The Ju Ju of War

[marct]

Hi Tom,

The more I think about it, the more I'm sold on this civil religion thing. Christianity (which I'm assuming is prevalent), or Wicca (what have you), can be something running private and independently of whatever other related sensibilities a warfighter carries with them.

I think the last figures I saw for the US placed Christianity (very broadly construed) at about 85-86% of the population with Judaism, Islam and Hinduism making up the bulk of the remainder. The last figures I saw on neo-Paganism (including Wicca in all its forms) put it at around 3-400,000 in the US, or about 0.1% of the population (there are all sorts of problems with that figure).

Ritual expressions of patriotism can be religious in this sense, but I'm worried about the effects of cognitive dissonance. I've often thought that the jihadists have an advantage over us because the socio-political expressions of their religious mantle are more consonant; i.e., their God is more warrior-like.

In the interests of accuracy, I think it would be better to say that their Prophet was more warrior-like, although I think that distinction is lost on too many people on all sides <sigh>. I think you are right about the potential for cognitive dissonance as well, but I think that can be fairly easily countered in the US case.

I would imagine transmutations of that sort take place among Christian warfighters, but don't know for sure. I would say there's a drive towards ju-ju (there, I used the word), a need for something magical, if you will, something that connects or integrates all the reasons together and seems cosmic at the time. Such "flashes" of insight could very well be the social cement that Rousseau and Durkheim were trying to get at. Perhaps there is some sense in keeping one's religion private.

My own guess is that it is a form of the panenhenic experience, which is the most common, and universal, form of mystical experience. I think that the type Durkheim was alluding to was a combination of that with some forms of the polytheistic variants (cf his introduction to the Division of Labour in Society, 2nd edition ref. the role of intermediary structures in modern societies and, especially, his discussion of the medieval guild structure).

This is one of the areas where I think the Regimental system is better than the current US system. It is a form of totemism focused on the Regiment in a manner similar to the Roman Legions focus on their Eagles or the Napoleonic Regiments focus on theirs. In Durkheiman terms, it is an intermediate structure that is intensely "civil" while, at the same time, being "religious".