Warrior Virgin, Warrior Queen, Champion General Mary, and Mother of Power

How can Virgin Mary be used as a symbol of war, military, imperialism, and violence? Virgin Mary was as far from war and violence as a human can possibly be. But Christian nationalists have used Mary as a militaristic icon since ancient times. 

Dorian Llywelyn, a Jesuit priest, scholar of Catholicism, and President, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has written a fascinating article about how Mary has become a warrior queen and a military general, who has won many battles, for many nations. 

In his article, The patriotic Virgin: How Mary’s been marshaled for religious nationalism and military campaigns, Mr. Llywelyn traces the history of the Warrior Virgin from ancient times. He gives the example of a prayer from 4th century Christians in Egypt to Christian's victory over Persians after Constantinople was besieged by the Persian navy in 626 AD. Christians believed that their prayers to Mary destroyed the Persian fleet. Mary was given the military title 'Champion General' in the Akathist hymn that has been prayed in both the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches. Since then, Mary has been used as a symbol of the military and nation. In the Argentinian and Chilian militaries, she is still considered a national patroness and a general.

 Mr. Llywelyn mentions interesting and intriguing episodes of history when both sides of the conflict invoked Warrior Mary. During the War of Mexican Independence (1810-21), local forces invoked "Our Lady of Guadalupe," a title of Mary used in Mexico while the Spanish imperialist army invoked another title for Mary, “Virgin of Los Remedios,” as their protector and supporter. 

Another such episode is the reign of English Queen Elizabeth I, called the "Virgin Queen" because she was never married. However, many of her English supporters also considered her the second Virgin Mary under whom the golden age of purity and justice was restored. She was the head of the Anglican Church and Catholic Christians suffered harsh persecution during her reign. In her book, "The Virgin Mary in The Perceptions of Women: Mother, Protector, and Queen," Joelle Mellon wrote that during those difficult times, when death or imprisonment was a real threat, the English Catholics asked Mary for protection and gave her a new title: Mother of Power.

A mural in Kyiv, Ukraine depicting the Virgin Mary cradling a U.S.-made anti-tank weapon

Source: The patriotic Virgin: How Mary’s been marshaled for religious nationalism and military campaigns

Mary as a national symbol

Mary has been used as the national symbol of many countries. Catholic countries are particularly susceptible to Mary's devotion as Mr. Llywelyn explains:

Off the battlefield, many Catholic cultures have historically felt they had a special relationship with Mary. In 1638, King Louis XIII formally dedicated France to the Virgin Mary. Popular belief interpreted the subsequent birth of the future Louis XIV as Mary’s miraculous reward, after 23 years of waiting for a male heir.

About two decades later, Polish King Jan II Kazimierz consecrated his country to Mary amid a war. Both acts reflected church and political leaders’ beliefs that their countries had a sacred mission and divine approval for their political ambitions.

This religious symbolism allows rulers to justify their actions, whether it's war, peace, theft, or imperialism, based on religion. 

Mary as a warrior

Ancient symbols and personalities are often reimagined and reinterpreted by powerful rulers or groups so that current political positions and actions can be justified. Traditions are invented and people think of them as ancient and long-standing while in reality these traditions of are relatively recent origin.

The following excerpt from a Novena/prayer to Mary shows that the "gentle maid" is also a powerful warrior. 

How strange it seems to think of Mary as a warrior.

The gentle maid of Nazareth, the Virginal Mother, the Mother of the Prince of Peace, is still called -and properly called- "More terrible than army in battle array."

And so she is....

Mary, conqueror of heresies

Mary, triumphant always in the battle with sin.

When then we put on the scapular, which is Mary's uniform, we join in a special way the regiment of which Mary is the queen and honorary colonel.

We pledge ourselves to do battle against the enemy of the human race.

We will be victorious as Mary is victorious, and conquering as Christ is conquering.

Although the battles and triumphs are spiritual, once you make someone honorary colonel of a regiment, it's easy to use it to also battle corporeal enemies that threaten us in the real world. The following image of Mary, with a club in her hand, is particularly interesting.

Source: Virgin most powerful: Catholic Belief in Mary's Strength 

Religious nationalism in 19th century Europe

Hugh McLeod in his article, "Christianity and nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe" (International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Vol. 15, No.1, 2015) discusses the 19th century European nationalisms, the relationship between Christianity and nationalisms and religious support for the First World War in all the European countries.

McLeod argues that nationalism was one of the most influential ideologies in 19th century Europe, along with socialism, liberalism and conservatism. Nationalism was sometimes allied with liberalism and at other times with conservatism. Socialists were also not devoid of nationalist sentiments. 

