We all remember Rambo, the muscle-bound commando with headband, machine gun in hand, strap of bullets over his shoulder.

Mark Walker suggests in his book Vietnam Veteran Films that Rambo represents the very American idea that, “the right man in the right place can win any battle.” In fact, Rambo represents America itself, evolving over the past 4 decades from his leftwing roots to his rightwing heyday to his apolitical present, along with our political ideals and our popular culture.

Rambo began as a leftwing reaction to Vietnam vets’ difficulties adjusting to civilian life. In David Morrell’s novel First Blood, Colonel Trautman tells Sheriff Teasle “you tolerate a system that lets others [kill] for you. And when they come back from the war, you can’t stand the smell of death on them.”

In the novel, Rambo is portrayed as an almost psychopathic killer, but the film adaptation downplays this, with him only causing one death, first because, as Susan Jeffords says in her essay The Reagan Hero: Rambo, “it would be difficult to maintain his characterization as victim…. and second, because helpless, screaming men far more effectively portray the consequences of a weakened masculinity than silent corpses do.”

Weakened masculinity to go with a weakened superpower, coming off the loss of the Vietnam War. In fact, Albert Bergesen argues in his book The Depth of Shallow Culture that “the ideal/reality gap” between the war in Rambo’s mind and the war he’s waging against the police has “geopolitical origin in the early moments of hegemonic decline.” He compares Rambo to Don Quixote, two men idealizing old ways of fighting to the point of delusion, “acting on the basis of a hegemonic code… when the material base of that [code] is dissipating.”

Then came the Reagan era, a pair of new rightwing Rambo films and a kids’ cartoon.

Along with Uncommon Valor and the Missing in Action films, Rambo: First Blood Part II was one of what Siskel and Ebert called in June of ’85, the “this-time-we-win films” in which, the Vietvet, returns to fight Vietnam again. Notably, as Colonel Rhodes says in the earlier Uncommon Valor, “this time nobody can dispute the rightness of what we’re doing.”

First Blood Part II “triggered long suppressed emotions,” says Sylvester Stallone in People Weekly, 8 July 1985, “Suddenly apple pie was an important thing on the menu… Millions of kids, too young to remember the nightly news clips of the war we lost [were] screaming and hooting at each new death” in the film.

Popular opinion was deliberately missing the point of the earlier Rambo story. America wouldn’t let Rambo be a symbol for rejecting war. Instead, by rescuing missing POWs in the second film, “a galling defeat could… be turned into a symbolic victory,” says Time magazine, 27 May 1985. Hegemonic decline be damned.

Meanwhile, Rambo became the first R-rated film franchise to get a kids’ cartoon, Rambo: The Force of Freedom, in which Rambo is more superhero now than soldier. He is called in the show’s opener, “the honor-bound protector of the innocent” and “liberty’s champion.”

Like the shallow, materialistic culture of ‘80s America, the third film, Rambo III, couldn’t have much depth. Despite a dedication to “the gallant people of Afghanistan,” the film spends most of its time with the protagonist and his rescue of his father-figure, and little time exploring the freedom fighters he would help to victory. In fact, in response to rumors that Stallone was rewriting the film “to be more philosophical” the producers quickly countered that he couldn’t turn it into a “talky-thinky film,” according to Forbes, 1 June 1987. If he “took out the action,” they said, he wouldn’t “have a film.”

The more recent, apolitical 4^th film, simply titled Rambo, puts Rambo on the side of the Karen freedom fighters in Burma, but steps away from political motivation.

Entertainment Weekly, 6 June 2008, called Rambo, “humorless and derangedly violent.” David Morrell, on his website, davidmorrell.net says the film is “spot on” in how he “imagined the character—angry, burned-out, and filled with self disgust.” In the age of so-called “torture porn” films like the Saw series, the over-the-top blood and gore of Rambo does not serve the purpose of Stallone, now directing as well as starring, to show the horror of the violence itself.

It is telling, taking Rambo as representative of America, when we have two wars going, and he says in the film, “there isn’t one of us that doesn’t want to be someplace else. But this is what we do, who we are.” He tells himself, “war is in your blood. Don’t fight it.”

He is talking about us.

He is talking about America.

Rambo has gone from left-wing, anti-war, as America was reeling from loss in Vietnam, to right-wing, jingoist as the Reagan era reinvigorated American nationalism, and more recently, he’s fallen into an apolitical, more realistically violent quagmire, as America is stuck in two wars abroad with no end in sight.

In conclusion, Loved or hated, Rambo has stood at the front of American culture and remains to this day an icon of… the spirit of America.

Works Cited

“Is there life beyond rambo?” Forbes 1 June 1987.

“Rambo: First Blood Part II” (Review). Time 27 May 1985.

 “With a $100 million gross(out), Sly Stallone fends off Rambo’s army of adversaries.” People Weekly 8 July 1985.

Bergesen, Albert J. The Depth of Shallow Culture: The High Art of Shoes, Movies, Novels, Monsters, and Toys. Boulder: Paradigm, 2006.

Collis, Clark. “Rambo” (Review). Entertainment Weekly 6 June 2008.

Davidmorrell.net

First Blood. Dir. Ted Ketchoff, Carolco, 1982.

Jeffords, Susan. “The Reagan Hero: Rambo.” The War Film. Ed. Robert Eberwein. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2005.

Morrell, David. First Blood. …1972.

Rambo III. Dir. Peter MacDonald. Carolco, 1988.

Rambo. Dir. Sylvester Stallone. Lionsgate, 2008.

