Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel Bradley Carter Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. By Jonathan H. Ebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. The paucity of scholarship addressing the role of U.S. religion in the First World War underscores that conflict’s secondary status in the American imagination, both popular and academic. As the centennial of the start of what was the twentieth century’s defining (and at the time humanity’s deadliest) conflict approaches, “the Great War” is garnering renewed attention. Jonathan Ebel’s Faith in the Fight is an important and welcome addition to a subject too long neglected. Faith in the Fight examines how various groups of Americans used religious “ideas, images, and beliefs” to make sense of the war, their involvement in it, and its inevitable life-changing and life-ending consequences (3). Noting that traditional studies “of America’s wars tend to ignore religion” and those of “religion tend to ignore war,” Ebel proposes to study the “religious thoughts and lives of soldiers and war workers” (both men and women) in order to “make more intelligible both . . . the appeal of war and memories of war, and the more specific religious and political events and movements in twentieth-century America” (3). This interdisciplinary approach, taking seriously the role of vernacular religion in wartime meaning-making, [End Page 73] is the work’s greatest strength. In eschewing an older “history of theology” approach, and an excessive focus on official, institutional religion in favor of a close reading of the “letters, diaries, and memoirs” of combatants and non-combatants alike—alongside popular wartime publications and other “public literature” such as “The Stars and Stripes”—and coupled with post war surveys, most notably one of “14,000 former soldiers, 2,400 of whom were African American,” Ebel demonstrates how religion “provided a vocabulary to help render the war experiences meaningful” (12, 16). Indeed, he illustrates how the “war provided an arena in which faith could be lived out” with religion simultaneously doing “a great deal of the work needed to romanticize war,” allowing “many soldiers to ignore or glorify war’s horrors” (16). Ebel’s work is at its best when limning the cultural contexts and constraints of sense-making. When exploring how notions of Progressive-era “muscular Christianity” informed notions of the Great War’s moral goodness, or how wartime ideas of redemptive violence were more problematic (and complex) for African Americans in Jim Crow America, Faith in the Fight excels. Ebel’s attention to racial differences in appropriating and applying a shared religious vocabulary within a DuBoisian “double consciousness” is illuminating. He notes how the “Christ imagined by black soldiers and war workers offered salvation in the midst of struggle, suffering and sorrow, but unlike the Christ proclaimed by many white soldiers did not require sanctification of the Pharaoh nation” (126). Indeed, the ability of vernacular religion to simultaneously enable wartime disappointment, disillusionment, and re-illusionment within and across differing racial and cultural-historical contexts represents the book’s greatest achievements. So too is Ebel’s chapter on the “Soldierly heaven,” “There Are No Dead” (145). Religion—institutional, as well as the popular, “lived” expressions at the heart of Ebel’s book—are understandably central to both contemporary and ex post facto endeavors to render sensible “the industrialized depersonalized violence” of the Great War (54). While Ebel is to be commended for going beyond the basic theological questions of theodicy (“why does God permit suffering?”) to show how “soldiers and war workers” made “sense of death and survival” (56), his appropriation of Rudolf Otto’s theology of the “Numinous” in the second chapter is perhaps the book’s weak point. That war’s horrific realities are often simultaneously “awful” and “awe-full” while (seemingly) resistant to ordinary sense-making—better suited to the deployment of religious vocabularies of transcendence and mysterium—should be obvious enough. Ebel’s otherwise thoughtful and provocative discussion is only slightly bogged down by this theological contextualization amidst an otherwise informative historical and cultural framework. Nevertheless, Faith in the Fight is a...