“From Jeremiad to Jihad is an ambitious volume. The selections here introduce new perspectives on the intersection of religious institutions and American culture. Whereas the subject of just war has largely been the provenance of religious and philosophical studies, with some input from international relations and political science, the authors of this volume have brought methods and questions from the study of history to bear on the discussion. Carlson and Ebel have pulled together a significant work that fosters new conversations between scholars interested in just war and American religious history.” – John Kelsay, author of Arguing the Just War in Islam

“Why is America, one of the world’s most religious societies, also one of the most violent? In a sophisticated, thoughtful and accessible manner, the essays in this collection provide an important examination of the complexities of American character that sees the sacred as sanctioning violence and allows violence to be sanctified.” – Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence

“This is a stunning collection of essays—the single most comprehensive and wide-ranging set yet prepared. With “jeremiad” and “jihad” as their guiding tropes, the contributors brilliantly trace the life of this rhetorical strain. This volume is ideally suited for courses in religion and history as well as anyone interested in the role of religious violence in American culture and life.” – Harry S. Stout, author of Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War

John Carlson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Jon Ebel is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

From Jeremiad to Jihad

Religion, Violence, and America

By John D. Carlson, Jonathan H. Ebel

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27165-4

Contents

Foreword Martin E. Marty, ix,
Preface, xv,
Introduction. John Brown, Jeremiad, and Jihad: Reflections on Religion, Violence, and America John D. Carlson and Jonathan H. Ebel, 1,
PART ONE. RELIGIOUS ORIGINS AND TROPES OF AMERICAN VIOLENCE,
1. From King Philip’s War to September 11: Religion, Violence, and the American Way Andrew R. Murphy and Elizabeth Hanson, 29,
2. A Nation Birthed in Blood: Violent Cosmogonies and American Film S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, 48,
3. From Covenant to Crusade and Back: American Christianity and the Late Great War Jonathan H. Ebel, 62,
4. From Jeremiad to Manifesto: The Rhetorical Evolution of John Foster Dulles’s “Massive Retaliation” Ned O’Gorman, 78,
5. American Providence, American Violence Stephen H. Webb, 91,
PART TWO. RELIGION AND AMERICA’S “OTHERS”,
6. New Israel, New Amalek: Biblical Exhortations to Religious Violence John Corrigan, 111,
7. Religion and Violence in Black and White Eddie S. Glaude Jr., 128,
8. State Violence and the Un-American West: Mormons, American Indians, and Cults Todd M. Kerstetter, 143,
9. Alma White’s Bloodless Warfare: Women and Violence in U.S. Religious History Lynn S. Neal, 159,
10. Of Tragedy and Its Aftermath: The Search for Religious Meaning in the Shootings at Virginia Tech Grace Y. Kao, 177,
PART THREE. THE ETHICS OF VIOLENCE AND WAR,
11. A Just or Holy War of Independence? The Revolution’s Legacy for Religion, Violence, and American Exceptionalism John D. Carlson, 197,
12. Why War Is a Moral Necessity for America: Realism, Sacrifice, and the Civil War Stanley Hauerwas, 220,
13. Contemporary Warfare and American Efforts at Restraint James Turner Johnson, 233,
14. Enemies Near and Far: The United States and Its Muslim Allies in Radical Islamist Discourse Sohail H. Hashmi, 250,
15. Varieties of “Violence”: Thinking Ethically about the Use of Force in the War on Terror Jean Bethke Elshtain, 273,
Contributors, 285,
Index, 289,

CHAPTER 1

From King Philip’s War to September 11

Religion, Violence, and the American Way

Andrew R. Murphy and Elizabeth Hanson

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable.

—CLIFFORD GEERTZ, “RELIGION AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM”

Clifford Geertz suggests an intimate connection between religion and suffering, a problem of interpretation central to any consideration of the relationship between religion and violence more generally. This chapter examines key episodes in America’s nearly 400-year history of turning to the jeremiad to explain violence endured and sometimes to justify violence inflicted. The jeremiad is part of a longstanding American rhetorical tradition, one that understands the nation as existing in a special, covenanted relationship with God, with special purposes to accomplish in the world. Although the jeremiad did not originate in America, and is not unique to the American experience—other peoples, in many different times and places, have proven all too eager to claim sacred status for their own communities—it has played a key role in Americans’ self-understandings since the early days of colonization. The jeremiad draws its inspiration from the Hebrew prophets, who frequently lamented Israel’s violation of its covenant with God. Through the jeremiad, prophets called Israelites to repent of their sins and rededicate themselves to their covenant with God; they predicted blessings if the people reformed, and catastrophes if they did not. In like manner, many Americans, from the earliest days of colonial settlement down to the twenty-first century, have understood their nation as chosen to carry out God’s purposes in human history. Thus Americans have often interpreted their nation’s successes (including the successful exercise of violence against other peoples) as signs that God approves of the nation’s spiritual state. But a special relationship and special purposes imply special responsibilities; and thus Americans have also often interpreted episodes of violence and other misfortunes as punishment sent by God in order to chastise this chosen people for failing to live up to the terms of their covenant.

The jeremiad (and the view of history that undergirds it) is based on two crucial claims. First, the epistemological aspect of the jeremiad involves a claim that humans, with some degree of certainty, can read God’s purposes in earthly events; these events, properly interpreted, provide a way to assess the spiritual health of a given community. Second, the ethical-theological component of the jeremiad presumes that God’s purposes encompass the use of violence in the pursuit of religious and divinely ordained political ends. Somewhere in the convergence of these two assumptions lies the power of the jeremiad to accomplish what Geertz saw as religion’s central power, that of making suffering sufferable. At the same time, it can become deeply problematic when such certainty about God’s will is combined with exhortation about the moral and religious dimensions of violence. Decoupling the epistemological from the ethical-theological claims makes possible important variations on the standard jeremiadic formula, as becomes evident through a consideration of Abraham Lincoln (who questioned the jeremiad’s epistemological pillar) and Martin Luther King Jr. (who questioned its ethical-theological one). These latter variations suggest novel and creative ways of reframing how the jeremiad relates religion and violence in the American tradition.

WINTHROP’S MODEL AND THE CITY ON A HILL

Notions of a chosen America go back to the earliest days of colonization. John Winthrop’s sermon A Model of Christian Charity, delivered on board the Arbella in 1630, provides the most famous reference to the American settlement as a “city on a hill.” But Winthrop’s sermon did not simply proclaim that New England was a city on a hill. Rather, it laid out two possible scenarios for the unfolding of New England’s future. Having entered into a covenant with God, Winthrop reports, the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Company must decide whether or not to honor that covenant: “[I]f we shall neglect the observation of these articles … and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.” Failure to observe the covenant would put the community on the receiving end of holy violence, the wrath of God “break[ing] out against us.” Winthrop’s goal was to avoid this outcome, and the Model continues with a striking evocation of the social harmony and mutual forbearance that God expected of his saints in New England. In this scenario, the community will be able to overcome the violence of its enemies and to earn the praise and envy of surrounding lands: “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, `May the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” These settlements about which Winthrop was so concerned grew and flourished over the subsequent decades. But the covenant was always on the minds of the colony’s ruling elite, and, given their providentialist worldview, New Englanders often interpreted their misfortunes—crop failures, Indian attacks, diseases, and epidemics—as signs of God’s wrath at their failure to live up to the godly standards set by the founding generation. Thus was born the American jeremiad, an American variant on the long-standing rhetorical form that the Puritans brought with them from England.

In New England, the jeremiad most often appeared in the form of an occasional sermon. Authorized by the civil government, occasional sermons were delivered during significant public events. They were “solidarity rituals” that cemented religious piety and politics in one public event. Occasional sermons delivered on days of thanksgiving or of fasting and humiliation sought to express either the community’s gratitude to God for blessings, or contrition in hopes of regaining God’s favor through public acts of penitence. According to Harry S. Stout, the speaker’s goals were “not to be innovative or entertaining, but to recall for his audience the vision that first impelled New England’s mission.” During election-day sermons, another variety of the occasional sermon, New Englanders were called upon to reflect on their collective past, to rededicate themselves as a community based on a common faith, and to choose godly leaders. On more somber occasions, clergy inveighed against a society that had fallen away from its religious roots and was reaping the consequences in faction, pride, and vanity, in Indian wars and natural disasters. By restricting public oration on such important occasions to the clergy, New England civil magistrates ensured that the sermon would occupy a prominent, virtually unchallenged, status on that day.

KING PHILIP’S WAR: RELIGION AND VIOLENCE IN EARLY NEW ENGLAND

Of the clergy likely to be called on to deliver occasional sermons in the generation following Winthrop, none played a more significant role in the colonies’ public life than Increase Mather. Mather, the son of Richard Mather and son-in-law of John Cotton, both celebrated figures of early Massachusetts Bay, was a towering figure in New England society. And though he spoke in the style of a prophet, it is unlikely that Mather knew how prophetic his 1674 sermon The Day of Trouble Is Near would turn out to be. For December of that year would see the beginning of King Philip’s War, a series of catastrophic conflicts with the natives. This war, so named for the chief of the Wampanoag tribe who spearheaded the native tribes’ armed resistance to the English colonists in 1675 and 1676, has been called “the great crisis of the early period of New England history.” By war’s end fully half of the towns in New England were damaged severely, and twelve were completely laid waste; the economy was in shambles, with the colonial treasuries near bankruptcy. Hundreds of English colonists (and far more Native Americans) were dead, wounded, or in captivity.

These grim details were in the future on the day that Mather preached in Boston. What Mather saw all around him were the sins of a once-godly people and their breach of the covenant into which the colony’s founders had entered. Mather called attention to “a great decay as to the power of godliness amongst us”; spiritual and carnal pride “in apparel, fashions, and the like”; disobedience within families, churches, and the commonwealth; insensitivity to the poor; and growing contentiousness and disunity. Not only did Mather see his own generation falling short of the godliness of its parents; he feared that such a pattern was getting worse among the colony’s youth. “Churches have not so performed covenant-duties towards their children, as should have been, and especially, the rising generation have many of them broken the covenant themselves, in that they do not endeavour to come up to that which their solemn vow in baptism doth engage them to before the Lord.”

