References to combat deaths as “necessary sacrifices” are drawn from centuries of Christian interpretation of the “Death of Jesus as required for salvation.” Warfare thus is transformed into a “sacred enterprise” devoted to saving the nation from its enemies.

The model of the heroic offering of oneself for the salvation of others (by Christ) inspires the view of those who die in battle are “redemptive sacrifices.” Fervor for war is sustained by the pervasive “use of sacrifice to name the loss of life in battle.”

Just as Christ died to save humanity, so does the soldier die in order to save the nation. Like Christ, soldiers die so we may live. By associating Christ’s death with the deaths of fallen warriors, the wars that took their lives also became “sacred enterprises;” as valuable to patriotic piety as “the cross upon which Christ gave himself.” Jesus’ sacrifice “bleeds into and informs the meaning of the sacrifice of soldiers in war.”

In The Gospel of Nationalism (1986), Arlie J. Hoover calls nationalism a religion, theorizing that the “fluidity of the religious sense” makes it easy for human beings to switch the object of religious veneration: from church to nation; from God to country.

Focusing on the sermons of German pastors during the First World War, Hoover demonstrates that the sacrificial soldier lay at the heart of religious nationalism. Far from being sinful, the life of the soldier was one of the most exemplary lives one could choose; a life of “moral courage, devotion, and self-denial.” The soldier, like Christ, was ready to “place his earthly life on the altar of love;” to “die for family, brethren, or country.”

German pastors looked upon the warrior’s death as the “most beautiful of all deaths.” The hero’s death—death of a German soldier—resembled the “free-will offering of Christ himself, who left his life voluntarily for his brethren.” Walter Lehmann expressed it as follows: “German nationality and Christianity agree at their very core in heroism—nothing is greater than to leave your life for your friends and your brethren. Both are fulfilled in the hero’s death.”

German Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack stated that soldiers can claim the promise of scripture: “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren” (I John 3:14). Whoever dies in battle “dies in the Lord”. Because he has “subordinated his bodily good” and has “offered his life for the good of the Volk.”

The nature of war, Hoover observes, makes it easy for the soldier to understand the essence of Christianity: heroism, love, sacrifice, and devotion to duty. As General Patton said, soldiers understand the cross “because they have borne a cross themselves.” They know instinctively what Jesus meant when he said, “Greater love hath no man who would lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

The sacrificial dynamic of war lies at the heart of Western civilization. It begins with Christ and his crucifixion. Christ died at the cross to save humanity. The soldier dies on the battlefield to save his country.