Much of the analysis of the apocalyptic nature of the rhetoric discussed here was initially worked out in the preparation of an arrested piece of street theatre called "the burning bush" conceived with Michael Casey, Daniel Lang/Levitsky, and Meredith Slopen. My development of these ideas has been greatly assisted through conversations with Elizabeth Castelli and Jennifer Glancy, and through the critical eyes, cast upon earlier drafts, of Michael Casey, Tanya Erzen, and Scott Kline.

Overview

Given that conservative Protestantism is all-too-apparently alive and well in the United States, it may be prudent to consider how common interpretations of the Bible become part of the political calculus. Many people on the left bemoan the Christian Right without paying attention to precisely how biblical interpretations get incorporated into right-wing discourse, and what recognizing biblical influence on U.S. politics might mean for engaging bellicose, imperialist rhetoric, such as that used by the younger President Bush and his administration. I am urging consideration of the way in which the primacy of the Bible - particularly, belief in the absolute, inerrant truth and authority of the Bible, and adherence to "fundamentals" of the faith therein - affects the government's policy and military decisions, and the American public's acceptance of those decisions. The public's response to the U.S. wars since September 11, 2001, may be affected by the overlap between long-standing, biblically inflected, national discourses on the one hand, and personalized understandings of the Bible popular in conservative Protestant circles, on the other.

My point is to think about how the Bush administration's language cleverly accesses congealed past discourses in its sacred posturing,[1] bringing the national past and the individual present together in securing support for war. The convergence of national and personal religious language prompts people to understand themselves and their nation through scriptural images - such as Israel entering the promised land - so that expansionist positions appear divinely ordained and, therefore, incontestable. In my view, the emotional and political force of such religious identifications should not be underestimated, even when the connections to contemporary politics are not always conscious or made explicit. These kinds of identifications form the framework in which events are understood, and they give spiritual pitch (and therefore emotional weight) to people's political convictions. Further, as I will discuss here, the power of biblical language in the United States increases exponentially when it intersects with prevalent understandings of gender and of the role of the United States in the world. In this essay I will examine how biblical tropes of the covenant (the promise of the land and blessing) and the apocalypse (the internal and external threat of evil against that promise) are mobilized in support of aggressive foreign policy, and how the gendering of these tropes may subtly affect the public's response to military aggression.

Covenantal Thinking

As scholars of religion and American history have repeatedly shown, American national identity has been shaped by the biblical language chosen by the first settlers, leaders, and preachers to emphasize both covenant and apocalypse. Of particular appeal to early Americans - from the Puritans to the architects of the American constitution - was the text of Deuteronomy, outlining the covenant between God and Israel.[2] The Deuteronomic covenant provided a hopeful and motivating narrative on which to model a perceived calling in the world and relationship to God. For instance, as sociologist of religion Robert Bellah recalls in his study of covenant and the American myth of origin, the Puritans who were to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony had already forged an "Agreement" between each other and God, before they departed England for the new world.[3] Covenant became the template for documenting and justifying communal decisions.

Like the Israelites, early Americans understood themselves to be entering into the Promised Land. Following the covenantal pattern outlined in Deuteronomy of prescribed moral and legal obligations to be kept by the people of Israel in return for God's blessing, the settlers understood themselves to be obligated to do God's will in return for God's blessings; the threat within both Deuteronomic and American covenantal thinking lay in the prospect of divine punishment for breaking covenant. Bellah points to John Winthrop's oft-cited sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," as a prototypical instance of early covenantal thinking, strongly influenced by Deuteronomy. Given while still aboard ship in 1630, Winthrop's sermon urged the people to live according to God's will, in order that the "city on the hill" might prosper. Patterning his sermon along the biblical lines of promise of blessings for kept covenant, and curses for broken covenant, Winthrop suggested that if the people kept their side of the covenant with God, they would be blessed, but if the covenant were broken, they would be punished.[4] Thus, Winthrop's covenantal exhortation was accompanied by the warning,

But if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship . . . other Gods, our pleasures, and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land wither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.[5]

The Puritans and their covenantal documents have had a lasting influence on American political life. As Sacvan Bercovitch, a scholar of American literature, puts it,

[T]heir influence appears most clearly in the extraordinary persistence of a rhetoric grounded in the Bible, and in the way that Americans keep returning to that rhetoric, especially in times of crisis, as a source of cohesion and continuity.[6]

Some scholars have gone as far as to argue that the covenantal model was foundational for American political theory and practice.[7] Political scientist Donald Lutz makes the argument that many of the early documents of the settlements prefigure the U.S. Constitution in their covenantal nature, even where they were not specifically named as covenants.[8] Bellah shows that the idea of a covenant between America and God persisted even once church and state were officially separated. Covenantal thinking has manifested itself in presidents' speeches in what Bellah calls the "tradition of American civil religion." Presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan have drawn on the analogy between the United States and Israel to affirm the status of the United States as the chosen people of God. The United States has consistently been described as the new Israel, divinely appointed by God to bring light to the nations.[9]

Within the tradition of American civil religion, the United States takes on a messianic role with respect to the rest of the world. From the mid-nineteenth century on, national self-understanding includes the notion of a special mission, a "manifest destiny," to lead all humanity toward civilization and progress.[10] American studies scholar Amy Kaplan suggests that it is precisely this understanding of the mission to save the world from various dangerous aggressions and dictators that grounds the notion of American exceptionalism. As long as the United States can present itself as safeguarding freedom for the world, its own pretensions to empire can be ignored. As Kaplan puts it, "imperial politics denied at home are visibly projected onto demonic others abroad, as something only they do and we do not."[11]

