Tag Archives: Sacrifice

Killing is Sacrificing

VIRTUE = WILLINGNESS
TO SACRIFICE ONE’S LIFE

Willingness to sacrifice — die for one’s country — constituted a philosophy of life for Hitler. Dying for Germany was the supreme virtue — and essence of National Socialism. Beginning with this understanding, it is not difficult to follow the “logic” of everything that happened after.

If virtue or goodness for Hitler was the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation, the absence of virtue (or evil) was unwillingness to sacrifice one’s life. Hitler revered, honored and glorified the German soldier who volunteered for military service and risked his life.

WHY DO GOOD MEN DIE,
WHILE THE WORST SURVIVE?

On the other hand, what about those who did not serve in the military — who sought to “shirk” their duty? Hitler became deeply disturbed — obsessed — with the idea that some Germans had avoided fighting in the First World War. Hitler pondered the question: “Why had the best (most courageous and patriotic) men died in the war, whereas the worst (most cowardly, unpatriotic) survived?” Why is virtue punished while lack of virtue is rewarded?

In hundreds of thousands of cases, Hitler explained in Mein Kampf, it was always a matter of “volunteers to the front, voluntary patrols, voluntary dispatch runners, volunteers for telephone detachments, volunteers for bridge passages, volunteers for U-boats, volunteers for airplanes, volunteers for storm battalions, etc.”

During four-and-a-half years, “again and again, again volunteers on a thousand occasions.” It was men who were filled with an “ardent love for their country,” urged by a “lofty sense of duty” who always answered the call for volunteers.

Some, however, sought to avoid military duty. These men, Hitler believed, lacked courage and a sense of duty. Hitler summarized his view in Mein Kampf:

One extreme of the population, which was constituted of the best elements, had given a typical example of its heroism and had sacrificed itself almost to a man. The other extreme, which was constituted of the worst elements of the population, had preserved itself almost intact, throughout taking advantage of absurd laws and also because the authorities failed to enforce certain articles of the military code.

The best, most heroic elements of the population had “sacrificed itself almost to a man.” Whereas the worst elements of the population — taking advantage of “absurd laws” — had “preserved itself almost intact.” The best men had died, whereas the worst had survived: This is what Hitler believed he had learned after four-and-a-half years of fighting in the First World War.

THE BEST MATERIAL IS
BEING “THINNED OUT”

Hitler addresses the issue again:

While for four-and-a-half years our best human material was being thinned to an exceptional degree on the battlefields, our worst people wonderfully succeeded in saving themselves. For each hero who made the supreme sacrifice and ascended the steps of Valhalla, there was a shirker who cunningly dodged death on the pretense of being engaged in business that was more or less useful at home.

Since the best “human material” was being “thinned out,” this kind of human material steadily “grew scarcer and scarcer.” Those soldiers who did not actually die were “maimed in the fight” or gradually had to “join the ranks of the crippled” because of the wounds they received.

The 400 thousand who died or were permanently maimed on the battlefields “could not be replaced,” Hitler explained. Their loss was “far more than merely numerical.” With their death, the scales — already “too lightly weighed at the end which represented the best human qualities” — now became “heavier on the other end with vulgar elements of infamy and cowardice.” In short, there was an “increase in the elements that constituted the worst extreme of the population.”

KILL THOSE WHO DO NOT SACRIFICE THEIR LIVES

It was not possible to do anything about the men who had already died. On the other hand, it would be possible to take measures in the future against elements of the population that had not sacrificed their lives. National Socialism would specialize in killing people who were unwilling (or unable) to sacrifice their lives. Nazism revolved around “thinning out” classes of people defined as the “worst elements.”

The sacrifice of German soldiers went without saying. This was “standard operating procedure.” This is what nations do: sacrifice young men in battle. Hitler initiated the Second World War in order to continue the sacrificial dying that had ceased when the First World War ended.

In the future, Hitler would expand the categories of people that would be required to die. Why should only soldiers be compelled to sacrifice their lives? Once in power, Hitler would require other kinds of people to forfeit their lives: defective children, mental patients, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and finally German citizens. They too would be compelled to “die for Germany”.

