War and the American Difference

Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity

Hauerwas, Stanley

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441238153
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

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.

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War and the American Difference

A Theological Assessment

America is assumed to be different, because Christianity is still thought to thrive in the United States. Whereas Christianity is allegedly dying in Europe, it seems alive and well here, which confirms for many the contention that there is an inherent link between Christianity and democracy. For it is assumed not only that America is a Christian nation, but also that it is the paradigmatic exemplification of democracy.

In A Secular Age Charles Taylor tries to explain this presumed difference between America and Europe. At least one of the reasons that may account for the difference, Taylor suggests, is that America never had an ancien régime in which the church legitimized a hierarchical social order. Also at work may be the different role that elites play in determining general attitudes toward belief and unbelief. For example, the skepticism of academic elites in British society had more effect in England because elites have more prestige in British society than elites in America.

The primary reason for the American difference, according to Taylor, is the development of a common civil religion that allowed Americans, as well as immigrants in America, to understand their faiths as contributing to a consensus summed up by the motto “E pluribus unum.” This is in marked contrast to Europe, where religious identities have been the source of division either between dissenters and the national church, or between church and lay forces. In America, religious difference, which is even more varied than in Europe, is subordinated to “one nation under God.” Religious people may find they are in deep disagreement about abortion or gay marriage, but those disagreements are subordinated to their common loyalty to America.[24] Their subordination also includes their faith in God; that is, whatever kind of Christian (or non-Christian) they may or may not be, their faith should be in harmony with what it means to be an American.

Taylor observes that this difference also accounts for the respective attitudes Europeans and Americans have toward national identities. Europeans generally are quite reticent about national identity, which Taylor attributes to the European memory of the First and Second World Wars. He observes that war, even wars that seem “righteous,” now make most Europeans uneasy. Yet that is not the case with Americans. Americans’ lack of unease with war may stem from their (incorrect) belief that there are fewer skeletons in the American closet than in the European closet. But Taylor thinks the reason for the American support of war is simpler. “It is easier,” Taylor observes, “to be unreservedly confident in your own righteousness when you are the hegemonic power.”[25]

Taylor is right to recognize that America’s unrivaled power in the world gives Americans a sense of confidence about our role as the “world’s policeman,” but he does not articulate—to use one of his favorite words—how American civil religion (our assumption that we are a “religious nation”) relates to the fact that war for most Americans is unproblematic.[26] War is a moral necessity for America because it provides the experience of the “unum” that makes the “pluribus” possible. War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.[27] World War I was the decisive moment because it was that war that finally healed the wounds caused by the American Civil War.

This is well documented by Richard Gamble in his book The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Gamble provides ample evidence to show how liberal Protestants justified the First World War as redemptive for the nation and church. For example, Lyman Abbott, a well known progressive Protestant who had sought to reconcile Christianity with evolution, argued that America as a Christian nation must be willing to be self-sacrificial in service to other nations. Therefore America rightly opposed “pagan” Germany because Germany is a society in which “the poor serve the rich, the weak serve the strong, the ignorant serve the wise.” By contrast, America is a society of “organized Christianity” in which the “rich serve the poor, the strong serve the weak, the wise serve the ignorant.”[28]

Harry Emerson Fosdick, the exemplar of Protestant liberalism, even suggested that returning troops would present a special challenge to the nation and the churches since the soldiers would have learned the meaning of self-sacrifice through the experience of the war.[29] They also would have experienced the potential of cooperative action through the regenerative power of devotion to a higher cause. Accordingly, the returning soldiers would challenge reactionary views of society and the church because they would expect to remake their world in accordance with the lessons they learned from the war.[30] War, in short, was seen as the laboratory for the more egalitarian social policies that advocates of the Protestant social gospel so desperately desired.