Apocalyptic Narratives

Covenantal thinking in early America was accompanied by an apocalyptic narrative. The Hebraic fear of curses for breaking covenant was amplified in the Christian context of the settlements by apocalyptic thinking about sin and judgment, as found in the New Testament. In the apocalyptic narrative that grew up around New Testament texts such as Matthew 24, Mark 13, and the book of Revelation, time is suddenly interrupted by the return of Christ and the judgment of all people, who are divided between eternal reward and eternal punishment (i.e., heaven and hell). Apocalypse becomes the guarantor of covenant, providing the vivid imagery of the everlasting consequences for keeping or breaking covenant. So while entry into the Americas was understood as the reward of paradise, a new world, a new order,[12] this promise was not without an accompanying threat of evil that might disrupt this utopic trajectory.

As scholar of American literature Edward Ingebretsen has suggested - and his work is foundational to my argument here - the Puritan settlers' calling as a divinely favored nation was accompanied by an apocalyptic belief that evil might at any moment creep in, steal all the things held most dear, and destroy the nation.[13] Sin was warned against as that which might destroy not only the present communal life, but also the individual's afterlife. Early Americans were constantly reminded that hell and all forms of evil threatened to intrude at any moment, and of individual susceptibility to entertaining evil. For the Puritans and their successors, Ingebretsen argues, a most terrifying aspect of evil was its ability to creep into the lives of individuals or their neighbors; thus constant guard was kept against it. Interior scrutiny formed good citizens, whose good behavior banished evil and fear. He suggests that many times this scrutiny bled into real life, causing suspicion of anyone or anything different.[14] Early preachers like Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards were instrumental in shaping consciousness of the invisible world and the ever-present threat of fire and brimstone. This threat of smoldering otherworldly punishment for moral corruption was even dramatized, in the case of the Salem witch hunts, in the burning of heretics.[15]

Ingebretsen highlights the colonial context in which apocalyptic thought shored up a covenantal "right" to the land. The threat of individual sinfulness to the covenant was amplified by the evil already residing in the land. In Ingebretsen's words, "the agents of imagined [moral] decline were many - and the Indians, those 'swarthy demons,' were always on hand as potential scapegoats to channel this negative energy."[16] Within this context, captivity stories of literal and spiritual bondage flourished, reminding settlers of the aboriginal people who seemed to threaten the nation's destiny.[17] Yet, clearly, the aboriginal peoples were more than just scapegoats. As historian Anders Stephanson shows, early Americans viewed the elimination of aboriginal peoples and the acquisition of new territory as an affirmation of their divine calling to bring civilization and progress to the world. He gives as early examples Winthrop's assessment of the smallpox epidemic among aboriginal peoples as "miraculous plagey," and Benjamin Franklin's assessment of rum as "'the appointed means' by which 'the design of Providence to extirpate these savages' was fulfilled 'in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth.'"[18] The genocide of aboriginal people was justified through analogy to the biblical promise of Israelite victory over the original Canaanite inhabitants of the promised land who, like the aboriginal people of the Americas, were understood as idolatrous, seductive, and covenant-threatening.[19] In a Christian apocalyptic context conquest of the land's inhabitants was also seen as victory over cosmic forces of evil.

Ingebretsen's work shows the longstanding connection between expansion of borders by banishing external threats, and the reinforcement of borders, through scrutiny of individual moral shortcomings. Captivity stories, with their thematics of external threat and deliverance, fed more general apocalyptic anxieties about something lurking internally, needing to be caught, uncovered, scrutinized, banished. Ingebretsen goes on to show that apocalyptic fear has remained a politically productive part of the nation's cultural imagination for centuries. He argues that fear has been both created and managed through religious confessions, devout obsessions with apocalyptic end times and judgments, and in secularized versions through gothic and science-fiction horror stories and films. In his words, "without obvious force or coercive violence, a mythologized religious framework . . . controls without seeming to control; shapes a political order while seemingly indifferent to shape."[20] Ingebretsen's description of the controlling functions of apocalyptic thought points to the relationship, to which I will return presently, between an externalized fear of the Other and an internalized shame, working together in the imperialist project of expanding borders and maintaining control of those within them.[21]

Biblically Inflected Discourse and The Imperialist Project

Biblically inflected national discourse, along with attendant hopes and fears, has persisted, perhaps because apocalyptic and covenantal images are expedient both in motivating governments' foreign-relations policy and action, and in enforcing compliant behavior at home. Not only have these discourses consistently authorized colonialism in general,[22] and American acquisition of territory and resources in particular, but at the same time they impart an aura of familiarity, historicity, and moral authority, to which much of the population is sure to submit.