Rambo: First Blood Part II. Dir. George P. Cosmatos. Carolco, 1985.

Rambo: The Force of Freedom. Ruby-Spears Productions, 1985.

Uncommon Valor. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. Paramount, 1982.

Walker, Mark. Vietnam Veteran Films. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1991.

COMFORT and COSMOLOGY

Religion provides escape and comfort and, most importantly, meaning, by providing a cosmology to explain the structure of reality, giving us a way to transcend the quotidian and find purpose in the everyday. The walls of religion are “familiar / comforting” [5]. Even when our religion has “been remodeled time / and again… the basic structure / remains the same” [6]. We know it; we find it comforting, our sense of understanding of how everything works. Religion serves as explanation, as bastion of order. Geneticist Dean Hamer has suggested that “humans inherit a predisposition to be spiritual—to reach out and look for a higher being” [7] and it is in this predisposition—which, even outside of genetics, makes logical sense, as every society throughout human history has included some sort of religion, even if only in the form of civil religion—that we can see a piece of the fundamental nature of mankind. We want to know how the universe works, and when the explanation does not present itself, we invent one to fit. And, we invent religion to separate us from the day to day, to help us transcend the mundane. The New Horizon Sanctuary addition to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia was specifically designed (with African cultural history in mind, tying into a point to come below) as a place of beauty separate from the city around it, an escape from the outside world. Similarly, the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California stands out from its surroundings, a beacon of something (supposedly) higher and brighter and better than the surrounding cityscape [8]. This separation from the everyday is vital. As Sita Wiener describes it, “as I sat there and meditated, I had the experience of transcending my body and mind, realizing myself as Omnipresent. I forgot my individuality” [9]. Finding explanation that brings us up away from the chaos of the quotidian can bring us out of ourselves, and can help us find our personal identity, and can lead to the continuity and community to be described below, all these purposes crisscrossing, fueling one another.

It is also important to realize that religion can reduce stress and anxiety. As Andrew Newberg and his colleagues found, “just twelve minutes of meditation per day may slow down the aging process” and “contemplating a loving God… reduces anxiety, depression, and stress and increases feelings of security, compassion, and love” [10]. In fact, prayer and meditation have been found to “permanently change numerous structures and functions in the brain—altering your values and the way you perceive reality” [11]. Meditating on the cosmology in which one believes, even only inasmuch as one might meditate on it in a weekly (or less often) church meeting, can permanently alter our brains so that not only does the cosmology we’ve accepted make even more sense to us, but we can become better people… in theory.

It is worth noting (even in getting ahead of the current point) that, even as we believe we can be better people, we often “believe ourselves to be members of a race that is fundamentally flawed and inherently doomed to suffering and misery…

[We] expect wisdom to be a rare commodity, difficult to acquire… [we]’re not surprised to be living in the midst of poverty, injustice, and crime, not surprised that [our] rules are self-serving and corrupt, not surprised to be rendering the world uninhabitable for [our]selves. [12]

It helps that, through religion we have a certain arrogance of knowledge, the oft referenced “holier-than-thou” attitude, arising from the comfort and order we find in cosmology. This arrogance of knowledge adds to the altering of the physical brain; in believing that the foundations of our religion is given by a God or comes from some superior (but not necessarily supernatural) intelligence, we fuel a psychological sense that our beliefs are good and reasonable and worth keeping. And, the longer such beliefs remain, the more ingrained they can become, physically and psychologically, and the more worth keeping they seem—after all, if they lasted as long as they have, they must be working.

CONTINUITY and CONNECTION

Religion it helps us have a sense of continuity with the past and the future. Seeking the holy, aside from the obvious comfort described above, is about finding continuity in addition to order. We want a connection to the past [13]. We want to know that the church we are attending—the physical structure, like the Old Ship Meetinghouse [14] in Hingham, Massachusetts, the oldest meetinghouse in continuous ecclesiastical use, having been originally built in the 1600s; or the idea structure, like Hinduism, often recognized as the oldest living religion in the world—has survived generations before us. We want to know that it will survive after us.

It is because of this need for continuity that the selection of the next Dalai Lama is such an important one for Tibetan Buddhists, “more than a matter of life and death” [15]. The current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the 14th. His position has existed longer than some other religions have. His reincarnation keeps the religion going, keeps the order and comfort going. For Tibetan Buddhists, the selection of the next Dalai Lama, which Communist China threatens to influence, is “about who controls their future” [16].

Of similar importance (but not so contemporary) is the promise in Jeremiah, the promise that God “will restore the fortunes of the tents of Jacob… the city shall be rebuilt upon its mound, and the palace shall stand where it used to be” [17]. The passage refers to a specific people, a specific time and place, but later Christians have applied it to themselves. They reinterpret it to fit with their own cosmology, their own eschatology. It furthers their religious comfort (reiterating the first purpose of religion described above) with the notion that if they believe in God, they will be saved and receive an eternal reward. “I have loved you with an everlasting love,” says the Lord. “Again I will build you, and you shall be built” [18]. The key here is that it goes beyond the comfort of the religious belief. This promise deals with putting something back that once was, connecting the future with the past through the present belief structure. It creates a bright-line through history and forward, relying on and refueling our beliefs. It is worth noting that any religion that has an eschatology—that is, a specific belief about the end—there may even be a sense that, since we are near the endtimes, certain progress is, even if potentially positive, unnecessary. Science, modernity, and progress—these are living, evolving ideas whereas religion and tradition—these are dead notions whose very stillness is what makes them so comforting and so timeless.

