WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH
When I recently gave a talk titled “Does Religion Cause Violence?” at a college, someone scrawled on a poster for the lecture the single word “Duh!” The idea that religion has a peculiar tendency to cause or aggravate violence has taken on the status of a truism in Western society. The idea is constantly repeated in the academy, court decisions, media coverage, and everyday parlance. The political corollary of this idea is the notion that religion must be tamed, removed to the private from the public sphere for the sake of peace. In the United States, for example, the dangers of religion in public have been cited repeatedly by the Supreme Court in banning public school prayer and public aid to parochial schools. In US foreign policy, the assumption is often made that Muslim social orders are especially prone to violence because they have not yet learned to domesticate religion in public life.
The idea that religion is essentially prone to violence depends on the idea that there is an essence of religion that is unchanging over time and space. Religion is seen as a transhistorical and transcultural feature of human life, whose outward forms exhibit a bewildering variety, but whose inward essence permits the identification of religion as such wherever and whenever it is found. A preference for secular social orders appears in this view as natural, because it corresponds to a universal and timeless truth about the inherent dangers of religion.
What happens to the idea that religion has an inherent tendency to promote violence, however, if we find that there is no such transhistorical and transcultural feature of human life, and religion is in fact a constructed reality of a peculiarly modern and Western vintage? Constructivist views of religion, such as those found throughout this volume, have opened us up to seeing that the concept of religion as such has a history that is tied up with the modern West, and therefore also carries with it a certain politics. In this chapter I will explore the history and politics of the idea that there is a transhistorical and transcultural feature of human life called “religion” that is inherently prone to violence. In the first section, I will argue that the religious/secular distinction arose as an ideological accompaniment of the triumph of the modern state over the medieval ecclesiastical order. In the second section, I will discuss the origins of the idea of religious violence in the tale of the “Wars of Religion,” a tale that does not stand up to historical scrutiny. In the third section, I will argue that the modern nation-state, rather than marginalizing the sacred, took on its trappings, especially in establishing a monopoly on violence. In the fourth and final section, I will contend that a constructivist view of religion can help to analyze and resist the violence done by the religious/secular distinction. This chapter is only a brief précis of ideas I develop at much greater length in my book The Myth of Religious Violence.1
WHY WAS RELIGION CREATED?
The primary use of the term religio in the medieval period was to distinguish religious from secular clergy, that is, clergy that belonged to orders from diocesan clergy. This is the meaning religion had when it entered the English language. In 1400, the religions of England were the various orders—Benedictines, Franciscans, and so on.2 A secondary use of religio in the medieval period was to refer—as in Aquinas—to one of the nine subvirtues attached to the cardinal virtue of justice.3 In this sense, religio approximated “piety,” but only as a bodily habit embedded in a complex set of practices within a Christian social order. Religio was not a universal genus of which Christianity was a species, it was not a system of beliefs, it was not merely interior to the human person, and it was not something separable from politics, economics, and other pursuits deemed “secular” in modernity.
The concept of religion as a universalized and interiorized human impulse, expressing itself in beliefs held on a nonrational basis, and essentially different from secular pursuits like politics, is a creation of Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, not coincidentally, is also the period of the rise of the modern state. Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, Herbert of Cherbury, John Locke, and many others contributed to the creation of a religious/secular distinction into which all human activities should be divided. The creation of religion was a product of the early modern struggle between civil and ecclesiastical authorities for power in Europe. Whereas medieval Christendom had subordinated civil to ecclesiastical authorities, at least in theory, in the early modern period civil authorities were largely successful in curbing ecclesiastical power and establishing the modern reality of state sovereignty. Key to this process was the confinement of the church’s proper area of concern to an interiorized human impulse called “religion” that is essentially distinct from politics, the proper concern of the state.
