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Photo: Dennis Flaherty
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One of ways in which the religious character of American nationalism can shine through is in how Americans treat the deaths of American soldiers. It's always a tragedy when someone's brother, sister, husband, wife, or child dies in military service -- but in America, such deaths are being treated like blood sacrifices which have an overt religious character.
In A Brief History of Death, Douglas J. Davies writes:
Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle's book Blood Sacrifice and the Nation was published in 1999; in it they argue that the USA possesses at its heart a kind of sacrificial culture that helps bind the states together. The sacrificial system is headed by the President, is symbolized in the flag and enacted through the death of soldiers in warfare. It is their shed blood that is the sacrifice.
They see the military - especially in its prime male soldiers - as a special training to kill and be killed. These are people who are 'death-touchers' and are bound together by an honour code. To have failed in a war, as in Vietnam, is deemed a shame and throws a shadow upon this very system of social life.
We could, in fact, strengthen their analysis by seeing how the USA often identifies itself as God's chosen people leading the world into truth and the proper way of life which is, essentially, that of American democracy. While this is, of course, one interpretation of events, it allows numerous aspects of life to fall into one broad explanation.
The daily pledge of allegiance to the flag in American schools would, for example, be unimaginable in most European countries. Similarly, unlike Britain and the death of its soldiers and civil personnel in the service of its empire period and in the two great wars, America tends not to leave its dead where they fall but to bring them home. It is in one of the hundred or more national-military cemeteries in the USA that the dead are, by strong preference, buried and not in 'some corner of a foreign field'.
This aspect of military death brings to the dead a high symbolic value; indeed, Marvin and Ingle see in the military funeral - with the flag being specially folded and given back to the family almost as a kind of symbolic baby - a powerful expression of the nation's commitment to giving life to maintain a way of life.
How do these nationalist rituals in America compare to similar events elsewhere in the world? Is there any other nation which treats military funerals in the same way, or is America fairly unique in this in the modern age?
Are these sorts of practices, rituals, and underlying attitudes healthy? I'm not sure that they are, though to be honest I've grown up with them and lived with them so long that it's difficult for me to create the sort of intellectual and emotional distance necessary to evaluate things properly. I simply don't trust whether I'm too biased in one direction or another.
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