Like prior national leaders, George W. Bush, his speechwriters, and members of his administration tap deeply familiar biblical images in the rhetoric motivating various military tactics. The position taken by the Bush administration with respect to the rest of the world clearly falls within the tradition of covenantal, messianic chosenness by God. In his speech on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001, Bush was able to make the same claim about the United States that the writer of John's gospel makes about Christ: "America is the hope of all mankind. . . . That hope lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it."[23] In the happy marriage of covenant and apocalypse, the impinging darkness must be fought. The light of the world requires darkness, in order to vanquish it. Throughout the Bush administration's rhetoric, the United States is described as using its military strength in the role of fulfilling, and ensuring, certain moral obligations for the rest of humanity, thus (both apocalyptically and paradoxically) creating a "new era" of peace and justice. To give but one example, the National Security Strategy of September 2002 (PDF), known best for advocating "pre-emptive strikes," claims that the United States has a duty "to help make the world not just safer but better" and to "defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere."[24] Here the United States polices "universal" moral obligation for the world. The rhetoric recalls the longstanding tradition of manifest destiny in U.S. nationalism that, as Stephanson argues, "constitute[s] itself not only as prophetic but also universal."[25]

In the National Security Strategy of 2002, and throughout Bush's speeches, the United States is apocalyptically chosen by "history" to fulfill its calling in the world. As scholar of religion Elizabeth Castelli observes, history actually converges with God in the speech given on the second anniversary of September 11, 2001. Castelli's observation can be extended to the rest of the discourses produced by the Bush administration: Throughout its documents, "history" seems to be a thinly veiled, secular substitution for "God."[26] History chooses the United States to lead the world to safety (resulting, of course, from enforced moral conformity):

History has called our nation into action. History has placed a great challenge before us: Will America - with our unique position and power - blink in the face of terror, or will we lead to a freer, more civilized world? There is only one answer: This great country will lead the world to safety, security, peace and freedom.[27]

The rhetoric is well crafted. It is, to many minds, as Castelli names it, an "unsettling juxtaposition of nationalism and theological determinism," but its purpose is, of course, to settle the matter. There is a certain inexorability in having been chosen: "We" (and here individual members of the population are interpellated into a single national mind) must not refuse the call of history/God; "we" must only accept.

The cosmic duty of the chosen nation is, as the fight with "darkness" and terror suggests, accompanied in this rhetoric by the urgency of cosmic battle with evil itself. The current rhetoric provoking fear of terrorism seems to be rooted in the apocalyptic heritage of the nation. The language Bush uses to describe terrorists in their caves and hiding places evokes an image of lurking evil, threatening the nation at every turn. The evil terrorists are those who (like Satan, presumably) "seek to master the minds and souls of others," over and against which stand "the defenders of human liberty."[28] Evil is fearful precisely because of its ambitious, murderous irrationality: "Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale."[29] Thus, the rooting out of "hidden evil" and "mad ambition," makes palatable rhetoric that continually demands weapons inspections in Iraq.

Moreover, within the discourse of the Bush administration, external threats are portrayed as having infiltrated the borders of the nation, thus necessitating increased internal scrutiny. Fear of "evil among us" ensures acquiescence with a demand for intensified domestic policing. Many proposals go uncontested, both formal and informal, encouraging people to watch for and report anything suspicious, in short, to spy on their neighbors. Such an apocalyptic fear of an internal hidden threat clearly grounds and justifies the disappearances of those who look Arab, Muslim, or South Asian in the United States after September 11, 2001. The U.S.A. Patriot Act allows individual's (mainly people of color's) rights to be suppressed in the name of exposing perceived hidden threats.

"Saving" Afghan Women

To turn the eye to gender for a moment, perhaps the impulse in the United States to save the world from hidden threats is somewhere at work behind the sudden urge to save Afghan women from the veil.[30] Here gender is the site on which imperialist, apocalyptic, and covenantal discourses converge. Postcolonial feminist critics point out how the discourse of protection harms Afghan and Muslim women. At a panel, "Responding to War," convened at Columbia University shortly after September 11, 2001, Lila Abu-Lughod suggested that the rhetoric of liberating Afghan women was just one more case - in Gayatri Spivak's words[31] - of white men trying to save brown women from brown men. Taking this postcolonial critique as a premise, I would like briefly to consider the rhetoric whereby white men both assume savior complexes and use the fear of hidden threats to assure public support. To be very clear, I am in no way arguing that Afghan women should not have self-determination. But I am suspicious that the American will to "free them" is consistent with the rest of the apocalyptic and covenantal discourses being mobilized, and therefore operates from a base of fear, and also misogyny.

Evidently, the trope of rescuing women has played a major role in shutting down popular American resistance to the attacks on Afghanistan, even though it has been well recognized that the discourse of saving women is only a front for ongoing U.S. military activity in that country. The urgent need to rescue Afghan women is successful as a front, because it necessarily interacts with many other American discourses with pretensions to "saving." As a front, however, it plays the important rhetorical role of tapping into the senses of inexorability and urgency that the prevalent apocalyptic and covenantal discourses carry. There is an urgency to "do something" to save the women of Afghanistan from the evil they face. The "something" that is accepted as the only option is American military aggression, because it fulfills expectations about the United States' savior role in the world.

I wonder though, whether the ready acceptance of this mission to save Afghan women has also to do with the apocalyptic underside of the U.S. covenantal savior complex. Misogynist portrayals of female sexuality through apocalyptic imagery have in the past been used as motivations and justifications for the subjugation of women (as internal and external threats) in colonial contexts. Fear of women's "secret" powers are typified by apocalyptic figures such as the Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17-18), and her more "secreted" latter-day Wiccan offspring, whose evil was "exposed" in the Salem witch hunts.[32] Literary critic Mary Wilson Carpenter has suggested that the fear of women demonstrated by misogynist tropes in apocalyptic discourse bolsters male homosocial utopic visions, such as the apocalyptic vision of finding, conquering, and controlling new "heavenly" lands.[33] Along these lines, religious studies scholar Catherine Keller draws connections between Christopher Columbus's apocalyptic vision of the new world, his description of the new world as a woman's nipple, and the corollary violation of the new world's women and children.[34]