People commonly focus on “aggression” or killing as the essence of political violence. However, what is the purpose of aggression? Is killing a demented form of entertainment? On the contrary, political violence contains a profound psychic and social meaning. Nations kill in order to produce sacrificial victims.

Some people sacrifice their lives voluntarily. These types of people are called “heroes.” Other kinds of people may be compelled to forfeit their lives. These people are involuntary sacrifices. Once the Nazis took power, Hitler sought to make certain that no one would be exempt. Everyone would be required to die for Germany.

Excerpts from TO DIE FOR GERMANY

HEROIC DEATH AS A
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

In November 1917, the youthful idealist Walter Flex wrote, “We died for Germany’s glory. Flower, Germany, as garland of death to us!” His benediction glorified all of the sacrificial dead of the war. During the Great War, propagandists and poets alike joined hands in exalting the blood sacrifice of the youth of Germany, thus transforming carnage into ethereal national revelation. Heroic death in war became a philosophy of life.

BLOOD SACRIFICE
CREATES THE NATION

Eleven thousand young men lie buried in the student cemetery at Langemarck, testifying to the depravity of war. Yet through propaganda and poetry, their graves were rendered sacred shrines. They had not died; instead, their souls had passed the earthly boundaries and had been transfigured. Their blood sacrifice had guaranteed the nation’s future.

THE STREAM OF
GERMAN BLOOD IS ETERNAL

Rudolf Hess:

The stream of blood which for Germany is eternal — the sacrifice of German men for their Volk is eternal — therefore Germany will also be eternal.

INDIVIDUALS DIE,
BUT THE VOLK LIVES ON

Sacrifice for the German people was not to be feared. “Death holds no sting for us,” Himmler affirmed, because individuals die, while the Volk lives on.” Because the men of the Germanic SS were more concerned about the future of the Volk than about their individual destinies, members would “willingly and bravely seek death, wherever that is necessary.”

GERMANY IS SACRIFICE

In his last letter to his mother, written before his death on the western front in 1940, Hitler Youth officer Ernst Nielsen tried to prepare her for the loss of her son. When the news arrived, he warned, she was not to grieve; rather, she was to affirm the nobility of the cause:

If I die, mother, you must bear it, and your pride will conquer your pain, because you have the privilege of offering a sacrifice that is what we mean, when we say Germany.

Civilization and Self-Destruction

OBEDIENCE UNTO DEATH

Although most people condemn state violence (even as we view aggression as a normal dimension of political life), still we are proud of our willingness to die and kill in the name of abstract ideals. By virtue of acts of political violence, we express our devotion to ideas and entities that we consider sacred—greater than the self.

Political aggression conveys power, toughness and masculinity. The sound and fury of battle feels significant and gigantic, as if something very important is at stake. Warfare expresses narcissistic grandiosity.

Yet at the heart of the human experience of political violence lies submission or—as it is called—“sacrifice.” Sacrifice represents the will to subordinate the self to something larger than the self. Throughout history, people have sacrificed their lives for gods and nations. Warfare is intimately tied to the will to sacrifice.

The ideology of the Nazi SS-man revolved around “obedience unto death.” Obedience unto death is the most radical form of political submission. The Nazis glorified—gloried in—their willingness to submit. What is the relationship between the will to become obedient unto death, and political violence? How does willingness to die become converted into the desire to kill?

HITLER’S PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE

In Mein Kampf (initially published in 1925 and 1926), Hitler presented a theory of the relationship between the individual and culture. Like Freud, Hitler focused on renunciation as the essence of civilization. Society requires that we give up individual desires in the name—for the sake—of the collective. From the beginning of his political career until its very end, Hitler insisted that the individual must devote his life to the collective. “Sacrifice for Germany” constituted the core of Nazi ideology.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that the capacity for civilization—for “creating and building culture”—arises out of the individual’s willingness to “renounce putting forward his personal opinion and interests” and to “sacrifice both in favor of the large group.” Out of this readiness to subordinate personal interests arises the ability to “establish comprehensive communities.” The state of mind that subordinates the interest of the ego to the conservation of the community, Hitler said, is the “first premise for every truly human community.”