Mcleod distinguishes between three types of nationalisms in nineteenth-century Europe:

Nationalism 'from below': The nationalism of the subject peoples, living within the great European Empires, that asserted their right to more autonomy or independence

Unification nationalisms: The nationalism of the people, who belonged to the same culture but were divided into numerous small states, that sought to form a unified nation-state for these 

Nationalism ‘from above’: The nationalism propagated by the governments through the education

system, etc. in their own countries so that their people are ready to defend or attack and do not fall prey to nationalism 'from below.'

Mcleod explains, with examples, why nationalism and Christianity were so close and overlapping in 19th century Europe or, in other words, why religious nationalism was so popular at that time:

Many of the classic histories of nationalism see it as an essentially secular ideology – even as a ‘political religion’, substituting for a declining Christianity. The French Revolution does indeed demonstrate this possibility. But more often nationalists made free use of Christian symbols and concepts, and churches willingly embraced nationalist ideologies. 

Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as an ‘Imagined Community’, whereby people felt an affinity with millions of others, whom they had never met and with whom they might have little in common, because they belonged to the same ‘nation’. But this ‘Imagined Community’ could not be created out of nothing. Its basic building blocks were shared language and/or shared historical memories. Even the language sometimes had a significant religious dimension, as is shown by the importance of translations of the Bible in the history of many languages. The historical memories nearly always had a significant religious dimension. The alliance between religion and nationalism was two-edged in its implications both for nationalism and for Christianity – as I shall argue. But it was uniquely potent as a means of inspiring both devotion to the nation and loyalty to the church. As regards the latter, it is well known that, in an era of increasing secularisation in many parts of Europe, loyalty to the church reached its highest levels in countries such as Ireland, where the links between religious and national identities were closest. Conversely, secularisation progressed much more rapidly where nationalism had a predominantly anti-church or anti-religious character....  

When nationalists pointed to shared experiences of oppression or of unity against external foes, these experiences were more often than not associated with religion. For example, in the eyes of Irish nationalists, the clearest example of British oppression was offered by the anti-Catholic Penal Laws ..... For English nationalists, on the other hand, the proudest moment in their national history was the defeat in 1588 of the Spanish Armada.... 

The national heroes whom they revered more often than not had an evident religious significance. The greatest figures in Spanish history were Ferdinand and Isabella, ‘The Catholic Monarchs’, who had not only united the nation, but had forced Muslims and Jews either to convert or to leave....  

Nationalists liked to celebrate distinctive national values and virtues, and very often these were seen as having religious roots. Thus nineteenth-century Britons frequently claimed that their political power, their economic success and their free institutions were all rooted in Protestantism. In a typical sermon of 1898, Dr Welldon, headmaster of Harrow School and later Bishop of Calcutta, claimed that ‘wherever there was a nation that was stationary and retrogressive it was Catholic, wherever there was a people that was progressive and Imperial it was Protestant’.... 

Nationalists celebrated the art, architecture, literature, music and folklore of their people, and very often these were shaped by specific religious traditions. A classic case is the French Catholic revival of the years around 1900, which was strongly coloured by nationalism.... An important part of this rediscovery was the realisation that French history and culture were so deeply imbued with Catholicism, that to be truly French it was necessary also to be Catholic. 

Nationalists also drew on ideas of national mission or chosenness. Many nineteenth century Britons believed that the British Empire had been providentially ordained to facilitate the spread of the pure Protestant gospel. Sometimes, as in France there were two rival versions of this national mission: one pointing to France’s historical identity as ‘The Eldest Daughter of the Church’, while the other focused on ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.... 

More commonly, as in Britain, explicitly religious and more secular understandings of national mission, rather than being in opposition to one another were mutually reinforcing, offering a repertoire of justifications for national pride and national power which could be drawn upon separately or in combination as the situation demanded. The historian of missions, Andrew Walls, highlights the immense popularity of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, whose justification for British (and American) imperialism as ‘The White Man’s Burden’, though not explicitly Christian, drew on biblical language and examples in a way that both Christian and agnostic readers found inspiring.

Meanwhile priests and pastors were often strongly influenced by nationalist ideas and gave them influential support through sermons, through ‘national’ hymns, through the teaching in church schools, through Christian youth organisations. 