In other words, the fear and subsequent violation of women's chosen mode of comportment is a theme familiar to feminist critics of the colonial uses of apocalyptic language. Certainly, the "freeing" of women has justified homosocial conquest after September 11, 2001. Is there anything more homosocial than the father-son war competition? As Castelli suggests, with characteristic acumen, "It is perhaps not incidental that the efforts of Bush-the-son since September 11 have had a decidedly Oedipal cast. One doesn't need to be Freud or Fellini to understand Bush-the-Son's assertion that his war will be bigger and longer than his father's."[35] But beyond justifying the war and saving brown women from brown men, the United States has also "saved" the world from a mode of dress - one which hides women's bodies from prying eyes - distinct from that prescribed by "universal" values. At a panel in New York City in March of 2002, sponsored by War Is Not the Answer, feminist academic and activist Silvia Federici made the point that there may be a fear of veiled women as the Other operating in the demand to free Afghan women. Federici derived her argument from Franz Fanon's suggestion that the French were concerned about Algerian women unveiling, not because they cared about women's freedom, but because it inhibited their proprietal gaze. If, on some level, a perceived threat of veiled women influenced the public's acceptance of the bombing of Afghanistan, it was a perception consistent with apocalyptic misogyny.

Political Discourse and Faith

It is not enough, however, to show that biblical subtexts are at work in describing and justifying U.S. imperialism in the name of protection.[36] It is crucial to explore the way in which biblical images in political discourse are able to interact with a substantial portion of the population's faith commitments. Not only do images of promise and threat recall familiar, historical, nation-building language, but they also gain strength by connecting with personal piety and individualized ways of reading the Bible. Biblically based national rhetoric easily becomes personalized truth. Indeed, biblically infused rhetoric is effective precisely because it can blur the lines between individuals' identities as Christians and their identities as citizens of the United States. American civil religion is not explicitly Christian, as Bellah points out;[37] the analogy, however, between the United States and Israel that serves as its rallying point was evidently born out of Christian beliefs, and continues readily to accommodate and even invite Christian interpretations. Christians are able to identify with Israel, through the equivalence that has been drawn by early Christian writers, as well as by contemporary theologians, between the "old" Deuteronomic covenant and the "new" covenant inaugurated by Christ. Like Israel under the "old covenant," the individual member of the Church under the "new covenant" is understood to be chosen and redeemed by God. Many Christians consider themselves part of the new, spiritual Israel by virtue of accepting their part in the new covenant. Such an identity can easily be conflated with membership in a nation that is also the "new Israel," in the slightly different sense of the inheritors of the Promised Land.

Such a conflation of spiritual and political identity takes on new gravity for any persons who also subject themselves to moral scrutiny in keeping with the demands of their faith. In conservative Protestant circles especially, redemption is thought to bring with it a personal relationship with Christ, in which all aspects of life and decision making are submitted to Christ for approval and help, through prayer and study of the scripture. In this view, individuals (members and citizens of the new Israel) must also always seek to do God's will, in accordance with scripture. And yet, for individual Americans "to do God's will" in the world of foreign affairs, they must necessarily rely on national leaders; they must follow, or oppose, those leaders as their conscience and reading of scripture leads them. If then, the president also prays and submits his decisions to the will of Christ, as George W. Bush claims to do,[38] the identification between Christian leader and Christian individual is made all the more easily.[39] Indeed, the president's claim to an intimate relationship with Christ makes it possible and likely for the American Christian who strives to be Christ-like to go beyond simply identifying as a member of the new (spiritual/national) Israel, to identify with its leader (Christ/Bush).

The importance of moral scrutiny, both before and after the individual's choice to accept the new, Christian covenant, is amplified by apocalyptic thinking. Thousands of American Christians avidly await the "rapture," the sudden return of Christ and the ascension of true believers into the heavens, as is manifested by the popularity of the fictional representation of that drama in the Left Behind series.[40] The preponderance of Internet sites devoted to the rapture attests to the activity of the apocalyptically minded faithful in scrutinizing current events as indicators of the proximity of the end times. Because the final return of Christ is expected imminently, cutting short any time remaining before the final reckoning, apocalyptic thought is accompanied by a sense of urgency, a sense that moral decisions must be made, and lives must be staked on those decisions. Action - to root out evil and avoid destruction - must be taken. The suddenness of the rapture is, as ever, used as a leverage point for encouraging conversion or rededication to the Christian life.

Personal apocalyptic belief can, therefore, quickly become conflated with national discourses, when evils to be guarded against suddenly appear - on television and confirmed by the president - in the form of Middle Eastern dictators. Fear of moral ill quickly moves from interior shame to external threat. National moral obligation becomes of utmost importance. And as recent presidents have so aptly modeled, personal moral shame is quickly exonerated by national banishment of external fears.

