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Death-Denial and Political Renewal
By Daniel L. Migliore

AN American presidential-election campaign generates a rhetoric of hope and new beginnings. Amid bands and balloons we are promised a new start in the realization of the American dream. We are assured by each candidate that a new era of happiness and prosperity will begin with his victory at the polls. The 1972 Republican and Democratic Party Conventions in Miami Beach carry on this quadrennial exercise in restoring our self-confidence and in refurbishing our national self-image.

The trouble with all of this is that while talk of hope is cheap, genuine hope is costly. Transforming hope emerges only where the illusion of omnipotence is given up. The possibility of new life rests upon the willingness to confront the reality of death, and there is not much evidence of this in American society today. Not surprisingly, much of the rhetoric of the present political campaign proclaims a rebirth without death, a resurrection without a cross.

Death and dying are realities which modern American culture conspires to keep at a safe distance and even to deny altogether. The picture of this conspiracy is now familiar: our society idolizes youth and health; it isolates the aged in retirement homes and the dying in lonely hospital rooms; it approves the repression of grief when loved ones die. Moreover, denial and deception are built into our funeral practices; violence and death have become the new American obscenities; and a mounting "pornography of death" in the mass media caters to deeply buried fears.

Less readily acknowledged, however, is the political dimension of the American denial of death. Our entrenched attitude toward death is one of the most important factors in the presidential election. It affects significantly the prospects for political and cultural renewal in the years ahead.

Denial may have a temporary psychological value, but the cost of protracted denial is always high. In the case of the massive death denial in American culture generally and in our foreign affairs in particular, the cost to others and to ourselves has been enormous.

Daniel L. Migliore was educated at Westminster College, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Princeton University, and has studied at the University of Tübingen. He is Associate Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of several articles in THEOLOGY TODAY and other journals.

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For a decade our country has waged a devastating war in Indochina. While some American families have paid dearly for this war, most Americans have felt only minor inconveniences. The Johnson and Nixon administrations have dropped many more tons of bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by the Allies in World War II. These air raids have killed and wounded thousands of civilians and have made refugees of millions more. Should the next escalation of the air war bring the systematic bombing of the dikes in the Tonkin plain, the number of civilian casualties would be staggering.

Yet such statistics do not seem to touch many Americans very deeply. The My Lai massacre created only momentary public nausea. Other reports or American atrocities have been passed over in silence. Defending the most recent bombing campaign over Vietnam, Admiral William P. Mack noted that (as of June 9, 1972) only seven Navy men had been lost in the raids. "This is a pretty good way to fight a war," he said.

How are we to account for this kind of frightening indifference to the suffering and death which American military power continues to inflict on the people of Southeast Asia? One answer to this question is that the victims of our bombs have been classified as Untermenschen. Consciously or unconsciously, we have defined them as creatures who are less than human and hence undeserving of our feelings of compassion. We have denied our human ties to the suffering people of Vietnam. They are "gooks," "commies," "possible VC," or just "the enemy." They are not killed (too much feeling of fellow-creature in that term!) but simply "wasted." Thus redefined, the deaths of our victims do not really affect us. We can experience the deaths of others as real deaths only when we feel humanly diminished by them. Our dehumanizing and depersonalizing definitions have shrunk our sense of human solidarity.

A second mechanism at work in our death denial is that of simply blocking the death and destruction in Vietnam from our consciousness. If we do not see the killing or hear the screams, then death is not taking place. After all, we are repeatedly told that the war is being "wound down." We are also assured that our planes drop "smart bombs" which hit only military targets. The possibility of tuning out the awareness of death is now available even to those who deliver the bombs. Our technological skill has developed to the point where we are able to kill at a distance (spatially and psychologically) and with no pangs of conscience. Herbert Marcuse has described this as "death in the abstract, killing that does not dirty your hands and clothes, that does not burden you with the agony of the victims-invisible death dealt by remote controls."

