CAROLYN MARVIN AND DAVID W. INGLE
(To be published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion: 64(4), Winter, 1996)
Americans live in a culture that is as religious as any that
exists. In this article we contend that nationalism is the most
powerful religion in the United States, and perhaps in many other
countries.(1) Structurally
speaking, nationalism mirrors sectarian belief
systems such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and others that are more
conventionally labeled as religious. It happens that nationalism also
satisfies many traditional definitions of religion, but citizens of
nation-states have religious reasons for denying it. We argue that both
sectarian and national religions organize killing energy by committing
devotees to sacrifice themselves to the group.(2)
We also explore the ritual role of media in propagating
national religion. Media are not the most important
ritual vehicles for nationalism, but they matter.
Though based in empirical observation, our claims are theoretical in
nature. Their value lies in re-thinking certain empirical phenomena in
relation to notions of nationalism and religion in the contemporary
world. Although our examples come mostly from the United States and its
majority sectarian faith, and although generalization is risky, the
principles we describe are broadly applicable to other enduring groups,
defined as groups for which members are willing to give their lives.
By "religion" we mean a system of cosmological propositions grounded in a
belief in a transcendant power expressed through a cult of divine being
and giving rise to a set of ethical prescriptions.(3)
In the moral world shared by many readers,
these prescriptions deplore violence and regard
any use of it as prima facie profane. Where religious devotees
unapologetically embrace violence, the faiths to which they subscribe
may be judged as morally flawed. Or, it may be claimed that
practitioners of violence who act in the name of religion have mistaken
the true prescriptions of their faith. The familiar claim that a
religious view of the world is characterized by a moral opposition to
violence ignores a more complex reality in which faiths that most deeply
bind the commitment of devotees are structures for organizing killing
energy. This is true both for religions that aggressively kill the
Other in the name of a deity or deities and those that pledge their
devotees to self-sacrifice when confronted with violence. We shall
argue that violent and so-called non-violent religions are structurally
indistinguishable from a certain perspective.
To equate nationalism and sectarianism unsettles
theorists of both. Theorists of nationalism see sectarianism as
dangerous to nationalism's healthiest aspirations. Sectarianism, they
fear, introduces passions that may be manifested in violence. Theorists
of nationalism wish to separate church and state by subordinating the
claims of the former to the latter. Theorists of sectarianism see
nationalism as threatening to religious values, especially non-violence.
The state, they say, is profane because it engages in violence. They
wish to subordinate state claims to fundamental
sectarian precepts.(4) Perhaps
nationalism and sectarianism recognize something about each
other that they hesitate to recognize about themselves. Each fears that
members of the other community are willing to kill and die for truth as
they understand it. For what is really true in any community is what
its members can agree is worth killing for, or what they can be
compelled to sacrifice their lives for. The sacred is thus easily
recognized. It is that set of beliefs and persons for which we ought to
shed our own blood, if necessary, when there is a serious threat.
Rituals that celebrate this blood sacrifice give expression and witness
to faith. Sacrificial death thus defines both sectarian and national
identity. This is the first sense in which both are species of
religion.
On the whole, we misunderstand the genuinely
religious character of American patriotism and the violent character of
genuine religion. What distinguishes nationalism from sectarianism is
not group logic, for both are religions of blood sacrifice. What
distinguishes them is historical location. In the West
Christianity once could kill and ask others to die in the name of its
particular god. In some places it does this still. But in general in the
West the power to compel believers to die passed from Christianity to
the nation-state, where it largely remains. Christianity has no
authorized guns within the boundaries of the United States, nor does any
other denominational sect. In our religiously pluralist society
sectarian faith is optional for citizens, as everyone knows. Though
denominations are permitted to exist, they are not permitted to kill,
for they are not officially true, which is a way of suggesting they are
false. Only the true god, whose agent is the nation-state, may kill.
The state allows whoever accepts these terms to exist, to pursue their
own beliefs, and to call themselves what they like in the process. But
only the deity may kill our own. Whoever competes with the true god,
the nation-state, may be punished at the cost of his life. This was the
fate of David Koresh for exercising power that not only belongs
exclusively to the national god but defines him. In civil religious
terms David Koresh's sin was heresy.
Americans traditionally regard the nation-state as
the domain of unassailable force and religion as the domain of
unassailable truth. This separation of faith and force is markedly
unstable and collapses completely in wartime. The more usual
arrangement elsewhere has been strongly forged links between spiritual
and political power. This is because the only religion that can truly
deliver the goods must have visible agency, worldly power. Jesus'
disciples felt it, and a Weberian Protestant ethic suggests it.