Mather took his sermon text from Ezekiel and noted that, although in scripture the Chaldeans had inflicted judgment on Israel, the ultimate source of their punishment was God, who sent the Chaldeans as punishment for the Israelites’ sins. God’s punishment was intended for a specific purpose: “that which the Lord intends by bringing his people into the furnace of affliction, is that he may make pure metal of them, yea, that they may be purged and sanctified, and become vessels meet for the master’s use.” The reason for such a spiritual declension, in Mather’s view, was clear: what was once a religiously based settlement had become infected with the poison of worldliness. “Alas! We have changed our interest. The interest of New England was religion, which did distinguish us from other English plantations; they were built upon a worldly design, but we upon a religious design, whereas now we begin to espouse a worldly interest, and so to chase a new God, therefore no wonder that war is like to be in the gates.” And yet, amidst the signs of trouble all around, Mather drew on his faith in God’s promises and his reverence for the founding generation as he voiced hope for the colony’s relationship with its God: “Our fathers have built sanctuaries for his name therein, and therefore he will not destroy us.” Not destroy, perhaps, but Mather felt sure that God was preparing to afflict New England.

Affliction came when armed hostilities began in 1675. By the spring of 1676, the Wampanoags and their allies were within ten miles of Boston. Although the jeremiadic emphasis on divine punishment had been a staple of New England public life for decades, the experience of King Philip’s War pointed out just how terrible God’s punishments could be. Between the spring of 1675 and the summer of 1676 scores of New England towns were burned, their inhabitants attacked and killed. When King Philip himself was killed in August 1676, hostilities came to a rapid conclusion. Shortly thereafter New Englanders began to produce histories of the war, trying to understand what had happened and why. One of the first came from the pen of Increase Mather. Mather’s account painted a portrait of the violence unleashed on both sides: for Mather, New England had been both a recipient of God’s violence, delivered by the Wampanoags, and an agent of divinely sanctioned violence inflicted upon the natives.

In such a providential framework, God rewarded righteousness with military victory, peace, and prosperity—and punished pride and disobedience with violence at the hands of the Indians. New Englanders ascribed any victory they enjoyed to God’s favor, rather than to their own military prowess, as when one author reported that “God (whose tender mercies are over all his works) in compassion to the English Nation in this Wildernesse, [did] wonderfully appear for our deliverance…. great numbers have surrendered themselves when by our own strength or outward Circumstances we could least expect it.” To claim success for one’s good fortune or well-being was the height of pride. All good things flowed from God. Even in the midst of the war, they lived in the hope “that (if our sins obstruct not so great a blessing) we may shortly once again see peace and safety restored to our (lately disconsolate) habitations in this Wilderness.” The rhetorical connections between New England’s righteousness, God’s will, and the outcome of the conflict played out more concretely after a Day of Public Thanksgiving in Massachusetts on June 29, 1676, when one author noted that “God himself hath sent from Heaven and saved us (for we see nothing of man, but God to be all in all) by Wasting [the Indians] with Sickness, Starving them through want of Provisions, Leaving them to their own Divisions, Taking away their Spirits, putting the Dread of us upon them, Cutting off their Principal men, Sachems and others. Blessed be his Great and Glorious Name.”

When New Englanders found themselves on the receiving end of violence, they sought to understand it by way of the same providential framework. At times God seemed to be punishing New Englanders for their waywardness by inflicting violence upon them at the hands of King Philip’s warriors. In one incident, a settler named Wright refused to seek shelter at the garrison with the other inhabitants of his town when the Indians arrived; instead, “he had a strange confidence or rather conceit, that whilest he held his Bible in his hand, he looked upon himself as secure from all kinde of violence; and that the Enemy finding him in that posture, deriding his groundlesse apprehension or folly therein, ript him open, and put his Bible in his belly.” Wright’s prideful approach to scripture provoked God’s wrath against him, making him the object of divine violence, and a cautionary example to others.

Although the example of Wright’s disembowelment made for sensational moral instruction, more typically, and in keeping with the social emphasis of the jeremiad tradition, chastening violence was interpreted by the entire community as punishment for collective sins. Even as they endeavored to mend their ways, their misfortunes at the hands of the Indians served as a yardstick by which to measure God’s anger with them. Mather noted that a “day of prayer and humiliation was observed Dec. 2, when also something happened intimating as if the Lord were still angry with our prayers, for this day all the houses in Quonsickamuck were burnt by the Indians.” Similarly, on April 20, 1676, as the churches in Boston prayed for God’s mercy in a day of humiliation, colonists in nearby Sudbury faced a grim judgment. Indians captured a number of them, “stripped them naked, and caused them to run the gauntlet, whipping them after a cruel and bloody manner, and then threw hot ashes upon them, cut out the flesh of their legs, and put fire into their wounds, delighting to see the miserable torments of wretched creatures.”

(Continues…)Excerpted from From Jeremiad to Jihad by John D. Carlson, Jonathan H. Ebel. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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