Below is Part I of Agnieszka Monnet’s important paper, "War and National Renewal: Civil Religion and Blood Sacrifice in American Culture." 

My reflections on Part I are in red.

Richard Koenigsberg
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Part I: “National Identity is Strengthened by Lives that are Lost”

Wars are often associated with a rhetoric of renewal or “new beginnings.” I would like to examine the conditions which allow war to function as an occasion for a new purchase on a shared sense of national identity and common purpose. One critical frame that brings such a proposition into focus is the sociology of religion and group identity founded by Emile Durkheim and developed in America since the 1960s in terms of the notion of civil religion.

Carolyn Marvin’s Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999) combines Durkheim’s insights with Réné Girard’s claims about the social function of ritualized sacrifice into a troubling argument (“Troubling,” meaning what? Painful to contemplate? Yes. But I can’t imagine a reviewer of Darwin’s Origin of the Species—published November 24, 1859—describing Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection as “troubling.” Only a single question about any theory: does it accurately describe reality.) about modern national cohesion as dependent on blood sacrifice.

Even if many modern nation states define themselves as quintessentially secular and legal entities, inspiring healthy patriotism (What is “healthy” patriotism? Two-hundred million people were killed in the 20^th century as a result of attachment to countries.) rather than overly emotional nationalism, they share with descent-based nationalisms a substratum of “mystical” ideals and rituals.

The most important, complex, and seemingly irrational of these is self-sacrifice for the common good or the group. (Self-sacrifice for the group, yes this is what Marvin’s book is about, as for the idea of the “common good”—200 million people killed in the 20^th Century as a result of self-sacrifice for the group. Marvin does not theorize about "the common good," or about "goodness" in general. Blood sacrifice is neither good or not good. It is the mechanism that is used to create and maintain the idea of the nation).

This willingness, closely associated with military valor and patriotic heroism, is in fact essential to the cohesiveness and endurance of any group, argue Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle in their book, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999) (yes, this is the argument of the book, but it isn’t “self-sacrifice” that Marvin is writing about, it’s Blood Sacrifice).

Without it, a nation will not be able to defend itself and will not even want to (But Marvin’s argument has nothing to do with “self-defense.” Her point--and this is what makes her an original, radical thinker--is that blood sacrifice—the death of many of one’s own people—is the very purpose of warfare).  

A nation that cannot inspire its members to lay down their life for it will inevitably fragment into clashing groups and lose its sovereignty (Yes, the book is about “human beings, soldiers in particular, laying down their lives,” articulating Marvin's theory that willingness to lay down one’s life is what holds a group together. Perhaps the current fragmentation of society relates to the fact that people are no longer willing or  passionate about sacrificing their lives for their nation).

While recognizing its central place in definitions of viable nations (those that produce a lasting sense of coherence and continuity in their populations), historians and scholars of national identity are at pains to account for the intensity of attachment that would induce individuals to die for their nation (Yes, this is a fundamental question, but is a psychological one, why people are willing to die for their nation. Monnet is correct. Historians have not accounted for the intensity of peoples’ attachment to their nations.

Isn’t it remarkable that historians have not been able to account for the single most important question underlying the historical process? Perhaps the phrase “at pains” is significant. To painful to contemplate).

Moreover, the specter of Japanese suicide pilots and Islamic airplane hijackers, whose deaths may be understood as heroic sacrifices in their own cultural contexts (actually, the dynamic is precisely the same: dying for Japan, dying for Allah, dying for Germany, dying for America—BLOOD SACRIFICE PRESERVES THE IDEOLOGY, this is Marvin's thesis...doesn't matter if we like the ideology or not, think it is good or evil. Blood sacrifice preserves the preserve the ideology in each and every case) but as terrorism in ours, complicates the work of distinguishing “appropriate” martyrdom from religious fanaticism (The term “appropriate martyrdom” is meaningless. Blood sacrifice is undertaken with the purpose of maintaining the ideology in any case. There is no distinction between appropriate martyrdom and religious sacrifice).  If, as Tom Nairn has suggested (1977), the nation is “the modern Janus,” no other aspect of national experience is more double-faced than patriotic self-sacrifice.

This essay will attempt to unpack some of the paradoxes raised by the notion of sacrifice in the context of US military history as well as the media treatment of the September 11 attacks, with a special focus on the sacred status of the flag (The flag is only a symbol for the nation. The central question is what does a nation symbolize) and the ambivalent position of the soldier (and other uniformed servicemen such as police and firefighters).

My final objective is to probe the theory of national renewal based on blood sacrifice advanced by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle by testing its explanatory power for two images that have become iconic as representations of military service and sacrifice: Rosenthal’s photo of the flag-planting at Iwo Jima and Thomas Franklin’s photo of Ground Zero.

Many nations also structure their national histories around the subsequent wars that they waged with other nations or internally. These events that organize national history and are sometimes (but far from always) associated with a regeneration of national cohesion and patriotic attachment. In the United States, the Civil War and the Second World War are widely regarded as the two most important military conflicts in terms of reorganizing national identity and renewing a sense of national purpose.

