Jon Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American ViolenceEmpire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence by Pahl, JonReview by: Dan McKananThe Journal of Religion, Vol. 91, No. 2 (April 2011), pp. 289-291Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660726 .

Accessed: 20/06/2014 01:18

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheJournal of Religion.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.209 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 01:18:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews

289

examinations of the Church Struggle from the perspective of each of his threechurch districts. In keeping with the other sections of the book, these con-cluding chapters are well documented and make good use of local archivalmaterial, effectively interweaving broader political and theological themes withthe fascinating life stories of individual pastors such as Gunther Harder andHerbert Posth from the Nauen district (113–25); Walther Schumann, GustavCarl, and Hermann Klemm from the Pirna district (148–68); and Karl Stegerfrom the Ravensburg district (176–90). These compelling narratives are relatedwith verve and help to rescue Jantzen’s prose from what could have been, inthe hands of a less skillful historian, a dry and repetitive analysis of fairly familiarthemes.

On a more critical note, Jantzen misses an opportunity to place his “bottomup” examination of Protestant parish politics within a broader scholarly context,virtually ignoring not only recent trends in the secular history of NationalSocialism but also the rich literature on German Alltagsgeschichte (history ofeveryday life). As a result, Jantzen’s analysis remains rather insular and self-referential, and this may limit the book’s potential readership and impact.Perhaps more seriously, the book lacks a conclusion. By this I do not mean thatit merely lacks an effective conclusion; there is no conclusion whatsoever. Thefinal word of the last substantive chapter, on the Church Struggle in Ravensburg,is the final word of the entire book before the bibliography begins. This isreally a shame, since it deprives Jantzen of the opportunity to draw togetherthe fascinating strands traced out in the preceding chapters and to reflect morebroadly on the significance of his impressive research. Overall, though, this isan interesting and insightful work whose positive attributes far outweigh itsweaknesses.DEREK HASTINGS, Oakland University.

PAHL, JON . Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence. New York:New York University Press, 2010. xiv�257 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Jon Pahl’s Empire of Sacrifice is an astute indictment of four centuries of Americanviolence. Building on studies of religious violence published in the wake ofSeptember 11, Pahl suggests that previous scholars have missed the mark inthree ways. First, they have been nearly silent about religious violence in theUnited States. Second, they have neglected the violence inherent in the “civil”and “cultural” religions that lend sacred authority to the nation and market.And third, they have failed to identify sacrifice as the basic form of religiousviolence, instead overemphasizing the role of millennialism (Mark Juergens-meyer) or monotheism (Regina Schwartz) in sanctioning brutality. “What isarguably the most dominant empire in human history,” Pahl insists, “has beenbuilt on a logic, psychology, and economy of sacrifice” (142).

Pahl develops this thesis in “postmodern” fashion, beginning with the “sac-rifices” of American youth in films from Reefer Madness to Hostel. Moving inreverse chronological order, he then considers the more familiar themes ofrace (contrasting Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X); gender (con-necting domestic violence in the eighteenth century to the Defense of MarriageAct); and the religious persecution of Quakers, which Pahl sees as the beginningof a pattern of “innocent domination” culminating in the global war on terror.Integrating recent works in American religious history with his own studies of

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.209 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 01:18:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Journal of Religion

290

youth ministry and shopping malls, Pahl brilliantly fills the gaps left by previousscholars.

Two aspects of Pahl’s argument are not fully convincing. First is his “icebergof violence,” according to which individual violence grows out of the “institu-tional” violence of prisons and the military, which derives from the “systemic”violence of social inequality, which in turn is caused by “cultural, religious, orverbal violence” (16). I found the first three levels of Pahl’s iceberg familiarand the fourth surprising. It provides the basis for his convincing argumentthat adolescent films prepare young people for the sacrifices demanded byempire by suggesting that subordination to patriarchal authority is the onlypath out of the violent rivalries of youth. Pahl also shows that Birth of a Nationwas a cultural artifact that generated systemic and institutional violence. ButPahl’s assumption that “violence almost invariably begins at the bottom of theiceberg” (16) leads him to devote excessive space to cultural materials thataren’t well suited to his argument—especially to activist films (The Handmaid’sTale, Dead Man Walking) that parallel his own analyses.

I am not an orthodox enough Marxist to insist that economic structuresshould be at the bottom of the iceberg, but I wish Pahl had emphasized theway his levels “interweave and interact” and that he had not so consistentlyskipped from the bottom to the upper two levels. An additional chapter on theviolence inherent in socioeconomic class might have helped. Without seriousattention to structural violence, Pahl perpetuates the tendency of previousscholars to hold religious violence at arm’s length. Just as works focused onIslamicist terrorists perpetuate notions of American innocence, so Pahl’s stresson the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the Bush administration, rather thanof our economically segregated public education system, may reinforce theinnocent presumption of readers from the liberal professional classes.