Wherever religion is fervently embraced, it follows in the minds of many
believers that it is entitled to glory in missions of conquest that
reflect God's will. Islam did this for centuries before European
monarchies accomplished it for Christianity. And though religions have
long survived and flourished in persecution and powerlessness,
supplicants nevertheless take manifestations of power as blessed
evidence of the truth of faith.
If nationalism is religious, why do we deny it?
Because what is obligatory for group members must be separated, as holy
things are, from what is contestable. To concede that nationalism is a
religion is to expose it to challenge, to make it just the same as
sectarian religion. By explicitly denying that our national symbols and
duties are sacred, we shield them from competition with sectarian
symbols. In so doing, we embrace the ancient command not to speak the sacred, ineffable name of god. That god is inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable,
beyond language. But that god may not be refused when it calls for
sacrifice.
Among the handful of theorists who have seriously
examined the religious character of American nationalism is Carlton
Hayes, who argued that Western nationalism adapted many features of
Christianity, in the shadow of which it first appeared. Citizens are
born into the nation-state, Hayes observed, just as supplicants once
were born into the Church. They have no choice but to be citizens, just
as medieval Christians were compelled to embrace the faith of their
birth. The social geographer Wilbur Zelinsky observes that the
contemporary American flag has a visual power and presence for its
believers that is comparable to the medieval crucifix (243). We agree.
The flag in high patriotic ritual is treated with an awe and deference
that marks it as the sacred object of the religion of patriotism. The
flag is the skin of the totem ancestor held high. It represents the
sacrificed bodies of its devotees just as the cross, the sacred object
of Christianity, represents the body sacrificed to a Christian god.
The soldier carries his flag into battle as a sign of
his willingness to die, just as Jesus carried his cross to show his
willingness to die. Both the cross and the flag mark the border, the
transformative point at which the believer crosses over into death. In
both Christianity and nationalism the violently sacrificed body becomes
the god renewed--in Durkheimian terms, the transformed totem. In
Christianity the revivified totem is the risen Christ. In American
nationalism the transformed totem is the soldier resurrected in the
raised flag. On the basis of his sacrifice the nation is rejuvenated.
As the embodiment of sacrifice, the flag has transforming power.
Certain acts cannot be performed except in its presence. It must be kept whole and perfect, as holy things are, and
ceremonially disposed of when it is no longer fit to perform the
functions of the totem object.
Some citizens openly speak of the American flag
as sacred. Can we disregard the impassioned testimony of others that it
is not, and neither is the nation it represents? The answer lies in the
ritual gestures that surround the flag. Roy Rappaport distinguishes
ritual gesture from language, which is always other than that which it
signifies. By contrast, gestures express what cannot be denied. What counts for the survival of the group is what we will do in public on its behalf while congregants bear witness. This is what group
maintenance requires: that we publicly execute our obligations. The
sanctity of national symbols is protected by treating them gesturally as
sacred, even while we insist in language that they are not. And when
the god commands it, we must perform the ritual sacrifice, war, that
sustains the group.
To understand how war is ritual sacrifice, recall
that the raw material of society is bodies. Organizing and disposing of
them is the fundamental task of all societies. The social is quite
literally constructed from the body and from specific bodies that are
dedicated and used up for the purpose. The enduringness of any group
depends at least partly on the willingness of its members to sacrifice
themselves for the continuing life of the group. The creation of
national or sectarian religious sentiment depends on a common secret,
which is that the underlying cost of all society is the violent death of
some portion of its members. There is more. Our deepest secret, the
collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends on the
death of this sacrificial group at the hands of the group itself.
This is the totem principle concretized. According to Durkheim, the group
becomes a group by agreeing not to disagree about the group-making
principle. On what understanding of the group is this pact made?
Durkheim never answered this question directly. Our answer is that the
totem principle by which the group constitutes itself is manifested in
collective victimage.
Why is it necessary to kill our own, and why can't
we admit it? It is necessary, and we cannot admit it because violence
poses the greatest threat to the group from within as well as without.
It is never eradicated. Like sex, it can only be channeled. When
violence begins, it can be prevented from spreading only if someone is
willing to submit. Submission is the sacrificial principle. To keep
violence from escalating and killing every member of the group, either
by invasion from without or contagion within, group members agree to
submit to a violent authority who punishes all who do not honor the
totem's exclusive right to kill its own.(5)
Even when the enemy kills us, his transgression is not so
much that he kills as that he kills us. Only totem authority--the group deity in sectarian terms, the group itself in Durkheimian terms--is so entitled.
