There is a sentence that has been spoken, in various forms, by the spokesmen of more than one of the movements we have examined, and it is among the most chilling utterances of our age: we love death as you love life. It is meant to terrify, and it does, but it is also meant as a boast and a creed, the distilled essence of a particular spirit that has come to animate the most violent currents of political Islam. That spirit is the subject of this article, and we may call it, without exaggeration, the cult of death—the exaltation of dying, and of killing while dying, into the highest act of devotion a human being can perform. It is a doctrine that inverts the most basic instinct of the creature, and to understand the enemies of Israel one must understand how that inversion was accomplished and what it has cost.

We take up the subject with the care it demands, for it touches on the deepest questions of life and death, and because the doctrine of martyrdom in its true and original sense is honored across many faiths, our own included. We are not here mocking the willingness to die for one’s convictions, which can be noble; we are examining a specific and modern perversion of that willingness—the turning of self-destruction, joined to the mass murder of the innocent, into an act of worship. And we keep, as always, the distinction between the doctrine and the persons, for the great majority of Muslims recoil from this cult as we do, and many of the bravest voices against it have been Muslim voices. It is the ideology we indict, not a people.

The Inversion of Life and Death

Every healthy culture, every sane religion, every ordinary human heart holds life to be a good and death to be, at best, a solemn necessity to be met with courage, never a thing to be courted and adored. The cult of death inverts this at the root. It teaches that death in the cause—specifically, death inflicted upon the enemy while destroying oneself—is not a tragedy or even merely a duty but a triumph, the supreme attainment, the shortcut to paradise and glory. The man who blows himself apart in a crowd is not mourned as a loss but celebrated as a victor; his photograph is hung in the streets, his family is honored and rewarded, his name is added to the roll of heroes. Death is not the price of the cause; death is the prize.

One must grasp how radical this inversion is, for it is the source of the peculiar horror and the peculiar power of the movements that embrace it. An enemy who fears death can be deterred, bargained with, made to count the cost; the whole architecture of deterrence rests on the assumption that men prefer to live. An enemy who genuinely loves death, who regards his own destruction as gain and the destruction of the innocent alongside him as glory, has stepped outside that architecture entirely. He cannot be threatened with the one thing he is told to desire. The cult of death is, in this sense, a weapon—perhaps the ultimate weapon of the weak against the strong—for it turns the most fundamental human limit, the fear of death, into a resource to be spent freely in the service of slaughter.

The Theology of the Martyr

The cult draws its power from a genuine strand of the tradition, however much it distorts it, and honesty requires that we trace the theology it exploits. The Arabic word for martyr, shahid, means witness, and the concept of the one who dies in the path of God bearing witness to the faith is ancient and honored. The texts promise the martyr extraordinary rewards: the immediate entry into paradise without the wait of judgment, the forgiveness of sins, a place of honor near to God, and the sensual delights of the garden depicted in vivid terms. For the believer persuaded that these promises are literal and that he stands on the threshold of claiming them, the incentive is overwhelming—eternal bliss purchased at the cost of a single moment of earthly violence. The recruiters of the death-cult press exactly this calculation upon the young and the desperate, and it is a calculation that, granted its premises, is hard to argue against.

But the leap from the honored martyr of the tradition to the suicide-bomber of the modern movements is a long one, and it was not made innocently. The classical concept of martyrdom envisioned the warrior who fell in battle at the hand of the enemy, not the man who took his own life by his own hand; and the deliberate killing of oneself, suicide, is condemned in the tradition in the severest terms, marked as a grave sin meriting punishment, not paradise. The architects of the modern cult had to bridge this gap by a deliberate reinterpretation—recasting the suicide-bombing not as the forbidden act of self-killing but as a permitted, indeed glorious, act of self-sacrifice in battle, a martyrdom operation rather than a suicide. This reinterpretation is the hinge on which the whole cult turns, and it is, by the lights of much of the tradition itself, an innovation and a distortion.

From the Battlefield to the Bus

The decisive perversion was not only the embrace of self-killing but the choice of target, for the cult of death did not confine itself to the battlefield; it carried its operations into the marketplace, the bus, the restaurant, the school, the festival. The genius—if so dark a word may be used—of the suicide attack as a weapon was precisely that it could strike the soft and undefended heart of a society, the places where ordinary people gather in the ordinary course of life, and turn them into killing grounds. This was not war against an army; it was war against civilians as such, the deliberate slaughter of the innocent chosen for their very innocence, because the terror that serves the cult’s purpose is maximized when no one anywhere feels safe.

