The militarization of prayer in America: White and Native American spiritual warfare

Abstract

This essay extends the literature on the militarization of everyday life to argue that contemporary military metaphors and practices have become a generative force animating the sphere of Christian prayer. The wars of the twentieth century and the corresponding process of militarization have affected almost every aspect of ABSTRACT This article examines how militarism has come to be one of the generative forces of the prayer practices of millions of Christians across the globe. To understand this process, I focus on the articulation between militarization and aggressive forms of prayer, especially the evangelical warfare prayer developed by North Americans since the 1980s. Against the backdrop of the rise in military spending and neoliberal economic policies, spiritual warfare evangelicals have taken on the project of defending the United States on the "spiritual" plane. They have elaborated a complex theology and prayer practice with a highly militarized discourse and set of rituals for doing "spiritual battle" and conducting "prayer strikes" on the "prayer battlefield". The work draws on ethnographic fieldwork at an intensive spiritual warfare boot camp organized by a group of Native Americans who have founded a training base in Oklahoma dedicated to training recruits in the theology and practical strategy of spiritual warfare. Despite their hyper-aggressive rhetorical and ideological stance, members of this network in fact practice self-sacrificial rituals of fasting, holiness, and submission to the Holy Spirit. Native prayer warriors are using spiritual warfare prayer to assert a privileged place for themselves in Christian life as heirs of God's authority over the stewardship of North American land and as central to the project of repairing sinful pasts both on and off the reservations, reconciling present racial conflict, and defending the land in spiritual battle against new immigrant invasions by foreign, demonic forces.

Praying for Paisley – Fr Gerry Reynolds and the role of prayer in faith-based peacebuilding: a preliminary theoretical framework

“…Poloma and Gallup (1991) demonstrated that those who prayed were more supportive of faithbased political action, Genova (2015) drew on Mauss to define prayer as a performative action in which individuals and groups derive meaning not just, or even primarily, from the words spoken in prayer, but also in the embodied action itself, regardless of worldly outcomes; Fuist (2015) argued that collective prayer 'dramatised' religious groups' socio-political beliefs, thereby communicating values and asserting a shared identity; and Butt (2016) described how public prayer meetings were used as platforms for Islamist political mobilisation in Pakistan. In other examples, scholars explored prayer's relation to explicitly political concerns by using people's own characterisation of prayer as 'spiritual warfare' to explain how it functioned to promote everyday militarisation in the United States (McAlister, 2016); and as a 'problematic' form of 'political praxis' among Pentecostals in Nigeria and the United States (Marshall, 2016, p. 92).…”

“…A framework for understanding the role of prayer in faithbased peacebuilding Because this article is developing a framework for understanding the role of prayer in faith-based peacebuilding, it adopts a rather benign view of prayer, assuming that peacebuilding is a benign pursuit. But before proceeding to that framework, it is necessary to acknowledge that prayer may not always be used for peaceful or benign endsa point made in several of the studies mentioned above (Butt, 2016;Marshall, 2016;McAlister, 2016). Indeed, one of the most famous examples of public prayer from the Troubles is Paisley's prayer against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from the pulpit of his Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church.…”

Praying for Paisley – Fr Gerry Reynolds and the role of prayer in faith-based peacebuilding: a preliminary theoretical framework

“…Poloma and Gallup (1991) demonstrated that those who prayed were more supportive of faith-based political action, Genova (2015) drew on Mauss to define prayer as a performative action in which individuals and groups derive meaning not just, or even primarily, from the words spoken in prayer, but also in the embodied action itself, regardless of worldly outcomes; Fuist (2015) argued that collective prayer 'dramatised' religious groups' socio-political beliefs, thereby communicating values and asserting a shared identity; and Butt (2016) described how public prayer meetings were used as platforms for Islamist political mobilisation in Pakistan. In other examples, scholars explored prayer's relation to explicitly political concerns by using people's own characterisation of prayer as 'spiritual warfare' to explain how it functioned to promote everyday militarisation in the United States (McAlister, 2016); and as a 'problematic' form of 'political praxis' among Pentecostals in Nigeria and the United States (Marshall, 2016, p. 92).…”

“…Because this article is developing a framework for understanding the role of prayer in faithbased peacebuilding, it adopts a rather benign view of prayer, assuming that peacebuilding is a benign pursuit. But before proceeding to that framework, it is necessary to acknowledge that prayer may not always be used for peaceful or benign endsa point made in several of the studies mentioned above (Butt, 2016;Marshall, 2016;McAlister, 2016). Indeed, one of the most famous examples of public prayer from the Troubles is Paisley's prayer against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from the pulpit of his Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church.…”

Proximations of Public Religion: Worship, Spiritual Warfare, and the Ritualization of Christian Dance

“…A rich body of anthropological literature has emerged on the politics, practices, and controversies associated with this movement. For recent examples, see Bialecki (), Marshall (), McAlister (), O'Neill (), Robbins ().…”