What was special about the “Aryan,” Hitler believed, was the extent of his willingness to sacrifice for the community. The self-sacrificing will to “give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s own life for others,” Hitler said, was “most strongly developed in the Aryan.” The Aryan was “not greatest in his mental qualities as such,” but in the extent of his willingness to “put all his abilities in the service of the community.”

Hitler sums up his philosophy of culture in the term pflichterfüllung, which means “Not to be self-sufficient but to serve the community.” Hitler distinguishes this posture of service from egoism or selfishness, and says it grows out of idealism, meaning the individual’s capacity to “make sacrifices for the community, his fellow man.” True idealism, Hitler declared in Mein Kampf, is nothing but the “subordination of the interests and life of the individual to the community.”

Hitler’s belief-system, then, focused on the requirement that the individual sacrifice for the large group, or community. Hitler never deviated from this ideology. The violence and terror he brought into being grew out of this ideology: Hitler sought to punish those whom, he imagined, were unwilling to devote their lives to the collective—to sacrifice for the community.

GLORIFICATION OF SACRIFICIAL DEATH

Taking the idea of sacrifice a step further, Hitler believed that the individual should be willing to die for the community. He glorified sacrificial death in warfare. According to Nazi ideology, dying for one’s country was the summum bonum: the greatest or supreme good; the principle from which all other moral values were derived.

The Aryan, Hitler said, willingly subordinates his ego to the life of the community and, “if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.” The idea of military service meant consciousness of the duty to fight for the existence of the German people by sacrificing the life of the individual “always and forever, at all times and places.” Nationalism meant acting with a boundless and all-embracing love for the people “and, if necessary, even to die for it.”

After Nazism and the Holocaust, many people tried to believe that Hitler and his ideology were foreign—radically different from anything that previously existed. This is a classic case of “othering.” In actuality, Hitler’s ideology of sacrifice—the foundation of Nazism—lies at the heart of Western political culture.

We valorize and memorialize the death of soldiers—their willingness to “give their lives” for the nation or community. The ultimate hero, finally, is someone who has “died for his country.” The nation for which a soldier dies may be called Germany, or Great Britain, or France, or the United States of America. In our hearts, the dream remains the same. We idealize and idolize those who have made the “supreme sacrifice.”

What was unique about Hitler was his embrace and glorification of the idea of sacrificial death, and the extent to which he promoted this idea. Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that more than once, thousands upon thousands of young Germans had stepped forward with “self-sacrificing resolve” to sacrifice their young lives “freely and joyfully on the altar of the beloved fatherland.”

Reflecting on the First World War, Hitler observed that the “young regiments went to their death in Flanders” crying “Deutschland ueber Alles in der Welt” (“Germany above everything in the world”). The most precious blood, Hitler declared, “sacrificed itself joyfully” in the “faith that it was preserving the independence and freedom of the fatherland.” Commenting in Mein Kampf on a memorial for German soldiers that he had visited in 1917, Hitler said: “In the sacred ground the best comrades slumbered, still almost children, who had run to their death with gleaming eyes for the one true fatherland.”

Mass-Murder by Government

WHY ARE WE SHOCKED BY THE HOLOCAUST —
BUT NOT BY THE FIRST WORLD WAR?

The Holocaust cannot be understood as an event separate from German history and Western civilization. The Holocaust grew out of the calamitous German experience of the First World War, and how Hitler interpreted and responded to this event.

When people learned of the death camps, they were horrified and appalled. “Incomprehensible” was a common reaction. Indeed, the event called the Holocaust is nearly beyond imagination. It is difficult to believe that human beings could bring something like this into existence. The event is so disturbing that some people deny it occurred.

When I became aware of the First World War, I was shocked, horrified and appalled. This event too is nearly beyond imagination. It’s difficult to believe that the leaders of “civilized” nations could ask men to get out of trenches for four years to be ripped apart — killed and maimed — by machine gun fire and artillery shells.

Here is a summary of the results of the First World War:

65 million men mobilized
8.5 million dead
21 million wounded
7.7 million POWs and missing
37 million total casualties

Although I was bewildered when I first began to read about the First World War, historians are apparently not. Perhaps they have become accustomed to this war. Whatever the reasons, historians — and people in general — rarely express surprise or amazement. The term “incomprehensible” is never used.

