Empire of Sacrifice

The Religious Origins of American Violence

Jon Pahl

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814767641
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

It is widely recognized that American culture is both exceptionally religious and exceptionally violent. Americans participate in religious communities in high numbers, yet American citizens also own guns at rates far beyond those of citizens in other industrialized nations. Since9/11, United States scholars have understandably discussed religious violence in terms of terrorist acts, a focus that follows United States policy. Yet, according to Jon Pahl, to identify religious violence only with terrorism fails to address the long history of American violence rooted in religion throughout the country’s history. In essence, Americans have found ways to consider blessed some very brutal attitudes and behaviors both domestically and globally.

In Empire of Sacrifice, Pahl explains how both of these distinctive features of American culture work together by exploring how constructions along the lines of age, race, and gender have operated to centralize cultural power across American civil or cultural religions in ways that don't always appear to be "religious" at all. Pahl traces the development of these forms of systemic violence throughout American history, using evidence from popular culture, including movies such as Rebel without a Cause and Reefer Madness and works of literature such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Handmaid's Tale, to illuminate historical events. Throughout, Pahl focuses an intense light on the complex and durable interactions between religion and violence in American history, from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush's Baghdad.

1

Rethinking Violence and Religion in America

Every physician will admit that by the correct diagnosis of a malady more than half the fight against it is won; also, that if a correct diagnosis has not been made, all skill and all care and attention will be of little avail. The same is true with regard to religion.

—Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Moment, 1846 (Diagnosis, no. 4, 1)

Once the bureaucrats sink their pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That’s when I began to see what we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match.

—Nanapush, in Tracks, by Louise Erdrich, 1988

Sacrifices . . . made possible . . . [a] nation, even when these sacrifices were not understood as such by the victims.

—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1991

The genesis of this book, although I did not know it at the time, was a conversation at a Wednesday luncheon in Swift Hall of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in the early fall of 1988.¹ I had just returned from South Dakota where I had attended a powwow in Oglala. The temperature had been 104 degrees Fahrenheit under a blazing, cloudless sky, yet the dancers and drummers had not missed a beat as they wove the sacred hoop in a circle of movement and sound. As I was about to launch into an extended ode of admiration for this ancient form of devotion, a table mate at the luncheon interrupted me with what I took, at the time, to be a rude question: “But what does it mean?” I paused briefly and then launched into explaining about the hoop as a symbol of unbroken Lakota identity and a sign of the perseverance of a people. I might even have quoted Black Elk. But the question came back to me again in a slightly different form: “But what does it mean to you—as a Lutheran? Or as an American religious historian? Or as a white man?” I was taken aback. I had no answers to her questions, and the conversation soon moved on. This book is my attempt to answer why I was unable—as a Lutheran or a historian or a white male—to articulate what I was doing that day in Oglala, watching the dancers go around and around in the heat to the constant rhythm of a drum.

Put more prosaically, any account of American religious violence has to begin with the First Peoples of North America. The violence done to the Lenape, Pequots, Menominee, Cherokee, Lakota, and so many other groups had (and has) explicit roots in religion.² Yet many historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and others continue to misdiagnose that malady. Such misdiagnoses produce pages of chicken scratch that exacerbate the suffering, turning living traditions into pressed trees. In other words, I have become convinced that what stymied my ability to answer my inquisitor at lunch two decades ago was not so much the result of my lived experience of Lutheranism or Christianity, although aspects of both traditions contributed to my incomprehension. Instead, as my interlocutor hinted, the greatest barriers to understanding what I was doing in Oglala came from my presumed identities as a historian and a white male. I innocently assumed that I could understand “as a scholar” what was going on in a Lakota dance, when in fact I was an outsider to the rite, with little or no comprehension of the history that led to the dancing, why the dancing continued, or even what it felt like to dance wearing full regalia in 104-degree heat. The research for this book has led me to recognize anew my arrogant naïveté and to see how this conjunction of arrogance and a presumed innocence replicated processes by which native lands were taken from the First Peoples of North America. In short, in my spectator consumption of a “native American” powwow and then in bragging about it, I participated in what I have come to call innocent domination. My blinders were religious. But those blinders were not only my participation in Lutheran or Christian circles, which in some ways might have helped me understand what was happening (given that some of the dancers were, in all likelihood, Christians). Instead, my primary blinders were of race, gender, class, and nation. What led me to be unable to answer what a Lakota dance meant to me was my identity (then still aspirational as an earnest PhD student) to be an “American scholar” and the attendant religious assumptions. As my fellow Lutheran Kierkegaard might have put it, I had misdiagnosed the root of my malady.

