Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (review)

The subtitle of this book defines its main subject: religion and the American soldier in the Great War. The author notes accurately that his book is the first on this topic since the publication of Religion among American Men (New York, 1920). It has two distinct advantages over the earlier work. First, it relies heavily on letters, diaries, and memoirs of participants that were not available in 1920. Ebel found many of his sources in the New York Public Library’s collection of U.S. World War I narratives and in several postwar collections of letters and other accounts of the experiences of soldiers. The public source was The Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the American Expeditionary Force. Second, it takes a broad view of the term American soldier, embracing a variety of military personnel: soldiers, airmen, and noncombatant workers. Many of the latter were women who served in a multitude of support agencies. This expansive view pays many dividends in providing a wider range of motivations and firsthand experiences.

The author has at least two goals and two arguments. One goal is to give voice to the religious ideas of participants in the war. He achieves this with considerable success by bringing to life the memories of a wide variety of individuals. Another goal is to establish the religious dimensions of the war. At the very least, he says, historians of American religion should begin to include them in their histories, to weave the voices of the soldiers and war workers “into the increasingly complex tapestry of American religious history” (p. 196).

The first argument is “the necessity, though not the sufficiency, of religion as a cause of American involvement in the Great War” (p. 194). It was, he claims, religion that put a large number of the participants in the war. The argument is not new, but the author makes it through the lives and words of those at the front, rather than the words of President Woodrow Wilson and some of the leading clergymen. The second argument is that World War I was not the “death of an old order and the birth of a new,” but that it demonstrated the continuity of the past with the future. It was about “the reassertion of religious ideas and ideals in the face of war and in war’s aftermath. It is, in short, a story of reillusionment” (p. 18). The American soldiers, in his broad meaning of the term, were more frequently advocates of prewar faiths “than they were revolutionaries against them.”

The book features an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter 1, “Redemption through War,” reveals that all kinds of Americans—men and women, Protestant and Catholic—saw the war in remarkably similar religious terms, as a way to achieve redemption. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with theological issues, including God, suffering, death and salvation, and the efforts of the participants to “theologize” the violence and devastation of the war. Ebel uses the arguments in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (Breslau, 1917; trans. The Idea of the Holy, 1923) to explore the memories of several of the combatants as they tried to come to grips with the presence of the numinous in the terror of the war.

Chapter 4, “Christ’s Cause, Pharaoh’s Army,” has both an intriguing title and powerful subject. African American participants fought a two-front war, one in Europe and another at home, experiencing what W. E. B. DuBois called a double-consciousness. Ebel’s readers will meet Vernon Smith, Isaac Sanders, Willie Thomas, Julius Mitchell, and others as they struggled to carry out their duties under the heavy burden or racism. Just as compelling are the stories of Carolyn Clarke, Addie Hunton, and others in chapter 5, “Ideal Women in an Ideal War.” The final two chapters are “There Are...