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MASS-MURDER: INTENTIONAL VERSUS ACCIDENTAL

In spite of the monumental carnage, the First World War is viewed as a “normal” dimension of history. We’d prefer not to put the First World War — or any war — in the same category as the Holocaust. Why? Because we view the Holocaust as an instance in which a nation intentionally engaged in mass–murder, whereas the 52-month episode of mass slaughter called the First World War is conceived as an event that occurred accidentally, or at least unintentionally.

It wasn’t that nations actually wanted to destroy large numbers of people. Rather, no one comprehended what they were getting into. The magnitude of killing was not expected. Things got out of control and went far beyond what anyone anticipated. It wasn’t as if anyone wanted what happened to happen. No one was responsible.

Can we truly claim that killing during the First War World — 9 million dead — was unintentional? Please provide your own insights on our blog.

WILLINGNESS TO DIE

Hundreds of books have been written seeking to fathom why some Germans were willing to murder Jews. Controversies have arisen. Were the murderers simply following orders — manifesting a universal human tendency to be “obedient to authority”? Had these people been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the anti-Semitic ideology that they believed that their actions were necessary and virtuous?

Rarely are similar questions asked about participants in the First World War. Soldiers are expected to kill. When they murder, they are simply doing their duty. No explanation is required. Regarding the First World War, we want to know — not only why soldiers were willing to kill — but why were they willing to die. This issue is glossed over. Do we imagine that it is natural for soldiers to go into battle — and to die when leaders ask them to?

One historian has posed the question of why soldiers continued getting out of trenches for four years — running into machine gun fire and artillery shells — when they knew that the results of this behavior were often fatal. In Rites of Spring (2000), Modris Eksteins asks:

What kept them in the trenches? What sustained them on the edge of No Man’s Land, that strip of territory which death ruled with an iron fist? What made them go over the top, in long rows? What sustained them in constant confrontation with death?

The question of what kept men going in this hell of the Western Front, Eksteins says, is “central to an understanding of the war and its significance”:

What deserves emphasis in the context of the war is that, despite the growing dissatisfaction, the war continued, and it continued for one reason: the soldier was willing to keep fighting. Just why he kept going has to be explained, and that matter has often been ignored.

Political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain (in Women and War, 1995) observes that the First World War was the “nadir of nineteenth-century nationalism.” Mounds of bodies were sacrificed in a “prolonged, dreadful orgy of destruction.” “Trench warfare” meant “mass, anonymous death.” Elshtain observes that we “still have trouble accounting for modern state worship”; the “mounds of combatants and noncombatants alike sacrificed to the conflicts of nation-states.”

I pose three fundamental questions.

Why, during the course of the First World War, did national leaders continually ask young men to engage in battle strategies that caused a great number of men to be wounded or killed?
Why did men in the great majority of cases follow orders — going like sheep to the slaughter?
Why have historians rarely interrogated the suicidal battle strategies of the First World War?

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HOW MAY WE ACCOUNT FOR THE RECURRENCE
OF GOVERNMENTAL MASS-MURDER?

Carolyn Marvin’s theory of warfare, presented in Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999), helps us to answer these questions. Marvin hypothesizes that “society depends on the death of its own members at the hands of the group,” claiming that the underlying cost of all society is the “violent death of some of its members.” In short, one’s nation or society “lives” insofar as members of one’s society die.

War is a ritual performed by nations — in order to claim sacrificial victims. Society, Marvin says, “depends on the death of sacrificial victims at the hands of the group itself.” The maintenance of civilization, society and the nation-state, according to Marvin, requires blood sacrifice in war.

What an unpleasant theory. However, is it less pleasant to reflect upon the 200 million plus human beings killed by governments in the 20th century? It is not a question of this instance of war, or that; of this instance of genocide, or that. Rather, the slaughter of citizens by nations is a consistent theme — a prominent feature — of twentieth century history.

Do we have theories to account for these recurring episodes of governmental mass murder? Of course, each historical event is unique. However, do we really wish to claim that each episode of societal killing has a separate cause?

Marvin’s theory arose out of her study of United States history, yet works perfectly to explain the phenomena I have studied. The First World War may be understood as a massive, collective ritual of blood sacrifice. Societies acted to cause the deaths of young men — in order to keep their nations alive. In some instances (for example, Australia and Canada), blood sacrifice gave rise to the nation.

