At a time when US society grows bifurcated, Jon Pahl's work on the religious origins of American violence is timely. Empire of Sacrifice offers analyses of film and literature which reflect and encourage ritualized brutality. In response to collective acquiescence to civil religion and “empire,” Pahl argues that US history reveals a pattern of “blessed brutalities,” episodic reoccurrences of “innocent domination.” Thus human sacrifice serves the invisible hand of capitalism and religion in the interest of American nationalism (1–5).
Pahl explores how cinema depicts youth in a way which reinscribes patriarchal, familial norms and the moral order. For him, Reefer Madness, Rebel without a Cause, Halloween, Hostel, and Scream code youth as scapegoats for cultural declination. In the horror genre, teens are murdered by a “punishing redeemer” (55). A threat to the “symbolic order” (57), teen victims meet death while challenging sacred boundaries. These morality plays “define boundaries by representing their defilement and eliminate options by depicting the terror of a world without limits on violence” (46). Brutality “saves” the moviegoer by establishing consequence. In keeping with “blessed brutality,” sacrifice for nation becomes inevitable (47, 52, 53, 55). War is justified as the innocent serve the symbolic order. “Calling the death of a soldier in war a ‘sacrifice,’” Pahl writes, “makes war a religious phenomenon … the desire for life becomes a demand for death” (59). For Pahl, “the visible violation of youth on the screen has normalized the ‘sacrifice’ of young people” (61). Using Frederick Douglass as a theoretical anchor, the book explores the slave narratives of Jarena Lee and Sojourner Truth, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and ends with Spike Lee's Bamboozled and Malcolm X. Pahl then connects highly racialized religious violence to gender and sexuality by analyzing The Handmaid's Tale and the writings of Abigail Adams and Abigail Abbot Bailey. This literary trajectory, he contends, emphasizes how the body has been subjugated to legitimize DOMA (Defense of Marriage Acts), a law which brutalizes gays and lesbians. Thus, for Pahl, US history evidences a recurrent pattern – “domination of land and peoples under unwarranted assertions of innocence” (141). Using the work of René Girard, Pahl maintains that the logic of sacrifice, extending from the execution of seventeenth-century Quaker Mary Dyer to the US system of capital punishment, “implicates collective or mimetic desire in violence,” holding “religion responsible for both containing and fueling that desire” (143). These “blessed brutalities” of religion and trade exist in an orbit influenced by Calvinism and the quintessential Pilgrim's Progress. The Puritans began a process, one now institutionalized, “to indoctrinate youth, and to prepare for the broader militarization of society” (166). Unshockingly, Pahl ends by focussing on holy-war rhetoric now commonplace in post-9/11 public discourse. “When we stop blessing our brutalities,” writes Pahl, people of faith might reengage the very ethics they preach (176).
Religion has a violent quality, particularly traditions rooted in sacrifice. Pahl's thesis, however, does not focus on particularities such as the crucifixion or the Eucharist. His focus concerns systematic violence, a symbolic order where the marginal die on the altars of civil religion and American nationalism. That this book might raise the ire of conservative pundits (and some historians) goes without saying. Pahl concludes on a hopeful note: the primary function of religion is (or should be) to eradicate violence and promote peace. However, to the extent that religion serves free-trade and nationalistic moralisms, peaceful forms may remain mere idealism.
