13). Further, he insists there is no direct correlation between people's attitudes and their de facto conduct, “religious convictions do not directly and immediately determine corresponding behavior. If, however, there is no necessary linkage between religious belief and violent action, a different model for this kind of connection must be developed; and this is the intention of the present book” (16).

Linking the eight case studies together is Kippenberg's interpretative analysis of the use of time, specifically what he calls the “prism of salvation history.” Rather than reading “sacred time” as a rebellion against historical time (a la Mircea Eliade) Kippenberg argues against time as a universal entity but instead for recognition that the proper time of moving systems is different in relation to one another (a la Stephen Hawking). What this rather abstract meditation allows Kippenberg to detail is how often religious conflict is part of an interpretative frame whereby a religious group reads the present as something that belongs to the distant past. For example, in Iran and Lebanon, the battles of Karbala (680 CE) are fought afresh in contemporary civil conflict; Israel interprets its military victory over the neighboring Arab states and the settling of the region that once belonged to the Holy Land as the beginning of the redemption of Israel and the world; under the state of siege, at the very moment when they have lost most of the land assigned to them by the United Nation in 1947, the Palestinians claim the whole of Palestine as the foundational land entrusted to them by the Prophet and finally, the jihadists carry out an attack on the US centers of power, like the attacks carried out by Muhammad and his adherents in the period when Islam became established as the order of the state in Medina.

While Kippenberg's concluding recommendations for how the cycle of religious violence might be interrupted are rather thin, his well-written and historically-robust case studies make this book a valuable addition to the growing literature on religion and violence.