Typical of the flashpoints that result is the Nigerian town of Yelwa. In 2002, insults at a polling station led to a rock fight between Christians and Muslims. In 2004, young men hollering for jihad herded Christians into a church and burned it down, along with a nursery school, killing dozens. Two months later, Christians from the area massed around Yelwa. They killed 660 Muslims and burned a dozen mosques.

Griswold has done an astonishing volume of reporting—in Yelwa itself and in similarly remote and dangerous parts of Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Her interview subjects include some of the cruelest people on earth, along with their most indomitable victims.

...Religion is always more powerful than it looks. There is a special danger to it. The most profound observation in this book comes from a left-wing Catholic priest, Peter Geremia, who works in the heavily Muslim Philippine south and has received death threats from Christian radicals for speaking out against their paramilitary anti-Muslim gangs. “If you take the name of God to kill, you become fear,” he says. “The more atrocities you commit, the more power you have.” Almost nothing could be more disturbing than this.

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