Robert Jewett’s latest book reflects his interest in tracing the workings of religious myth in civic life. His previous book, Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (2003, written with John Shelton Lawrence), focused on the American context and one of its cherished narratives, which anticipates the intervention of a singular rescuing hero to resolve seemingly insurmountable crises. Mission and Menace uses that story as a lens through which to view the history of religion in the U.S. The story can take both positive and negative turns; it can motivate both selfless and self-interested action. Lately, according to Jewett, the “menacing,” zealous side of American religion has prevailed, especially in the political domain. Jewett’s primary concern is how the nation’s mythic self-understanding shapes its foreign policy — particularly how these national stories led to the war in Iraq and continue to hinder constructive engagement with the Muslim world.
Mission and Menace follows a standard narrative of U.S. religious history, beginning in New England with the Pilgrims and Puritans and their respective millennial projects to realize God’s purposes on earth. He discusses the “deflation” of these original plans in the later seventeenth century, the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, the coming of Revolution, and the early nineteenth-century Second Awakening. According to Jewett, these episodes either prompted or evidenced a burgeoning American zeal for accomplishing God’s will through political violence, for “redeem[ing] the world by the destruction of enemies” (6). The nineteenth century, for Jewett, witnessed the increased sharpening of zeal and the commensurate rise in religiously motivated bloodletting, at home and abroad — most notably in the Civil War, fueled in North and South by appeals to the Bible; and in the Spanish-American War, which became a millennial project of Manifest Destiny. Jewett argues that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, religion has become denatured by overmixing with self-interested American politics, captive to aggressive Fundamentalists on the right and uncompromising Liberals on the left.
The book’s story, from colonial times through the nineteenth century into the twentieth and twenty-first, seems to be one about the dangers of religious acculturation. Traditional religions — for Jewett, Christianity (especially Protestantism) and Judaism — have lost their traction on the culture in which they dwell, and indeed have become captive to it, such that they no longer can speak in Jewett’s favored vernacular. The past four hundred years of American religious and political history demonstrate the need for prophetic realism, which, Jewett writes, “seeks to redeem the world for coexistence by the impartial enforcement of law” (6). Jewett hears it voiced most clearly by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
Jewett’s motivation in writing Mission and Menace obviously rises from his concern about the role that zealous nationalism played in drawing the U.S. into what he calls the “Iraq quagmire” (300). Many chapters begin or end with Jewett’s lament over the current conflict, and how its roots rely for support on the “menace of triumphant civil religion” (the title of the book’s last unit). This single text, therefore, feels like two. One is a conventional survey of religion in the U.S. that unfortunately does not reflect important new historiographical directions. Indeed, many sources Jewett cites are quite old, contributing to the book’s staid feel. Readers might consult such excellent resources as Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas Tweed (California, 1997); David Hackett’s reader, Religion and American Culture (Routledge, 2003); Catherine Brekus’s edited volume of essays on The Religious History of American Women (Chapel Hill, 2007); or R. Marie Griffith’s document collection, American Religions (Oxford, 2008). These and other studies prompt questions about how gender, race and ethnicity, class, and region contribute to or complicate zealous national projects.
The other book contained in this text is an argument about that zeal, namely that the nation and its leaders are subject to delusions about our status before God, our mission, our nature, our innocence. (James Morone’s book, Hellfire Nation [Yale, 2003], discusses a similar zeal but traces its effects in many arenas, not just foreign policy; Christopher Collins’s more recent Homeland Mythology [Penn State, 2007] offers an explanation about how this delusion takes hold.) These phantasms lead us to act at best unwisely and at worst violently toward those who interfere with the completion of our divinely inspired work of nationhood. Jewett finds a clear instance of such delusional behavior in the initiation and conduct of the Iraq war; the “war on terror” also receives criticism on this count for being waged under illusory conditions rather than with clear, pragmatic, compassionate goals in mind. The inclusion of compassion is important, since Jewett seems to fault violent zeal even in the service of noble ends; he questions, for instance, the rightness of John Brown’s anti-slavery raids and Carrie Nation’s anti-saloon campaigns.
The two books contained in Mission and Menace do not coexist happily. The bitterness of Jewett’s tone feels out of place in a historical work. Historians bring biases along whenever they write about the past, but the best ones strive to open those perspectives up to the light and air of archival sources and public scrutiny. History tries to temper undue passion before setting analyses in stone, else it contributes to the very chaos that it seeks to move through. Historians should give the widest possible berth to their readers to gauge the evidence and pronounce the sentence themselves. To do less implies a mistrust of the evidence and a fear of the audience.
Perhaps Jewett’s edge comes from his situation as an observer, from abroad, of American religion and myth-making; he is currently Guest Professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg. Mission and Menace echoes with the voices of his students there. Doubtless the views of American foreign policy are more acute on that side of the Atlantic. Indeed, Jewett’s geographical distance from the U.S. may equip him with an unusual but important critical distance. At that remove, Jewett is less subject to American media- and pop cultural- versions of the war. Readers need to wrestle with Jewett’s voice of loyal opposition. But perhaps at this great distance, Jewett also feels a little too free to trace contemporary events, such as George W. Bush’s preemptive war doctrine, to the biblical language of Revelation or historical metaphors like the Puritans’ “errand” (see 293 for his summary of American religious history). Such connections may exist, but to be unearthed and then scrutinized with prophetic force, they must receive more precise treatment.
Anne Blue Wills is associate professor of religion at Davidson College, Davidson, N.C.