For Locke, for example, religion was a matter of “opinion” not adjudicable by public reason. Locke wanted a sharp separation between the “outward force” of the state and the inward persuasion of religion, which is the province of the church. “The end of a religious society … is the public worship of God and, by means thereof, the acquisition of eternal life. All discipline ought therefore to tend to that end, and all ecclesiastical laws to be thereunto confined. Nothing ought nor can be transacted in this society relating to the possession of civil and worldly goods.”4 Locke does not appear to think that his attempt to “distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion”5 is involved in the creation of something new. He sees himself as trying to separate two essentially distinct types of human endeavor that have gotten mixed up together, mainly by the ambitions of churchmen. The church, whose only business is religion, has overstepped its boundaries: “The church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in everything perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other.”6
In fact, Locke was witnessing a very new configuration of power, the birth of the modern state, which was proving that the boundaries were certainly not fixed and immovable. Locke’s claim that they are essentially fixed gives legitimacy to the new order by making it appear natural. The idea of religion as transhistorical and transcultural and the idea that the religious/secular boundary is fixed and immutable are themselves part of the new configuration of power that comes about with the birth of the modern state. In this view, religion appears not as what the church is left with once it has been stripped of earthly power, but as the timeless endeavor to which the church’s pursuits should always have been confined. We might want to say that the modern separation of church and state is a good thing. But we should not ignore the way that the term “religion” carries not merely descriptive but normative political power.
THE BLACK LEGEND OF THE “WARS OF RELIGION”
The idea that religion has a tendency to promote violence followed closely upon the creation of the idea of religion as an essentially private and nonrational human impulse. The labeling of the European wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “Wars of Religion” is found already in Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other early modern theorists of the modern state. For all of them, the chief reason for the wars was pointless squabbling between Catholics and Protestants over religious doctrine. As Locke put it, the unwillingness to tolerate the religious opinions of others “has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world upon account of religion.”7 These disputes would be harmless but for the way that the churches have sought to use coercive political power to enforce their doctrinal opinions. The solutions offered by political theorists vary, but they tend to center on the state’s appropriation of powers hitherto claimed by the church. Hobbes would do away with doctrinal dispute by absorbing the churches into the state and making the state the undisputed arbiter of doctrinal disputes. Similarly, Spinoza’s state would absorb the church, while putting greater emphasis on the individual’s complete liberty to believe whatever he or she would about mere doctrine. Voltaire and Rousseau would favor a compulsory civil religion of public cult and morals, while leaving the individual similarly free in matters of belief. Locke would establish clear boundaries between the proper business of the church, which is religious doctrine and rites, and the proper business of the state, which claims a monopoly on violence and jurisdiction over the civil interests of society. What they all have in common is a significant reduction of the public power of the church, and a complementary augmentation of the power of the state, justified by the need to defuse the threat of further religious wars.
Although they continue to use the phrase “Wars of Religion,” historians often note that the tale of religious zealotry run amok told by political theorists hardly does justice to the actual wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most oft-reviled “War of Religion,” the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), for example, was largely a struggle between Catholic France and the Catholic Habsburgs of Germany and Spain. The Catholic Cardinal Richilieu of France supported Lutheran Sweden, which in turn attacked Lutheran Denmark. Historians tend to deal with such facts by recognizing the presence of political and economic factors alongside religion in these wars. What a constructivist view of religion helps us to see, however, is that it is pointless to try to divide up responsibility for the violence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe among different discrete factors called “politics,” “economics,” “religion,” and so on, because such distinctions are anachronistic. The Eucharist, for example, was not a purely “religious” phenomenon, but was a powerful locus of social and political cohesion. When King Francis I of France reacted violently to anonymous Calvinist placards attacking the Catholic Eucharist in 1534, it was not a purely “religious” controversy; Francis saw the placards as a threat to social order and to his authority. In the sixteenth century, there simply was no neat distinction between religion and politics. According to John Bossy, religion is not fully formed as a separate concept until around 1700.8 Any attempt to assign the cause of the wars in question to “religion”—as opposed to politics or other “secular” causes—will get bogged down in hopeless anachronism. The same, of course, is true of attempts to pin the blame on political and economic causes as opposed to religion. We might best say something like what Axel Oxenstierna—Gustavus Adolphus’s chancellor and architect of the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years’ War—told the Swedish council of state in 1636: the war was “not so much a matter of religion, but rather of saving the status publicus, wherein religion is also comprehended.”9 There is simply no way to isolate “religion” as the source of the conflict from the whole fabric of the status publicus. It is clear that the standard narrative of the “Wars of Religion” will not stand up to scrutiny of the term “religion.”
The point is not that the concept of “religion” was simply absent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but that the distinction between religion and social or political factors was in the process of development as new forms of power—what would become known as the “state”—were developing. The modern idea of religion as a realm of human activity inherently separate from politics and other “secular” matters depended upon a new configuration of Christian societies in which many legislative and jurisdictional powers and claims to power—as well as claims to the devotion and allegiance of the people—were passing from the church to the new sovereign state. The secular/religious binary helped facilitate this shift. The noun “secularization” as it first appeared in France in the late sixteenth century meant “the transfer of goods from the possession of the Church into that of the world.”10 The new conception of religion helped facilitate the shift to state dominance over the church by distinguishing inward religion from the bodily disciplines of the state. The new subject is thus able to do due service to both church and state, without conflict. Certain interests promoted this process, while others resisted it.