These two devices of denial-our refusal to look and to feel, and our repudiation of human solidarity-have not only injured others; they have also violated our own humanity. Caring for others is part

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of what it means to be human, and when we lose this capacity to care we become stunted and degraded beings. Where death is ignored, there can be little real care or love. The reality of death reminds us that life is precious and fragile. The denial of death is a flight from love. To take satisfaction in the reduced American death toll in Vietnam while ignoring the Vietnamese casualties caused by the intensified air war is to contribute to our own dehumanization.

When we deny the death of others, we express at the same time our own fear of dying. This is as true of societies as it is of individuals. Vietnam has brought American society to the threshold of awareness of the possibility of its corporate death. But we are bereft of symbols to interpret constructively this intimation of American mortality.

The experience of death is an experience of loss. What we have lost in Vietnam is our image of ourselves as the advocate of justice and peace among the nations and our assumption of the invincibility of American military power. This experience of the death of American innocence and almightiness is dimly but widely shared, and we are now confronted as a people with the task of coping with this loss. Over the past few years I have found that increasing numbers of my students in different courses want to write on the subject of death. This subject would not have attracted many seminary students eight years ago. I interpret this present interest in death as an expression of a growing feeling that we belong to a society which is, morally speaking, dying. The symbols of national purpose and values which our culture has bequeathed to this generation of young people now evoke cynicism rather than conviction. Some observers find this upsurge of interest in the meaning of death excessive and morbid, and this may be true in a few cases. But on the whole I think it represents, perhaps unconsciously, a preparation for the dying process requisite for a rebirth of personal and corporate integrity and life style.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross has described the stages of response of a dying patient as moving from denial and anger, through bargaining and depression, to hope. This analysis seems to apply as well to our corporate response to our loss in Vietnam. The failure of the Vietnamization program and the repeated defeat of American military objectives have been consistently denied by three American administrations. Each defeat has led to angry escalations of the war, the latest being the massive air and sea war against North Vietnam. The Paris negotiations resemble Ross' descriptions of the bargaining maneuvers of the dying patient. The purpose of the negotiations to date has not been to reach a realistic settlement but to stall for time in the hope that the real facts will somehow

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disappear. Meanwhile, the mood of helplessness and depression is wide-spread among those who see no way out of a demoralizing situation.

The voice of authentic hope in this election year would summon the American people to some honest admissions and some costly new commitments. The appearance of honest hope in American political life depends on the willingness of the people and its leaders to recognize that what we have done in Vietnam was wrong, that we have needlessly inflicted suffering and death on many, that the Vietnam war was not a deviation from our usual attitudes and practices in domestic and international affairs but their ugly culmination, that the view of ourselves as morally pure and militarily invincible is badly mistaken. The momentous choice which we now face as a nation is whether we will let our experience of loss and defeat occasion the renewal of our sense of the solidarity of all men or whether we will continue to follow the old patterns of denial and anger.

This choice will confront our society even if all American troops are withdrawn from Vietnam within the next several months. The search for a scapegoat will no doubt be pressed by some groups in the post-Vietnam era. Scapegoatism is of course only another form of denial that radical change is necessary in ourselves. We should have no illusions about the difficulty of assimilating the experience of fault and failure on a scale as large as the Vietnam war. Men do not easily admit mistakes. The summons to death and rebirth will sound no less foolish to Americans in the nineteen-seventies than it did to Nicodemus in the first century.

III

American civil religion legitimizes the denial of death in our culture and political life. It supports rather than exposes our inability to confront death in the individual and social spheres of existence. The God in whom we trust is the great provider and protector of our affluent society. National homage is offered to this God on such occasions as a New Year's bowl game when an opening prayer provides the religious dimension to the national celebration of American virility and competitiveness. The sentiments expressed in the religious services held in the White House at the President's request are typical of the civil religion: self-congratulatory and completely reassuring.

The civil religion provides us with an occasion to be thankful to God for his manifold blessings. It does not offer us opportunity to recognize our finitude, acknowledge our pretensions, admit our mistakes, and renounce our foolish imperialistic impulses.

