“Jeremiad” and “Jihad” are not the only organizing principles that begin with the letter “J” in this thought-provoking volume of collected essays. John Brown also features prominently in the introduction by John Carlson and Jonathan Ebel. The authors use Brown's deadly raid on Harper's Ferry to raise questions about how to assess religious justifications for violence, whether “moral ends justify violent means” (2), and how a better understanding of religion can offer a better understanding of violent episodes in America's past, present, and future. Brown is a particularly illuminating figure because of the moral complexity surrounding his mission to end slavery. “Should we remember him as a jeremiadic figure?” the authors ask. “A jihadist? Perhaps as both?” (13) Though the idea of Brown as jihadist might seem foreign, the authors make the argument that “jeremiad and jihad have more in common than first meets the eye” (11). While the jeremiad is undeniably “familiar,” the jihad—defined as a struggle to live righteously and follow God's will—might also be said to describe figures like Brown.
The fifteen thoughtful essays in this volume take a similarly nuanced approach to a topic that can lead in the direction of anything but. They are united in their refusal to essentialize religion as inherently violent and refusal to find violence in “every corner of American history and culture.” They also refuse to take the opposite extreme of “put[ting] a halo on American history and policies” (8). Despite the heavy subject, an undercurrent of hope pervades the volume as a whole, that “peering deeply into the darkness should not blind us to the light but rather stoke our yearning for it” (xvi).
The volume's moral undertones reflect the editors' and contributors' backgrounds in the disciplines of religious studies, history, and ethics (as well as political science, communications, theology, film studies, and international relations). Those expecting a straightforward chronology from the “jeremiads” of the Puritans to the “jihads” of the present will be disappointed. One of the book's central contentions is that the jeremiad and jihad have been constant themes throughout American history instead of the one giving way to the other. Still, with the exception of the introduction, only one of the essays deals primarily with jihad (Sohail H. Hashmi's incisive “Enemies Near and Far: The United States and Its Muslim Allies in Radical Islamist Discourse”), whereas the jeremiad forms a constant refrain throughout. “Just war” is another principle beginning with “J” that surfaces much more frequently than “jihad,” although From Jeremiad to Just War is hardly as catchy or current a title.
Ebel and Carlson group the essays, by well known and emerging scholars, and representing both new work and selections from existing publications, into three thematic sections. The first, “Religious Origins and Tropes of American Violence,” introduces key terms like jeremiad, covenant, crusade, and providence. Andrew Murphy and Elizabeth Hanson's opening essay recapitulates the argument in Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). S. Brent Rodriguez's chapter on violent cosmologies in American film offers a useful and teachable companion piece to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Stephen H. Webb's chapter on the providential tradition is a bit of an outlier in this section, and something of a jeremiad itself. Webb offers a sweeping history of providential thought from the Puritans to the War on Terror, but the piece works better as theology than history. Webb asks “whether Americans have lost the cultural coherence—and the resulting confidence in America's purposes—that render meaningful the idea that God is intimately involved in guiding American history” (92). He wants Americans to reclaim this “coherence” and offers “hope yet for a political use of the doctrine that might be self-reflective and humble” (105).
The second part, “Religion and America's ‘Others,’” examines violence deployed by and against religious and racial “others,” including Native Americans, African Americans, Catholics, and Mormons. John Corrigan describes the persistent application of the biblical Amalekite narrative to these “others,” while Eddie Glaude analyzes the rhetoric of David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet who, in different ways, called for violent resistance to the violent institution of racial slavery. This section also includes an essay by Lynn Neal on cultures of violence sustained by white women like Alma White, and reflections on the Virginia Tech tragedy by Grace Kao, who taught at the school at the time. Kao shows how people tried to use religion to make sense of the violence, whether pegging Seung-Hui Cho as a covert jihadist or engaging in interfaith memorialization.
Although ethical engagement runs through these first two sections, it is most explicit in the third and final part, “The Ethics of Violence and War.” Among the essayists here are Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Bethke Elshtain, who offer divergent perspectives on the justness of war. Hauerwas makes a case for pacifism; drawing on Harry Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), he indicts American just war advocates as having inherited the notion that “war is a necessity to sustain our belief that we are worthy enough to be recipients of the sacrifices made on our behalf in past wars” (224). Elshtain, by contrast, urges close consideration of the contextual appropriateness of different varieties of violence, suggesting that pacifism “is unhelpful ethically” (275).
From Jeremiad to Jihad's interdisciplinarity is fresh, sophisticated, and stimulating. It is an eminently teachable book, although undergraduates might need some help to understand how the authors' different approaches shape the conclusions they draw, whether normative or historical. This is engaged and engaging scholarship at its best; it deserves a wide audience for the balanced way in which it considers a critical subject.