Christianity and democracy in America were and continue to be, through the experience of war, inextricably linked. Arthur McGiffert, the president of Union Theological Seminary, argued that religion was necessary “to promote and sustain democracy.” Religion, according to McGiffert, had to dispose of its “egoistic and other-worldly character” by becoming socially responsible. “The religion of democracy,” he warned, “must cease to minister to selfishness by promising personal salvation, and must cease to impede human progress by turning the attention of religious men from the conditions here to rewards elsewhere.”[31] Such was the lesson to be learned from war.

I call attention to how Americans understood the theological and moral significance of World War I because I think we fail to appreciate what Taylor identifies as the American civil religion if we do not take the American understanding of war into account. For example, Taylor observes that the traditional American synthesis of “civil religion,” associated with a nondenominational Christianity with a strong connection to civilized order, is still, unlike its British counterpart, in its “hot” phase. That it is so, however, has everything to do with the American experience of war as constitutive of the substance of our civil religion.

Even political theorists as insightful as C. B. Macpherson can miss the significance of war for American civil religion. Macpherson identified two versions of liberal democracy, which he argues shape American democracy but are in conflict with one another. In the first, a capitalist market society is assumed to be compatible with democratic processes. This form of democracy, no matter how much the rise of the welfare state modifies it, remains dominant—particularly in America, and various balance-of-power models from American political science have given renewed theoretical legitimacy to it.

Macpherson associates the other version of liberal democracy with John Stuart Mill’s attempt to moralize liberalism by arguing that a liberal society must be one in which all the members of the social order are equally free to realize their capabilities. From Macpherson’s perspective liberal democracy, particularly the democracy of the United States, has tried to combine both forms of liberalism.[32] Thus at times “liberal” means the stronger can dominate the weak as long as they follow market rules, while at other times it means the attempt, usually through state agency, to achieve freedom for all to develop their capacity. As a result, American politics cannot help but appear incoherent, as different and contradictory policy alternatives are put forward in the name of “freedom.”[33]

For example, one defense for abortion is the right of an individual to have control over her body, but it is still assumed that laws against suicide make sense in the name of preventing harm. While some portions of the American society think it legitimate to appeal to their religious convictions to address such issues, others see this as a threat to the consensus that makes America work. Thus Taylor’s observation that, even though the Protestant character of the original American civil religion has been broadened to include “all faiths” or “no faiths,” there is still a strong “religious” character to American public life. That such is the case is confirmed by the very existence of secularist and liberal believers who seek a more secular America.[34]

I agree with Macpherson that both forms of liberalism shape American life, but the tension between them can go unnoticed exactly because America is so wealthy and has the common moral experience of war. Of course wealth, as it turns out, makes war necessary; yet Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because they understand war as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy. From such a perspective, the military adventures prompted by September 11, 2001, were absolutely necessary for the moral health of the republic. That America must fight an unending war against terrorism means Americans have a common enemy that unites us.

If I am right about the place of war for sustaining the American difference, as a Christian I wish America as a nation was more “secular” and the Christianity of America was less American. Put differently, I wish America was more like Europe, for I fear that the American version of Christianity cannot provide a political challenge to what is done in the name of the American difference. In short, the great difficulty is how to keep America, in the proper sense, secular.

In order to elaborate this observation I think it helpful to call attention to Mark Lilla’s important book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. Lilla begins his book by giving voice to a sentiment raised after September 11, 2001, and occasioned by the Bush presidency. He (and many on the Left) had assumed that battles over revelation and reason, dogmatic purity and toleration, divine duty and common decency, had been relegated to the scrap heap of history. So people like Lilla “find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”[35]

Lilla seeks, therefore, to defend “the great separation,” that is, “to develop habits of thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms without appeals to divine revelation or cosmological speculation.”[36] Lilla understands this separation to be an extraordinary achievement because political theology is a “primordial form of thought” that for millennia provided the well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and shaping moral lives. In the West, Christianity was the source of political theology even though the political theology Christianity represented could not help but create political societies that were and are inherently unstable. The instability results from the Christian presumption that believers are in the world but not of it. For example, Christians have always had trouble making sense of an empire they accidentally acquired.[37]