According to Robert Bellah, American civil religion has not always been shallowly optimistic about the character and destiny of the United States. At times it has given symbolic expression to pro-

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found religious insights. As shaped by the founding fathers, it looked upon the new nation as a fresh start for mankind. The Revolution was interpreted as the New Exodus, and the young country was declared to have a divinely given mission in the world. This self-understanding has been increasingly secularized, but it still helps to shape the American consciousness.

When the nation faced tragedy and suffering on an unprecedented scale during the Civil War, the civil religion took on new themes and acquired new depths. Lincoln employed the symbol of sacrificial death and rebirth to express the agony and hope of the wartorn nation. A representative of the civil religion at its best, he perceived a tragic possibility of new life in the midst of national disintegration and death.

By comparison, the civil religion today is superficial and evasive. It has few prophetic voices and scarcely mentions the greatest danger we face in what Bellah calls "the third time of trial," the American temptation to an arrogant misuse of power in a revolutionary world. Still, Bellah is cautiously hopeful about the renewal of American civil religion: "It has often been used and is being used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions. It is in need-as is any living faith---of continual reformation, of being measured by universal standards. But it is not evident that it is incapable of growth and new insight."

Like Bellah, I would be grateful for a new reformation of the civil religion. But as long as it gives religious legitimacy to the denial of death, I do not see how it can help the nation to come to terms with its moral sickness unto death of which the Vietnam War is symptomatic. As a people we need to learn the meaning of humility and to become aware of the limitation of military power to provide "national security" and to uphold the "national honor." The failure of American military objectives in Vietnam might serve to heighten our awareness of our propensity to technological violence upon other men and upon the environment. It might become the occasion for giving up old attitudes of superiority and deathlessness. It might arouse in us a desire for fundamental changes in our national and international affairs. These changes would require a kind of death. The Bible calls it repentance. The chances are very slim, that American civil religion will help to cultivate a spirit of national repentance.

IV

Theology and the church have to share part of the responsibility for the death denial which pervades our culture and manifests itself most poignantly in our inordinate fear of defeat and loss of face in Vietnam. Much traditional theology has reinforced the tendency to see death simply and always as an enemy. The symbols of resurrection and life after death have often been interpreted in

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ways which either offer post-mortem. compensation to those who are oppressed and exploited in this world or provide religious sanction to man's grasp for limitless power.

The true meaning of the symbol of resurrection, however, is the very opposite of the endorsement of the passion for omnipotence. Resurrection is the biblical symbol for the grace and trustworthiness of God. It is the symbol which expresses the conviction that the experience of discontinuity and the coming of the new can be confronted with trust. Resurrection symbolizes the new life which comes as a gift when we take the risk of breaking with old attitudes and ways which have dehumanized others and ourselves. Resurrection of the body symbolizes the new life of man in community which begins on the other side of the death of our self-centered existence.

We do not have a choice between dying and not dying. But we do have the freedom of interpreting our death. This is true not only of that death which is the termination of our biological existence but also of the many penultimate deaths with which we are confronted in life. Jesus summoned his followers to risk the loss of their lives that they might find true life. This summons is not based on an obsession with death; it expresses the profound insight that men are truly free only when they are able to risk everything for the sake of a new world ruled by love. The gospel creates an openness to death which is also an affirmation of abundant new life.

Many of our images of God are mere projections of our own desire for almightiness and of our consuming fear of death. When Bonhoeffer said that "only a suffering God can help," he rightly saw the connection between honest confrontation with death and the possibility of new life and new human community. The demonic is characterized by the grasping of power and by the inability to absorb any experience of powerlessness. In this sense, the demonic is present in modern American culture. We are driven by the will to consume and to control. We abhor powerlessness and death. Thus in spite of all the superficial changes we undergo, we resist the coming of the genuinely new. As Paul Tillich noted, "The new is created not out of the old, not out of the best of the old, but out of the death of the old."

Our refusal as a people to risk the death of the old imperial ways may seem insurmountable. Yet this fear of being less than omnipotent is transcended by the image of One who abjured omnipotence and by risking death for the sake of love taught us what it means to be truly human.