Blank check nationalism?

Ted Grimsrud—September 5, 2025

How is it that Americans so easily devote so many resources for war? We spend almost as much on war as the rest of the world combined each year. This does not make the US military particularly effective. Since 1945, few US military interventions achieved their objectives (for example, Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, and Ukraine in our present moment). Yet failed interventions have not much hindered the growth of military spending or the continued willingness of the American Empire to intervene.

My own experience growing up in this country may offer a clue about such seeming contradictions. I had a pleasant youth. Yet, when I turned 18 I without thought registered for the draft and expected to end up in Vietnam killing our “enemies.” I expected to act in ways contrary to the pleasantness of the first 18 years of my life. Though the Vietnam War violated what I believed about the goodness of the US and about how I should live my life, I would have gone.

Though I lived with moral seriousness and cultivated living justly and peaceably, I unquestioningly accepted the state’s right to take me from such a life and train me to kill on command. I accepted the state’s right to demand that I contradict my morality. I would take this path to unjustly deny the rights of people our leaders call “enemies” mainly.

Central to this big contradiction are the ways we are shaped from early on in life. Our environments condition us to accept certain values, obligations and orienting principles about life. The beliefs and practices of our families and the interests and pressures that come from the various institutions and cultural assumptions that surround us shape us toward warism.

Embedded theology

I use “embedded theology” for beliefs, values, and convictions that shape us prior to our awareness of what they are. These orienting beliefs embedded in our psyches direct our ways of seeing the world from the time we are very young. I call these beliefs “theology” because they refer to what we believe to be most important. We may find God and doctrines in the traditional senses to be most important. Or we may not believe in God. We all, though, have a hierarchy of values, convictions about what is most important that shape our lives more than anything else.

For example, many believe retaliation to be necessary when someone harms someone we love. We may believe it to be crucial for one’s sense of wellbeing that one be seen as a winner and not a loser. Or we might believe a key to one’s identity is to be being a citizen of the US. We might have an automatic sense of life as a hierarchy of power and authority. This hierarchy requires of us a consistent responsibility to defer to and even obey those who are above us. These views may be embedded in our psyches, shaped by our environment before we even realize it.

These various beliefs of our family and friends, of our communities, and of our broader culture exist before we are born and shape the world we enter and thus shape us. They enter our consciousness before we can evaluate them and shape them. They are precritical. They may be hidden from us until something in our life brings them to the surface. As well, they in turn serve as filters of our perceptions of everything else. They provide the interpretive framework for the thinking and perceiving and choosing we do as we evolve in our worldview as we grow up.

Such beliefs, then, work not as conclusions so much as starting points. They shape how we discern meaning as the lenses through which we observe life. Usually, we become aware of our embedded theology when we face questions that make us wonder if how we see the world is adequate. We then must think consciously about what we have always assumed to be true. Such consciousness may lead us to change elements of our embedded theology or reaffirm it.

I came to question my embedded theology about American warism when I realized that it contradicted my experiences in life. The embedded theology had shaped my life in subtle and hidden ways that I would have never self-consciously scrutinized or deliberately affirmed. Structures around me (my nation, our popular culture, various religious institutions) used that theology to exert pressure on me to conform. I tended to accept the call to war despite many of the more conscious aspects of my moral life placing high value on virtues that war contradicted.

The Powers

Let us think about the embedded theologies that push us toward war in light of the concept of the Powers. As human beings embedded in culture, the Powers (a metaphor for the institutions, structures, traditions, and conventional wisdom of the world around us) shape us. We best understand these Powers as concrete, historical elements of social life that have a kind of existence apart from each of us as individuals. This existence may even be seen as willful.

Institutions have motives and values that transcend those of the individuals that make them up. An individual may leave, but the culture of the structure continues as before. The image of the “Powers” conveys the seeming willfulness of institutions and other structures, the sense that they are more than simply the sum of their individual parts. When we speak of the “Powers” of various structures and systems, ww refer to them as actors in their own right.

Nation states are quite important Powers surrounding us. So are massive corporations that have evolved in the past several centuries to exert enormous power over an increasing part of human life. These structures have been created by individual human beings but over time evolve their own motives and interests. We may think of Powers as “fallen” when their interests become powerfully destructive to human wellbeing. For example, the fallenness of the state may be seen when patriotism pushes people not toward a healthy sense of community but toward exclusivism and domination. Still. the Powers are not inherently evil or totally fallen. They play a role in all life-enhancing elements of human cultures and ways of ordering our social life. Their place in the world is complicated and ambiguous. Still, some Powers are fallen and shape our world in harmful ways. We must be aware of how the Powers’ existence shapes our lives and when they serve their own interests—not human wellbeing. We must be aware of their presence in our lives as we seek self-consciously to develop ways of being human that are actually life-enhancing.

