American warism

Ted Grimsrud—September 12, 2025

One main characteristic of the US during my lifetime has been the centrality of “warism” to the nation’s sense of itself. By “warism” I mean war as central for the nation’s identity. Signs of the US as a warist society may be seen in all the money that the nation spends on preparing for war and the war-related priorities in the operation of our government. American warism may also be seen in the bipartisan consensus on miliary spending, one area where Democrats and Republicans always agree. Most of our government spending goes for war and war preparation. And the US spends way more on military-related items than anyone else in the rest of the world.

The myth of redemptive violence

What I will call the “myth of redemptive violence” grounds American warism. This myth is the quasi-religious belief that we gain “salvation” (that is, a sense of security and of meaning and purpose) through violence. People throughout history have put tremendous faith in using violence for such “salvation.” The amount of trust people put in such instruments may perhaps be seen most clearly in the amount of resources they devote to the preparation for war.

Theologian Walter Wink described how this myth works. His book Engaging the Powers asserts “violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death.” This myth remains invisible as a myth. We assume violence to be simply part of the nature of things. We accept violence as factual, not based on belief. Thus, we remain unaware of the faith-dimension in accepting violence. We think we know as a fact that violence works, is necessary and inevitable. We do not realize we operate in the realm of belief in accepting violence.

This myth operates on many levels. Americans assume the need for violent state power to sustain order. We willingly subordinate ourselves with few questions to this power and regularly encounter the myth on the level of popular culture. The books we read, the movies and TV we watch reiterate the story of creation as grounded in violence and chaos. Thus, we need military and police violence to subdue chaos and dominate enemies. We must subordinate ourselves to people in authority who exercise this necessary and redemptive violence. We join in the exercise of violence against our nation’s enemies when called upon. We accept one of the world’s most powerful police systems and one of the world’s largest prison systems.

This myth makes the nation-state central. The nation’s welfare, defined by its leaders, has the highest value. “There can be no other gods before the nation,” Wink wrote. This myth places patriotic religion at the heart of the state and gives its imperialism divine sanction. War requires a kind of religious justification. Warists believe god gives states the right to order citizens to give money and even their lives to maintain order. “By divine decree, the state utilizes violence to cleanse the world of evil opponents who resist the nation’s sway. The name of god—any god, the Christian god included—blesses and favors the supremacy of the chosen nation and its rulers.”

Though American belief in the redemptive necessity of violence is old, World War II accelerated the evolution of the US into a warist society. For its sustenance, this warism relies on the myth of redemptive violence. Americans continue to embrace this myth even in face of troubling evidence. The myth’s resulting warism corrupts American democracy and destroys the country’s economy and physical environment—and as an unquestioned myth it is invulnerable to dissent even as the country spirals down from crisis to crisis.

The ideology of the national security state

Wink calls what has emerged as the operating framework for American warism “the ideology of the national security state.” He sets the date for this emergence as 1947, when the American government created two new political institutions that came to embody this ideology: the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. These two new agencies came after the creation a few years earlier of the centralized military structure in the Pentagon and the emerging nuclear weapons program. The US government established the National War College in 1948 to propagate the national security doctrine. Wink wrote, “These institutions were but the outer form of a new Power being spawned: the national security system.”

World War II played a crucial role in the emergence of this ideology and its attendant structures. All of American history does contain expressions of the national security ideology. However, prior to World War II, this ideology had only limited influence. As recently as the mid-1930s, American military spending remained minimal. Powerful political forces opposed involvement in “foreign entanglements.” President Franklin Roosevelt, long a supporter of American military force, felt constrained in his ability to pursue interventionist policies in the years leading up to World War II. In fact, his efforts to get the U.S. formally to enter the War (the last time going to war would depend upon Congressional declaration of war) succeeded only after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on the US.

The War opened many possibilities for the advocates of the American national security ideology. Wink characterizes the doctrine of the national security state as follows: “The survival of the nation is the absolute goal. National strategy intends to incorporate the whole nation into the national survival plan, to make it the total and unconditional object of each citizen’s life. In this view, all times are times of war. Peace is nothing more than the conventional name given to the continuation of war by other means. All politics is a politics of war.”