Israel knew this horror in a sustained and terrible form during the years when the buses and cafes of her cities were torn apart, week after week, by young men and women sent to die while murdering whoever happened to be near—children, the elderly, families at a meal, teenagers at a club. The aim was not military advantage in any conventional sense; it was the breaking of a society’s will through the manufacture of perpetual dread, and the murderers were sent forth not as soldiers but as human bombs, their deaths celebrated by those who dispatched them. To call this martyrdom is to do violence to the word, for the martyr of old bore witness by dying; these bore witness by killing, and by dying only incidentally, as the means of killing more. The cult had turned the witness into the murderer.

The Manufacture of the Martyr

The suicide-bomber is not born; he is manufactured, and the machinery of his manufacture deserves to be understood, for it reveals the cynicism beneath the religious language. Around the cult of death has grown an entire apparatus of recruitment and glorification: the preachers who exalt the martyr, the videos that immortalize him, the posters that paper the walls with his image, the songs that celebrate his deed, the payments that reward his family. The bereaved are not left to grieve in private; they are honored publicly and, in many cases, paid a stipend, so that the death that should have been a family’s catastrophe becomes its source of standing and income. A society can be configured to produce martyrs as a factory produces goods, and the movements of the death-cult have so configured the societies they control.

This manufacture exposes the lie at the heart of the cult, for those who run the machinery are seldom those who feed it. The recruiters and the leaders who preach the glory of death rarely send their own sons to claim it; they spend the lives of the poor, the young, the grieving, the impressionable, while preserving themselves to direct the next operation. The cult of death is, in practice, a cult in which the powerful consume the powerless, dressing the consumption in the language of paradise. The boy persuaded to blow himself apart gains, if his recruiters are right, the garden; but they gain a weapon, a headline, and a living, and they gain it at the cost of his single irreplaceable life. There is a cruelty in this beneath even the cruelty of the murder itself—the cold exploitation of devotion by men who do not share the risk they preach.

The Children and the Cult

The most grievous dimension of the cult, and the one that should most stir the Christian to grief, is its reach into the lives of children, for a death-cult that would perpetuate itself must capture the young, and these movements have done so with deliberate care. In the schools and summer camps and television programs of the societies they control, children are taught to revere the martyr and to aspire to his crown; they are dressed in the costumes of fighters, taught to handle weapons, drilled in the songs of death, and told that to die killing the enemy is the finest thing a life can achieve. A child so formed has been robbed, before he could choose, of the most basic gift—the love of his own life—and conscripted into a creed that means to spend him.

This is the abuse beneath all the other abuses, the corruption of the innocent at the root, and it ought to be named for what it is. To take a child and teach him to long for death, to fill his imagination with the glory of his own destruction, to prepare him from his earliest years as the fuel of a war he cannot understand, is among the darkest things that can be done to a human soul. The first victims of the cult of death are not those its bombers kill; they are the children the cult captures and deforms, the ones taught to hate their own lives before they have begun to live them. The believer who grasps this prays for those children with a particular anguish, for they are doubly lost—lost to the cult that claims them and, unless mercy intervenes, lost to the death it teaches them to seek.

The Dispute Within Islam

Fairness requires, and truth confirms, that the cult of death is not the settled teaching of Islam but a contested and, by many lights, heretical innovation within it, and this must be said plainly lest we slander the whole for the crime of a part. The mainstream of the tradition has always condemned suicide as a grave sin; many of the most respected religious authorities in the Muslim world have issued rulings against suicide-bombing and the killing of civilians; and vast numbers of ordinary Muslims regard the cult with the same horror that any decent person feels. The reinterpretation that recast self-killing as martyrdom was the work of particular ideologues serving particular movements, and it has been resisted, at real personal risk, by Muslim scholars who insist that it betrays rather than fulfills their faith. The honest examiner honors that resistance and refuses to let the murderers speak for the whole.