If the totem may kill us, we are all at risk and all
killers. This knowledge must be set apart from the group, for it
suggests the frailty of group cohesion. We use the term taboo to
describe the tension between the violent sacrificial mechanism that
sustains enduring groups and the reluctance of group members to accept
responsibility for enacting it. To protect themselves from
acknowledging the source of group unity, citizens render totem violence
and its symbols sacred. The knowledge that the group must sacrifice its
own to survive is a secret. We keep it by treating violence as primitive and morally suspect, a failure of social structure rather than an elemental component.(6)
Where violence exists, it is presented as a last resort, a challenge to
civilized modernity as the hallmark of the nation-state. Thus, we avoid
acknowledging in a thousand ways the true nature and object of totem
power.
For example, we tell ourselves that the purpose of
war is to kill the enemy. And it is. But what keeps the group together
and makes us feel unified is not the sacrifice of the enemy but the
sacrifice of our own. If the ritual purpose of war were merely to kill
the enemy, the deaths of some 40,000 or more Iraqis would have made a
lasting contribution to American national unity. During the Persian
Gulf war, notable for the ephemerality of its unifying effect, only 147
Americans died, a poor totem sacrifice. The two most unifying
bloodlettings in American history, the Civil War and World War II,
sacrificed the largest number of the nation's own, both absolutely and
in proportion to the total population. We
construct our identity from the bodies of group members. All enduring
groups, national or otherwise, rely on just such a sacrificial identity.
The doctrine that provides the central experience of
Christian faith is the sacrifice of an irreplaceable son by an
all-powerful father whose will it was that the son should die violently.
Ritually speaking, the sacrificial promise is that the father's desire for blood revenge against those who offend his power
will be satisfied for all time. Because history begins anew with this
sacrifice, there need never be another. It has not turned out that way.
The measure of the Christian believer's devotion to the faith remains
his willingness to do as Jesus did and sacrifice himself. Willingness
to sacrifice oneself, the ultimate sign of faith in social existence, is
also the sign of the patriot, the proven and true member of the nation-
group. We declare that we don't want death, that only the most
compelling need justifies the death of our own. (And this is true. The
compelling need is the survival of the group.) Through successful
sacrifice, internal hostilities are discharged, the group is unified.
Then the cycle begins again. Those who worship the son who died at the
heavenly father's command revere the totem principle, that only our own
god has the right to kill our own, just as surely as those who revere
the soldier son, who dies at the command of patriarchal generals.
In both sectarian and national religion the son's
willing sacrifice is much admired, while the father's decision to
sacrifice him is hidden. To say that Christians worship a violent father
who sacrificed his own son may appear blasphemous to believers. The
claim articulates the unspeakable totem principle. During the 1992 presidential campaign, for example, talk centered around
whether the son, Bill Clinton, was a good son or not for refusing to
submit to sacrifice in Vietnam. The discussion was never about whether
George Bush had been a good father to send the sons to a bad war. That
taboo discussion suggests the sense in which religions that counsel non-
violence as a strategy are indistinguishable from those that do not.
Both counsel the willing sacrifice of their followers to violence. Both
are willing that devotees should die to demonstrate the viability and
integrity of the totem principle that only their own god has the right
to kill their own. Both understand that violence will not stop until
someone is willing to submit. In the case of American nationalism, that
god is the group symbolized in the totem fetish, the flag, and embodied
in the totem leader, the President.
The claim that violence, and only violence, produces
enduring group unity is at odds with arguments that enlightened modern
nations maintain order not chiefly by force but by other means. These
include social pressure implemented by surveillance, a claim identified
with Anthony Giddens, and a sense of group identity fostered by
collective textual imagination, a notion championed by Benedict
Anderson. To speak briefly to each: Surveillance without coercion
would be toothless. Where surveillance compels response, its targets
recognize explicitly or implicitly the physical force behind it.
Second, not textual communities but communities of blood unite their
members sacrificially. The holiest of religious holidays do not
celebrate literature but blood symbolically framed as birth or death. Texts may
describe blood sacrifice and may be useful instruments in the formation
of national consciousness for that reason. But textual communities do
not physically fight for their members. Only communities bound in blood
do this.