Understanding myself as an “American” meant that I had inherited or assumed particular ways of thinking about violence, religion, and their relationship that made it easy for me to attend a powwow without really thinking about what I was doing there. In this chapter, I try to unravel some of those assumptions, to remove some blinders, and to rethink violence, religion, and their relationships in American history. I do so as a historian, a white male, and a Lutheran Christian who has come to realize that all these constructions have given me access to privilege. Such privilege has been anything but universal, however. What follows is my attempt to begin discerning how so many white, male, Christians in America, joined by many others, have repeatedly failed to see how their actions have produced suffering and violence in the world. At the same time, it is also my hope that my insights might help turn readers away from such patterns of innocent domination, to which, I believe, all humans are attracted. I hope that we might build a more collaborative, just, and peaceful future. That I express this hope on paper made from pressed trees is only one of the many layers of irony: at some level, until we meet face to face, we all are simply going around in circles. But I do hope that out of this circling, some readers might realize that while my words might be nothing more than chicken scratch, they are a gift we can offer to motivate one another to attend to and care for the living trees in our midst and to forge sustainable and sustaining relationships with the diverse and beautifully different people we come to meet: Lakota, Lutheran, and beyond.

Rethinking “Violence”

The word violence as used in this book refers not only to acts of individual physical aggression but also to social and linguistic systems of exclusion and collective coercion, degradation, or destruction of property, persons, and the environment.³ Violence is any harm to or destruction of life, whether intended by individuals or enacted by systems of language, policy, and practice. By defining violence in this way, I intend to identify with what can be called a “maximalist” approach to the topic. This approach contrasts with a “minimalist” approach that would limit the term violence to acts of individual, illegitimate, or illegal physical aggression, although sometimes minimalists also include conflict in their purview.⁴ Systems of exclusion, coercion, and so forth emerge from a collective consent of some kind, minimalists argue, and might therefore be called “unjust,” but to label them violence is to blur terms.⁵ My reasons for preferring the broader, if blurrier, definition will become apparent in due course, but my main reason is consequentialist: people die just as surely from unjust systems as they do from a gunshot or interpersonal conflict. In fact, they die more slowly and with greater suffering. To exclude these systems from the opprobrium associated with the word violence, therefore, is to release the agents responsible for these systems from accountability, which may be, of course, exactly why many people want to limit the term.

TABLE 1. The Violence Iceberg

CRIMINAL VIOLENCE practices of vandalism, rape, murder, etc.

INSTITUTIONAL CONTROL institutions such as prisons, military, legal system, etc.

SYSTEMIC/SOCIAL/COMMUNITY VIOLENCE community-based inequities in housing, healthcare, education, etc.

CULTURAL, RELIGIOUS, OR VERBAL VIOLENCE discourses and images of domination and revenge

In my teaching, I often explain what I mean to include under the term violence by referring to the metaphor of “the violence iceberg,”⁶ which is shown in table 1. As this metaphor of an iceberg suggests, each “layer” of violence builds on the previous one, and the layers interweave and interact, in what I am willing to argue is a causal connection. Discourses—words and symbols—are the crucial forms of violence and also the foundation on which other acts and practices are built.

More specifically, I believe that violence almost invariably begins at the bottom of the iceberg. That is, violence begins with, or is implicated in, words or other gestures of communication or what can be loosely called culture. At the “bottom” of the iceberg rest those ways in which human beings decide on the terms that make violence plausible against the world, another, or one’s self. Any act of aggression, especially if it is enacted collectively, must involve some signs or symbols that motivate or at least initiate the action. To locate the origin of aggression in this way is to include in the scope of its study such phenomena as myth and ritual as well as other aspects of culture like art, literature, music, and manifold forms of communication. People must somehow persuade themselves that this aggression is worth enacting, and this internal process is manifest in such cultural products as languages, religions, and other such phenomena noted primarily for their conceptual and practical complexity.

