Sacredness

   The title of Dr. Byrd's book, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution," brought my thought back around to the question we asked, and have continued to ask, since the beginning of the course, which is "what makes a war sacred?" The answers that we found with King Phillip's War and with Juster's definition seem to have often led us back to the question of intensity.  However, the readings for this week do not mainly point in that direction.  Although we only read an excerpt of Dr. Byrd's book, it seems to me that we read very little that pointed towards "new and sometimes bizarre forms of sacred violence,"[1] except for maybe the conduct of the two brothers fighting against each other that ended in a scalping.[2]  Instead, in Dr. Byrd's narrative and analysis, we are led back to Juster's assertion that the main target of sacred war in the colonies were "Words and objects, not people."[3]  In my post on August 28th, I suggested that in many ways, it was more effective for colonists to attack their enemies by attacking "their symbols and reality, and dominating them by replacement of those symbols with their own."[4]  We see this clearly in Dr. Byrd's book, where the colonists attacked the royalist interpretations of scripture, and replaced them with their own understandings of those texts.  In attacking these symbols of religious and political authority, the colonists were reordering symbols and recreating their own reality.  

  My question, then, is where does this leave us?  Can we, from what we have read so far, come to even a tentative agreement, about what the definition of a sacred war is?  Does the "sacredness" of war come primarily from the manipulation of religious symbols, or is there more to it than that?

[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] James P. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: the Bible and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44. 

[3] Juster, "What's 'Sacred' about Violence in Early America?

[4] Joshua W. Jeffery Sr., “Symbolism and Power,” Religion and War in American History (blog), n.d., accessed September 19, 2013, http://religion-and-war-in-america.blogspot.com/2013/08/symbolism-and-power.html.