Predestination and Callings

As a strange counterbalance to the sense of urgency imparted by an apocalyptic need to combat evil, however, there is a certain strand of predestination in much of contemporary apocalyptic thinking. God's unchangeable plan is fully prescribed and described in scripture; the Christian's job is simply to understand God's plan as it unfolds, and to be ready for the end. In the Reverend Jerry Falwell's assessment, "It is impossible to stop the march of prophecy."[41] There is, therefore, a certain fatalistic compliance embedded within the exigency of apocalypse. In more extreme representations of this viewpoint, the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, in particular, are scrutinized for their possible fulfillment in today's world. So, for instance, multiple Internet sites interpret Iraq as the modern-day geographic and moral equivalent of ancient Babylon. For example, one such site offers this apocalyptic interpretation:

The anti-christ will get into war with Egypt, and take the spoils back to Iraq (Daniel 11:25). They will try to settle things; have peace talks. . . . He will come against Egypt again. In Daniel 11:30, it says the ships of Chittim, the U.S., shall come against him. He shall be grieved and return, and have indignation against the Holy covenant.[42]

In these literalist apocalyptic readings, world events turn around a third kind of "Israel," the actual "holy land" which must be restored in some way before Christ is to return. God's plan as dictated by the Hebrew prophets, therefore, entails the convergence of all three Israels - geographic, spiritual, and national - providing the perfect and (within this logic) uncontestable rational for U.S. involvement in the Middle East.[43]

In more allegorical readings of scripture, God's plan for the future can be understood on the level of analogy between a biblical character and a reader, as can be seen in the autobiography of George W. Bush, where he likens his call to national leadership to that of Moses's call to lead the children of Israel.[44] Bush is challenged to accept the call in a sermon, which begins with the need to "spend" and "consume" time immediately and responsibly, before it runs out.[45] Here, clearly, the covenantal notion of divine calling joins with an apocalyptic understanding of the necessity to fulfill that calling before it is too late. When the demand for (personal and national) submission to God's unchanging plan is combined with an expectation of a sudden end, the outcome is pressing conformism. The president must adhere to God's "plan," and so, therefore, must the people.

In short, these twin discourses of covenant and apocalypse have produced a national identity in which the nation's actions in the world are seen as inexorably urgent. Because the United States understands itself as a nation chosen and commanded by God, its path seems singular and unalterable (at least if the nation is to fulfill its covenantal obligation). But its task, because it functions on both human and cosmic levels, is of the utmost exigency. The future, not only of the United States but of the world, hangs in the balance. For the conservative Protestant Christian especially, this language resonates at a personal level with the urgent need to fight evil, internal and external, in order to prepare for the return of Christ. What works so effectively in Bush's rhetoric is that, although it does not really stray too far, as Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard points out,[46] from the mainstream confines of civil religion, it takes on a greater significance within the interpretive traditions of conservative Protestantism, to which much of the population adheres, and with which Bush's personal commitment to Christ corresponds.

Gendered Readings

There may also be other, subtler factors at work in the public's favorable response to the Bush administration's rhetoric, only one of which I am able to touch on here. I am interested in how prevalent understandings of gender roles become part of the equation when covenantal and apocalyptic national discourses are integrated into a particular faith perspective and taken to heart as personal truth. For example, contemporary conservative and mainstream readings of biblical covenant are often imbued with a heteronormative understanding of gender. In other words, these biblically based discourses contain an embedded conceptualization of gender as a binary set of heterosexual relations and distinctions,[47] which, in the present context, idealizes masculinity as heroic and active, and femininity as receptive and maternal. Interpreted through this kind of thinking about gender roles, the covenantal and apocalyptic rhetoric of war is made to appear, like gender, as "natural."

Culpability for this gendered reading of covenant lies in part with the Hebrew prophets, who more than once depict Israel as an unfaithful woman in need of rescue. The prophets consistently chastise Israel for taking political matters into her own hands (described as sexual infidelity) and suffering for it; if only she would leave things up to her male leaders (Yahweh and his approved king). Contemporary interpreters amplify this image of Israel by reading prophetic texts through gender stereotypes even when the Hebrew constructions are difficult, unclear, or ambiguous.[48] Some contemporary versions of this story, built from prophetic texts such as Ezekiel and Hosea, build a whole theology around Israel, the-unfaithful-wife-turned-prostitute who must be reclaimed by Yahweh. The title of the book Whoredom: God's Unfaithful Wife in Biblical Theology by Raymond Ortlund (1996) speaks volumes about the way that this image can get taken up in contemporary interpretations.[49] Thus, in biblical scholarship and in writing for lay people, Israel is commonly described as a damsel in distress (the distress is of course her fault for sleeping with the enemy) who must wait to be rescued by Yahweh or his divinely appointed ruler.

This language of gender in the prophetic writing and its interpretation dovetails with a particular kind of biblical colonial discourse. The hope for rescue of Israel from her sexualized sin takes the form of expectation that she will be led into triumph over - as opposed to alliance with - other nations. Israel is instructed by God, some interpreters insist, that she must not work in any way on her own terms, for to do so would be a grave sin. This gendered depiction of Israel's hope for political dominance both condones Israel's colonial aspirations, but disavows responsibility for it at the same time. Israel's active, aggressive colonialism of surrounding nations is disavowed by the story of a more passive, lady-like colonialism, in which Israel must be chastised and then led into domination by the divinely appointed (masculine) ruler, who does only Yahweh's bidding. Israel is not to take the initiative, credit, or blame for her colonialism. She is merely a conduit for Yahweh's will; she is not responsible for these conquests, rather, Yahweh is.[50]

When the gendered biblical narrative is transposed to the present, it also takes on an apocalyptic quality. In the prophetic narrative, when Israel suffers it is her own fault; it is the consequence for breaking covenant. Here the trope of the sexually sinful woman is a connection point between the two discourses that are easily exploited by rhetoricians. As a backslidden "harlot," the spiritual/national Israel paradoxically becomes, for politically-minded evangelists like Pat Robertson, her own mortal enemy, the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon. In an interview, Robertson states, "I frankly think that the United States of America stands on the brink of really terrible judgment. . . . America is like Babylon, the Mother of Harlots. So that is cause, in my opinion, for a righteous God to bring His wrath against us."[51] With an apocalyptic understanding of the new covenant framing the image of the United States, the negative consequences for covenant breaking through sexual transgression (metaphoric and literal) are of a cosmic order.

