A Religious History of the American GI in World War II. By G. Kurt Piehler

Abstract

On Flag Day 1954, Congress amended the US Flag Code, adding the phrase “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Less than a year later, Will Herberg published Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology—popularizing the idea of the United States as a “triple-melting pot” in which the three titular Abrahamic faiths could enjoy equal claims to an American identity grounded in a shared civil deity. G. Kurt Piehler’s A Religious History of the American GI in World War II credits this Cold War “embrace of tri-faith pluralism” to the largely successful implementation of a “Rooseveltian vision of the free-exercise of religion” within the US military during the World War II (pp. 5, 7). A Religious History of the American GI is a welcome addition to the growing literature on lived religious experience in wartime. That scholarship, as well as an extensive use of interviews with combat veterans and the Rutgers Oral History Archives, informs Piehler’s thematic study of “the religious life of the GI” (p. 9). Rich in first-person accounts, it is insightful, nuanced, and at times poignant. This is especially true in the chapter “The Dead.” Piehler unflinchingly considers a topic elided in most military histories as he explores how both United States and enemy dead were treated. Like most chapters, this one uses personal anecdotes (often painful), most often from the combat chaplains who cared for the war’s dead and dying.