What precipitates the large-scale ritual sacrifice
we call war? Totem crisis, a term we adapt from Rene Girard's notion of
sacrificial crisis, sets it in motion (39-67). A totem crisis occurs
when there is uncertainty about any of the essential borders that
demarcate our group. When territorial borders are breached and no
longer differentiate Us from Them, there may be a totem crisis. Or
there may be uncertainty because persons inside or outside the
territorial border usurp the prerogative of the totem god and kill our
own. In both conditions totem legitimacy is re-established only by
sacrificing our own--in the successful case, enough of us to make an
offering of real value. Sacrifice restores totem authority and
reconsolidates the group. This is why we die for the flag and commit
our children to do so. To resolve totem crisis, the totem must
re-create its exclusive killing authority out the very flesh of its members. Blood is the group bond. Blood sacrifice at the border, or war, is the
holiest ritual of the nation-state.(7)
To admit that we kill our own is unacceptable, for
if there is not shared agreement about who will be sacrificed, violence
may become chaotic instead of ordered; the group may be destroyed. To
keep the sacrificial secret, an acceptable pretext to slaughter group
members must be created. What Girard calls the ritual victim constitutes this pretext. In the nation-group context, this is the enemy. In addition to a ritual victim, a second or surrogate victim
must stand in for members of our group against whom
we have real grievances.(8) As a
group we agree to kill members of a surrogate-victim sacrificial class
expressly created for the purpose. Upon it we displace our anger at
other members of our group. The ritual victim gives us an acceptable
reason to kill our own. The surrogate victim is constituted in the
portion of our group that we kill. The priestly class that trains for
sacrifice at the hands of the American nation-group is the military.
Soldiers live apart in monastic orders that discipline and purify
themselves for ultimate sacrifice. The knowledge that the true object of
sacrificial violence is ourselves is separated from devotees, as sacred
things are, whenever it threatens to surface explicitly.
What does successful ritual sacrifice accomplish?
After enough bloodletting, the slate of internal hostilities is wiped
clean. The group begins again. The external threat is met. Our bad
feelings toward one another are purged. Time begins anew, space is
re-consecrated. The group basks for a while in the unanimity of its
effort, until internal hostilities accumulate once more, and the entire
cycle must be repeated. Thus, what constitutes the nation in any moment
is the memory of the last successful blood sacrifice that counts for living group members. In the United States this is World War II, fast receding
in its effect as a national unifier as those who carry its body memory
become a smaller and smaller proportion of the population. Lacking that
memory, we must search for new sacrifices, while agonizing over our
internal disunity.
Not all wars are successful blood sacrifice rituals.
Some imperil rather than consolidate the group bond. Blood sacrifice
rituals that give rise to enduring unity within the group must satisfy
the following conditions. Since most do not, their success is qualified
to that extent.
All important things in society are ritualized. The prototype ritual of nation-state cohesion is popular war, though other rituals count. These include presidential elections, sending soldiers off to war, and welcoming them home again. These national rituals also organize and express group identity, but blood sacrifice is the most potent. This is because it is body-transforming. In the system of nationalism mass media perform the same functions that sacred and priestly texts perform in other religious systems. They recall central moments of group identity, rehearse ritual and mythic structures for believers, and pull from the flux of daily life what is grist for the mill of religious nationalism. The view that media are a reduced or corrupted ritual form is mistaken insofar as this is a claim that media rituals have replaced, badly, something else. The something else is blood sacrifice, the central rite of nation-groups. Media are instrumental in reporting blood sacrifice and assembling congregations who acquire knowledge of group threats and sacrificial occasions, and are socialized into the proper execution of ritual forms by media. Nationalism is the religion; among the vehicles available to ritualize it are media. Our central points about ritual as it pertains to nationalism are these:
The organizing structures that interest us are
exclusive neither to the United States nor Christianity. They are
totemic. The representation of national blood sacrifice in totem terms
was visible on Israeli television following the assassination of Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November, 1995. We will briefly address
some of its features. In the greater vulnerability of Israel's
territorial boundaries and the loss of a traditional ritual enemy the
Oslo peace accords posed a genuine totem crisis for Israelis. In the
period leading up to Rabin's assassination that peril was ritually
expressed in angry images of dissent portraying the Prime Minister in
Palestinian headdress and, alternatively, in SS uniform. Protest that
blurred distinctions among group members in relation to traditional Others
conveyed dissenters' belief that traditional group boundaries and
definitions were at risk. A vulnerable group may precipitate the sacrifice of a group leader who has staked his all on embodying it, though this sacrifice may take many forms besides assassination, including electoral defeat.(11) The bloody assassination of Rabin
instantly became a ritual focus for renewing national unity and shoring
up the group's sense of itself through demonstrations of collective rededication to the idea for which Rabin was assassinated.