Another way to understand the importance of continuity in belief systems is to look at where continuity has deliberately been broken. The Tana Toraja of Sulawesi had their tao-tao effigy building practice altered by Christian missionaries to change them from seeming idols (containing the souls of the dead) to being more specifically representative statuary, more like photographs than vessels for the dead themselves [19]. Similarly, in the residential schools, a Native American boy, before even being taught one lesson in how to be a good (Christian) American, had his hair chopped off, and his name replaced with a good Christian name. Before he could be taught a new tradition, his connection to the old one had to be torn away.

COMMUNITY and CONSENSUS

Religion helps take our individual identity and expand it into community solidarity and a cultural identity. “Being part of a community with its own history, convictions, customs, and values can add richness and meaning to life,” says Judith Plaskow [20]. Finding likeminded individuals, people who believe what we believe—this extends the comfort and continuity further. It acts as evidence, as well, of our rightness, adding to our arrogance of knowledge and our sense of order.

Modern religion often makes the continuity link and the community link concurrently and deliberately; for example, the main front page [21] of website for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, includes family history links, making personal history and church history interconnected. The website [22] for the Episcopal Church emphasizes one’s public role with links for advocacy, community, and networking. By linking the personal with the communal, religion dictates all of our interactions with the world. Practitioners of a particular religion find that their beliefs color everything, altering the way they see the world, a la Andrew Newberg above; they see everything through the eyes of the community. “God is present—immanent—in community and is experienced in community” [23], says Mary Farrell Bednarowski in The Religious Imagination of American Women. Tying back again to an earlier point, the togetherness of community provides comfort even without the unified beliefs, simply by providing a sense of belonging, as described in the following passage from Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs in America:

We know what we’ve got to do… to pay respect to the Buddha and his teachings, to respect the adults and their wishes… [to] take care of the temple as if it were our home, and to take care of the younger generations in hopes that they too will see what we teenagers of Wat Dhammaram realize now. And what do we realize now? What we realize is that the temple is not [just] a place of worship, but a place where we have made lifetime friends.... We will always come back to it because at one time or another, it was our second home. [24]

Houses of Worship, specifically, maintain connections between practitioners of a given religion. They can also connect religious immigrants to one another, upon arrival in a new country, and also to practitioners back home. They come to a new country, “wishing to transfer their native heritage to their offspring to educate them about the history, culture, language, values, and religion of their homeland” [25]. They want to bring the community they had with them, to be maintained even as it is merged with a new community. What they do not want is to be isolated from either.

Connecting back to the point on continuity, to the promise of the future in a belief system’s eschatology, The Ghost Dance movement of 1890 “prophesied the imminent coming of an age when the dead would return, the whites would be eliminated in a cataclysm of selective destructiveness, and the lives of all Indians would be returned to a state of bounty and pristine purity” [26]. In the face of cultural genocide and assimilation, this Ghost Dance movement drew together previously disparate indigenous tribes into one community, giving them solidarity in hope for a better tomorrow.

CONTROL and CONFORMITY

Religion provides a ready ethical guide for behavioral control and consensus within the community. Emma Goldman suggested that “most theists see in god and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment” [27]. And Napoleon is said to have called religion “excellent stuff to keep common people quiet” [28]. Even Civil Religion, absent the usual institutions of religion, has as one of its primary dogmas the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice [29]. Religion not only defines the boundary between the known and unknown, the knowable and the unknowable, but also the acceptable and unacceptable. It sets down specific moral guidelines and rules to live by, dictating how practitioners (and often, non-practitioners, making for much conflict) should act from day to day and moment to moment. Classical theism, according to Bednarowski, consists of an omnipotent, omniscient, unchanging monarch who rules his creation from a distance” [30], a God who sees what we do and demands that we do it a certain way.

In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that Protestantism fueled the rapid development of modern capitalism in the West by “legitimating individualistic profit seeking [and] justifying capitalist exploitation” [31]. Because of a resulting sense of duty toward profit seeking, the potlatch gifting ceremonies among Native Americans were seen as a cultural affront to Americanism, a “denial of the thrift and progress of an expanding economy, of the virtues necessary to build a nation” [32]. Thus, the potlatch necessitated governmental response, laws passed against such wasting of personal property. Religion (like Protestantism), even Civil Religion (like Americanism), demands adherence to the community’s rules. “By setting down an underlying theoretical matrix centered on biopower, a perversely modern style and strategy of ‘disciplining the body and of regulating populations,’ I can more from the realm of the singular body and subjectivity to that of the body politic and nation imagined” [33]. On the note of biopower, in modern biomedicine, there is “religio-magical management of the body,” in which “the doctor takes the place of priest” [34].

Rules to live by certainly make daily life easier for many, putting boundaries on action that provide as much comfort at times as cosmology does in putting order upon the universe. But, inevitably, one finds himself in conflict with the rules, or finds the rules changing over time. And, in the face of the community’s rules, an individual cannot often exercise much power. “Civilization is aggressive, as well as progressive—a positive state of society, attacking every obstacle, overwhelming every lesser agency, and searching out and filling up every crevice, both in the moral and physical world; while Indian life” and, really, all individual life “is an unarmed condition, a negative state, without inherent vitality, and without powers of resistance” [35].

