What is modern politics? Kahn describes it as “a distinctive form of religious experience” that depends on the shift of sovereignty (Schmitt) from the monarch to the people. When the miraculous of sovereignty shifts, so does sacrifice:

“The domain of sacrifice shifted [in modern politics] from that of religious resistance to the state to that of political patriotism. Modern stories of sacrifice are less likely to be of religious resistance to the state than of individuals whose faith in the ‘truth’ of the state - the popular sovereign - fuels an ultimate resistance against those who make ‘false’ claims to represent the people. For Americans, Lincoln becomes the great image of the martyr - a politicized Christ. Martin Luther King, Jr., too is celebrated not for his adherence to a religious claim to truth in resistance to the state, but as a sacrificial patriot in the Lincolnesque tradition.” As Hauerwas points out in his recent War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity , patriotic sacrifice is self-perpetuating. Sacrifices are demanded from the living because failure to sacrifice would dishonor the dead who sacrificed themselves.

Kahn pushes further to point out the 20th century was not, as often believed, a secular age, but “was marked by the magnitude of its faith, and even by the extreme character of the sacrificial demand made by political communities of ultimate belief. Western nation-states became grand institutional structures for the sacrifice of their citizens to the idea of the necessity of the state’s continued existence. Only under such an idea can we begin to make sense of the millions sacrificed on the battlefields of Europe, let along the extension of the battlefield to the entire territory of the state. The modern state coopts the act of sacrifice to its own ultimate end, which is only the continued existence of the popular sovereign.”