Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War - Paperback

by Jonathan H. Ebel (Author)

Faith in the Fight tells a story of religion, soldiering, suffering, and death in the Great War. Recovering the thoughts and experiences of American troops, nurses, and aid workers through their letters, diaries, and memoirs, Jonathan Ebel describes how religion--primarily Christianity--encouraged these young men and women to fight and die, sustained them through war's chaos, and shaped their responses to the war's aftermath. The book reveals the surprising frequency with which Americans who fought viewed the war as a religious challenge that could lead to individual and national redemption. Believing in a "Christianity of the sword," these Americans responded to the war by reasserting their religious faith and proclaiming America God-chosen and righteous in its mission. And while the war sometimes challenged these beliefs, it did not fundamentally alter them.

Revising the conventional view that the war was universally disillusioning, Faith in the Fight argues that the war in fact strengthened the religious beliefs of the Americans who fought, and that it helped spark a religiously charged revival of many prewar orthodoxies during a postwar period marked by race riots, labor wars, communist witch hunts, and gender struggles. For many Americans, Ebel argues, the postwar period was actually one of "reillusionment."

Demonstrating the deep connections between Christianity and Americans' experience of the First World War, Faith in the Fight encourages us to examine the religious dimensions of America's wars, past and present, and to work toward a deeper understanding of religion and violence in American history.

Back Jacket

"In this book, Jonathan Ebel focuses on the Great War and the jolt it delivered to devout young American Christian soldiers. How were they to interpret this bloodletting and their own role in it? Where was God in the vast and terrible story of war? Where was God in relation to America? With keen sensitivity, Ebel takes up these and other questions. His book adds a fascinating and indispensable chapter to the scholarship on World War I."--Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Sovereignty: God, State, and Self

"In this beautiful and poignant book, Jonathan Ebel draws on the letters and diaries of American soldiers of the First World War to illuminate how they understood their service to be a religious calling. Anyone who thinks about the morality of war must read this book."--Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University Divinity School

"Employing a wide variety of sources, Jonathan Ebel reconstructs the religious meaning of World War I for American soldiers and civilians, and his findings are highly revisionary. The conventional wisdom has been that the Civil War was the last 'romantic' war and that cynicism and disillusionment have ruled ever since. Yet when Ebel actually looks at the evidence, a very different picture emerges--one of deep-seated faith and an idealistic belief in America as a Christian nation."--Harry S. Stout, Yale University

Author Biography

Jonathan H. Ebel is assistant professor of religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.