CONSUMPTION and CONFLICT

Finally, religion justifies consumption and any negative actions taken against those outside our religious community [36]. As noted above, Protestantism promoted capitalist development in the West. While many, obviously, subscribe to capitalist ideals, at least in part, even some of those who adhere to capitalist notions understand that modern global capitalism does damage in one part of the world often to balance out progress in another, keeping some nations on the periphery of the World-System so that other nations can remain in the powerful core. In addition to this, and noting the aforementioned problem with religious eschatology and progress, certain religions would have no reason to try to fix any problems in the world, to curb consumption for example for the sake of the environment, because the end of time is near and all will be well long before we destroy the planet.

But, beyond consumption, religion also justifies conflict in discrimination, violence and war, relying on the “castigation of anyone who does not accept or fit within the monolithic moral order [and] justification for stigmatizing and suppressing religious heresies… brutal oppression found in colonial movements of conquest” [37]. Given the order of cosmology, the arrogance of knowledge, the justification from continuity and community, one cannot help but, in the face of differing beliefs, act to alter them or, worse, destroy them. Tolerance is “an attitude impossible for those whose personal religion is strong… no really religious man can pass the unbeliever by and do nothing” [38]. And so, we change the religious beliefs and practices of others as much as we can. It can be as simple as the aforementioned altering of the tao-tao effigies of the Tana Toraja, or the cutting of the hair of the Native American in the residential school. It can come down to laws passed, like those against the potlatch, or the Ghost Dance, all because a people are different from us and inherently, pose a threat; as Claire Boothe Luce pointed out:

Having too many Asians Orientals in her words posed a particular threat, because their ways differed substantially from those of the majority culture in the United States: We are utterly justified in controlling and keeping low Oriental immigration in terms of numbers, because of the fact that they in too great numbers may undermine our way of life, our living standards, our form of religion. [39]

We fear the alien and want to extinguish it, by either “extinction or assimilation into [in this example] American society. The powers of Progress and Improvement were seen to be such that no primitive race could survive intact” [40]. These primitive races are ones, like the Hopi, who have sacred places they do not even bother to mark, like those at Woodruff Butte (Tsimontukwi), making the bulldozing of them that much easier [41]. If their sacred places cannot be easily identified, if they don’t build stone churches on them, if they don’t worship how we worship, then such places are not worth preserving.

And, of course, it has always been this way. As St. Augustine said, “God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind” [42]. And, even in the Bible, we have example—many, actually—of one people warring against another in the name of God and religion:

They warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males… burnt all their cities… and… took all the spoil, and… Moses said unto them… now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. [43]

How different is this from, say, the massacre at Wounded Knee? Men and women and children, prepared to surrender, were under the watchful eye of four Hotchkiss machine guns. When one of them, allegedly, took out a rifle and fired it at the American soldiers, the Hotchkiss guns “opened fire and sent a storm of shells and bullets among the women and children…. The guns poured in 2-pound explosive shells at the rate of nearly fifty per minute, mowing down everything alive” [44]. Men, women and children mowed gathered together and gunned down because they were different, because they retained their indigenous ways instead of subscribing readily to Americanism and Christianity. “You slaughter living beings and call it religion / hey brother, what would irreligion be?” [45]

It was not all active slaughter, of course. White Americans [46] put natives into schools where they could be indoctrinated. They sought to “improve” these primitive peoples’ lives. But, “those actively trying to improve Indian lives [were] without an explanation for the self-destruction of native communities through addiction, violence, and suicide” [47]. In the face of cultural genocide, Native Americans could choose annihilation or assimilation, destruction or self-destruction. Niezen argues that European monotheism was “willing to struggle violently in both the Old World and the New against local versions of the faith in which orthodoxy was compromised by specific idols or witchcraft or creative interpretations of the origins and nature of good and evil” [48]. Native traditions were an affront to Christianity simply by existing [49].

IN CONCLUSION

Obviously, religion is not all bad. Nor is it all good. When comfort from cosmology and continuity leads to a community that operates in control and conflict, the math of it is so simple that one can easily blame religion itself.

Whenever we fail to take a full look at the worst, whenever we deny the imperfections of our belief system, whenever we deny the evils our theologies have created and perpetuated, whenever we deny the abuse we ourselves have caused and suffered in the name of our Christian beliefs, we risk, at the least, perpetuating the present violence and at the worst, causing more harm even inadvertently. [50]

But, it is necessary to understand that war is the product of mass action, the “cultural genocide, like the social injustice of racism, is a cumulatively created product of the many” [51]. Edward Lazarus, in Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present, suggests a different angle to the problem: “what the country lacked, what perhaps any democratic country subject to the pressures of popular opinion would have lacked, was the will and self-discipline to curb its own people” [52]. The Community—the group mind—makes its moves in the name of good or bad, of charity and intolerance equally. And, the people cannot necessarily keep the community from acting. Often, as part and parcel of the community, they will cheer it on, even when its actions are destructive, because what other choice do they have? To stand up to the community, to the religion, is to find one’s self alone, separated from the community and the continuity and the comfort.

Coming back to the Pirahã, they not only have no religion, but they have virtually no violence and no war. But, there are only about 300 of them left. Such a small group would not have the control urge a larger group would. It would not feel the need to make others live as it does [53]. In the eighteenth chapter of the Zhuangzi, the Marquis of Lu provided wine to a seabird, fed it meat from a slaughtered bullock and had music played for it. But, the bird was dazed and too timid to eat or drink and died in three days. The Marquis’ error was in treating the bird as he (the Marquis) would have wanted to be treated, not as a seabird would. You cannot put (by force) upon others what you think is beneficial or deleterious, as their views of such will differ from yours; there is no universal value system (yet). Until there is, we have religion to keep things going by giving us comfort and meaning, a sense of continuity, solidarity with our community, rules to live by, and justification for our consumption and any actions we take against those who are not a part of our community. It gives life structure, order. It makes life worth living, even on the worst days.