THE DESIRE NOT TO KNOW

Marvin’s theory explains why wars recur — their function for societies and human beings. Just as significantly, her theory seeks to explain the fact that we don’t want to know the truth: that warfare is sacrificial ritual. The occurrence of war — and the denial of warfare’s purpose or function — are part of the same dynamic or complex.

According to Marvin, knowledge that society depends on the death of sacrificial victims at the hands of the group is the “totem secret”; the “collective group taboo.” While we enact warfare as a sacrificial ritual, we simultaneously don’t wish to know that we are enacting this ritual.

Throughout the twentieth century, governments have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings. Did each war and episode of genocide occur because of reasons unique to each given event? Perhaps a more parsimonious hypothesis is that episodes of violence generated by societies and governments represent the fulfillment of a collective desire.

Warfare is not forbidden. Indeed, we take it for granted that nations will wage war. It’s what they do. This is what I mean when I say that people believe that Nations Have the Right to Kill (Koenigsberg, 2009). We are not forbidden to wage war, but up to now we have been forbidden to know why we wage war.

The sacrificial meaning of warfare once was a secret — but no more.

Warfare: Slaughter or Sacrifice?

Destroying the World to Rescue the World

Paul Kahn: The popular sovereign emerges when all members of the polity can experience the pain of politics. All citizens are equal, when all read the same history of suffering as their pain, and all stand equally before the threat of future pain—sacrifice—for the state.

At the heart of the state, we find a commitment to the willing sacrifice of all of the national resources—human and material—for the end of preservation of the state. All can be called upon to sacrifice—to suffer—for the maintenance of the state. Nuclear weapons are the perfect expression of democratic pain. A policy of mutual assured destruction is the end-point, ending in a vision of universal self-sacrifice founded on a love of nation.

Richard Koenigsberg: Better dead than red. Hitler declared, “You are nothing, your nation is everything”: destroy the world in order to rescue one’s nation and its sacred ideals. But the other side—one’s enemy—they too are willing to destroy the world in order to preserve their sacred ideals.

Destroy the world in order to save the world. This is the fundamental structure of political ideologies: Where is evil located? Who is the enemy? Evil is located within the heart and soul of the enemy. Political ideologies are rescue fantasies. To save the heart and soul of the world, one must destroy evil—kill off the enemy.

Hitler located evil in “the Jew.” If Germany was to survive, every single Jew in the world would have to be located and destroyed. “We may be inhumane,” Hitler declared, “but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest dead in the world.” Is there any political ideology that does not have this structure?

Ideologies differ in terms of the class of people identified as the source of evil: Jews, communists, capitalists, the great Satan, terrorists. Political ideologies seek to locate the source of evil. In our hearts the dream remains the same: if only this class of people did not exist, the world could return to a state of perfection. Destroy the enemy to save the world.

Torture—or Noble Sacrifice?

Paul Kahn: Nothing is easier than to describe the horror of the battlefield. Yet, despite our knowledge of that horror, we celebrate a political history of achievement on the battlefield. The West not only experienced the destruction of a generation of young men in the First World War, it pursued the Second World War to the point of genocide and the destruction of European material wealth and civil society.

The experience in the trenches of the First World War may come to appear as nothing other than a torturous mauling and destruction of bodies. For the soldier who has lost faith in the sovereign character of a politics of sacrifice, war becomes a scene of horrendous torture: broken bodies, pain and death. Once a family loses this faith in the sovereign, it will only see the state conscripting and killing its loved ones.

The sacred loses its power and we are left with the tortured body—a residue of politics when faith in the sovereign has disappeared. Wilfred Owen captures this residue of the dying body when he writes: “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?” Not sacrifice, but slaughter; not the transcendence of the merely human, but the evil of the loss of the human. To those who do not hear God, Abraham’s action must have looked like a bizarre torture of his son.

Richard Koenigsberg: Yet historians continue to write about episodes of mass destruction as if they make sense. Historians are true believers. Their craft builds upon faith in sovereign entities given names like France and Great Britain and Germany. Dying for one’s country: sacred devotion.

