The present article takes on a challenge posed by Håkan Rydving in acritique of the cognitive science of religion, published in Temenos vol44, 2008. Here, Rydving questions the usefulness of the cognitivescience of religion for analysing certain phenomena, among them”different Muslim reactions to the drawings of the Prophet Muhammadin the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten”. Using diverse Muslimreactions to caricatures of the Prophet as a starting point, the presentarticle places these reactions in a theoretical framework ofcontemporary research on sacred values, devoted actors and identityfusion, as parts of ordinary human social cognition. The argument isthat models of how the human mind works, contrary to Rydving’ssuggestion, are highly relevant for the study of religions and form animportant contribution to a collective academic endeavour to understandand explain human cultural phenomena on multiple levels of analysis.