1. Bokononism is a fictional religion, from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, a religion deliberately built on foma, harmless lies that can make one a better person. Mercerism is another fictional religion, notably featured in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and also in his short story, “The Little Black Box.” I invoke fictitious religions here to draw a parallel between all sets of beliefs, however real, in connecting people and providing some semblance of connection and control and understanding.
2. Though I am not making specific citations, all this information can be found in Everett’s book about his experience with the Pirahã, entitled Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes.
3. Their grammar and way of life is limited to experience “seen or recounted as seen by a person alive at the time of telling,” as Everett describes it in “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” Current Anthropology, August-October 2005.
4. http://www.andrewnewberg.com.
5. Pam Wynn, “Religion,” 8-9.
6. Ibid, 12-4.
7. Laura Sheahen, “The Brain Chemistry of the Buddha,” beliefnet, http://www.beliefnet.com/News/Science-Religion/2004/10/The-Brain-Chemistry-Of-The-Buddha.aspx. It is also notable that, as Paul Henri Thiry said in Good Sense in 1772, “the brain of man, especially in infancy, is like soft wax, fit to receive every impression that is made upon it.” When we are taught religion, generally, we are not in a position, psychologically speaking, of really knowing what it is we are receiving, regardless of how predisposed our brains may or may not be to accepting it.
8. These two church examples taken from the documentary America’s Houses of Worship.
9. Sita Wiener, Swami Satchidananda, New York: Bantam, 1970, 88.
10. http://www.andrewnewberg.com.
11. Ibid.
12. Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael, New York: Bantam, 1997, 40.
13. I have a teddy bear manufactured the month I was born and gifted to my mother just before my birth, not because I require the physical comfort of a stuffed animal, or even because I necessarily have specific memories of the bear from when I was very young, but simply because I have always had the bear, and it serves as a simple constant in my life even when so much else may change, sometimes drastically, over time. For some, going to church, something they may have done every week since they can remember, is just as easily a constant regardless of any specific fondness or direct comfort a church service has ever given.
14. America’s Houses of Worship.
15. Richard Spencer, “Dalai Lama and reincarnation by referendum,” Telegraph 1 Dec 2007.
16. Ibid.
17. Jeremiah 30:18.
18. Ibid, 31:3-4.
19. As described in the documentary Around the World in 80 Faiths.
20. Quoted in Mary Farrell Bednarowski, The Religious Imagination of American Women, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999, 19.
21. http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=e419fb40e21cef00VgnVCM1000001f5e340aRCRD.
22. http://ecusa.anglican.org.
23. Bednarowski, 66.
24. Gurinder Singh Mann, Paul David Numrich, and Raymond B. Williams, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs in America: A Short History, New York: Oxford UP, 2001, 35. (note: page numbers for this book come from the eBook edition on a Nook reader, so will differ somewhat from those in the paperback)
25. Mann, Numrich and Williams, 12.
26. Ronald Niezen, Spirit Wars: Native North American Religions in the Age of Nation Building, Berkeley: U of CP, 2000, 131.
27. Emma Goldman, “The Philosophy of Atheism,” Mother Earth Journal. 1916.
28. This line has been quoted by so many sources that finding the original source, be it in writing or in some speech of his, is seemingly impossible.
29. As outlined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract.
30. Bednarowski, 50.
31. Quoted in Timothy C. Lim, Doing Comparative Politics: An Introduction to Approaches and Issues, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006, 107.
32. Niezen, 140.
33. Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (Feb 1999), 52, citing Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality volume 1 and his concept of biopower, governmental control over not only our actions but our bodies, justifying laws dictating how we live on a very focused level, leading to legislation on abortion and many month long debates on governmental control over healthcare. Additionally, and relating to the fifth and final point to come, biopower justifies any action the government may take in destroying or protecting our bodies; that is, biopower, inasmuch as we as a community allow for it to dictate policy, justifies everything from jail sentences and the death penalty to wars abroad fought in our name.
34. First quote, Bryan Turner quoted by Niezen, second quote Niezen himself, in Niezen, 95.
35. Lewis Henry Morgan, quoted in Niezen, 51-2, and obviously interrupted by me.
36. The latter, on our behalf, justified by the notion of biopower specifically, and religion generally.
37. Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine, quoted in Niezen, 92.
38. Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee, quoted in Niezen, 1.
39. Quoted in Mann, Numrich and Williams, 31.
40. Niezen, 162.
41. As described in the documentary In the Light of Reverence.
42. Quoted in Niezen, 13.
43. Numbers 31.
44. James Mooney’s reconstruction, quoted in Niezen, 135.
45. Kabir, “Song of the Saints of India,” 8-9.
46. Not just in the United States, but also in Canada, as described extensively in Niezen.
47. Niezen, 3.
48. Ibid, 221.
49. A similar problem can be found in the lumping together today of all of Islam whenever fundamentalists commit acts of violence. But, if the whole cloth of a religion can be blamed for the acts of extremists under its aegis, then what of Christianity in the face of the Crusades, the Inquisition?
50. Sheila Redmond, quoted in Bednarowski, 41.
51. Niezen, 227.
52. Quoted ibid, 153.
53. Of course, the Pirahã do not make any effort to learn English and effectively insist that any researcher coming to them learns their language to get by, so even in such a small group, there is at least some semblance of control over outsiders.