Losing faith, one perceives the horror of the battlefield. Warfare comes to be experienced as torture: the torture of young men. The First World War was a massive scene of torture, with national leaders sending young men to be blown to pieces: broken bodies, pain and death.

But they were “dying for their countries.” Faith transforms slaughter into sacrifice. Dying for Great Britain, the young men are revered, memorialized, commemorated. The soldier—like Christ—is resurrected in the immortality of the nation. And so in the soldier all will be made alive. The soldier dies so that we may live.

Destroying Witches/Killing Enemies

Paul Kahn: A secular age looks back at the wars of religion and sees in them a great evil: bodies were destroyed for “no real reason.” All the suffering and destruction to what end? Similarly, we look at the tortured destruction of witches and heretics as a kind of madness producing great evil. Once faith is gone, we are left with only tortured and maimed bodies.

So we are beginning to see our own political past. We do not see political martyrs, but senseless suffering. No longer understanding the sacred character of the political, we see only the tortured bodies of the victims. We see a field of arbitrary death and destruction that contributes nothing to the well-being that we would place at the heart of the contemporary political narrative.

Or, I should say, this is what we might begin to see—or even hope to see—but still not quite yet. The politics of the sublime, of the sacred character of the nation, recedes but is not yet gone. The popular sovereign remains a brooding presence capable of enthralling the nation. It remains a hungry god and we remain willing to feed it our children. We react in only half-forgotten ways to the attack of September 11.

Richard Koenigsberg: Yet we do not yet understand political mass murder as a “kind of madness.” We still do not equate our drive to destroy “enemies” with the “tortured destruction of witches and heretics”: a form of madness producing great evil.

Looking back upon the twentieth century, historians imagine that—somehow—it all made sense: anti-Semitism was a cultural form rooted in Western civilization and history; communism was a doctrine created by serious thinkers who believed that a humane world required the elimination of capitalism and capitalists; and preservation of the American way of life required the destruction of communism and communists (generating “witch-hunts”).

Was killing Jews in Nazi Germany analogous to killing witches? Yes. However, the enlightenment belief in rationality persists: we seek “reasons”; assume there must have been reasons, refusing to embrace the reality of collective madness. MAD = mutually assured destruction: “A doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both attacker and defender.”

Insanity—or Noble Sacrifice?

Paul Kahn: Willingness to sacrifice for the creation and maintenance of political meanings always appears inconceivable to those outside of the community. We find it incomprehensible that Palestinians would be willing to blow themselves up for the maintenance of a political identity. But the suicide bomber is not different in kind from the Israeli soldier. Both know that political identity is a matter of life and death.

Both sides in this conflict wonder at the capacity of the other to kill and be killed. We have the same reaction to the sacrificial politics of others as we do to those who believe in different gods, rituals, and sacred texts. It literally makes no sense to us; it appears “crazy.” How, we wonder, can anyone believe that the gods appeared in that object or that place? This shock of difference, however, usually does not cause us to doubt our own beliefs. We think others strange, but that does not unmoor us from our own sacred rituals. The same is true of our own political meanings.

Richard Koenigsberg: How strange and bizarre that Islamic radicals would willingly die for Allah. How weird. Yet 360,000 Union soldiers died in the American Civil War in the name of “preserving the Union.” And 126,000 American soldiers died in the First World War—in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” We don’t find these deaths strange at all. There is nothing “crazy” about dying for our own sacred ideals. By virtue of faith, slaughter becomes noble sacrifice.

Sacrifice, American Exceptionalism and War-Culture (part I of II)

Review Essay of Stanley Hauerwas’s book War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity

by Kelly Denton-Borhaug

Publisher: Baker Academic
Author: Stanley Hauerwas
Format: Paperback
Published on: Oct. 2011
ISBN-10: 0801039290
Language: English
Pages: 208

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discounted price, click here.

How are American identity and America’s presence in the world shaped by war, and what does God have to do with it? Esteemed theologian Stanley Hauerwas helps readers reflect theologically on war, church, justice, and nonviolence in this compelling volume, exploring issues such as how America depends on war for its identity, how war affects the soul of a nation, the sacrifices that war entails, and why war is considered “necessary,” especially in America. He also examines the views of nonviolence held by Martin Luther King Jr. and C. S. Lewis, how Jesus constitutes the justice of God, and the relationship between congregational ministry and Christian formation in America.