If this is true, then the idea put forth by political theorists that the rise of the modern state rescued Europe from the scourge of religious wars becomes highly dubious. The modern state was not simply a response to the advent of religious difference in the Reformation and the subsequent violence that religious difference unleashed. If the Reformation itself was at least in part an effect of the ongoing struggle for power and authority between church and civil rulers—which had been going on for quite some time before Luther nailed his ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg—then the transfer of power from the church to the state was not so much a solution to the wars in question, but a cause of those wars. The so-called Wars of Religion were fought by state-building elites for the purpose of consolidating their power over the church and other rivals. The point here is not that these wars were really about politics and not really about religion. The point is that the very distinction of politics and religion made possible by the rise of the modern state against the decaying medieval order—the transfer of power from the church to the state—was itself at the root of these wars.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the aggregation of power by the emergent state was a cause, not the solution, to these wars. The process of state-building, begun well before the Reformation, was inherently conflictual. Beginning in the late medieval period, the process involved the internal integration of previously scattered powers under the aegis of the ruler, and the external demarcation of territory over against other states. As Heinz Schilling comments, the invention of sovereignty demanded both the “integration and concentration of all political, social, economic and other power under the supremacy of the ruler,” and “at the same time the process of state-building meant territorial integration and a dissociation from the ‘outside’ world, which as a rule was implemented in an offensive, not infrequently even aggressive manner. All the states of the early modern age aimed to augment their state territory through expansion and the annexation of as much territory as possible.” Schilling continues:
The internal process of state-building was no different to the external one and the accompanying birth of the early modern Europe of the great powers was accompanied by massive disruptions. Internally the rulers and their state elites used violent means against the estates, cities, clergy and local associations which laid claim to an independent, non-derived right of political participation which the early modern state could no longer grant under the principle of sovereignty. Externally in addition to the above-mentioned tendencies of territorial adjustment between the states, conflicts were mainly over “rank,” since at this stage there was no generally acknowledged system of states. Therefore, at the end of the middle ages, Europe entered a long phase of intense violent upheaval both within and between states.11
The link between state-building and war has been well documented by historians of the early modern state. Charles Tilly has shown how building a state depended on the ability of state-making elites to make war, and the ability to make war in turn depended on the ability to extract resources from the population, which in turn depended on an effective state bureaucracy to secure those resources from a recalcitrant population. As Tilly puts it, “War made the state, and the state made war.”12 Much of the violence of the so-called Wars of Religion is explained in terms of the resistance of local elites to the state-building efforts of monarchs and emperors. As Michael Howard writes,
The attempts by the dominant dynasties of Europe to exercise disputed rights of inheritance throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became consolidated, in the sixteenth century, into a bid by the Habsburgs to sustain a hegemony which they had inherited over most of western Europe against all their foreign rivals and dissident subjects, usually under the leadership of France. The result was almost continuous warfare in western Europe from the early sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth centuries.13
THE RELIGION OF THE STATE
Constructivist readings of religion help us to see not only that religion has a history, but also that religion has a politics. Constructivism argues that there is no transhistorical and transcultural religion out there; what counts as religion in any given context depends upon how power is configured in that context. The idea that there is a transhistorical and transcultural feature of human life called “religion” that has a tendency to promote violence is not only historically false; it is also politically useful. The creation of religion and the myth of religious war helped facilitate the transfer of power and loyalty to the state in early modern Europe, and helped establish the idea that the rise of the state was the solution to the wars, rather than a significant cause of them.