In addition to its various Christian roots, America, quite early on, took on its own religious importance, became its own civil religion, a belief system built around rugged individualism, Protestant-fueled commerce, and stability through consensus. In the face of America, expanding into occupied territory, the natives, with their indigenous religions, “were destined either for extinction or assimilation into American society. The powers of Progress and Improvement were seen to be such that no primitive race could survive intact” [1]. How a native could survive was  to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” [2]. But, what resulted from these attempts to make the Indian conform, to “actively… improve Indian lives” was the “self-destruction of native communities though addiction, violence, and suicide” [3]. This wholesale destruction of what it was to be an Indian [4], this cultural genocide broke the spirits of those subjected to it. So, even when they made the effort to assimilate, to fit in at the residential schools, to go along to get along, psychologically, it could be more damaging than rewarding.

The residential schools, specifically, though they were “more effective than attempting to educate [children] while they remained under the influence of their parents and communities” [5], led to a lot of psychological damage because, in these institutions, separated as they were, isolated as they were, they involved “absolute, unchecked institutional control over the powerless” which Niezen, in Spirit Wars, calls “a recipe for social disaster” [6]. Niezen suggests that Indian children were “in serious danger of severe physical and emotional abuse,” and this separate from the overt mental destruction of their native beliefs, language, and culture. Upon arriving in the residential school, the Indian child had his hair chopped off, had his name taken away, replaced with a good Christian name. Before he’d even been taught one lesson in how to be a good American, his individual identity was already being stripped away. In 1998, the Government of Canada, which put Indians through a similar process as that America used, “acknowledged the connection between its programs of Indian residential education and an immense toll of suffering still being felt in the native population resulting from cultural loss, separation from families, and victimization through physical and sexual abuse” [7]. An ongoing, institutionalized process of social and spiritual destruction led, naturally, to an ongoing process of social and spiritual self-destruction. What choice did these children have, taken from their homes and their parents and their way of life and constantly told how uncivilized and even evil those things were?

America represented the common good, regardless of what form of Christianity one followed—though, of course, one had to conform in following one form thereof, as “civilization and Christianity must go together” [8]—and Americans, as a whole and often individually, believed it their duty first to educate and indoctrinate the Indian before they turned to outright destruction like the slaughter at Wounded Knee. They believed that “even the most savage people could be improved by association with more rational beings” [9]. And, of course, they were “more rational beings;” they were the better people come from far away to inhabit, to improve, and, eventually, to embody America. By the late 1700s, they saw the “native North Americans as representative of an earlier form of life from which Europeans had emerged as the pinnacle of human achievement” [10]. This Whiggish take on history made it virtually inevitable that any primitive society would be inculcated or trampled.

Native healing and ceremonialism was seen by missionaries a “satanic,” by medical reformers as “superstitious,” and by government agents as “seditious” [11]. Any Christian notions about Indian inferiority simply fueled further American notions about which culture was dominant, and these both led government officials to find new ways to stop Indian practices, outlawing everyday practices as well as ceremonial practices, when not taking children to put in the residential schools. The Indians had to “take part in civilized life by leaving behind their attachments to ‘thraldom’ and ‘superstition’ and learning a new and better language, religion, and means of livelihood” [12].

This entire notion of the better language, the better religion, the better means of livelihood—this is inherent in any organized society, so inherent that Rousseau coined the term “civil religion” to explain the often religious way citizens adhere to and become prideful of the core ideology of their society, even when their individual religious (or not) beliefs may differ. America is the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” with no room for the primitive Indian. Canada, similarly, had God to “keep our land glorious and free” in the “True North,” its “home and native land” also having no room for the native, as long as he insists on acting in his native manner. Coming to the New World, settlers and colonists brought a very simple notion of how people should live. And, though they may have peacefully coexisted with some natives for a time, eventually, the glaring differences between how the Indian lived and how the European lived, meant one would have to change to fit the other or be destroyed… the distinction between these two options not necessarily a very big one.

[1] Ronald Niezen. Spirit Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 162.

[2] Richard H. Pratt, Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, 1892. Quoted ibid, 46.

[3] Ibid, 3.

[4] Despite the racist lumping together here under the term “Indian,” I will continue to use it through this essay, as it is important to realize tribal distinctions did not matter to white America and, ultimately, were meaningless in the face of cultural genocide. In fact, reactionary religious notions, like the Ghost Dance movement, crossed tribal lines and formed, perhaps, a more cohesive indigenous whole, at least in appearance, that matched what white America already saw.

[5] Niezen, 223.

[6] Ibid, 76.

[7] Cited ibid, 86.

[8] Ibid, 47.

[9] Bruce Trigger. Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered. Quoted ibid, 49.

[10] Ibid, 50.

[11] Ibid, 224.

[12] Ibid, 223. And, while I only barely touch on it here, it is certainly worth noting that one thing government did was “teach the Indian to divide up land and farm it, to live the agricultural lifestyle that Americans did, taking away even the core of how Indians subsisted from day to day.

In the face of changes in society and culture, advances in science and technology, many a religion has to alter itself to survive. When dominant religions were pushed, through expansionism and colonialism, into the same space as lesser [1] religions, these lesser religions also had to change to survive, often taking on aspects of the dominant religion and mixing those aspects with many of its own to create something new, a syncretic hybrid of two traditions. Withouth this hybridization, many a lesser religion would have gone extinct quite quickly. Some notable examples of such hybrids, with many followers, are Vajrahana (Tibetan Buddhism), Thai Buddhism, and the Macumba traditions of Brazil, and on a much smaller scale (i.e. with fewer followers), there are the examples from the first episode of Around the World in 80 Faiths: the Bugis and Tana Toraja of Sulawesi, and, even more specific examples in festivals like the Carabao festival in Pulilan and the Fertility festival in Obando, these latter two in the Philippines.

