US War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation by Kelly Denton-Borhaug (review)

In US War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation, Kelly Denton-Borhaug uses cultural and linguistic analysis in order to understand the place of war in American culture and discourse. She begins by noting that war culture is so deeply embedded in America’s ethos that its citizens are generally unaware of the extent to which the United States has been militarized, with both weapons and ideology. With sobering detail, Denton-Borhaug documents how the military has penetrated and shaped institutions ranging from colleges to industry. She explains how militarization is exemplified in the consumer and civilian culture through video games and the rise of a surveillance state. By way of this analysis, the author makes the case that Dwight Eisenhower’s fear concerning the influence of the military-industrial complex has fully been realized in modern America.

Denton-Borhaug then addresses what she considers to be the ideological fountainhead for America’s militarism: the Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement. In short, as Christianity teaches that an innocent man had to sacrifice himself to save humanity, so also American war-culture ideology teaches that soldiers, citizens, and the country must sacrifice on the battlefield in order to achieve national or political salvation. Denton-Borhaug suggests that politicians and others draw on the notion of the necessity of sacrifice as a way to convince people to support militarized conflict and to endure the inevitable hardships that result. By analyzing US political rhetoric between 2001 and 2003, Denton-Borhaug makes a compelling case that the Bush administration used sacrificial images of victims and abusers to set up a simple black-and-white ethical paradigm to justify the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From there Denton-Borhaug turns to feminist theological and linguistic analysis to deconstruct the language of sacrifice in political discourse. She argues that when sacrifice in war is seen as a necessity, the brunt of its effects is often borne by the weakest groups in society. The sacrifice motif also sets up a problematic model of active masculine protectors and passive women in need of protection, which leaders often exploit to convince the public to “trust them.”

If Denton-Borhaug simply asked Christian leaders to guard against the use of Christian theology to justify national or political war-making interests, I doubt few would object to her case. In fact, I commend her for drawing attention to these critical issues and arguing for tactics that encourage peacemaking. Unfortunately, Denton-Borhaug argues that the solution to the political use of sacrificial theology is to jettison it, or at least to marginalize its use in Christian teaching. She proposes that we replace it with a theology of work, a cure that may be even worse than the disease she diagnoses and that is, moreover, not logically required to achieve the peacemaking she promotes. In this regard Denton-Borhaug could have been more transparent about her own presuppositions. For example, she clearly leans toward nonviolence, leaving readers to wonder whether genocide, nuclear buildup, and state-sponsored terrorism are the only justifications for war (222). Moreover, I am not completely convinced that America’s use of sacrificial language is an unvarnished harm. I suspect that at least some of the United States’ use of sacrificial language stems from a desire to avoid language that glorifies war. Would America be better off if we used militaristic terms like “Death to Afghanistan” that emphasize domination, rather than the suffering associated with “sacrifice”?

Despite these weaknesses, Denton-Borhaug’s book is a valuable antidote for Christians who have grown too comfortable with America’s military-industrial complex and ideological war-culture machine. We would do well to take seriously her exhortation to work to remove the roots of war in our effort to create a world of peace.