Scientists and governments typically treat political violence is if it were another way to reach instrumental goals - politics by other means. In this talk I will present experiments carried out in the lab and in field sites in the Middle East and North Africa showing that support for and willingness to participate in political violence is driven more by moral and spiritual concerns than by instrumental or material motivations. Studies show: (a) support for political violence is relatively insensitive to material gains and losses; (b) willingness to participate in political violence is more sensitive to perceived spiritual formidability than it is by perceived physical formidability of adversaries; (c) that political violence is motivated the desire to defined cherished sacred values; (d) that willingness to engage in political violence in the name of such values seems to be made intuitively as measured by response time; and that (e) extremism (willingness to sacrifice the life for a cause) is predicted by a devotion to sacred values that trump all other concerns including attachment to family and abstract group identities