Anniversaries of notable battles, as well as royal birthdays and jubilees provided occasions for special services with patriotic sermons and sometimes the composition of new hymns with patriotic themes. For example Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897 were marked by numerous special services at which imperial themes played a big role. The year 1913 saw the anniversary of the Prussian uprising against Napoleon and special services were held in many German churches.... Walls notes a new category of ‘national hymns’ entering British hymn-books in the 1880s, and observes that it was then that hymn-books began to include the national anthem. The Swedish historian Alf Tergel refers to the popularity in the early years of the twentieth century of hymns by J.A. Eklund, bishop of Karlstad. In ‘Our Fathers’ Church’ he recalled Sweden’s decisive role in the Thirty Years’ War, and then went on to appeal to ‘Christian youth’ to ‘battle for God’s glory in the North’..... 

In Britain Christian youth organisations with military trappings proliferated in the years 1880–1914. The prototype was the Boys’ Brigade (BB), founded by a Glasgow Presbyterian in 1883, and also popular in the English and Welsh Free Churches. This aimed to attract members through the wearing of uniforms and military ranks, and marches through the street banging drums and blowing bugles, and carrying dummy rifles....

Again in France there were rival Catholic and Republican youth organisations in these years, but both were imbued with the nationalist spirit.... For Catholics and republicans alike, politics and religion were closely bound together and could not be clearly separated, and neither could be separated from devotion to an idealised Catholic or Republican France.

There were many reasons for the strongly nationalist colouring of much European Christianity in the nineteenth century, but among these reasons we should remember that priests and pastors could not be entirely detached from their social environment. It would indeed be crudely reductionist to suppose that clergymen thought and behaved exactly like other members of their social class, but it would be equally unrealistic to suppose that they lived entirely within a clerical sub-culture. Protestant clergy, in particular, who had been educated at university with future doctors and lawyers, and who also married and had children, were especially likely to be influenced by their family and by those of their parishioners with whom they mixed socially. Furthermore, both Protestant and Catholic clergy were highly politicised in this period, and were influenced not only by their families but by the political circles in which they moved...

German Empire Standard (1871-1918) with motto, Gott mit uns (God with us)

Source: Wiki Commons

Of course, religion and nationalism did not always agree and there were tensions as Mcleod explains:

In spite of many affinities, the relationship was two-edged. Religious sentiments and symbols could nearly always be drawn upon by nationalist orators and organisers – but churches were institutions with their own doctrines and interests which could contradict the nationalist agenda. 

A striking example was the conflict between Italian nationalism and the papacy. Enthusiasts for Italian unification initially hoped that the pope might give his blessing to their cause. But it soon became clear that Pius IX was completely opposed.... In response to papal obstruction, a nationalist movement that had initially been strongly influenced by Catholicism took on a strongly anti-clerical dimension.  

The church might also be strongly committed to nationalist objectives, while condemning the methods that some nationalists used. Here the classic example would be the persistent tensions between the Irish Catholic Church and the revolutionary wing of Irish nationalism, from the Fenians in the 1860s to the Provisional IRA in our own times. 

Moreover the alliance between religion and nationalism, while extremely effective in countries that were more or less religiously homogeneous, could raise problems within religiously divided nations, where appeals to the religion of the majority risked alienating minorities. Indeed there is a fundamental tension between a religion such as Christianity, which claims to have a message for all of humankind and in which ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek’, and the claims by nationalists that everyone’s first loyalty should be to his or her own people. 

So in the later nineteenth century many nationalists were seeking new bases for national identity which were religiously neutral and which circumvented confessional differences.... Sometimes this meant a focus on language, or even on sport.... But most often the search for alternative bases for national identity meant recourse to the newly fashionable racial ideas, which gained intellectual authority from trends in anthropology and in Social Darwinism.... In Great Britain the dominant imperialism of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was legitimated by belief in a national mission to bring civilisation and good government to less favoured regions of the world. This was often linked to Protestant Christianity and its plethora of overseas missions. But increasingly this religiously based concept of national mission was supplemented by, or even replaced by, claims for the racial superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon peoples’.... 

National churches were not surprisingly those readiest to identify with ‘the nation’. These national churches included most obviously the ‘people’s churches’ (Volkskirchen) of Germany and Scandinavia, the Churches of England and Scotland, the Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox Churches – but also the Catholic Churches of France and Spain which saw themselves as churches of the nation, or those of Ireland and Poland which claimed to speak for a nation as yet denied nationhood. Overt opposition to the nationalist agenda was most likely to come from minority churches, whether because of uncertainty as to how far they were really part of the national project – or whether the experience of being in a minority (and often of discrimination arising from this) tended to make such churches readier to question mainstream values and conventional wisdom. Thus in Germany the Catholic Church was more cautious than the Protestants in its support for militarism and imperialism....

McLeod's article demonstrates that religious nationalism was almost as popular in the 19th century Europe as it is now in Asia and North Africa.