Militant Christianity An Anthropological History

Today's militant Christians follow an ancient ethos we can trace four thousand years to the Battle-ax culture of early Indo-Europeans. Roman Emperor Constantine, from a Germanic background, approved Christianity in AD 312, believing it promised he would be 'the Anointed' greatest emperor. His Indo-European militarism characterized northern European Christianity, through Martin Luther's and John Calvin's aggressive Protestantism, American colonization ruthlessly dispossessing Indian nations, rise of competitive capitalism, to contemporary White American Protestants fighting to make America an officially Christian nation. Taking a broad anthropological approach, Militant Christianity is a new insight into the culture of 'Christian Warriors.'

Alice Beck Kehoe is a former professor of Anthropology at Marquette University. Among her publications are North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account (1981, third edition 2006); The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization (2nd ed., 2006); Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology (1998); Shamans and Religion (2000); America Before the European Invasions (2002); Controversies in Archaeology (2008); and Expanding Anthropology 1945-1980 (edited with P. L. Doughty, 2011). Her research also includes archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork on the Northwestern Plains, ethnographic fieldwork in an Aymara Indian village in Bolivia, and continued collaboration with Amskapi Pikuni, Blackfeet Reservation, Montana, for whom she prepared a history, Amskapi Pikuni: The Blackfeet People (2012).