And yet honesty also forbids the opposite error, the comfortable insistence that the cult has nothing to do with religion at all, that it is purely a matter of politics or poverty wearing a religious mask. The recruiters quote scripture; the bombers die invoking God; the rewards promised are the rewards of paradise; the whole apparatus is saturated with theological language and motivated, in its adherents, by theological conviction. To deny the religious dimension is to misunderstand the cult as thoroughly as to blame all Islam for it. The truth lies in the hard middle: that the cult of death is a distortion of the tradition, fiercely contested within it, and also a distortion that draws its power from real strands of the tradition and could not exist without them. Both the distortion and the strands it exploits are real, and an honest reckoning names them both.

The Heaviest Toll

It is a fact too little acknowledged in the West that the cult of death has shed far more Muslim blood than any other, and the honest examiner must say so, both for truth’s sake and to dispel the lie that this is simply a war of Islam against the rest. The bombers of the death-cult have slaughtered worshippers in mosques, mourners at funerals, children in markets, and pilgrims at shrines, the overwhelming majority of their victims being fellow Muslims judged insufficiently pure, or of the wrong sect, or merely in the way. The societies most terrorized by the cult are the Muslim societies in which it operates, where ordinary people live under the shadow of the bomb and bury their dead by the hundreds. The cult of death is not, in its daily operation, chiefly a weapon against Israel or the West; it is a weapon that falls hardest upon the Muslim world itself.

This truth ought to reframe the Western believer’s whole understanding of the matter. The ordinary Muslim is not the ally of the cult but, far more often, its principal victim and its bravest opponent—the parent who fears for a child drawn toward the recruiters, the scholar who condemns the bombers at risk of his life, the village that resists the militia and pays for it in blood. To speak of the cult of death as though it were the natural expression of a billion people is not only false; it is an insult to the multitudes who suffer under it and oppose it. The believer who stands against the cult stands, in doing so, with those Muslims who stand against it too, and his quarrel is with the doctrine that devours them, not with the people it devours.

The Long Shadow

The damage the cult inflicts is not measured only in the dead, grievous as that count is, but in the slow deformation of every society it touches, for a people taught to venerate death cannot flourish in life. Where the martyr is the highest hero, the builder and the healer and the teacher are diminished; where dying-while-killing is the summit of aspiration, the patient work of living—of raising children, tending fields, pursuing knowledge, making peace—is robbed of its honor. A culture that hangs the bomber’s portrait in the square and names its streets for the dead has set its face against the future, for it has taught its young to long for the grave rather than to labor for life. The cult does not merely kill; it sterilizes, draining a people of the energies that build a civilization and pouring them into the manufacture of corpses.

This is why the cult of death is, in the long run, a catastrophe for the very cause it claims to serve, and why its defeat is in the truest interest of the peoples it has captured. No nation was ever built on the worship of death; no people ever prospered by spending its children as bombs; no future was ever secured by teaching the young to despise their own lives. The societies that have embraced the cult have reaped not victory but ruin, generation after generation, while the future they might have built has been buried with their martyrs. The believer who longs for the flourishing of the peoples of the region—and he does long for it, for they are made in the image of God—must long for the breaking of the cult’s grip upon them, for as long as it holds them they cannot live, and a people that cannot live cannot be at peace with the living nation on its border.

Why It Defeats Deterrence

The strategic consequence of the cult is the unraveling of the logic on which the peace of nations has long depended, and the Christian must understand it to see why this enemy is so peculiarly dangerous. The whole structure of deterrence, by which the strong restrain the strong and even the wicked are held in check, rests upon the assumption that men fear death and will not provoke their own destruction. A regime, however hostile, that wishes to survive can be deterred by the certainty of unacceptable loss; this is why even the bitterest national rivalries have so often stopped short of mutual annihilation. But the cult of death removes the foundation stone of this entire structure, for it produces actors who do not fear their own destruction but desire it, and who therefore cannot be deterred by the threat of it.

This is why the prospect of the cult of death joined to the weapons of mass destruction is the nightmare that haunts every serious observer of the region, and why it bears so directly upon the survival of Israel. A nuclear-armed regime of ordinary worldly ambition might still be deterred, as such regimes have been deterred before; a regime, or a movement, animated by the conviction that its own destruction in the course of destroying the enemy would be the supreme religious triumph cannot be relied upon to make the same calculation. The cult of death does not merely produce suicide-bombers in the marketplace; it raises the terrible possibility of suicide on the scale of nations, and it is this possibility, more than any other, that makes the Iranian project and the apocalyptic theology beneath it a matter of Israel’s very existence.