Such divine wrath on the sinful woman, America, was evident, for Roberston's friend Falwell, in the events of September 11, 2001. Falwell's belief that "the Abrahamic covenant - the promise that God gave to Abraham that he would bless those who blessed him and curse those who cursed him - is a fundamental ethic for the success of any society."[52] Such an interpretation of national ethics undoubtedly led him - on Robertson's 700 Club television show, two days after the towers fell - infamously to attribute September 11 to a God angry with those who, to Falwell's mind, had broken the covenant. Notable in Falwell's accusation of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians" was his attempt to shame alternative forms of gender expression and sexual identity. A fear of contravened gender roles thus manifests itself through an apocalyptic interpretation of covenant.

But, it is important to note that, within both old and new covenantal frameworks, punishment for sexual deviance is a precursor to repentance, forgiveness, and triumph. The only acceptable response, following a national disaster, within this logic, is to passively wait to be led into dominion over other nations by Yahweh. American international triumph - as in the devastation of Afghanistan or the deposing of Saddam Hussein - can be seen as a sign of God's favor.

If - and here I am only sketching an idea - this rather dominant interpretation of the prophetic view of Israel becomes conflated with the Israel of American civil religion, then those who put their stock in the image of the United States as Israel might identify (even unconsciously) with an image of the shameful, feminine, passive people of God. If so, they would be positioned to do nothing in the face of their nation's imperialist mission, in fact, to welcome it as God's favor, and to feel no responsibility for it, since it must all be left to God. Insofar as such identifications might be operating in the American populace, however, they work in complicated ways, because as I have suggested above, identification as the people of God can move toward an identification with a messianic figure (a divinely appointed leader). So on the one hand, American people, identifying as the feminized people of God, feel it is not up to them to do anything one way or another, as they ought to be passive. And on the other hand, a self-styled, divinely appointed leader and his armed forces do the masculine work of rescuing the United States, the world, and Afghan women from "evil men," at the same time achieving control over other nations.[53] With the strange sort of cross identification that goes on between Israel and God, the U.S. population and its president, an apathetic authorization of imperialism sets in. Though the call to aid the rest of the world must be heeded, it is well enough to leave it up to the president to heed it. People passively wait for the president in their role as damsel in distress, but at the same time they feel that it is they who are avenging September 11, 2001, or helping Afghan women, or oppressed Iraqis, in their identity as divine leader on the world scene.

Now, as in the past, apocalypse and covenant have been represented through misogynist, gendered imagery that worked in tandem to authorize American dominance. Where apocalyptic language feeds a sense of urgency with respect to national policies and military action, covenantal understandings of American identity feed the public's willingness to go along with the specifics of its government's actions. Even if the present administration were not to be re-elected, the prevalence of biblically rooted discourses in American culture and politics suggests that after a brief remission they would soon resurface, given their emotional and spiritual currency. The question is, can this kind of deeply rooted rhetoric be effectively resisted? Though this essay is necessarily only one small contribution to a larger collective project of strategizing resistance, it would point to thinking about how to dismantle conscious and unconscious identifications with misogynist biblical images and discourses that may create emotional attachments to political positions in favor of war. Of course, any such attempt must also take account of how attachments to biblical images and ideas work into positions of resistance.[54] Those who wish to engage the rhetoric of the United States as savior and judge (and harlot) must carefully, and self-critically intercept these discourses. The challenge lies, perhaps, in creating a rhetoric and a discourse that counteracts any sense of purpose and entitlement to save a helpless world from evil.

Endnotes

1. To read a line or two with Guy Debord, the "sacred contemplation," with which the Bush administration shrouds itself, promotes no less than "spectacular consumption which preserves congealed past culture." Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Black and Red (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983 [1967]), 25, 192. One of the most disturbing "missions" of the present administration - as proposed by the Project for the New American Century, a think tank whose statement of purpose is signed by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others - is framed in the language of spectacle: "to fight and decisively win multiple simultaneous major theatre wars." See Thomas Donnelly, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (Washington, DC: Project for the New American Century, 2000), iv: http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf. [Return to text]

2. George E. Connor, "Covenants and Criticism: Deuteronomy and the American Founding," Biblical Theology Bulletin 32, no. 1 (2002): 4-10; Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); and Donald S. Lutz, A Preface to American Political Theory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 136. [Return to text]

3. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 15-16. [Return to text]

4. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 13-15; Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," in The Bible and American Arts and Letters, ed. Giles Gunn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 221-32, at 221-22; and Edward J. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 11-12. [Return to text]

5. Cited in Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 15. [Return to text]

6. Bercovitch, "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," 219. [Return to text]

7. See Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions, Covenant Tradition in Politics series, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995); Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid, eds., Covenant, Polity, and Constitutionalism, vol. 10, no. 4 of Publius: The Journal of Federalism (Philadelphia: Center for the Study of Federalism, 1980). For more tentative statements of the similarities between the biblical notion of covenant and the U.S. Constitution, as well as American constitutional law, see Edward McGlynn Gaffney, "The Interaction of Biblical Religion and American Constitutional Law," in The Bible in American Law, Politics, and Political Rhetoric, ed. James Turner Johnson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 81-106; and Neal Riemer, "Covenant and the Federal Constitution," Publius: The Journal of Federalism 10, no. 4 (1980): 135-48. [Return to text]

