After reading Jill Lepore's The Name of War, I would seriously question Susan Juster's assertions in her essay on sacred violence. Juster, in her essay, states that "For the historian of colonial America, the question is not the ubiquity of religious violence but the apparent scarcity of it."[1] However, Lepore's account of King Phillip's War directly contradicts that Juster's thesis that violence, and especially religious violence, was scarce in the colonies. According to Lepore, "To some New Englanders, King Phillip's War was thus a holy war--that is, a war fought for the goals of the Church and subject to few limits of conduct (since the Indians were infidels, 'blud ffor blud shal bee ther portion Just."[2]
In the case of this war then, which according to Lepore had no truly declared end, the target of the war was indeed people, and not simply "words and objects." Does this attack that focuses more upon people, and less upon symbols which refer to religion, make King Phillip's War any less of a holy war, or an instance of "sacred" violence?
[1] Susan Juster, “What’s 'Sacred' about Violence in Early America? Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World,”Common Place, October 2005., accessed August 28, 2013, http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-01/juster/.
[2]Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999), 108-9.
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