I was also troubled by Pahl’s reliance on the work of Rene Girard. Much ofhis material was first presented at gatherings of the Colloquium on Violenceand Religion, which is devoted to exploration of Girard’s theories, and Pahlseems to endorse Girard’s view that all religions stem from practices of sacrifice.The root of sacrifice, for Girard, is “mimetic rivalry” between persons of equalstatus who desire the same things, then restore social order by killing a marginalscapegoat. Pahl demonstrates that sacrifice is widespread and that it is oftenunderstood by its perpetrators in terms that mirror Girard’s model. But Pahl’sexamples suggest that “mimetic rivalry” is not the cause of sacrifice but a mys-tification that conceals its true roots in social hierarchy. When he shows howNorth and South are reconciled by the sacrifice of African Americans in Birthof a Nation, for example, his point is that the film’s emphasis on rivalries amongwhites obscures the underlying problem of racial inequality. Pahl cites BruceLincoln’s observation that sacrifice may be rooted in the “radical asymmetry”of power (211 n. 8) but never grapples with the degree to which this unravelsGirard’s theory.

Pahl is clearly embarrassed by Girard’s Christian triumphalism, which heblames on Girard’s “lesser” interpreters (211 n. 7). The logical implication ofGirard’s system is that a certain kind of Christianity avoids sacrifice and thusstands outside a category of “religion” that is otherwise capacious enough toinclude everything from Islam to shopping malls. Only a faith centered onJesus’s death and resurrection, from the Girardian perspective, can overcomethe logic of sacrifice without returning humanity to the chaos of mimetic rivalry.Eager to avoid this exclusivist conclusion, Pahl identifies the Islam of Malcolm

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.209 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 01:18:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews

291

X as a possible antidote to American violence. But much of his rhetoric pointsto a sort of interfaith Barthianism that still pits good “faith”—often identifiedwith traditional major faiths—against the bad “religion” embodied in the ritualsof the state and marketplace.

Pahl promises a sequel in which he will describe a “coming religious peace,”when religions will be “disestablished of their historic responsibility to prop upsystems of force.” In such a world, “people of faith” will forsake “blessed bru-talities” and instead build justice on the foundation of everyday practices ofnonviolence (175). I hope Pahl will use that project to highlight religious chal-lenges to hierarchy as well as to sacrifice. I would also urge him to considerthat civil and cultural religions may contribute to religious peace. ThroughoutU.S. history, countless activists have appealed to the Declaration of Indepen-dence, using the nation’s civil religion to challenge its imperial practices. Suchcultural organizations as Heart of the Beast Theatre in Minneapolis use ritualprocessions to create spaces of recreation and consumption that are less de-pendent on capitalist violence than shopping malls. These forms of religionmust be placed alongside ecclesial practices if we are to realize the promise ofpeace.DAN MCKANAN, Harvard Divinity School.

WEISS, RICHARD S. Recipes for Immortality: Medicine, Religion, and Community inSouth India. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ix�260 pp.$74.00 (cloth).

When the god Siva descends upon a practitioner of traditional Tamil medicinein Puthumai Pittan’s 1943 tale God and Kandasamy Pillai, the author takes buta few artful strokes to conjure up the world of the healer’s trade: “I have amedical practice, siddha medicine is my specialty,” Kandasamy Pillai began.“The money isn’t really enough for both my magazine and my family, though.I’ve written a piece on the uses of mercury in this issue, describing all kindsof new techniques.” Siva evinces little interest, but Kandasamy Pillai soldierson, oblivious to the god’s real identity as the mystic lord of all siddha knowledge:

“Here, show me your hand, and we’ll see what your pulse looks like,” said KandasamyPillai, grabbing God’s right hand.“In a speeding rickshaw?” God smiled.“Behold the doctor’s skill!” said Kandasamy Pillai. He checked God’s pulse carefullyfor a few beats. “The bile is high; are you indulging a bad habit?” he asked coyly.“Oh you clever fellow, and so many others too,” laughed God. (Putumaippittan,“Ka� tavul�um Kantacami Pil�l�aiyum” [1943], in Putumaippittan Kataikal�: Mul_ut Tokuppu[Nakarkovil: Kalaccuvat�u Patippakam, 2000], 556–57. Translation of this portion bythe reviewer.)

Siva worship, traditional lore, alchemy, secrets yet to be learned, the scentof quackery, and a diagnosis that may well indeed be right: siddha medicinetraverses so many concerns of Tamil scholarship that it seems natural for study,yet it has not met with much substantial critical treatment since PuthumaiPittan’s story first saw light of day. Richard Weiss’s thoughtful, ably researchedbook provides a most welcome remedy, bringing the complex aims of siddha

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.209 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 01:18:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions