• PART I: America is a Religion: Our High-Church Politics and Sacred War
  America is not just civil religion—it is honest-to-God church religion. Our nation tells us who we are, and how we should live together. Religions are living faiths. The word is from the Latin religare—to bind together—and that is what religion is for: To frame how we belong to each other, what is meaningful in life, and how together we should cherish each other.

• PART II: Why See America as a Religion?
  Why see America as a religion? How can we hold to our true faith if we see it as just another sacred construct in humanity’s long search for meaning? Communities of belief perform best when belief is unshaken. Yet there are urgent reasons why we need to see ourselves for what we are. We are entering a time of crisis in America’s relationship with the world, and in American identity.

• PART I: American Exceptionalism: Counterterrorism, American Exceptionalism, and Retributive Justice
  American exceptionalism should be understood as the core passion of American civil religion, envisioning a nation rooted in a savage yet pure wilderness—“God’s American Israel”. The act of taming one’s own world is in itself an act of purification—and of tempering and strengthening those who might one day redeem a corrupted and oppressed humanity.
• PART II: Three Kinds of Terrorist
  The terrorist is the terrorist “against the body,” or the heretic. Society may condemn him, yet if he recants there is hope for return to the body politic. The second terrorist is the apostate, who has renounced the American idea wholesale and seeks its overthrow. The third type is the stranger, alien to the sacred body.
• PART III: Retribution: Counterterrorism, American Exceptionalism, and Retributive Justice
  Moving American exceptionalism away from Universalist visions of redemption and back to retributive justice is itself an admission of weakness and fear—and the impending end of its own Universalist claim. Terrorism has come to dominate our religion in unconquerable antithesis. In today’s American civil-religious thought, terrorism is the Devil himself—and the Devil drives.

The 20th century’s wars—from 1914-1951, and their aftermath—killed perhaps 150 million individual human beings. We casually ascribe this calamity to madness, evil, or the inevitable efficiencies of an industrial economy. Yet I argue that this killing was embedded in the desire of peoples to fulfill—through war—the vision that drove them. This was the paradoxical, unconfessed vision of Modernity—which replaced universal institutions of collective identity (for centuries vested in social order and Church) with a dynamic new alternative.

Transcendence through War (Response by Alexander Chirila)
Chirila responds to Michael Vlahos’s paper, “Rites of Spring:” The myth of transcendence through sacrifice, bloodshed, and battle is an enduring expression of a desire to bridge Nature and the Divine through Death. Vlahos points out that we cannot entirely escape our collective desire for transcendence, or the primitive belief that this can be achieved only through sacrifice.

• Terrorism’s Sacred Heart: The Sacrifice
  What makes terrorism so powerful is that it leverages the most powerful of human actions: the sacrifice. For thousands of years, human sacrifice has represented a sacred rite, with many layers of explicit ritual and symbol—in which our most precious loss transforms into our most precious gift. Think of the sacrifice—enacted and memorialized—as the mortar of our collective belief and belonging.
• The Ideology of Sacrifice is Hemorrhaging
  In his essay, “The Rites of Spring,” Michael Vlahos stated that War in Modernity was an “extended ritual demanding mass sacrifice in which the literal ‘body and blood’ of millions at once renewed and re-fertilized the nation.” However, this national theology “no longer rules America as it once did.” The fervent faith of a whole nation—leading to sacrifice on the high altar—has been “emptied of belief.”
• The Primary Purpose of War is Ritual and Symbolic
  If the primary purpose of war is ritual and symbolic, it means that war is instrumental of itself. It also means that the creation of ritual and symbol through war is intended to create a feeling in us, to make us feel good. Good about what exactly is the crucial question?

• D-Day (June 6, 1944), the Invasion of Normandy: “A moment of unique American sacrifice”
  Michael Vlahos podcast on the John Batchelor radio show: “We had to create—not just a mythic moment—but a moment of unique American sacrifice. We managed to do that. As we look back, it is the great liturgy of the American experience—not just in World War II—but of the America that was born on that day. It’s a kind of high mass of the nation—of the American ethos.”