In his review of US War Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation, David Weddle summarizes Denton-Borhaug’s argument: Deaths in battle are often “designated as sacrifice,” and therein a “powerful motivation for warfare lies.”

References to combat deaths as “necessary sacrifices” are drawn from centuries of Christian interpretation of the “Death of Jesus as required for salvation.” Warfare thus is transformed into a “sacred enterprise” devoted to saving the nation from its enemies.

Religious institutions, Denton-Borhaug says—perpetrating uncritical portrayals of Christ as the ultimate sacrifice for human salvation—“feed into war culture.” The model of the heroic offering of oneself for the salvation of others (by Christ) inspires the view of those who die in battle as “redemptive sacrifices.” Fervor for war is sustained by the pervasive “use of sacrifice to name the loss of life in battle.”

Just as Christ died to save humanity, so does the soldier die in order to save the nation. Like Christ, soldiers die so we may live. By associating Christ’s death with the deaths of fallen warriors, the wars that took their lives also became “sacred enterprises;” as valuable to patriotic piety as “the cross upon which Christ gave himself.” Jesus’ sacrifice “bleeds into and informs the meaning of the sacrifice of soldiers in war.”

In The Gospel of Nationalism (1986),  Arlie J. Hoover writes about nationalism as a religion. He theorizes that the “fluidity of the religious sense” makes it easy for human beings to switch the object of religious veneration: from the church to nation; from God to country.

Focusing on the sermons of German pastors during the First World War, Hoover demonstrates that the sacrificial soldier lay at the heart of religious nationalism. Far from being sinful, German pastors agreed, the life of the soldier was one of the most exemplary lives one could choose, a life of “moral courage, devotion, and self-denial.” The soldier, like Christ, was ready to “place his earthly life on the altar of love;” to “die for family, brethren, or country.”

German pastors looked upon the warrior’s death as the “most beautiful of all deaths.” The hero’s death—death of a German soldier—resembled the “free-will offering of Christ himself, who left his life voluntarily for his brethren.” Walter Lehmann expressed it as follows: “German nationality and Christianity agree at their very core in heroism—nothing is greater than to leave your life for your friends and your brethren. Both are fulfilled in the hero’s death.”

German Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack stated that soldiers can claim the promise of scripture: “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren” (I John 3:14). Whoever dies in battle “dies in the Lord”. Because he has “subordinated his bodily good” and has “offered his life for the good of the Volk.”

The nature of war, Hoover observes, makes it easy for the soldier to understand the essence of Christianity: heroism, love, sacrifice, and devotion to duty. As General Patton said, soldiers understand the cross “because they have borne a cross themselves.” They know instinctively what Jesus meant when he said, “Greater love hath no man who would lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

So there you have it: the dynamic of warfare for Germans during the period of the First World War does not differ from the dynamic of warfare that Denton-Borhaug reveals as lying at the heart of American culture. She recognizes this when she states that Christian proclamations that portray the work of Christ as a sacrifice “cement the architecture of (the social structure of war) in Western culture such as the United States.”

The sacrificial dynamic of war lies at the heart of Western civilization, not just American culture. It begins with Christ and his crucifixion. Christ died at the cross to save humanity. The soldier dies on the battlefield to save his country.

It is not that nationalism “borrows” from Christianity. Nationalism, rather, descends from Christianity. It is another version of the idea of an immortal entity whose existence depends on sacrificial death. The body politic replaces the body of the Church. The idea of the soldier derives from—symbolizes—Christ, who died so that we might live.

Denton-Borhaug writes about “challenging an institution, war.” This amounts to becoming aware of the metaphor of sacrifice that defines and sustains the institution. Once we begin to “understand and interrogate these destructive connections,” war-culture begins to “dismantle in our minds.” At this moment, a “new kind of consciousness or awareness about our reality begins to dawn upon us.”

What, precisely, is this new form of consciousness or awareness? It is recognition that—although each war is different and represents many different things—there is one dynamic that is constant. This dynamic revolves around the significance of the sacrificial death of the soldier.

How does one go about generating psychic and cultural change?

It is not a question of “telling truth to power.” The project of awakening from the nightmare of history does not take place (initially) on the stage of society—because cultural beings are immersed within—impregnated by—this fantasy of sacrificial death.

Change occurs as most scientific change occurs. The first step is establishing a relationship between variables: between the institution or ideology of war, on the one hand, and sacrificial death, on the other.

One of the reasons I have established a “space of freedom” at the Library of Social Science is precisely to enable us to explore this fundamental truth—the relationship between warfare and sacrificial death—unimpeded by noise from the outside. Those of you who read the Library of Social Science Newsletter are among those on the cutting edge.