We may see in American history a continual struggle between a “democracy story” and an “empire story.” World War II brought a decisive turn in this struggle. Prior to World War II, when America engaged in military conflict (and tended more toward the empire story), at the end of the conflict the nation demobilized (tending back toward the democracy story). Since 1945, there has been no full demobilization because we have moved directly from World War II to the Cold War to the War on Terror. We have moved into a situation where “all times are times of war.” The national security ideology links closely with the myth of redemptive violence. The purveyors of this ideology use the language, rituals, and symbols of already existing religions. They justify their use of violence in the name of God and Christian faith.

One key question about the national security state clearly reveals its religious dimension: Why would non-elites who bear terrible costs in a permanent war society submit to warism, in many cases offering intense support and, in times of war, suffering great consequences? We may find the answer in the promise of “salvation.” That is, the promise of security, of validation of one’s identity as an American, and of meaning and purpose. As I reflect on my own willingness to offer such support in face of the possibility of being drafted to go to the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, I add one other element. I felt a desire for “salvation” simply by being influenced by the embedded theology of blank check nationalism. Americans don’t typically even have an awareness of the assumptions that they accept about their nation and its demands on them.

The need for an enemy

The evolution of the US into a full-fledged national security state required the presence of a “threat” that could justify its tremendous costs. To expand our military presence to a global system of bases and other outposts, to devote resources to develop our nuclear weapons system, to justify the extraordinary risks such a system presented, to sustain support for a peacetime military draft, and to make actual military interventions acceptable, the US needed an enemy. Truman’s 1947 Truman Doctrine speech made clear that the justification of all these policies and practices would be the “Communist threat,” the presence of the Soviet Union as our great enemy.

This enmity had not been inevitable. From the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, American leaders were hostile toward the new Soviet entity. However, during the Soviet Union’s turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, it hardly posed a threat to the US. Then, after Hitler’s Germany first invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and six months later declared war on the US, the Americans and Russians worked as allies. Most American accounts of World War II fail to recognize how central a role the Soviets played defeating Germany. Europeans fought their war mainly on the Eastern Front. Fully 80% of the German casualties came at the hands of the Red Army. The Soviet/American alliance, tense with mutual suspicion, did end the Nazi threat.

Shortly after the end of the War, US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, recognized that it would not be in the interests of the US for an arms race to follow America’s introduction of nuclear weapons. He sought to control and limit the spread of nuclear weaponry. We should continue our alliance with the Soviets in order to limit its use. He, radically, suggested that the US voluntarily surrender its monopoly on nuclear weaponry.

Several of Truman’s top advisers agreed with Stimson. Truman, though, sided with those who wanted to sustain the American monopoly on nuclear weaponry and turned Stimson down. This choice led to a severe turn toward an adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union—and, indeed, stimulated feverish efforts by the Soviets to create their own nuclear arsenal, efforts that were successful. Such an adversarial turn enabled the national security state ideology to reign supreme in Washington. Thus began the Cold War. The leaders’ turn toward enmity against the Soviet Union led to uncritical acceptance of such enmity on the part of the general population. This uncritical acceptance resulted in the fateful embrace of blank check nationalism that made fear of the Soviet Union central to most Americans’ embedded theology.

Legacy of ashes

Americans have since followed a path fraught with violence, failed opportunities for peace, and ultimately the breakdown of the democracy story. The US began a peacetime draft for the first time in its history in 1947. This socialized young Americans into warism. Facing the likelihood of being drafted into the Vietnam conflict provided the context for my own struggle with and ultimate rejection of uncritical nationalism that I will recount in future posts.

Truman’s decision to reject Stimson’s proposal led directly to the opposite outcome. The Soviet response to the American nuclear monopoly led to a mad race that put the entire world on the brink of annihilation. Several times we came within a hair’s breadth of disaster. We remain on an extraordinarily dangerous precipice awaiting doomsday. The 1947 Truman Doctrine signaled the militarization of America’s place as the world’s great superpower. An endless series of disastrous military interventions around the world has followed down to the present day.

Even now American people have little consciousness of the “anti-American” way their nation has followed in the world. Americans in general think the best of their country and believe in its good intentions. They turn temporarily critical only in face of foreign policy failures. The embedded theology of uncritical nationalism has rarely been threatened, and never in sustainable and transformative ways. I grew up with no sense of the viciousness of the American interventions going on around the world during the 1950s. About the time I reached adulthood, though, a brief period of widespread negativity about the American Empire did surface largely due to American failures in Vietnam. As brief as this period proved to be, it lasted long enough to have a major impact on my own self-awareness as an American, as we will see.

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