(Monnet’s analyses of the Revolutionary War and  the Civil War are among the finest I’ve read on these topics).  If America was “born” in the Revolutionary War, it is justifiable to say that it was “reborn” in the Civil War. Robert Penn Warren claimed (1961/1998) that the “The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history.” Before the Civil War, Warren contends, the United States “had no history in the deepest and most inward sense.”

John Neff has proposed (2005) that the Civil War produced two separate national ideologies which could each be called a civil religion: the Lost Cause of the South, and the “Cause Victorious” of the North.

Most historians would agree that American national self-understanding changed significantly during the Civil War. One concrete example of this transformation is the shift in usage from the plural to the singular in relation to the United States, as in “The United States is a republic” as opposed to “The United States are a republic.” This shift is generally dated to around 1861, which is to say, the beginning of the Civil War, and helped American conceptualize the entity or cause they were fighting for (on the Union side, that is).

Another example of how the Civil War helped create a sense of common national identity is the way in which it occasioned the founding of a national military cemetery system. Up until the Civil War, the bodies of slain American soldiers had not been retrieved systematically from battlefields nor been the objects of special reverence.

It was in 1862 that, for the first time, the U.S. government decided to set aside, by Act of Congress, special cemeteries to bury the bodies of those who gave their lives in defense of the Republic, and an entire network of sacred national sites was thereby created.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) is a powerful mixture of political and religious rhetoric that should serve as a point of departure for any analysis of the notion of American civil religion. Although this concept no longer inspires the same intensity of debate as it did in the decade following Robert Bellah’s influential essay on the subject in 1967, it remains a compelling framework through which to understand the emotional and quasi-mystical dimensions of American politics.

Civil religion has been defined in a variety of ways, but I use it to refer to the way in which national institutions, rituals and ideologies function like a religion: dividing the world into sacred and profane spheres, providing constituents with a sense of supra-individual transcendence and collective continuity, and offering an emotionally satisfying frame for coping with death.

If national civil religion resembles traditional religions in these three aspects, the modern nation has wrested from religion a fourth aspect that it now monopolizes completely: the power to kill non-members for the sake of its self-preservation and to ask members to die in its name. Yes, this is what nations do: kill non-members and members as we;;. Whether this is for the sake of “self-preservation in a realistic sense, is debatable. Marvin would argue that that sacrificing the lives of human beings killing is fundamentally a symbolic or psychological mechanism. The actual nature of the conflict is orthogonal to the mechanism). Currently, only the nation-state legitimately holds this right, which is why the nation can be said to have replaced religion in the social organization of death.

Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg offers a revealing blueprint of how religious notions structure American political ideology. The word “dedicated” is used seven times in this speech of 267 words. The first use is completely neutral, in the sense of “committed to” or “defined by”: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

However, in the next lines, Lincoln begins to rework the meaning of this word, pushing it steadily into a religious frame. For example, the third appearance of the term is synonymous to “consecrate” or set aside as sacred, without actually saying so explicitly: “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

To speak of “dedicating” a piece of land for burial purposes, while not in itself overtly religious, shifts the register of the term in a more religious direction by referring to an activity, that of burial, which had traditionally been a function performed by the church and not the state. Building upon this sense of the word, Lincoln repeats it once more in the next line, this time as an exact synonym of “consecrate,” and reinforces this meaning by the even more explicitly religious verb “to hallow.”

In other words, “dedication” has at least two different meanings in the Gettysburg Address: that of committing one’s self to a course of action or program, and a setting aside for religious or special purposes. When Lincoln says in the third paragraph that “we cannot dedicate” this ground, he performs a subtle but significant confusion between the two senses.

By arguing that the battle itself has “consecrated” the land, Lincoln shifts from the neutral to the religious sense of the word and moreover implies that the battle itself is somehow sacred. Sociologically, in the light of Durkheim’s theory, which locates the sacred in the experience of the collective, this makes sense, i.e. the battle is sacred because it is about the fate of the nation.

The concepts invoked here, i.e. dedication, consecration, and devotion, are used in ways that need to be understood not only for their rhetorical value, but for their ritual and performative function in the context of the official event at which they are uttered: the dedication of one of the very first war cemeteries. Lincoln was not only dedicating this one cemetery, he was defining the meaning and purpose of the war cemetery as a national institution.

In doing so, he articulated one of the most enigmatic paradoxes of national identity: namely, that it is strengthened by the lives that are lost in its name (yes, this is what Marvin’s book is about: the paradox that national identity is “strengthened” rather than weakened by lives that are lost. What do the historians have to say about this strange dynamic? Most of them are fast asleep).

The “devotion” inspired in the survivors by the sacrifice of the dead produces a “new birth of freedom,” a phrase that refigures the deaths of the soldiers (not a single word of empathy in Monnet’s paper about the actual soldiers who died; not a single word.

Seems she’s bought into the proposition that the nation is “strengthened” by lives that are lost. If men have to be slaughtered to “preserve” the nation, so be it).  into an image of birth linked to national identity through the word “freedom” (a term which vaguely but unmistakably signifies “America”).