Politics & Power Quote by Rebecca H. Davis

Davis lands the blow by borrowing the language of religion: war as a "beneficent deity". It’s a chillingly apt metaphor because it captures how societies launder violence into virtue. A deity doesn’t need evidence; it needs devotion. By framing war this way, she’s not praising youthful patriotism so much as diagnosing a cultural catechism in which sacrifice is automatically holy and bloodshed is rebranded as moral growth.

The quote’s sharpest move is the list of supposed dividends: "national honor", "uplifts", "patriotism", "courage". These are abstract nouns that sound noble precisely because they’re hard to audit. Davis is pointing at the rhetorical mechanism that makes war politically saleable: shift attention from the physical and psychological wreckage to intangible gains that can be claimed regardless of outcomes. It’s also a warning about education and media as moral amplifiers. If young people have "come to look upon" war this way, someone taught them to.

Context matters: Davis wrote in an era when American expansion and industrialized conflict were increasingly narrated as proof of national maturity. Her critique anticipates the 20th century’s propaganda machines, when youth were prime targets for recruitment and mythmaking. The subtext is less about youthful naivete than adult responsibility: the real scandal isn’t that the young believe in war’s ennobling power, but that the culture keeps handing them a theology of violence and calling it character.