 Vajrahana brought together the magico-religion of the Bön, which could be described “in distinctly unfavourable terms as a perversion of Buddhism, a kind of marginal countercurrent in which elements of Buddhist doctrine and practice [have] either been shamelessly copied, or else inverted and distorted” [2], though practitioners of a Bön still insist their religion is the same as it was before Buddhism came to Tibet. Regardless of claims made, Vajrahana retains animist and shamanist elements not found in Buddhism elsewhere. Similarly, Thai Buddhism demonstrates “how ‘traditional’ magical, supernatural, Buddhist and other components are blended in the practices of Thai religious syncretism” [3].

 Macumba, which came, along with slaves, “directly from the sophisticated structure of the [Yoruban] mother-religion in Africa,” a religion involving “the divine interaction between humans and Living Gods” through music and dance [4]. When African practitioners of the Yoruban religion mixed with Roman Catholics in the New World, Macumba was born. The gods of the Yoruban and the saints of Roman Catholicism mixed. The Yoruban gods “have been reborn and continue to be reborn, the same, yet different” [5].

 The Bissu spirit mediums among the Bugis of Sulawesi are devout Sunni Muslims (even though Islam establishes that access to prophecy has been cut off since Mohammed and contact with spirits in this way does not happen). As one female follower pointed out [6], they can separate the two with a simple distinction: “one is religion, the other is tradition.” Except, this distinction, viewed from outside, seems, at best, a contradiction. Religion is tradition is religion. But, the Bugis don’t see it that way, just as the followers of Bön see themselves not as Buddhist while others see an obvious hybridization going on, just as practitioners of Macumba can continue their dances, with the faces of Catholic saints representing their gods. They take what they take, reject what they reject, and the result makes perfect sense, because even these new hybrid religions have now become tradition.

 The Tana Toraja used to make small effigies of the dead, vague representations of loved ones no longer around. These “tao-taos” seemed like idolatry to Christian missionaries, but they found that they could not keep the Tana Toraja from making effigies. So, instead, they got them to change the effigies. No longer vague representations, the tao-taos were now lifesize, carved and painted to resemble specifically the dead, more statuary than idol [7].

 A similar mix of traditions occurs in the Carabao festival hybridized with the Feast of San Isidro in Pulilan, Philippines. What once was a pagan harvest festival has connected to Catholic celebration, animist roots going accepted but unacknowledged, as the Carabao bull is paraded through the streets along with Catholic imagery. Similarly, in Obando, Philippines, a fertility dance ends at a Catholic church, where the crowd “dances” its “prayer.”

 In all these examples, local, lesser religions find ways to maintain at least some of themselves in the face of dominant, missionary religions. This is a matter of survival, culturo-religious desperation. But, there is, of course, a separate advantage, other than simple survival, in hybridizing a religion. Elliott West, in The Last Indian War, suggests that the Nez Perce, for example, “might draw more fully on two traditional sources of strength, commerce and spirit,” in mixing their religion with American Christianity, “and with that they could hope for greater command of their immediate world, seen and unseen” [8]. And, for what greater purpose is religion than to command—or, at least, to understand—the immediate world, seen and unseen? It is this same reason that those outside of religion, poets and filmmakers alike, still find inspiration in religion. The grand ideas, however incorrect they may be on a fundamental level, will always have appeal to the artist; they transcend the everyday, put the quotidian into a much larger, often more beautiful stage. Religious ideas make the everyday seem a piece of something fantastic, something transcendent, whether one believes in a particular religion or not. And, old traditions, among those who believe in them, have an even greater transcendence. So, of course, when faced with extinction, these ideas are held tightly, desperately, and inasmuch as they can be maintained, even as greater religions (or science) weigh down upon them, they mix and match and give birth to something new, something that can thrive between traditions, something that can, over time, become the new tradition so that, for example, Bugis attended a spirit medium’s ceremony don’t even question their only Muslimhood. They are not one thing or the other [9] but both, simultaneously.

 [1] Here, “lesser” refers not to some value judgment about any particular religion, but a simple measure of the number of practitioners a particular religion has.

 [2] Per Kværne. The Bon Religion of Tibet. London: Serindia, 1995. 10.

 [3] Pattan Kitiarsa. “Beyond Syncretism: Hybridization of Popular Religion in Contemporary Thailand.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36 (Oct 2005): 463.

 [4] Serge Bramly. Macumba: The teachings of Maria-José, mother of the gods. San Francisco: City Lights, 1994. Ii.

 [5] Ibid, iii.

 [6] In Around the World in 80 Faiths. Dir. Rob Cowling. BBC Manchester, 2009.

 [7] In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud suggests that the more cartoonish a face (i.e. the less detail to it), the “more people it could be said to describe” (31). He writes of a “universality” of cartoon imagery, much like the smaller tao-taos, that can embody not only anyone but also ourselves as readers. When the missionaries got the Tana Toraja to add detail to the effigies, they took away some of the universality of these people’s  experiencing of death. Still, of course, the Tana Toraja  maintain what they can of their older practices; they do still make effigies (even if altered from the old way), they do still have their wild marches to the burial, they do still keep the dead around until a proper funeral can be afforded, and yet they are considered Christian.

