Introducing the Military Model of Religion

In the previous post, I started blogging my dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. In this post, I wish to begin outlining the military model of religion. A fair criticism of the dissertation is that, arguably my dissertation was never really about Jewish messianism. What I am really writing about is the military model of religion, with the missionary and esoteric models as foils. Furthermore, not only do I go for long stretches without talking about messianism, but I am often not even talking about Judaism at all. As readers of this blog can appreciate, this is the product of my rather eclectic manner of thinking. It certainly did not help matters that I was forced by my advisor to attempt to write large-scale history, including Christianity and Islam. In essence, instead of making sure I stayed focused on something narrow, he pushed me to follow my tendencies that were most likely to cause me to fail.  

In the military model, your religion is obviously right because the armies of your religion are crossing borders and defeating other religions. Imagine that you are an early medieval Muslim. It is obvious to you that Islam is true. How could a band of tribesmen from Arabia have defeated both the Byzantine and the Sasanian Empire, conquered the Near East, and marched all the way to Spain unless this was the will of Allah? Obviously, Allah wanted to spread pure monotheism so he used his beloved Arab people, who were the first to embrace the divine teachings of the prophet Mohammed, to accomplish this. The promise of a heavenly reward for Muslims can already be glimpsed by the fact that Arab Muslims, in this world, have achieved such political power. If you want to be rewarded in this world and in the next, you need to become a Muslim. On the flip side, much of the story of modern Islamic thought comes down to the question of how is it that Islam stopped being successful. This only serves to underscore how important Islam's early military success was to its self-understanding.  

Behind the armies leading the military model to victory, lies a political entity such as a state. The religion’s political sponsor will come to dominate other religions and their respective political sponsors, presumably through military means, causing competing religions and politics to fall away. In the ancient world, this was understood in very literal terms with the god (or gods) of one people defeating a rival god.  Underlying this worldview is a sense of being on the right side of history. Even if the hoped for final victory has yet to come, the political victories scored by the religion, even small ones, indicate the inevitability of that victory. Military model religions have little need to engage in apologetics or even develop a complex theology. The argument for the religion is the observable fact of the existence of the community of the faithful and its political success. Such a religion contains little in the way of universalizing ethics. On the contrary, its only concern is the advancement of the community so that it dominates all others, regardless of how unjust such a state of affairs may be. 

It is important not to overemphasize the role of physical violence in the military model. The military model of religion might also be labeled the community model in that it starts from the perspective of a community and not, as we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, individuals. It should be understood that the military model does not have to use a literal threat of force to achieve its aims. On the contrary, it is most powerful in the form of a warm surrounding community, full of friends and family. There is a close connection between the coercive power of overwhelming armed might and that of a community in that overwhelming armed might in its most extreme forms (like in the relationship between a state and an individual) can paradoxically appear as if no force is being used.  Such force is so obvious that it can pass unmentioned and become part of the unchallengeable reality surrounding a person. Thus, the person being subject to such force may come to “willingly” comply out of the sense that this is the only “reasonable” option. It is hard to distinguish it, particularly for those subject to it, from the soft pressure of the social expectations on the part of a surrounding community. Thus, community pressure and the threat of physical force merge together. The most powerful sorts of communities will be established states with the ability to exert social pressure that is not so incidentally backed by physical force.    

Considering that the military model works best when it can use a perceived sense of reality rather than physical force, its chief weapon is ritual. This creates a perceived sense of communal reality in which a body of individuals performs the same action.  The ritual act allows the community to conquer physical space. By integrating ritual into the calendar, the community can also conquer time and extend itself to both past and future generations.  In this sense, the ritual community consists not only of those living in the present but also of past generations, who performed these same rituals and passed on their traditions to the present. Of particular importance here are rituals performed for the sake of the dead. Beyond possibly aiding those who have passed to the next world and gaining their aid in return, rituals for the dead strengthen the sense of the community existing through time. Similarly, rites of passage use ritual to extend the community into the future as a new generation embraces the identity of the community. 

Ritual also serves a practical purpose of gaining the aid of supernatural beings. Thus, military model religions tend have strong magic components, offering the direct physical aid of a god, as opposed to ethical religions, in which a god offers moral teachings that allow one to live a better life. There is something distinctly amoral about magic in that its sole purpose is to subvert normal cause and effect. Thus, it allows the practitioner to gain things they did not work to earn and have no just claim to. As we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, one of the primary criticisms of the military model, in addition to the fact that it lacks theological depth, is that it does not encourage ethical behavior. As such, military model believers can be attacked for caring little about god or man. 

A classic book that I recently read that does a fantastic job of encapsulating what is essentially the military model is Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. The first part of the book gets us into the lived experience of late medieval Catholics in England before this world was destroyed by the English Reformation. Catholicism was built into people's daily lives. For example, the calendar was dominated by saints' days and the cycle of Jesus' birth and passion. While I am skeptical about Duffy's claims as to how well lay Englishmen actually understood the particulars of the Catholic theology that lay behind such holy days, Duffy is a valuable voice in that he is sympathetic to popular religion. It is easy even for scholars who are personally religious to look down on such religion as superstition. (I am often guilty of this myself.) As intellectuals, we are going to be naturally inclined toward the missionary and esoteric models. These are intellectual models of religion. Their criticisms of the military model, essentially any popular religion, are going to be our criticisms. As such, instead of simply pointing out the obvious problems with the military model, our job becomes to understand why the military model has not simply been conquered by its critics. On the contrary, as we shall see, it is the military model that generally manages to convert its critics.