U.S. war-culture, sacrifice, and salvation

Abstract

U.S. War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation by Kelly Denton-Borhaug. Equinox Publishing, 2011. Paper, viii + 279 pages, $29.95. ISBN: 9781845537111Many peace educators have struggled with pervasiveness of war and violence in this world. Too often it seems that, in popular consciousness, unchallenged assumption is that this pervasiveness translates into a situation where violence becomes a necessary and natural means to fight fire with fire. According to biblical theologian, Walter Wink, this response is underlain by a false belief in of redemptive violence, briefly that violence can save and bring about peace. In present volume, Kelly Denton-Borhaug convincingly shows that U.S. war culture is buttressed by this belief. In particular, she draws our attention to how a discourse of necessity of sacrifice, both in terms of military service and ways of understanding Jesus' death on cross, reinforce each other in U.S. context, monopolistically serving to quell dissenting and alternative positions.In forming her argument, Denton-Borhaug provides many examples that show how militarism is connected not only to industry in United States, but also to film, video gaming, education, and other aspects of culture. She also cites predominance of a penal substitution model of atonement in popular Christianity. Namely, this model is centered on view that to open a path for salvation, Jesus needed to die for us in order to pay a debt (or serve penalty) that was required as a matter of justice because of human sin. Here, Denton-Borhaug makes link with way soldiers' deaths have been explained throughout U.S. history as a necessary sacrifice, in order to protect freedom at home (in particular) and abroad. Not only are war and death of U.S. soldiers required outcomes within this framing but deaths of enemy combatants and civilians in theatre of combat also become necessary. The absence of loved ones serving or dying abroad is also often represented within language of necessary sacrifice. Additionally, massive military budgets are justified in similar terms, even as social programming is cut or ill-funded in favor of the needs national security.The end result of these intersections, perhaps not surprisingly, given an all-volunteer army, is that it is those on margins of U.S. society who most often pay highest cost of military culture. Bearing brunt of an unequally shared sacrifice are representatives of lowest socio-economic groups who are disproportionately represented in terms of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq even as those same groups are squeezed by lack of a wider social safety net at home. At same time, military contractors grow wealthy and those who directly choose to send troops into war remain aloof from immediate dangers of armed conflict. Lest some might be tempted to think that rhetoric and effects of myth of sacrifice are problems particular to one side on political divide in United States, Denton-Borhaug cites both Republican and Democratic use of sacrificial language when praising dead soldiers' valor, justifying necessity of particular wars, and acknowledging sacrifice of loved ones via images of homes with empty chairs at dinner table. …