Lilla argues it was Hobbes who found the way, after a millennium of Christian political theology, to discuss religion and the common good without making reference to the nexus between God, man, and the world. Hobbes was able to do so because he, anticipating Feuerbach, had the wisdom to turn questions about God into questions about human behavior; to reduce that behavior to psychological states; and then to portray those states as artifacts of desire, ignorance, and the material environment.[38]

For Hobbes the gods are born out of fear of death, poverty, and calamity; but Hobbes knew better than to try to deny such fear. Rather he focused fear on one figure alone, the sovereign. Such a sovereign—Hobbes called him an “earthly God”—could ensure that his subjects should fear no other sovereigns but him. No longer would there be a tension between church and crown because now the sovereign would make clear that salvation depended on obedience to himself.

Lilla thinks Hobbes’s great achievement, this great separation that is crucial for the art of living in a liberal democratic order, is secured by three developments. The first is the intellectual separation made possible by the scientific revolution, in which a now mute natural world is separated from its Creator. As a result, investigations into nature can be separated from thoughts about God. Second, the crucial distinction between the public and the private was developed, relegating religious convictions and practices to the latter. To be sure, Lilla acknowledges, Hobbes made the sovereign responsible for public worship, but not for actually mounting an inquisition to determine if citizens really believed “Jesus is the Christ.” Third, perhaps less obviously but equally consequential, is Hobbes’s argument for separating academic inquiry from ecclesiastical control. One of the achievements of Hobbes’s project can be seen in theology’s becoming, as it has in modernity, but another academic discipline relegated to divinity schools.[39]

Though Hobbes is often thought to legitimate a violent understanding of politics, that is, human existence as a war of all against all, Lilla argues that Hobbes is actually trying to limit the violence that is unleashed by political theology. For when war is undertaken in the name of God, there can be no limit to killing, because so much is allegedly at stake. That is why human beings who believe in God commit acts in war that no animal would even commit. Animals kill only to eat and reproduce, but humans fight to get into heaven.[40] Hobbes, on Lilla’s reading, is the first great realist in international affairs. After Hobbes, war at least has the potential to be humanely limited because it can be fought for selfish reasons.

According to Lilla’s argument, Locke and Hume provided softer accounts of Hobbes’s Leviathan but nonetheless remained fundamentally Hobbesian. Like Hobbes, they wanted to protect modern man from the superstition and violence associated with political theology by developing liberal habits of mind. In particular Locke thought it possible and necessary to liberalize Christianity itself, which Lilla suggests bore fruit in the work of Rousseau, Kant, and Protestant liberals such as Schleiermacher and Troeltsch. Yet Lilla judges the attempt of Protestant liberals to ground religion in human experience to be a failure because

It failed to inspire conviction about the Christian faith among nominal Christians, or attachment to Jewish destiny among nominal Jews. Once liberal theologians succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.[41]

Such is the dilemma of Christians in America. To the extent that Christians try to be “political” by playing by the rules set down by “the great separation,” they cannot help but become unintelligible not only to their neighbors but, more importantly, to themselves. I think this helps account for the strident rhetoric of the Religious Right in America. Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism. The Religious Right makes a fetish of this or that belief (e.g., the substitutionary account of the atonement they take to be the hallmark of Christianity), but by doing so they play the game determined by the great separation—that is, Christianity becomes primarily a matter of “belief.”

Yet secular people in America fear the Religious Right, because they think that the rise of the Religious Right and Islam threatens the “great separation.” Thus Lilla ends his book by reminding those who, like him, are committed to Hobbes’s great achievement that they are the exception. They cannot expect other civilizations to follow the path of the West. But according to Lilla, the West has made the choice to protect individuals from the harm they can inflict on one another in the name of religion. It has done so by securing fundamental liberties and by leaving the spiritual destinies of each person in their own hands. In short, Americans have chosen to keep our “politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.”[42]

But Lilla’s account of the great separation does not explain how a country allegedly shaped b...