The common myth of religious violence claims that the modern state tamed religion by removing it from the public sphere. In fact, however, the state was not secularized but sacralized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As John Neville Figgis wrote, “the religion of the State has replaced the religion of the Church.”14 The end of the so-called Wars of Religion found the rapidly aggrandizing states of Europe appropriating the trappings of sanctity from the church, a process that had already begun in France well before the Reformation. What David Potter calls a “royal religion” developed in France in which the king was seen as both priest and the image of God on earth.15 In England, Elizabeth I suppressed celebrations of Corpus Christi and appropriated significant symbolic aspects of the feast with herself substituting for the Eucharistic Host.16 At the same time, martyrdom pro patria eclipsed martyrdom pro fide.17 In short, the transfer of power from the church to the state that occasioned the creation of religion also accompanied what Bossy calls the “migration of the holy” from the church to the state.18
Even if we concede that the early modern state took on the trappings of the sacred, is it not now the case, with the advent of liberal, secular, social orders in the last two centuries, that the Western world has finally vanquished religion? To the contrary, there is a large body of scholarship that considers modern nationalism as a religion, and the debate over “civil religion” in the United States captures the same sense that liberal nation-states reproduce some of the same dynamics as confessional states. For example, Carlton Hayes, author of the book Nationalism: A Religion,19 argues that the decline in public Christianity with the advent of the modern state left a vacuum for the religious sense that was filled by the sacralization of the nation, the “enthronement of the national state—la Patrie—as the central object of worship.”20 Robert Bellah famously identified “an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America” that “has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.”21 Bellah argued that the civic rituals of American life revolve around a unitarian God that underwrites America’s sense of purpose in the world. This God, however, is not the Christian God. References to Christ and the church are kept to a private, voluntary sphere of worship.22 The implication of Bellah’s argument is that the separation of church and state in America is not the separation of religion and state. Similarly, Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle identify the flag as the totem object of American civil religion and argue that “nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States, and perhaps in many other countries.”23
According to Marvin and Ingle, the transfer of the sacred from Christianity to the nation-state in Western society is seen most clearly in the fact that authorized killing has passed from Christendom to the nation-state. Christian denominations still thrive in America, but as optional, inward-looking affairs. They are not publicly true, “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.”24 The nation and the flag are the only things publicly recognized as worth killing and dying for. For most American Christians today, for example, it would be inconceivable to kill for Christianity, but the occasional necessity of organized slaughter on behalf of the nation-state is generally taken for granted.
If this is true, then there is simply no good reason to accept the notion that there is something called “religion” which is inherently prone to violence in ways that “secular” ideologies and institutions are not. The supposedly secular nation-state can and does inspire violence on a massive scale. What the World War I poet Wilfred Owen called “the old Lie” came back with a vengeance in the twentieth century: “Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori.” Although it may be true that Christians, for example, profess that God is absolute in a way that the nation-state is not, what matters is behavior—especially behavior during wartime—and not simply belief. In other traditions and other contexts, what people will kill and die for may be different. The point is simply that there is no a priori reason to assume that ideologies and institutions that are commonly identified as religious inspire more violence than those identified as secular. People use violence for all sorts of reasons. An adequate approach to the question of violence would be resolutely empirical: Under what circumstances do ideologies and institutions of all kinds encourage violence? We should examine jihad and the sacrificial Christian theologies, but we should also examine ideologies of freedom and the “invisible hand” of the market and the role of the United States as worldwide liberator.
A CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH
Is the term “religion” helpful at all in such an investigation? Carlton Hayes and Marvin and Ingle continue to use the term in a functional way to argue that nationalism really is a religion because it functions to reinforce a certain kind of social order. For functionalists, what matters is not what people believe but how they believe. It does not matter that the flag does not refer to a god; if it is treated as a sacred object and is a central symbolic point for the configuration of power in a society, then it is a religious object.
Functionalist approaches to religion and violence are helpful because they don’t rely on arbitrary religious/secular distinctions. Functionalist approaches expand our critical lenses beyond the usual lists of “world religions”—Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and so on—to include other ideologies and institutions like “secular” nationalism that also focus killing energies in similar ways. However, insofar as functionalism continues to regard religion as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon—albeit a much more inclusive one than previously thought—functionalism is less helpful. A constructivist approach would not bother with trying to decide, once and for all, what is and is not a religion. What matters for the constructivist in any given context is why some things are called religion and some things are not. What configurations of power are authorized by the different ways that “religious” and “secular” are used?
Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist acknowledged, in supporting a proposed amendment against “desecration” of the flag, that the flag is regarded by Americans “with an almost mystical reverence.”25 Here the word “almost” is crucial, for American civil religion must deny that it is religion. Marvin and Ingle ask, and attempt to answer, the key question:
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. The god is inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But that god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice.26
Marvin and Ingle treat nationalism as a real religion, according to their definition.27 But whether or not nationalism is really a religion is beside the point. What is crucial is the question they ask: Why deny it is a religion? Why affirm it? What is authorized by either the denial or the affirmation? Why is it acceptable in some contexts for Abraham Lincoln to say that reverence for the Constitution is “the political religion of the nation”?28 Why, in other contexts, is the American constitutional order held as the model of “secular” government? With regard to the question of violence, why is violence on behalf of the Muslim umma religious, but violence on behalf of the American nation-state is secular? What is gained or lost by the insistence that violence on behalf of America is of a fundamentally different nature from violence on behalf of Islam?
