God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America’s Armed Forces in World War II by Michael Snape (review)

Michael Snape is the Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University in England and the author of numerous articles and books on religion in the British Army. In God and Uncle Sam, he discusses the pervasive religiosity that characterized America’s armed forces during World War II. His book is based on an incredible variety of published and archival material, including newspapers and periodicals, U.S. Army and U.S. government publications, and hundreds of other primary and secondary sources.

Snape is quite forthright in challenging historians such as Paul Fussell who declared World War II “a notably secular affair” (qtd. on p. 599) and emphasized American soldiers’ indifference regarding religion. Snape reveals the great number of individuals and groups promoting religion among the troops during that war. Army and Navy chaplains, as well as an overwhelmingly Protestant officer corps emphasized the importance of religious preaching as a means of building soldiers’ military morale. Civilian America agreed that religious belief was a vital component of military might. Almost every denomination or faith group in the nation spent huge sums of money sending religious tracts, magazines, and other publications to both chaplains and soldiers. Snape also points out that warfare itself aided the promotion of soldiers’ religious faith. In one of the most interesting chapters in the book, on “foxhole religion” (pp. 317–95), he explains how the threat, experience, and aftermath of combat stimulated religious belief and practice among the troops. Another chapter shows how both soldiers and leaders of America’s armed forces “were strongly inclined to understand their enemies and their allies in religious terms,” depending on whether they felt a “sense of religious commonality or difference” (p. 397). This approach resulted in hatred for Nazism and the Japanese but also some degree of sympathy for German and Japanese Christians. It also created a dilemma for many American soldiers who, as Christians, agonized over the destruction and profanation of churches and sacred sites in Europe, the Pacific, and Japan.

According to Snape, the armed forces’ embrace of religion during World War II exerted a significant effect on the postwar period. He describes World War II as “a key period in the history of American religion in the twentieth century, acting as a pivotal phase between the troubled years of the interwar decades and the booming religiosity of the late 1940’s and 1950’s” (p. 3). Snape views the “experience of military service” in that war as a crucial “agent of . . . change” (p. 3) during the postwar years. Among the results he cites a “tremendous vindication” (p. 510) and invigoration of overseas missionary work, a striking increase in religious membership and participation, particularly on the part of ex-soldiers and their families, greater religious toleration among the American people, the development of a religious interpretation of the communist threat, and the rise of evangelical religion.

At a time when the role of religion in the U.S. armed forces is under scrutiny and the subject of much debate—not just in the Army, Navy, and Air Force but in the civilian sector as well—this book about religion in World War II might provide a new perspective on the issues that are being raised. By the same token, general readers and scholars who are interested in the religious or military history of America will find this book a treasure trove of information that has not been readily available in the past.