Mary Ellen Koniezny Christopher Morrissey University of Notre Dame
How and why does religion either support or oppose state-sponsored violence? The case of the highly polarized public debate in the United States before the beginning of hostilities in Iraq in 2003 provides an important opportunity to examine religious advocacy when many religious groups took divergent positions for or against the war. This study asks the following empirical research questions: How and why did religious advocacy against the Iraq War differ from religious advocacy for the war? How similar or different were religious and secular advocacy on the war? How did religion enter the broader debate over the war and what were the consequences of its participation in the debate? To answer these questions, the study analyzes public documents to analyze the cultural structure and content of the public debate. Second, the study uses interviews of important elite participants based in Washington, DC in the public discussion in order to better understand their strategies and networks that may otherwise be obscured by analysis of only the documents that made it into the public record. Finally, the study will use a variety of polls to analyze any shifts in public opinion on the issue of the Iraq War.
Broader Impacts
In this "Age of Terror" there is much interest in the relation of religion to violence and peace. By investigating variation in religious advocacy both for and against state violence, this dissertation could potentially offer valuable understanding and information beneficial to society, both domestically and internationally, in curtailing violent conflict.
The principal objective of this dissertation was to answer the theoretical question: How and why does religion either support or oppose state-sponsored violence? The case of the highly polarized public debate in the United States before the beginning of hostilities in Iraq in 2003 provides an important opportunity to examine religious advocacy when many religious groups took divergent positions for or against the war. This single case then, clearly demonstrates religion’s ambivalence, its ability to legitimate both violence and peace. The study answered the following empirical research questions: How and why did religious advocacy against the Iraq War differ from religious advocacy for the war? What are the social and cultural roots of different religious positions on the war? How did religion enter the broader debate over the war and what were the consequences of its participation in the debate? This study is part of a broader research tradition investigating religion’s ambivalent relationship to violence and peace and fills a significant gap within that tradition. Unfortunately, much research on these relations fails to analyze variation between religion’s support of violence or nonviolence. As a result, general understanding of religion’s ambivalence is underdeveloped. This research addressed and ameliorated this shortcoming by analyzing variation between religious advocacy for war and against it on one case and comparing advocacy positions both across and within religious traditions. In this so-called "Age of Terror" there is much interest in the relation of religion to violence and peace. By investigating variation in religious advocacy both for and against state violence, this dissertation offers valuable understanding and information beneficial to society, both domestically and internationally, in potentially curtailing violent conflict. Furthermore, the results of this study will be broadly disseminated—in the academic press in the form of a book, in diverse popular media, and in the form of communication of findings to the religious institutional advocates studied in the research. In this dissertation, I analyzed religious actors debating the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 as well as the religious cultural dimensions of the larger public discussion. I argue that one cannot adequately explain the country’s entry into the war without understanding the role of public Christianity in the argument for it. Furthermore, by analyzing elite religious advocacy both opposed and in favor of the conflict, I theorize the sets of identity relations and cultural repertoires that explain whether religious advocates will support or criticize state-sponsored violence. I find that the varying identity relations between religion, nation, and state largely predict religious advocates’ positions on the war. Given these basic religious positions, I then explicate the constellation of symbolic codes that inform and sustain the basic positions of religious advocates vis-à-vis war. These include the nature and constitution of political order, the nature of evil, the role of peace—particularly as it relates to the political order, the proper object of Christian love, and the value and practicality of nonviolence in the world. Additionally, I analyze patterns of discourse that differentiated between war supporters and war opponents—war supporters used less secular discourse than war opponents. I find that the social and political context primarily explains the particularly religious tenor of these actors. Advocates’ sense of identity and their expertise influenced how they participated in the debate. Finally, I find the social sources of these distinct positions. Significant social contact with victims of structural violence tended to lead advocates to positions against the war. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of the direct contributions of this dissertation to academic understandings of religion, politics, war, and peace as well as its contributions to knowledge about public religion’s relations to the politics of war and peace in America and our understanding of the relations between religion and violence. With the assistance and support of this generous grant from the National Science Foundation this research was successfully conducted and the resulting dissertation defended. Currently, the dissertation manuscript is being is being revised into a book, hopefully for a major publisher. This project came significantly under budget for two reasons. One, the total number of respondents interviewed was lower than that was budgeted. Some advocates involved in the debate over the war declined to participate in the study, while the original number of significant advocates in the project’s original budget was probably too high. The lower number of respondents brought down both the travel costs and the transcription costs for the project. Two, the concentration of participating respondents in Washington D.C. and careful scheduling of interviews during trips helped reduce the total transportation costs of the study.
