From Jeremiad to Jihad is the finest collection of essays on religion and violence in America yet published. It reflects growing sophistication in interdisciplinary study at the vexing nexus of nationalism, theology, ideology, ritual, force, aggression, racism, sexism, war, peace, justice, and more, in the United States context.
The editors wisely eschew imposing normative definitions of “religion,” “violence,” or “America” on the 16 authors (of 15 chapters). Most of the scholars in From Jeremiad to Jihad come out of this intellectual free-for-all looking quite good. They shed clear light on the religio-graphical (to coin a term), historical, and ethical cases they study. A few scholars — including perhaps the most prominent names in the collection — come across as painfully self-righteous crusaders in their own causes. As Jean Bethke Elshtain puts it, in words ironically true about her own essay: “We soothe our consciences as we twist our intellects” (283). This book offers some clarity about crusaders, about the long history of violence stemming from religion in America, and about the prospects for a different way in the future.
The book is in three parts. After an interesting Introduction via John Brown by Carlson and Ebel, five chapters each explore: “Religious Origins and Tropes of American Violence,” “Religion and America's ‘Others,’” and “The Ethics of Violence and War.”
The first section is the weakest. Andrew R. Murphy and Elizabeth Hanson's overview of the “American Way” from King Philip's War to September 11, 2001 accurately covers familiar ground from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush's Baghdad; ground that I surveyed, more creatively if I may say so, in Empire of Sacrifice. S. Brent Rodriquez-Plate generalizes dangerously from the Hollywood film There Will be Blood to imagine violent American “cosmogonies” bubbling up spontaneously like black crude. Ebel's essay on “Covenant to Crusade” in the Late Great War is an excellent survey of the research he explored more fully in a monograph, and provides what I think should have been the other key term — “crusader,” rather than “jihad” — in the title of the book (invoking “jihad” as if it was actually a central problem in American religious history strikes me as an ethically suspect, although probably market-savvy, and undoubtedly alliterative, decision). Ned O'Gorman's essay on John Foster Dulles holds “American liberalism” responsible for the most “national violence” in history. O'Gorman offers this dubious conclusion in an effort, apparently, to prevent jeremiads from becoming manifestos, which struck me as a less-than-transparent methodological move for a critic of liberalism (communism?); though perhaps someone in O'Gorman's field of communications would find it compelling. And, finally, Stephen H. Webb's “American Providence, American Violence” is an excellent theological apologia for “providential thinking” and the humility it might provoke. I found Webb's essay personally persuasive, although again it was better as theology than history.
The five chapters in the second section, on “Religion and America's ‘Others,’” are focused, crisp, often stunning exposés of how religious discourses and practices have stoked violence across institutional locations and constructions of community in American history. John Corrigan's study of how the biblical trope of “Amalekites” inspired cruelty and genocide shows how reliably imaginative narratives of vengeance can stoke quite literal and material violence. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.'s “Religion and Violence in Black and White” brilliantly uncovers the racist contours of the systemic and economic “violence that undergirds so much of American life today” (141), simultaneously reveals the quite real “moral injury” this violence causes among its victims, and also shows the difficult (and different) ways that African-Americans like David Walker (1796–1830) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882) mobilized narratives into movements to respond to that violence. Less effective, due to huge context jumps, though no less interesting thereby, is Todd M. Kerstetter's attempt to apply Bruce Lincoln's distinction between religiously “minimalist” and “maximalist” societies to relations between the U.S. state and “Mormons, Indians, and Cults” in the American West. Demonstrating the wisdom of Simon Wiesenthal's bon mot that “genocide does not begin with ovens; it begins with words,” Lynn S. Neal unblinkingly describes the “culture of hate” promoted in a “bloodless war” by early feminist, anti-Catholic, and Ku Klux Klan advocate Alma White (1862–1946). Finally, rounding out this extremely strong section is Grace K. Yao's “The Search for Religious Meaning in the Shootings at Virginia Tech.” Yao's conclusion (based on her research and lived experience in the Virginia Tech community), namely that religion can on the one hand stoke violence (especially among crusaders looking for Muslim enemies or moral decadence to rail against) and, on the other hand, can soothe individuals and comfort communities, rings exactly the right notes of ambivalence and contingency, to my ear.
Part Three of the book, “The Ethics of Violence and War,” is the most uneven. Carlson's essay on the American Revolution builds a convincing case that the revolution was a holy war that birthed a nation whose appeal to religious particularism gave it the transcendent warrant we now call American “exceptionalism.” Carlson holds out hope that an alternative view of the nation might be found in “exemplarism,” whereby America is held accountable for the contradictions between its ideals and reality. But those ideals are the problem, according to pacifist Stanley Hauerwas, who contends that “sacrifice” in war is all but inevitable for democracies like America. Such a globalizing argument actually undermines the supposed realism of the pacifism Hauerwas wants to promote, since the evidence of history (as profiled by Steven Pinker, among others) suggests that democracies generally are not bellicose; the United States is the unfortunate exception to the rule. More grounded empirically and ethically is James Turner Johnson's effort to revive just war thinking on behalf of restraint in warfare; Turner helpfully notes that “in those conflicts today in which restraint in war is most conspicuously lacking, there is no state strong enough to impose and monitor the rules of international law” (238). Similarly realist, and perhaps of greatest value to readers of this journal, is the argument of Sohail H. Hashmi, “Enemies Near and Far: The United States and Its Muslim Allies in Radical Islamist Discourse.” After tracing how the United States “became implicated in the Islamist trope” in the past two decades, Hashmi helpfully summarizes that “religion plays as complex and malleable a role in justifying violence in the radical Islamist universe as it does in any other context,” and that the stated motivations for Islamist jihad “are overwhelmingly political” (268–269). Finally, Jean Bethke Elshtain engages in a self-justificatory attempt to distinguish “force” from “violence,” and thereby defend her defense of what history is likely to show was an indefensible global “war on terror.” Of course, Hannah Arendt effectively sketched such a distinction between “force” and “violence” decades ago. But Arendt's effort was on behalf of liberal human rights against totalitarians of any stripe; Elshtain's effort is on behalf of American jihad. And that's probably the topic for a good jeremiad.