To answer these types of questions is simply to trace the uses to which the myth of religious violence has been put. For example, since 1940 the idea that public religion is dangerous and divisive has been invoked by the US Supreme Court in case after case, in decisions banning school prayer, forbidding voluntary religious instruction on public school property, forbidding state aid to parochial school teachers, and so on. One such case is the 1963 Abington decision forbidding public school prayer. In dissent, Justice Potter Stewart famously warned that the decision would be seen “not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism.”29 Stewart noted the long history of government religious practice in the United States, including the fact that the Supreme Court opened its sessions with “God save this Honorable Court.” In their concurring opinion in Abington, however, Justices Goldberg and Harlan addressed this objection by drawing a sharp line between patriotic invocations of God and “religious” ones.
There is of course nothing in the decision reached here that is inconsistent with the fact that school children and others are officially encouraged to express love for our country by reciting historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence that contain references to the Deity or by singing officially espoused anthems that include the composer’s professions of faith in a Supreme Being, or with the fact that there are many manifestations in our public life of belief in God. Such patriotic or ceremonial occasions bear no true resemblance to the unquestioned religious exercise that the state has sponsored in this instance.30
Goldberg and Harlan offer no reason why patriotic invocations of God bear no true resemblance to religious invocations. But it is clear that, for them, what separates religion from what is not religion is not the invocation of God. God may be invoked in public ceremonies without such ceremonies thereby becoming religious exercises, provided such ceremonies express “love for our country.” Separating religion from nonreligion in this case depends not on the presence or absence of expressions of faith in God, but on the presence or absence of expressions of faith in the United States of America. Again, we see how the religious/secular distinction and the myth of religious violence are part of the legitimating conceptual apparatus of the modern Western nation-state.
The idea that religion must be separated from public power for the sake of peace also influences much American foreign policy. Muslim societies are seen as essentially problematic because they lack a proper separation between religion and the secular. Indeed, to call Islam a “religion” is immediately to mark it as an abnormal religion, because it does not make a neat distinction between religion and politics. Conflicts between Western and Islamic social orders can be explained by the inherently pathological nature of the latter. The myth of religious violence can then justify Western military action in the Islamic world. We will have peace once we have bombed the Muslims into being reasonable.
A constructivist approach to the question of religion and violence will always take a hard look at what counts as religion and what does not in any given context, and see what kinds of power—good and bad—different uses of the term authorize. A constructivist approach will be critical of all kinds of violence, taking a hard look both at Muslim-inspired violence and at the things—flags, markets, “freedom”—to which secular social orders sacrifice lives.
NOTES
1. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “religion.”
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Blackfriars (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 2–2.80–81.
4. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 22–23.
5. Ibid., 17.
6. Ibid., 27.
7. Ibid., 57.
8. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 170–71.
9. Axel Oxenstierna, quoted in Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge, 1984), 122.
10. Walther von Wartburg, “Saeculum, séculariser,” in Französiches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Basel, 1964), 11:44–46, quoted in Jan N. Brenner, “Secularization: Notes Toward a Genealogy,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 433.
11. Heinz Schilling, “War and Peace at the Emergence of Modernity: Europe Between State Belligerence, Religious Wars, and the Desire for Peace,” in 1648: War and Peace in Europe, ed. Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum, 1998), 14.
12. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42.
13. Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 15.
14. John Neville Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625 (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1960), 124.
15. David Potter, A History of France, 1460–1560: The Emergence of a Nation State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 43, 285.
16. Richard McCoy, Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 58–66.
17. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 232–72.
18. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 153–71.
19. Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960).
20. Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 100.
21. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Donald E. Jones and Russell E. Richey (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1990), 21.
22. Ibid., 28–30.
23. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (Winter 1996), 767.
24. Ibid., 769.
25. William Rehnquist, quoted in Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 30.
26. Marvin and Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation,” 770.
27. Ibid., 768. “By ‘religion’ we mean a system of cosmological propositions grounded in a belief in a transcendent power expressed through a cult of divine being and giving rise to a set of ethical prescriptions.”
28. Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2.
29. Abington Township School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), 313.
30. Abington Township, 374 U.S at 307–8.