This foundational layer of complexity is only the beginning. Individuals also gather together in communities, societies, or social groups, and these groups empower individuals to act on one another, or to act en masse, in often informal patterns of practice that might turn violent or produce destructive consequences. Classes, guilds, families, nations, and so forth all enact interests to exclude some, include others, and distribute resources in more or less equitable ways. Informal practices can also become policies, and policies regarding education, health care, housing, and any number of other matters of social survival can produce consequences that result in coercion, degradation, harm to and destruction of life: that is, in violence. Not all policies are just. Some policies protect the interests of a few at the expense of the many. This is why politics is so often a blood sport. Power can be hoarded and used, legally, to violate others.

Consequently, among the social groupings that humans have constructed are those that use formal institutional (or bureaucratic) structures to respond to human aggression and then themselves legitimize coercion to control or contain violence. Among these institutions are the military services, prisons, legal systems, and states—understood in the broad sense as agencies of civilization that may, or may not, be coextensive with a nation.⁷ These forms of violence may be extensions of the kind of exclusions that emerge from “below” in various social groupings and policies, in which case they are unjust and serve primarily to rationalize violence itself. Any police state, or arbitrary use of police power is a good example. But laws can also emerge from the consent of the governed and respond to illegitimate acts of aggression to protect collective interests and control the unchecked spread of violence. In such cases, the coercion is an unfortunate accompaniment of living in a world of competing interests, in which some people will not always use nonviolent means to reach their goals. In such cases, violence is warranted and just. Violence here is the legitimized control through institutional means of individuals or groups that do not consent to live together peaceably by the rule of law, through means that ascertain and formalize the consent of the governed. To be clear, I am not a pacifist. In some cases, violence, as a last resort, can be justified. But I do think such cases are rare, even though they have been far too frequent in the history of human cultures. Nonetheless, in some cases, duly authorized states or governments, acting in response to an initial act of aggression, have good reasons to respond with counteraggression.

Accordingly, it is at the “top of the iceberg” that we discover the most overt form of violence and the only form usually recognized as such in popular culture, namely, acts of criminal aggression such as vandalism, murder, and rape. Everyone recognizes these practices as violent, and they often are the paradigm against which other forms are measured and in relation to which “solutions” to violence are recommended. The reasons that solutions tend to address the tip, rather than the foundation, of the iceberg are not difficult to understand. Individual acts of physical aggression seem to be subject to the simplest solutions. Needless to say, they may not always be, but just as I cannot defend that claim here, neither can I, in this brief historical work, defend either the iceberg metaphor or its specifics. Suffice it to say that I believe the model has both plausibility and significant explanatory power. Violence cuts across language, culture, society, and individual behavior in ways that implicate all of them. The effectiveness of this approach to studying violence in American history will, I trust, be apparent in the following case studies, in which the connections between discourse and practice will be made explicit.

Rethinking “Religion”

If violence is difficult to define, religion is no less so. Many previous sui generis definitions have fallen into disrepute, particularly following the critique of anthropologist Talal Asad, who found the notion of “religion” inherently biased in favor of the privatized, sanitized, and hegemonic Protestantism of the Euro-American West.⁸ Asad’s critique has been joined by those of several other scholars, notably Russell McCutcheon and Tomoko Masuzawa, who find “religion” complicit in various forms of Western imperialism.⁹ I grant these thinkers their points, but I also agree with the University of Chicago historian of religions Bruce Lincoln that a relatively nonbiased way to talk about “religion”—always provisional, evolving, and contingent on particular circumstances and settings—is not only possible but necessary. To refuse to define religion is to allow the term to be defined by journalists and politicians who bring to the table agendas other than critical understanding. Religions are, no doubt, varying sites of knowledge and practice with widely divergent goals, contours, and boundaries. Yet to fail to offer an alternative critical meaning of the term to those who continue to use the term uncritically is to abdicate the scholar’s public responsibility. Mere critique is too easy. Fortunately, Lincoln takes up the challenge of identifying some terms that might be useful for comparing cultures and understanding different religions. I think he does so in a way that sets the stage for a definition that can be both accurate and useful in diagnosing some of the links between religion and violence (see table 2).

TABLE 2. Bruce Lincoln’s Four Elements of “Religion”

1. Discourse: “A discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent status.”

2. Practices: “A set of practices whose goal is to produce a proper world and/or proper human subjects, as defined by a religious discourse to which these practices are connected.”

3. Community: “A community whose members construct their identity with reference to a religious discourse and its attendant practices.”

4. Institution: “An institution that regulates religious discourse, practices and community, reproducing them over time and modifying them as necessary, while assertin...