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Review Essay: Religion, War, and the Meaning of America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Harry S. Stout
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Abstract

The norm of American national life is war. From colonial origins to the present, Americans have never seen a generation that was not preoccupied with wars, threats of wars, and military interventions on foreign soils. This is not something Americans—or American historians—are trained to think about. In American memory and mythology, the United States is, at heart, a nation of peace; it unleashes the quiver of war as a last resort and only when pushed. In like manner religion, especially what we now call evangelical Protestantism, has been a conspicuous presence in American wars from the seventeenth century to the present. American wars are sacred wars and American religion, with some notable exceptions, is martial at the very core of its being. The ties between war and religion are symbiotic and the two grew up inextricably intertwined.

Type
Review Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 275 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2009

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References

Notes

1. For a classic account of the role of “manifest destiny” throughout American history, see Weinberg, Albert K., Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935)Google Scholar.

2. See Stout, Harry S., Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006)Google Scholar.

3. For classic accounts of the Monroe Doctrine and its aftermath, see Bemis, Samuel Flagg, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York: Knopf, 1949)Google Scholar; and May, Ernest R., The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

4. See Stout, , Upon the Altar of the Nation, 191–93Google Scholar.

5. Quoted in Friedman, Leon, The Law of War: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1972), 1: xix Google Scholar.

6. These totals do not include covert activities, blockades, proxy wars, assassinations, or the threats of war for geopolitical gain (as in President James K. Polk's famous threat to England, “fifty-four forty or fight!” to acquire the Pacific Northwest).

7. Butler, Jon, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90 (March 2004): 1357–1478 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Among the texts I examined are: Albanese, Catherine L., America, Religions and Religion, 2d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992)Google Scholar; Butler, Jon, Wacker, Grant, and Balmer, Randall, Religion in American Life: A Short History, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Corbett, Julia Mitchell, Religion in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990)Google Scholar; Hudson, Winthrop S. and Corrigan, John, Religion in America, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1992)Google Scholar; Handy, Robert T., A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Williams, Peter W., America's Religions: Traditions and Cultures (New York: Macmillan, 1990)Google Scholar; Marty, Martin E., Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984)Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., Religion and American Culture (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)Google Scholar; and Scott, Edwin Gaustad, and Schmidt, Leigh, The Religious History of America (San Francisco: Harper, 2002)Google Scholar. I did not include Mark Noll's exhaustive A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) because it restricts its coverage to Christianity.

9. See Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. The evolution of this transformation is traced in Stout, Harry S. and Taylor, Robert M. Jr., “Studies of Religion in American Society: The State of the Art,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Stout, Harry S. and Hart, D. G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–50 Google Scholar.

11. Hudson and Corrigan, Religion in America.

12. Corbett, , Religion in America, 298 Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 254.

14. Butler, , Wacker, , and Balmer, , Religion in American Life, 424 Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., 231–43. In some texts, Lincoln's religion appears as a proxy for the Civil War. For similar coverage, see Gaustad, and Schmidt, , The Religious History of America, 194–96Google Scholar; Williams, , America's Religions, 183 Google Scholar; or Handy, , A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada, 267–68Google Scholar. Elsewhere I have attempted to explore the religious meaning of the Civil War in Upon the Altar of the Nation.

16. Butler, , Wacker, , and Balmer, , Religion in American Life, 323–429 Google Scholar.

17. Gaustad, and Schmidt, , The Religious History of America, 324–28Google Scholar; and Marty, , Pilgrims in Their Own Land, 365, 474–76Google Scholar.

18. Williams, , America's Religions, 144 Google Scholar.

19. For example, see Jewett, Robert, The Captain America Complex: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

20. Richard Hofstadter is generally credited with coining the term “consensus,” in which he pointed to “the defense of freedom as the thread that wove American history.” See especially Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948). For descriptions of “progressive” and “consensus” historiography, see Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1973); and Novick, That Noble Dream.

21. See Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

22. For works exploring American civil religion by historians and sociologists, see, for example: Bellah, Robert N., The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Cherry, Conrad, ed., God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971)Google Scholar; Hudson, Winthrop S., Nationalism and Religion in America: Concepts of American Identity and Mission (New York: Harper and Row, 1970)Google Scholar; Jewett, The Captain America Complex; Mead, Sidney E., The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1975)Google Scholar; Richey, Russell E. and Jones, Donald G., eds., American Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar; Strout, Cushing, The New Heavens and New Earth: Political Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation; Wilson, John F., Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Moorhead, James H., American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation.

23. To be clear, other texts include the term “civil religion,” most notably Marsden's Religion and American Culture, 42–45. But none organize their text around a co-equal American civil religion existing alongside of particular denominations and American “religions.”

24. Albanese, , America, Religions and Religion, 434 Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., 439. See also Albanese, Catherine L., Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

26. Albanese, , America, Religions and Religion, 454–55Google Scholar.

27. Ibid., 458. In their most recent edition of Religion in America, Hudson and Corrigan differ from Albanese, noting “civil religion is far from dead” (428).

28. While Albanese chooses not to trace the causative links between war and civil religion, she does address the (international) “religion” of American popular culture, with a particular emphasis on film, sports, rock and roll music, and nature religion (463–500). In fact, both are crucial dimensions of the religious meaning of America.