Uncritical nationalism

We rarely deliberate carefully about one of the most important beliefs of our American embedded theology: uncritical or blank check nationalism—the almost unquestioned willingness to accept the state’s call to prepare and fight in wars. Few Americans self-consciously give their state a “blank check.” Yet, assumptions and deep-seated beliefs we are not consciously aware of shape how we see the world before we even notice them.

Uncritical nationalism operates when momentum toward war reaches a critical mass. For example, in the mid-1930s, millions of Americans opposed militarism and vowed not ever to go to war. Only a few years later, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the US, virtually all Americans did support war. That the American people did so does not seem remarkable given the circumstances. It does seem remarkable, though, how quickly and decisively people made the switch from skeptical to affirming about war. Many seemed to hold a sincere refusal to fight in wars. However, they gave their more deep-seated loyalty to the state. They gave the state the power to determine when war actually was necessary.

After World War II, the American military became more interventionist resulting in many military interventions. Probably the one that differed the most from World War II was the war on Vietnam. It became deeply unpopular. For a moment, such a problematic experience of war threatened the embedded theology of blank check nationalism. In a surprisingly short time, though, blank check nationalism returned in force. No new evidence supported the embedded theology “doctrine” of the US as a benign empire. The Powers simply re-gained their hold.

American leaders worried about “the Vietnam syndrome,” suspicion of the US military that weakened the hold of uncritical nationalism. Yet, a strong argument for the immorality of America’s war on Vietnam that would lead to rejection of American warism did not gain wide acceptance. The main shapers of public awareness in the mass media and educational system showed little interest in such an argument. Disbelief in warism did not take hold and thus did not threaten the blank check nationalism. When the popular, unapologetically warist Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, American culture mainly returned to its warist assumptions.

The uncritical nationalism persisted despite the abysmal record of US interventions down to the present, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Shortly after Joe Biden’s election in 2020, his administration intervened in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The US and its NATO allies resisted peace negotiations in the lead-up to Russia’s escalation of the conflict in the early months of 2022. The US poured weaponry into Ukraine and undercut a negotiated settlement that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to in the Spring of 2022. American political leaders of both parties voiced virtually no opposition to this intervention even as Ukraine faced deep losses.

Along with the failed intervention in Ukraine, the US continued unrestricted support to Israel. That support led to genocidal engagement beginning in October 2023. Despite widespread moral outrage around the world, findings in international agencies of Israeli war crimes guilt, and the ineffectiveness of the Israeli war effort, American political leadership, corporate media, and public opinion in general remained quite supportive of the Biden Administration’s policies.

Why are Americans so susceptible to uncritical nationalism? Why does it retain its power even when it shows itself to be so harmful not only to the direct victims of American warism but also to the American people themselves? Why do we not recognize this dynamic that is so problematic? Even more, why do we so seldom even think about it? I suggest, in a nutshell that the problem stems from the ways the Powers exploit the deep-seated embedded theology of blank check nationalism. To elaborate on this suggestion, in the posts to come, I will look at my own experience with this embedded theology and consider what led me to step away from it.

A peaceable nation?

May we honestly imagine that the US will transform to be a peaceable nation? I doubt it. Social structures that benefit from the dynamics of warism dominate our political system. Our warism-shaped mass media marginalizes and misrepresents advocates for peace. We see embedded warism in our two-party system that gives voters only a choice between two expressions of the same corporate domination. The two greatest threats to life on earth—the climate crisis and nuclear war—went virtually unnoticed in our recent presidential election.

In the face of the despairing dynamics of our current moment, we may be said to have two main choices. One is to numb ourselves and remain passive or the second is to find some way to cultivate hopefulness that points toward some sort of positive resolution to our dilemmas. To choose the second option we must bring our embedded theology of uncritical nationalism to the level of awareness. Then we might deliberate whether this underlying set of convictions indeed offers a humane view of the meaning of life. In future posts, I will argue that it does not and suggest a path of freedom from the dominance of that embedded theology.

[This is the second of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The first post in the series, “Is pacifism relevant to the American Empire?” may be found by clicking on this link. The third post, “On being a proud American,” may be found by clicking on this link.]