Over the last two years, the Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Unit (CARV) has invested considerable time and effort in refining and, where necessary, reformulating academic theories of religious violence. In 2023, CARV has partnered with the Moral Injury and Recovery in Religion, Society, and Culture Unit to continue that work specifically as it concerns religious sacrifice. This panel profiles four scholarly projects that unpack the polysemic concept of "sacrifice" and use diverse methodological approaches to address the diversity of religious thought and practice which surround it.
This paper explores the construction of political martyrdom narratives around George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt, and argues that such a closer examination can help scholars articulate a new vocabulary of political martyrdom. Political martyrdom provides a fertile ground for understanding the intersections of death, violence, collective memory, and meaning-making across historical contexts. It involves three components: 1) death in what we might call “unnatural” circumstances, generally connected to an individual’s identity(ies) or political commitments. Such conditions often involve the exercise of violence by state authorities, community members, or even martyrs themselves; 2) the sacralization or consecration of that death, embedding it in a community’s collective memory and ascribing it transcendent meaning. Consecration charges the death with powerful cultural and political resonances and places the death within narratives that attribute it symbolic significance; 3) ot merely death and consecration, but the repeated commemoration of the martyr’s memory across the generations through media, ritual, and commemorative practices.
In the summer of 2020, Sean Feucht introduced a new archetype into the world of American Religious Right leadership: the persecuted worship troubadour. Feucht’s fame (and notoriety) has spread since he launched his mid-pandemic “Let Us Worship” campaign, staging public worship gatherings with thousands of Christians attending in defiance of local COVID restrictions. He has leveraged that popularity to rapidly become one of the most recognizable figures in American religious politics. But undergirding Feucht’s provocative worship tours and aggressive MAGA associations is a potent narrative of persecution, of being “canceled,” and of having to stand firm against his demonically inspired opposition. Through a close-reading of Feucht’s martyrdom narrative (particularly his hagiographic Superspreader documentary), this paper examines how he has created a model of right-wing living martyrdom where he can be simultaneously a gleeful provocateur and a Davidic, set-upon saint who advances Christian freedom – and public Christian dominance.
The Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin is an important new religious site which thematizes and visually represents human sacrifice as central to orthodox Catholic piety. This sacrifice is not understood as a “self emptying” spiritual economics, but instead insists on the necessity of women’s bodily sacrifice in service of both virginity/purity and reproduction. Through an examination of two paintings at the shrine, both of female Catholic saints canonized for sacrificing their lives rather than violating the Church's position on virginity and abortion, this paper will examine the dynamics of sainthood as sacrifice in an anti-abortion religious context.
Airport chaplains who conduct en route memorial rituals for newly identified veterans’ remains during the veterans’ final journeys home offer what I call *tangible islands*—brief spaces of healing for the veterans’ families amid the liminal sea of the families’ feelings of guilt, moral anguish, grief, ambiguity, and relief. Using refined DNA analysis techniques, the U.S. Government is identifying the remains of American soldiers killed in wars decades ago. With bodily identification unavailable until now, families whose loved ones were killed in combat have spent generations grieving ambiguous losses. In this liminal grieving space, relatives may suffer moral injury around sending their loved ones off to war, as the soldiers die, do not return home in caskets, and remain missing in action until some families receive repatriation notification that confirms their suspicions of the soldiers’ deaths. Through tangible islands, airport chaplains help provide healing to the families of long-missing veterans.