The Opposite Cult

Against the cult of death the Christian sets not merely an argument but an opposite cult—if the word may be redeemed—a wholly contrary understanding of sacrifice that exposes the perversion by contrast. For there is at the center of the Christian faith a death freely chosen, a supreme self-sacrifice held up as the highest act of love; but it is the exact inversion of the suicide-bomber’s deed. The Founder of the faith laid down His life not by taking the lives of His enemies but by giving His own for them; He killed no one; He died praying for His murderers; and the glory of His death lay precisely in that it was suffered for others rather than inflicted upon them. The Christian martyr who follows Him bears witness as the original word means—by dying, never by killing—and the church has always held that the martyr who takes others with him into death has not joined the company of the witnesses but betrayed it.

Here is the deepest contrast in the whole field, and it is worth dwelling upon, for it reveals the two spirits at war beneath the politics. The cult of death says: I will die, and I will take you with me, and my dying-while-killing is my glory. The cross says: I will die, and I will die instead of you, that you may live, and my dying-for-you is My glory. The one seeks paradise by sending others to the grave; the other opens paradise by going to the grave alone, in the place of others. They are not variations on a theme; they are opposites, the very antipodes of the moral universe, and the distance between them is the distance between the spirit that destroys and the Spirit that saves. To stand with Israel against the cult of death is, in the end, to stand on the side of the cross against its dark inversion.

Choose Life

The Scripture that the people of Israel received speaks to this matter at its root, for it sets before the human creature the most fundamental of all choices and commands the right one in words of startling simplicity. I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, says the LORD through Moses; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. Life is the gift and the command of the God of Israel, held sacred because the human being is made in His image, so that to shed innocent blood is to assault the image of God and to throw away one’s own life is to despise His gift. The whole moral vision of the Scriptures stands against the cult of death—against the murder of the innocent and against the worship of self-destruction alike—and sets in their place the sanctity of life as the creature’s first dignity and first duty.

This is why the believer can recognize the cult of death for what it is: not a strange excess of religious devotion but a rebellion against the Author of life, a creed that calls evil good and death glory, and that bears, beneath its religious language, the signature of the one who was a murderer from the beginning and the father of lies. The God of Israel is not the God of death but the God of the living; He desires not the death of the sinner but that he turn and live; and His final word over the cult of death is not its triumph but its undoing, in the day when death itself, the last enemy, shall be destroyed. The cult exalts the grave; the God of Israel has promised to empty it.

The Believer’s Response

How shall the believer respond to a creed so dark without his own spirit being darkened or his compassion failing? He responds first by refusing both the lie that the cult is the whole of Islam and the lie that it has nothing to do with religion at all, holding instead to the honest and harder truth. He stands with Israel and with all the targets of the cult, naming the slaughter of the innocent as the evil it is and refusing every euphemism that would dress murder as martyrdom. And he grieves—for the children captured and deformed by the cult, for the young lives spent by the cynical men who preach a death they do not share, for whole societies configured to produce martyrs as a factory produces goods. His firmness against the doctrine and his pity for its victims are not in tension; they are the same love, refusing to surrender anyone, the targeted or the conscripted, to the spirit of death.

And he lifts his eyes, finally, to the One who is the resurrection and the life, and in whom the whole logic of the cult of death is overturned and swallowed up. The cult promises paradise through the grave it fills with others; the gospel opens paradise through the grave its Author filled with Himself and then burst open from within. Against the spirit that loves death the believer sets the God who is the fountain of life, who made the human being for life, who grieves over every life destroyed, and who has sworn that death shall not have the last word over His creation or over His covenant people. The enemies of Israel may love death and boast of it; but the God of Israel is the living God, and the living do not finally fall to the worshippers of the grave. He has set before the nations life and death, and He has not left them without a witness as to which they ought to choose; and over the people of His covenant He has pronounced not death but life, and that more abundantly. The worshippers of the grave have raised their boast—that they love death as their enemies love life—and they have meant it to terrify the living into surrender. But the living are not without an answer, and it is older and surer than their boast: that the God who breathed life into the dust is stronger than the spirit that courts the grave, that He has numbered the days of the cult as He numbers all the works of darkness, and that the last enemy, death itself, the very thing the cult adores, is the enemy He has sworn to destroy. They love death; He is the living God; and the living God will have the final word over the lovers of death, as He will over death itself.