Beck recognises that understanding the war on terror requires a wider interpretive range than the conventional idiom of power politics can encompass. He uses literary sources to reconstruct the archetypal encounter with the dark-skinned other. His guide is Richard Slotkin, whose Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, first published in 1973, illuminates the murderous rage long concealed in US history textbooks by anodyne phrases like ‘westward expansion’.
Yet the idea of the mythic frontier, important as it is, doesn’t capture every aspect of the war on terror: its religious intensity for example, or the resistance of the warriors to learning from their repeated failures. This kind of warmaking is not based on a reasonable assessment of the evidence: it is rooted in a faith-based belief system – an outlook fostered by evangelical Protestantism for much of US history, but now cut loose from its theological moorings and surviving, even flourishing, among all sorts of Americans, including many who have never been inside a church. Ever since evangelical revivals swept across the country in the 19th century, American history has been animated by efforts to imagine the local network of believers as a righteous community – one that will eventually expand to the entire nation, perhaps the world. At the same time, such communities are haunted by the fear of falling away from righteousness. Waves of worry about moral decline also periodically washed over the political class, rallying its members to rededicate themselves to their collective missionary purpose.
The ideal of a righteous community left little room for moral uncertainty: one was either included or excluded, saved or damned. Believers had an air of millenarian expectancy, excited but anxious, waiting for the Messiah to return – or, in the Jewish version, to come for the first time. In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the motif of waiting for the Messiah sets the moral stage for a range of possibilities: everything from withdrawing from the world to making the world a better place for the Messiah to inhabit, as in Social Gospel Protestantism and Reform Judaism. This tradition reinforced a powerful social democratic ethos, but it also led the way to emotional ground jointly occupied by hard-right Israeli and Christian Zionists. The mingling of hope and anxiety, the mood of tense expectancy, the endless (perhaps impatient) waiting, all intensified by the need to reaffirm communal righteousness through missionary commitment: this shared sensibility also intensified the craving for conquest within Israel’s leadership and among its American defenders. There are many reasons war fever has raged out of control, as Homeland brilliantly shows, but the millenarian worldview contributed to igniting the conflagration. How else can we explain the compulsion to repeat failed strategies time after time, still less the willingness to destroy the entire world, oneself included, to fulfil what one believes is a divinely ordained purpose?