About the author: Stanley Hauerwas (Ph.D., Yale University) is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of numerous books, including Cross-Shattered Christ, A Cross-Shattered Church, With the Grain of the Universe, A Better Hope, and Matthew in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

About the Reviewer

Rev. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. She holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Her teaching and scholarly interests include Christian theology and ethics with a particular focus on the ethics of models of redemption in liberation theologies. She is the author US War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation. More information is available through her blog.

US War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation

By Kelly Denton-Borhaug

Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd.
Author:Kelly Denton-Borhaug
Format: Paperback
Published on: Dec 15, 2010
ISBN-10: 1845537114
Language: English
Pages: 298

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discounted price, click here.

The military-industrial complex in the U.S. has grown exponentially in recent decades, yet the realities of war remain invisible to most Americans. A culture has been created where sacrificial rhetoric is the norm when dealing in war. This culture has been partly enabled to flourish because popular American Christian understandings of redemption rely so heavily on the sacrificial. U.S. War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation explores how formulations of Christian redemption have been manipulated to create a world and a time of necessary sacrifice. It reveals the links between Christian notions of salvation and sacrifice and the aims of the military-industrial complex.

Dear Colleague,

Professor Kelly Denton-Borhaug’s review essay of Stanley Hauerwas’ book, War and the American Difference, represents a major breakthrough in our understand of the sacrificial dynamics of warfare.

Building on Hauerwas’ central themes, she argues that the “sacrificial war narrative”— profoundly embedded in American culture, historical memory and national consciousness— is “our national story.” Subsequent to the Civil War, “sacrifice and the (American) state became inseparably intertwined.”

This sacrificial metaphor at the heart of citizenship—inextricably tied to war—has incredible power, all the more so because “most citizens are unconscious of its active impact in our lives.” In fact, Denton-Borhaug says, most citizens are “blithely unaware” of the “sacrificial war-culture that profoundly shapes their understandings of citizenship and the nation.”

The text which appears below is a summary or edited version of the first two sections of Denton-Borhaug’s review essay. We urge to read the essay in its entirety here.

We are grateful for Professor Denton-Borhaug’s valuable contribution.

Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

PS: The text below covers the first two sections of the review essay. A summary of the balance of the essay will appear in a subsequent edition of the Library of Social Science Newsletter.

“Sacrifice, American
Exceptionalism and War Culture”

Review Essay by Kelly Denton-Borhaug

There is a story that informs American attitudes and identity. Hauerwas traces the impact of this story on Americans in this book. This is a story about “the sacrifice of war,” and how it shapes our understanding of the nation and citizenship. As Hauerwas explores this story, especially through its development in the experience of the American Civil War, the connection between “the sacrifice of war” and a common moral identity for American citizens becomes clear.

The experience of the Civil War defined and unified the nation: “The story of the transformation of the Civil War from limited to total war is also the story of how America became the nation we call America”. We should not miss the ways that Christian sacrificial formulations influenced the development of this national narrative.

I expand here upon Hauerwas list: from President Lincoln as a Christ figure; to the many sermons comparing the war to “a vicarious atonement” made for the developing nation; to the growing need to justify the unbearable and overwhelming accumulation of death over the course of the war through sacralizing death; and through the sacrificial national commemorations that developed both during and after the war, including those that continue up to the present day. Thus, “sacrifice and the state became inseparably intertwined”.

The text that appears in this issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter (Part I of II) is a summary or condensed version of the first two parts of Denton-Borhaug’s essay.

Please click here to read the complete review essay. If you wish to comment on this excerpt—or the entire review essay—leave your reflections and commentary below.

This is our national story. Yet we tend not to think consciously about this as our “story” – certainly not as consciously as we think about other national stories that shape us as citizens—such as those about the separation of church and state, freedom of religious choice and freedom of the state from religion. These others stories tend to push (quasi)religious factors into the background.

I argue that the sacrificial war narrative—so profoundly embedded in American culture, historical memory and national consciousness—shapes us in a subterranean, subconscious fashion. As George Lakoff has demonstrated, we cognitively internalize certain metaphors that shape the way we value, make decisions, and generally go about living our lives—but tend not to be conscious of these same metaphors.