Would the incremental unity achieved by this blood
sacrifice endure? The assassination was not a popular war in which the blood
sacrifice of soldiers directly touches many families. But, as Prime
Minister, Rabin had a para-family relationship to every member of the
group. He was a willing sacrifice just as a soldier is, and for the
same reason. As the most exalted member of the totem class, his job was to bear the burdens of the group and sacrifice
himself to it when called to do so. Within hours of the assassination
Acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres appeared on television to assure
group members that the sacrifice had been willing. On the last day of
his life, said Peres, the usually dour Israeli Prime Minister had been
happy and serene. He had his fate willingly.
A prominent element in the ritual reconstruction of
the assassination was the lyric sheet for a peace song sung by the Prime
Minister minutes before his death. Blood from the fatal wounds soaked the lyric sheet. The story of this relic was endlessly repeated
in media and recounted at the funeral by Rabin's closest aide, who displayed it for devotees. It performed the same ritual function of the flag soaked in
battlefield blood of American sacrificial myth. Both embody the spirit
of the soldier sacrificed for the group idea, in this case, peace with
Israel's neighbors.
But the sacrifice was imperfect. Rabin's assassination
was not unanimous victimage. Though his death may have been the real or
fantasized wish of many group members, it was not the articulated resolve of the group, as in a
popular war in which citizens are moved to declare that they offer their children for sacrifice. Imperfect sacrifice risks exposing the totem
secret. The knowledge that the group cannibalizes itself to survive is group-threatening. Seven months after the assassination, Israelis overturned the Labor government that had cast itself as inheriting Rabin's policies. They did so uncertainly. Less than a single per cent of the vote separated the two major candidates amid significant gains by splinter parties. The sacrifice of Rabin, followed by a series of suicide bombings whose casualties were enough to imperil totem unity but not enough for a full-scale war, left the country muddled and searching for a unifying vision. In totem terms the prognostication was that more sacrifice would be required before a defining sacrifice could be declared.
Conclusion
Cohesion in enduring groups is accomplished within a
framework of violence as a structural rather than contingent social
force, religion as the truth that we are willing to die for, and
the re-presentation of society to itself through blood sacrifice rituals
performed on the bodies of supplicants. The most powerful expression of
this religious framework in the United States, and perhaps not only
there, is nationalism. On the surface, we deny nationalism's religious
attributes and functions in order to keep the the killing authority of
the group from being challenged by sectarian faiths that have been
stripped of the power to sacrifice the lives of devotees. When these
faiths or others do challenge totem power, a totem that wishes to endure
must fend them off decisively. This means by killing its own, if
necessary. If it does not act, a new enforcer may overthrow it.
Our analysis is not a brief in favor of violence or against it.
It is an argument about the structural role of violence in organizing
and maintaining enduring groups. It is clear that human beings suffer greatly from violence. The practice of non-violence does not avoid suffering or end violence; it redistributes both. Answering violence with non-violence may be no less painful and destructive in its effects on individuals and groups. Similarly, benefits may accompany both violence and non-
violence in the form of group unity and survival. It may be troubling
to realize that there are no absolute formulas for achieving peace and
goodness, such as total reliance on the precept never to act violently.
In the language of sectarian religion, our dilemma is that we are never without sin, which is to
say, violence, even when we give up our own bodies, or our children's, to the violence of others.
The traditional esteem in which we hold non-violent sacrifice to the
forces of violence is misleading to this extent: conventional
interpretations of non-violence obscure and conceal the violent authority that demands
sacrifice and perpetrates violence against supplicants or their perceived enemies, even when both parties offer themselves willingly. We are meant not to notice. The secret keeps us together.
Carolyn Marvin is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa 19104. David W. Ingle is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Widener University, Chester, Pa 19013.
*This article is based on our forthcoming book, Capturing the Flag: The Symbolic Structure of Nationalism. The authors gratefully thank Martin E. Marty for comments on an earlier version delivered as a plenary session at the "Conference on Media, Relgion and Culture," sponsored by the Lilly Endowment and the World Association for Christian Communication, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Jan. 11-14, 1996. The authors also thank David Park for unstinting assistance in preparing the manuscript.
