PhD student, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus.

The civil religious justification of the war on terror - religion and politics in the 21st century

 In my project I intend to compare the use of civil religious narratives in the presidential rhetoric with that of soldiers in the field in three different cases:

• The time immediately following the 9-11 attacks
• The justification of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regimea
• The crises caused by the continuous rebellion in Iraq.

The aim of this comparison is twofold. First, based on the assumption that the Civil Religion Idea only holds an explanatory value if it can be proved to exist both as rhetorical expressions and as a sociological bond in the specific context (or that both Rousseau and Durkheim in a way are right), it is my intention to examine whether and to what extent coherence could be found between the justification of the War on Terror on the system level and on the actor level respectively. Second, in prolongation of the common notion that the present crisis of the engagement in Iraq constitutes an archetypical example of the crisis of the dominant American military strategy, the strategy of complete annihilation of enemy forces, it is my hypothesis that this crisis also contains a significant civil religious aspect, an aspect that can contribute to the explanation of why both the administration and the army find it so hard to adjust to the low intensity warfare of the 21st century.