The Metaphor of War
and
The Salvation Army

Melissa Wiley's Response
Excerpted from email 6/07/04

     I was not able to access your site...however, if you have done anything visually, like a diagram of the Salvation Army, to enhance your metaphorical analysis, I think that would be great. To me, the strongest and most interesting aspect of your project was the visual construction of metaphor.

     About the few items, like the prayer table, that don't fit into the military metaphor, you might just mention that they are part of another metaphor, one which military campaigns often appropriate to bolster their cause--serving God, or any abstraction, like justice or freedom. Even in wars that we conceive of as purely political, like Vietnam, justify themselves in terms beyond the political sphere, where they can't be reproached. It is very hard to criticize "freedom," Bush's main reason for fighting in Iraq.

     Seen in this way, the metaphors of war and religion seem always to be in service of one another at some point. Within the Salvation Army, you might say that the war metaphor is mostly in service of religion. But the presence of the prayer table (I think that's what it's called, or altar) might be thought of as a way for the Salvation Army to preserve a difference between metaphor and the reality of God and the hope for eternal life. That is, it refuses to put such serious beliefs entirely in terms of metaphor. Unlike Nietzsche, for instance, the Salvation Army can continue to function only if there are some limits to metaphor. It must fight for something, even if the way it fights is conceived in terms of metaphor.