The sacrificial metaphor at the heart of citizenship—inextricably tied to war—has incredible power, all the more so because most citizens are unconscious of its active impact in our lives. In fact, most citizens are blithely unaware of the contradiction between their assumptions regarding “the separation of church and state”—and the deeply religious sacrificial war-culture that profoundly shapes their understandings of citizenship and the nation. Legal and political theorist Paul W. Kahn has explored this dimension:

Through our secular faith as U.S. citizens, our identity is affirmed by way of those who sacrificed themselves for the conception and maintenance of the nation. In addition, through ongoing sacrifice (with war as the apotheosis), citizens are linked to “the organic body that is the mystical corpus of the state.”

This national narrative—alive in commemorative national rhetoric and ritual, but subconscious in terms of its religious reality—has enormous power. I argue that this is the story we must investigate more deeply if we are to truly understand the morally compelling nature of war for people of the United States. Hauerwas explicates the consequences of U.S. sacrificial war-culture that were cemented in the experience of the Civil War and beyond.

He quotes historian Mark Noll: “War is America’s altar. . . our church”. What does this mean? We can identify a host of consequences. I expand on Hauerwas’ list: first, war becomes a central component in the story of American exceptionalism. Second, the compulsion toward war increases in ratio to our connection to war as our most dynamic moral reality. Third, the dying and killing of war become attached to certain understandings of redemption, both personal and national.

Fourth, the sacrifices of war create the very mechanism through which the nation achieves and maintains its transcendent status. President Lincoln declared that it is through war that the nation achieved the right to exist “in perpetuity”: “The baptism of blood in war unveils the transcendent dimensions of the union” (note the religious language!). Fifth, not only does war transcendentalize the nation—the nation must return to war again and again in order to maintain this transcendentalized status.

For the very dysfunction Hauerwas describes is in fact an addiction to sacrificial dynamics. “American wars,” he writes, “must be wars in which the sacrifices of those doing the dying and the killing have redemptive purpose and justification”. Just war analysis is not so much the attempt to investigate whether a given war will rise to the level of just war principles, but is revealed as “an attempt to control the description, ‘war’”.

The text that appears in this issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter (Part I of II) is a summary or condensed version of the first two parts of Denton-Borhaug’s essay.

Please click here to read the complete review essay. If you wish to comment on this excerpt—or the entire review essay—leave your reflections and commentary below.

In other words, to understand the dynamics of sacrificial war-culture in the United States, we must investigate our language, and how it shapes our very ways of knowing, for “War possesses our imaginations, our everyday habits and scholarly assumptions”. One way to investigate this keen insight would be to explore more deeply the utilization of sacrificial formulations in just war discourse.

American popular political culture is a most revealing site to discover these dynamics at play. For instance, a 2008 television ad for the presidential republican candidate featured a veteran of the Iraq war speaking directly to the camera—to the American people as it were— passionately arguing that Obama is unfit to be president because “he doesn’t understand or respect the sacrifices of war.” The word, “sacrifice” surfaces repeatedly in this short speech, while the camera focuses on his upper body, only at the end panning out to show his entire figure—and the loss of his limb—to make very visually specific the “sacrifice” he has endured.

The ad powerfully warns the American public that not to ascribe to commitment and faith in this sacrificial construction is a type of (religious?) political heresy that casts suspicion. In fact, not to ascribe wholeheartedly to this belief is to be cast out: marked as “other” from patriotic, faithful Americans. The veteran concludes his sacrificial logic, “It is a fundamental truth that freedom is always worth the price.”

Hauerwas includes a chapter that suggests a way forward, expanding upon his colleague Enda McDonagh’s suggestion that one way to counter the bulwark of just war thinking, and its self-imposed discipline and paucity of imagination, is to begin to use a different rhetorical formulation: “start a discussion about war that would make war as morally problematic as slavery”. In other words, develop an argument regarding the “abolition” of war in similar terms to the abolition of slavery.

The text that appears in this issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter (Part I of II) is a summary or condensed version of the first two parts of Denton-Borhaug’s essay.

Please click here to read the complete review essay. If you wish to comment on this excerpt—or the entire review essay—leave your reflections and commentary below.