Your Apropos‐​of‐​Nothing Observation of the Day

Fun with juxtaposed quotes:

Durkheim taught that in religious worship, society adores its own camouflaged image. In a nationalist age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage.

-Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 56.

and

Addressing Congress [in 2003], Bush declared that "the course of this war is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." A form of religious nationalism permeated the whole address. Bush took words from a hymn, "There's Power in the Blood," to refer to the "power, wonder-working power," of "the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people" — words which in the hymn are used of the lamb, Jesus Christ.

-Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 128.

Crazy as I thought those days were at the time, the more you think about it, the crazier they seem. You'd think American Christians would have found this sort of thing mindblowingly offensive. Yet, they sort of seem to have dug it.

Nationalism. Powerful stuff.