This excellent volume of essays, edited by John Carlson and Jonathan Ebel, investigates the complex relationship between religion and violence in the making and meaning of America. Each of the fifteen essays offers an insightful, scholarly, yet readable perspective on this topic of the problematical hybridity of the American soul. Although the editors make no claim to comprehensive treatment, the volume succeeds as a unified whole largely through consistent and creative use of the book's guiding tropes—jeremiad and jihad—two rhetorical traditions echoing from America's distant and not-so-distant past that exemplify the “covenant and crusade,” which are thematic of the American “way.”
The book is divided into three main parts. The first, “Religious Origins and Tropes of American Violence,” analyzes various religious understandings of and justifications for the option of violence. One frequent reference in these selections is John Winthrop's “Model of Christian Charity” sermon of 1630, which was decisive in imparting America's self-understanding as the “city on a hill” among the wayward of the world, as well as its need for decisive scolding whenever it failed in that vocation. Such discourse has tied together religion and violence throughout the years, as explored in the chapters on Woodrow Wilson's use of the rhetoric of covenant and John Foster Dulles's Cold War threat of massive retaliation. The idea of covenantal unity as key to America's success in war is properly examined, as is the disturbing tendency toward conflation of God and America, which has resulted in new forms of nationalist faith.
The essays comprising part 2, “Religion and America's Others,” examine the role of religion in bolstering America's sense of self by identifying others and outsiders—exclusionary rhetoric that has often served as the precursor to violence. Religious others in the New World could be seen as new Amalekites who feared their God-sanctioned destruction by God's elect. The interconnection of religion and violence in the process of American “othering” is further explored in chapters dealing with the development of African American national consciousness in the attempt to resist racism; the tension resulting from the confrontation between maximalist and minimalist religious observance; and the use of the rhetoric of religious bigotry to incite violence in the name of God and to account for God's punishing justice.
Part 3 investigates the ethics of violence and war and evaluates justifications for collective violence, taking up the important matter of whether and how to distinguish between violence and war. These selections examine America's fidelity to its founding values and its commitment to just war principles in the actual theaters of its warfare, considering, for example, the ways in which America's revolutionary legacy shaped the contours of civil religion and American exceptionalism, the profound way that the Civil War was rendered “total war” through absolute blood sacrifice, and the questions and dilemmas arising from America's own experience in the role of the despised other in its encounter with jihadist extremism.
This outstanding collection of essays both deepens and broadens our understanding of the complexities and tensions inherent in the American character and its historical narrative. It is recommended as a valuable resource to all students of American social and cultural history and as a library resource for religious studies programs.
