Does religion lead to war or peace? The proponents of religion usually think of it as an agent of peace. But before we speculate on how religion can contribute to peace, we have to acknowledge the role that religion provides in war. Most acts of religious terrorism in recent years are undertaken as part of a cosmic war-a great spiritual war between good and evil. This is true not only of the Muslim activists who believe in jihad, but also of Christian militants in the United States, Jewish activists in Israel, and members of Aum Shinrikyo who unleashed nerve gas in Tokyo's subways. Those who believe in cosmic war think that is being waged not only in a spiritual sense, but on a worldly plane. Often the evil forces are imagined to be Westernization, or globalization, or specifically George Bush and the US government. At the same time the opposition to these acts of cosmic war, including the US "war on terrorism" and its invasion and occupation of Iraq, have been undertaken with a religious zeal as well. Why does religion and warfare often go together? War has always been a part of the religious imagination, and images of religious warfare are part of every religious tradition's history and mythology. The idea of war, I believe, is part of the way that religion deals with great issues of good and evil, chaos and order. Ultimately, then, images of war lead to images of ultimate order and harmony. The challenge for our times is to find ways in which cosmic war can return to the spiritual plane, and religion in worldly confrontations can become an agent of order, toleration, and peace.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER is Director of Global and International Studies and Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and fifteen books.

His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), is based on interviews with violent religious activists around the world. A previous book, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press 1993) covers the rise of religious activism and its confrontation with secular modernity. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has been reprinted as Gandhi's Way (University of California Press, rev. edn. 2005). Among his edited books is Global Religions (Oxford University Press, 2003), and Religion and Global Civil Society (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book on religion and war, and is co-editing the Encyclopedia of Global Religion and an anthology of writings on religion and violence.