Burnt Offerings in America, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Burnt Offerings in Modern America

Émile Durkheim

Unfortunately, when men (and it’s mostly men) like Thích Quảng Đức, Mohamed Bouazizi, or Aaron Bushnell offer themselves as burnt offerings, we don’t know where those offerings go. With burnt offerings of animal flesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Hebrew Tanakh, offerings go directly to God or the gods, who take delight, pleasure, and nourishment from humans’ sacrifices. Nowadays, we lack such confidence.

Nearly all early civilizations practice some form of blood sacrifice. Some are dramatic, like Abraham’s averted sacrifice of his son Isaac, or Menelaus’ unaverted sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to start the Trojan War. Others are merely grotesque, as the human sacrifice supposedly practiced among the Mexica (often misnamed the Aztecs), a narrative mainly remembered in lurid Spanish retellings. But early religions agree, the gods require blood.

However, religions generally move away from blood sacrifices. They gradually replace spilled blood with the first fruits of the people’s harvest, or gold, or ultimately the cheerful work of devoted hearts. We might imagine, optimistically, that True Believers gradually realize their gods require human hands to perform divine missions. More realistically, they probably realize that propitiating sky spirits with gifts doesn’t do much by itself.

Émile Durkheim believed that pre-literate Earth Spirit religions started without gods. Early peoples, in Durkheim’s telling, sought the people’s well-being, and selected a totemic image, usually an animal, to represent the people’s collective spirit. Across succeeding generations, though, worshippers forgot the image’s original symbolic meaning. They took metaphorical stories literally, and started worshipping spirits which their priestly ancestors never intended anyone to factually believe.

Durkheim, and his rough contemporary Sigmund Freud, wrote extensively about what they termed “primitive” totemic religions in Africa and Australia. Unfortunately, they wrote without visiting those places. Both thinkers wrote mainly about their own places and times. Watching religion fade from French public life, Durkheim saw “Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité” and images of Marianne, the personification of France’s national spirit, march into the spaces God recently vacated.

No society, Durkheim believed, could survive long without having something it considers sacred. Societies create mythologies, wither of sky spirits or of national heroes like Robespierre and George Washington, to embody the nation’s spirit and embolden shared identity. Whether the object of worship is Jehovah or Paul Revere, what we worship isn’t really the identity which might have existed somewhere, once. It’s the moral principle that identity represents.

Aaron Bushnell

Which necessarily elicits the question: what principles do Americans consider sacred?

American patriots seek sacred principles in the Declaration of Independence or the Federalist Papers—while conveniently ignoring impolitic passages, like the “Merciless Indian Savages” clause. Without either a king or a state church, America has recourse only to Enlightenment philosophy and humanist precepts. Christian Nationalists might think America has a state church, but only in vague terms; pressed for details, they, like most Christians, fall quickly to infighting.

Americans demand that schoolchildren learn the mythology of Thanksgiving, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily. These myths and rituals serve social needs left vacant by religion’s retreat from public life. They give Americans a unifying narrative and shared identity, while we recite public moral statements in unison, exactly like the Apostles’ Creed. As in church, these secular values are vague, but they’re shared, which is what really matters.

Those American principles, however, have not withstood scrutiny. Tales of American atrocities which trickled in slowly from the Philippine-American War or Mexican Border War, accelerated in the Twentieth Century. War crimes in Vietnam or Operation Desert Storm hit the nightly news, and the hideous violence and mission drift of the Global War on Terror happened instantaneously online. Now America’s proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza are streaming live.

When Aaron Bushnell immolated himself this weekend, he wore his military uniform, then live-streamed his suicide on Twitch. Therefore, he didn’t just destroy himself. American secular religion, embodied in his uniform, burned first. And he distributed the image to goggle-eyed Americans instantaneously, circumventing a commercial media apparatus that’s often seen its independence undermined by state intervention, especially during wartime. This wasn’t just a statement, it was a religious declaration.

Therefore, only one question remains: will True Believers accept this declaration? Bushnell’s suicide was only secondarily about his stated beliefs; like the Pledge of Allegiance or the Apostles’ Creed, his final manifesto was necessarily vague. Religion isn’t about information, it’s about the True Believers themselves, and it doesn’t intend to educate them, but to transform them. Are we, who take Bushnell’s principles seriously, willing to let ourselves be transformed?