The Odd Appeal of War

Chapter 1 questions why we often think of war when confronted with an extreme social anomaly or some inexplicable crisis. The chapter begins with a discussion of the 9/11 attacks and the immediate response of many Americans (including President George W. Bush) that the country was at war. This began the idea of a war on terror, an idea that was similar to Al-Qaeda’s idea of war on America, as both born out of a sense of social chaos and a threatened conquering by a shadowy enemy. War is an imagined alternative reality. Examples in culture include computer games, novels, and religious mythology. The etymology of the word “war” is based on the old English werra, meaning “chaos,” “confusion.”

Can Religion Cure War?

Since war and religion are similar conceptual entities—imagined views of alternative reality—the question this chapter explores is whether either will ever wither away or cease interacting with the other. This chapter begins with the case of the Moro movement in the Philippines and how peace began to descend upon the region in part by transforming images of warfare into peaceful struggle and reverting religious images into the traditional mythology of religious activity. There are several ways that religion can play a positive role in lessening the violence of war: by limiting war as the ethical idea of a just war suggests; by treating war metaphorically, as in the war on poverty; or in the symbolic displacement of violence that war images provide. More likely images of war and religion will persist in our culture and in personal imaginations. As long as we understand that these are imagined constructs and contain them within our own imagination, and make a clear distinction between the mundane worlds and the alternatives, we will be able to abide the continuation of these two creative though potentially destructive ways of perceiving the world.

Religion as Alternative Reality

Chapter 3 explores the notion that, like war, religion is an imagined alternative reality. The chapter begins with the remarkable success of the Left Behind novels, Evangelical Protestant novels that imagine the end of the world at the time of the rapture, when righteously saved souls are transported to heaven and the ordinary world struggles with the control of the Antichrist. Though extreme, this vision is characteristic of all religion: it presents an alternative view of reality. All religion is imagined in that they are constructions of an alternative view of reality, as the sociologist Robert Bellah has argued. Like war, religion is a response to a perception of deep disorder, though in the case of religion it is often the fear of one’s own demise, the fear of death. For this reason most religious traditions have incorporated violence and death into their rituals and images (the Christian cross is an obvious example), as a way of showing that in the religious imagination the fear of chaos is overcome and death has been defeated. As does war, religion provides an imagined scenario of chaos conquered.

War as an Alternative Reality

Chapter 2 explores the possibility that the idea of war is an imagined alternative reality. First, a former militant in the Sikh separatist movement explains how the idea of warfare permeated the worldview of the youth in the Punjabi village where he was raised. Second, concepts of war from the political scientist Kenneth Waltz and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr are presented, as well as the insights of the eighteenth-century German soldier Carl von Clausewitz, who theorized that all war stems from the notion of absolute war, the all-or-nothing conception of reality in which there are only winners and losers. This worldview can be exhilarating since it offers the possibility of destroying forever the enemies—the sources of discord—that confound ordinary life. Hence enemies have to be invented, if they didn’t exist before, for the idea of war to be imaginable.

Why Do We Think about War?

This introduction probes the question of why it is so easy to think of the idea of war in times of extreme social conflict. It begins with the example of the Philippine government’s siege of the city of Marawi to rid it of ISIS fighters in 2017. As a result local Muslims began to think in terms of war. Every religious tradition is full of images of warfare. Why do these images come so easily to the imagination, and what does religion have to do with it?

The Marriage of War and Religion

Since war and religion are both alternative realities, this chapter explores the relationship between the two. The chapter begins with an account of identical twin German brothers who both joined ISIS and were soon killed in suicide attacks. Were they motivated by religion or the lure of war? This chapter considers three options. One is that war encompasses religion by imagining that God is on the side of the militants engaged in it. A second is that religion encompasses war, usually in a metaphoric way through religious mythology and images. (One possibility that is dismissed is that religion automatically leads to war, since there is no evidence that that is the case). The third possibility—perhaps most likely in the case of the German twins—is that religion and war are combined in “cosmic war.” Religious militant movements such as the Islamic State combine an apocalyptic notion of religion with militant engagement; in ISIS war is religion and religion is war.