8. Donald S. Lutz, "From Covenant to Constitution in American Political Thought," Publius: The Journal of Federalism 10, no. 4 (1980): 101-34; Donald S. Lutz, "The Mayflower Compact, 1620," in The Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted, ed. Stephen L. Schechter (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 17-23; and Donald S. Lutz, "The Declaration of Independence, 1776," in The Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted, ed. Stephen L. Schechter (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 138-49. [Return to text]

9. Bercovitch, "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," 221-24; Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post Traditionalist World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 175. [Return to text]

10. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), xii-xiv. [Return to text]

11. Amy Kaplan, "'Left Alone with America': The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3-21, at 13. [Return to text]

12. Bercovitch, "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth," 222-24. [Return to text]

13. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell. [Return to text]

14. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, 21-28; Tina Pippin, Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image (London: Routledge, 1999); Tina Pippin, "Of Gods and Demons: Blood Sacrifice and Eternal Life in Dracula and the Apocalypse of John," in Screening Scripture: Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film, ed. George Aichele and Richard Walsh (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), 24-41; Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Lee Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) have also shown how apocalypse forms a deeply seated layer within American culture. [Return to text]

15. Cotton Mather's tract, Wonders of the Invisible World (1692; Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper, 1950), also details his involvement with the Salem witch hunts. [Return to text]

16. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, 21. [Return to text]

17. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, 22-27. [Return to text]

18. Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 11. [Return to text]

19. Robert Allen Warrior, "A Native American Perspective: Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians," in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 287-95; Laura E. Donaldson, "Postcolonialism and Biblical Reading: An Introduction," Semeia 75 (1996): 1-14; and Bercovitch, "The Biblical Basis for the American Myth." [Return to text]

20. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, 201. [Return to text]

21. The twinning of external threat and internal shame is something like introjection in Freud's description of melancholia; it is also something like what Bhabha identifies in colonial and postcolonial contexts as the uncanny (unheimlich), i.e., the repressed fear of the Other, who uncannily reemerges as the stranger within, and who represents a shameful threat to internal order (i.e., homeland security), and must then be exposed. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge. 1994), 10, 166-67. [Return to text]

22. The covenantal/apocalyptic quest for a new land, and the apocalyptic rooting out of "evil" inhabitants and their practices, are very much a part of Western colonizing identity. See Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Alain Milhou, "Apocalypticism in Central and South American Colonialism," in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, ed. Stephen J. Stein, vol. 3, Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age (New York: Continuum, 1999), 3-35; and Reiner Smolinski, "Apocalypticism in Colonial North America," in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, ed. Stephen J. Stein, vol. 3, Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age (New York: Continuum, 1999), 36-71. Daniel Elazar argues (with no sense of irony) that "frontiersmen . . . that is to say, people who have gone out to settle new areas where there were no established patterns of governance . . . are to be found among the most active covenanters." Elazar, "The Political Theory of Covenant: Biblical Origins and Modern Developments," Publius: The Journal of Federalism 10, no. 4 (1980): 3-30, at 13. In short, covenant, apocalypse, and colonialism are habitual bedfellows. [Return to text]

23. George W. Bush, "President's Remarks to the Nation" (New York, September 11, 2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020911-3.html. For a brilliant reading of the apocalyptic logic of this citation, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, "Globalization, Transnational Feminisms, and the Future of Biblical Critique" (paper presented at the Global Future of Feminist New Testament Studies conference, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, February 28, 2003). [Return to text]

24. The White House, National Security Council, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 17, 2002): 1, 2, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf. [Return to text]

25. Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, xiii. [Return to text]

26. Tony Blair is also fond of deifying history. For instance, during his speech to the U.S. Congress on July 17, 2003, as reported in the BBC News (July 18, 2003), Blair made assertions about what history would forgive (being wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) and what it would not forgive (hesitation in the face of menace). [Return to text]

27. George W. Bush, "Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation," (Washington DC, June 6, 2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020606-8.html. [Return to text]

28. Bush, "President's Remarks to the Nation" (September 11, 2002). [Return to text]

29. Putting President Bush's speech, "Remarks by the President in Address to the United Nations General Assembly" (New York, September 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html); together with the assertion in the The National Security Strategy of the United States of America that the United States is above the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (31), and with the United States's record of arms dealing, Bush seems to be acknowledging that the United States is the "outlaw regime" that provides "shortcuts to mad ambition." Such a blatant, unconscious self-indictment is perhaps to be expected in such a flamboyant accusation. [Return to text]

30. There is a large body of literature on the complex set of colonial and postcolonial relations behind the problem of a Western drive to "unveil" Muslim women and on Muslim women's political and social agency in wearing the veil, with which I cannot engage within the scope of this essay. See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Zohreh T. Sullivan, "Eluding the Feminist, Overthrowing the Modern? Transformations in Twentieth-Century Iran," in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 215-42; Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1999); Minoo Moallem, "The Textualization of Violence in a Global World: Gendered Citizenship and Discourse of Protection," Review of Japanese Culture and Society 11-12 (December 1999-2000): 9-17; Minoo Moallem, "Transnationalism, Feminism, and Fundamentalism," in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli with Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 119-45; and Homa Hoodfar, "The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: Veiling Practices and Muslim Women," in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Castelli with Rodman, 420-46. [Return to text]

31. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. [Return to text]

32. Caroline Vander Stichele, "Apocalypse, Art and Abjection: Images of the Great Whore," in Culture, Entertainment and the Bible, ed. George Aichele (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 124-38; Pippin, Apocalyptic Bodies; and Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell. [Return to text]

