Christianity and American State Violence in Iraq: Priestly or Prophetic?

• Author: Tajgetiren, Omer
• Position: Book review

Christianity and American State Violence in Iraq: Priestly or Prophetic?

By Christopher A. Morrissey

New York: Routledge, 2018, 158 pages, [pounds sterling]120.00, ISBN: 9781138736023

Sociologist Christopher A. Morrissey's book Christianity and American State Violence in Iraq: Priestly or Prophetic? attempts to rethink the relationship of religion and violence by taking American Christians' responses to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a case study. The two terms in the title of the book, priestly and prophetic,' come from Max Weber's work and Morrissey uses them to describe two different religious orientations toward the state and toward war. The priestly approach legitimizes and defends the state's power and its war-making capacity, whereas the prophetic approach challenges it. The overall purpose of the book is to investigate whether Christians in the United States took a priestly or a prophetic approach in the context of the Iraq war, and to explain the variation among Christians regarding their perspectives toward the war.

The book finds that among religious elites, the prophetic approach prevailed and the priestly approach was a minority position. In contrast, in the case of non-elites, the priestly approach was more common. To explain the variation among these attitudes, Morrissey employs "contact with the victims of structural violence" (p. 6) as an explanatory variable. After comparing and contrasting the biographies of interviewees, Morrissey finds that one salient characteristic distinguishes war opponents from proponents: the former have been exposed to the destructive consequences of war in different contexts. Such exposure was a "life changing experience" (p. 125) and it made interviewees "aware of human suffering" (p. 121). On the other hand, war proponents' biographies do not include such exposure. They lived insulated lives and had no direct contact with victims of structural violence. Although Morrissey seems careful not to attribute a deterministic effect to these contacts (pp. 132-133), he still gives too much explanatory power to such experiences. As he says, "The broad public support for the Iraq war is, sociologically speaking, the unsurprising result of social factors that are relatively well known to students of American religious public life" (p. 151). The term "social factors" in this quote refers to people's lack of contact with victims of violence, and for Morrissey this is the main factor for explaining one's...