 [8] Elliott West. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 38.

 [9] Except, of course, when it is convenient to specify, as followers of Bon might, where, depending on the time and place, it would make more sense to be a part of  state-sponsored Buddhism or to stand out from that crowd, amidst “sociocultural turbulence… in contemporary Thailand” (Kitiarsa, 464).

The Aztecs didn’t have science like we do. They didn’t have radio telescopes (or regular telescopes for that matter), or spectrometers to help them identify what those bright dots in the sky were. They couldn’t see that the universe was expanding, that they were on a planet hurtling through space, orbiting the sun. They didn’t know that E-mc². They didn’t know Newton’s Laws of Motion or Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion. Somehow, still, they had to explain the world in which they lived, and they had to find their place in it.

What they—specifically the Mexica ethnic group of Aztec in Tenochtitlan—came up with involved gods who sacrificed themselves to fuel the birth of a new sun when the old, fourth one, was gone. This fifth sun required further, regular sacrifice, and the people had to repay the debt they had incurred when the gods cut out their own hearts for the sake of this fifth age. And so, while the common imagery is of human sacrifice atop the temple [1], there was a lot of blood offered to the gods, the most common [2] method auto-bloodletting, i.e. piercing one’s own body to offer up blood. They did, of course, practice the sacrificing of other humans, in order to repay the gods and ensure the coming of each new day.

The question we must ask, is, if there were tortures and executions in, say, the Inquisition, and witches burned at the stake, and Crusades in the name of Jesus Christ (and defense against such Crusades in the name of Allah), and to this day, people still die in the name of religion, are killed in the name of religion, then what is the difference between the Aztecs (and the other Mesoamericans who practiced human sacrifice, of enemies and their own) and any religion today? Is it simply a matter of tact or new secular laws protecting people from being sacrificed, or is it science stepping in to explain how the universe really works?

The key here, is, if a culture knows enough, will they give up the bloodier elements of their rituals? Do we not already have, in so many cultures around the world today, evidence that, indeed, a culture WILL give up its more “barbaric” rituals as civilization advances? I would contend that, in fact, the Aztecs just didn’t know enough, but we do. And, that is the difference.

Ancient cultures, the Aztecs, the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Egyptians—their gods make a certain psychological sense if you look at their lives. For example, the Greeks had little useful land, the Sumerians farming could be ruined by flooding, so the chief deity of these two peoples is a storm god, a force behind the weather, who they hoped they could placate into running things smoothly, so food would grow and life would go well. The Egyptians had an easier time of farming, with the regular flooding (with topsoil replacement) of the Nile, so their chief deity was the sun god. The Aztecs’ chief deity (arguably) was Huitzilopochtli, personification of war and the sun, but the Temple Mayor in Tenochtitlan honored not only him but also Tlaloc, an older [3], rain god. They were farmers, dependent on the weather to have successful crops in the chinampa islands they created out of the swampy land into which they settled. They were also warriors, competing in battle with other ethnic groups nearby, so it makes sense that two of their primary deities are a sun (and war) god and a rain god.

They also offered a great deal of their blood sacrifices to the god of death, Mictlantecuhtli. Of course, death is one of the great irremediable negativities of life for all people, one of the great uncontrollables. While we understand the weather better these days, and, do not really worship the sun (or a personified representation of such), we could understand—even those of us who are not religious—wanting to believe in a god of death to whom we can sacrifice to keep death away. If we had as many gods as some of the great ancient pantheons, perhaps we would have a god of missed calls and a god of cars (to whom we would offer sacrifice to protect us from accidents [4]) and many more. But, instead, many of us have but one god, whom we propitiate for good health, for a happy life, even for our sports teams to win. It isn’t hard to understand the need for someone to as for such things. And, if we truly think about the horrors committed even today in the name of religion, it isn’t so hard to understand human sacrifice.

Aztecs lived in a stratified, diverse society, built around tribute to those with power. They owned slaves. They had a notable agriculturo-capitalist system of trade. They made war, sacrificed enemies and themselves. They could only understand the world as best they could, and they had to live it the way that worked for them. The flaw is not in choosing to believe in gods, choosing to sacrifice to them, but in not being advanced enough to know better. Writing about an Inca girl who had been sacrificed, Richard Dawkins wonders if perhaps she “really believed she was going straight to everlasting paradise, warmed by the radiant company of the sun god” [5]. Like the Aztec children, going to serve Tlaloc, did she go willingly, or did she scream? Dawkins continues:

Regardless of whether she was a willing victim or not, there is strong reason to suppose that she would not have been willing if she had been in full possession of the facts. For example, suppose she had known that the sun is really a ball of hydrogen, hotter than a million degrees Kelvin, converting itself into helium by nuclear fusion… Presumably, then, she would not have worshipped it as a god, and this would have altered her perspective on being sacrificed to propitiate it. [6]

[1] It is worth noting here that in the imagery of these sacrifices in the Ancient Voices segment we watched, the faces of even the bodies falling down the steps, their hearts already extracted, had contented looks.

[2] This claim, as to which form was most common, comes from the Ancient Voices video.

[3] Tlaloc predates the Aztec moniker. A discovery near Mexico, dating centuries earlier than the Aztecs, included the bones of children sacrifices to Tlaloc. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18164233/from/ET/

[4] Of course, given the litany of Catholic Saints, there are modern equivalents for some people, but most of us—probably even most Catholics—don’t think these “gods” are acting on our behalf so directly that we need offer them blood.

[5] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2006. 368.

[6] Ibid, 369.