33. Mary Wilson Carpenter, "Representing Apocalypse: Sexual Politics and the Violence of Revelation," in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 107-35. See also Pippin, Apocalyptic Bodies; Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then; and Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse. [Return to text]

34. For a critique of Keller's proposed alternatives to apocalyptic language, see Laura E. Donaldson, "The Breast of Columbus: A Political Anatomy of Postcolonial and Feminist Religious Discourse," in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, ed. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41-61. [Return to text]

35. Castelli, "Globalization, Transnational Feminisms, and the Future of Biblical Critique." [Return to text]

36. Here my argument is informed by Moallem's discussion in "The Textualization of Violence" of the discourses of protection. Moallem cites Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan who observe that the service of protection "tends to efface the will to power exercised by the protector" (Pathak and Rajan, "Shahbano," in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Castelli with Rodman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 195-215, at 200. [Return to text]

37. Bellah, Beyond Belief, 175. [Return to text]

38. Howard Fineman, "Bush and God," Newsweek 141, no. 10 (March 10, 2003): 22-30. [Return to text]

39. Thanks to Tanya Erzen for this insight into the appeal of Bush's own commitment to those of faith. Along these lines, David S. Gutterman gives an extensive analysis of the language Bush uses to describe his conversion experience in such a way as to transform his weaknesses, which might hinder political success, into "signifiers of divine strength." Gutterman, "Presidential Testimony: Listening to the Heart of George W. Bush," Theory and Event 5, no. 2 (2001): 31, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.2gutterman.html. [Return to text]

40. For analyses of the Left Behind series, and of other conservative Protestant writing, see the Web site Proselytizing Media: Conservative Christian Media Encounters the World, ed. by Tanya Erzen, http://www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb/christianmedia (project under development). See also Melani McAlister, "Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Fundamentalism's New World Order," South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 773-98. [Return to text]

41. Jerry Falwell, interview by Cal Thomas, in Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?, by Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 259-78, at 273. [Return to text]

42. Jerry and Dena Rogers, "God's Plan for the End-Time Harvest" (2003), http://www.planetkc.com/nnnel/GODS_PLAN.htm. See also A Voice in the Wilderness, "Iraq War: Gulf War II" (2003), http://www.a-voice.org/main/iraq-war.htm. [Return to text]

43. For an entertaining account of Reagan's apocalypticism, see Gore Vidal, "Armageddon?" in Gore Vidal: United States Essays, 1952-1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), 995-1006. For a more theoretical discussion of Reagan's rhetoric, see O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse. [Return to text]

44. George W. Bush, A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House (New York: Perennial, 1999), 8-9. [Return to text]

45. Bush, A Charge to Keep, 2. [Return to text]

46. Fred Barnes, "God and Man in the Oval Office," Weekly Standard 8, no. 26 (March 17, 2003): 11-12. [Return to text]

47. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993). [Return to text]

48. For the way scholars reinscribe the misogyny of the prophets, see J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, supplement series 215; Gender, Culture, Theory series, vol. 3 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 101-28. [Return to text]

49. Raymond C. Ortlund, Whoredom: God's Unfaithful Wife in Biblical Theology, New Studies in Biblical Theology series (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996). [Return to text]

50. Several examples of the gendering of colonial language in scholarly readings of the prophets can be taken from interpretations of the prophetic text of Micah. Delbert Hillers glosses the text of Micah 5:6-14, accounting for a strange poetic shift between Israel's aggression and defeat, as follows: "Israel's rights have already in the past been violated by other nations, but she cannot and should not avenge herself. Instead the supreme power will step in to vindicate her rights by punishing her adversaries." Hillers, Micah: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Micah, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 73. Some scholars are so insistent on the point of Israel's feminine passivity that they gloss over aspects of the text that do not quite bear out such a reading. For instance, in Micah 4:13, Zion is figured as an active, ambiguously gendered, colonizing force. Using language usually reserved for kings, Zion (modified by feminine verb forms) is depicted as having an iron horn (a rather phallic image) and copper hooves, trampling other nations. Yet scholars explain this active colonizing role away. For instance, James Luther Mays calls the image a later addition to the original prophecy, in order to amplify what he sees as the (colonial) purpose of the book: "a promise which looks for the peoples [i.e., other nations] to be brought under the reign of YHWH by the divine power of Israel." Mays, Micah: A Commentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 109, emphasis mine. Hans Walter Wolff interprets likewise, "the 'daughter of Zion' herself becomes the agent of Yahweh's punishment of his enemies, but she is empowered and authorized to do this only by the word and deed of Yahweh." Wolff, Micah: A Commentary, trans. Gary Stansell (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1990 [1982]), 133. So also does William McKane, who writes, "the defeat of the mighty nations by the daughter of Zion is a miracle wrought by Yahweh (v. 13) and cannot be accounted for by weight of armour." McKane, The Book of Micah: Introduction and Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 12. For further detailed analysis, see Erin Runions, Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation and Future in Micah, Playing the Texts series, vol. 7 (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 182-209. [Return to text]

51. Pat Robertson, interview by Cal Thomas, in Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?, by Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 248-58, at 258. [Return to text]

52. Falwell, interview by Cal Thomas, 284. [Return to text]

53. In my own experience after September 11, 2001, in antiwar efforts to talk to people on the street, I was astounded by the number of people who were willing to trust the president, even when they were not sure that war on Afghanistan was the best solution. [Return to text]

54. For instance, the apocalyptic image of "the beast," and "the belly of the beast" is often invoked on the Left to speak of capitalism and its institutions. [Return to text]