God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 is a chronicle of presidential rhetoric and public intellectual writing from the close of World War II to the presidency of Barack Obama. Raymond Haberski's interest is in charting and describing civil religion through these years of crisis and transformation with an eye toward the centrality of war to conceptions of America's place in the world. In this project Haberski joins Robert Bellah, Catherine Albanese, and Andrew Bacevich, to name just a few, in addressing the question of the relationship between war and civil religion and writing from an archive of hyper-public sources – texts composed for and often performed in public. In the forty-five years since the publication of Robert Bellah's “Civil Religion in America” (1967), no one has produced a treatment with the historical scope and sensitivity to geo-political contexts that characterizes God and War. Indeed, the chief contribution of Haberski's study is the careful and nuanced extension of Bellah's original essay backward from Vietnam to 1945 and forward from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. Bellah did some of this work himself in essays from the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, but God and War does so with the consistent tone and historical method that a single vantage point allows. Haberski writes accessibly and fluidly, drawing on fascinating texts. In the process he introduces the reader to the most influential religio-political voices of the last seventy years.

As Haberski notes, times of war are times of particular civil religious intensity. They are also times of increased scholarly reflection on the phenomenon, times, perhaps, to move the conversation and the analysis of civil religion in new directions. For its many virtues, God and War is fairly traditional in its approach to civil religion. Beginning in the introduction, God and War accepts a rather amorphous conceptualization of the phenomenon it seeks to study, “a hybrid of nationalism and traditional religion” and then moves on to moments in which the author finds “civil religion” (5). This approach in no way hinders Haberski as he presents material from Truman, Eisenhower, Niebuhr, Herberg, Kennedy, Murray, Johnson, and so on. He is a skilled and responsible intellectual historian. Still, with little scholarly consensus as to what the term means, a more vigorous effort to define “civil religion” and a more sustained engagement with problems of definition would have been useful at a number of levels. On the one hand, it could have helped the field toward some much-needed precision in the use of a term that, though vexing, is not going away anytime soon. On the other, it would have provided a guide for Haberski's own use of the term, which he sometimes presents as a thing unto itself, e.g. “the emergence of postwar civil religion afforded common ground,” and other times qualifies with articles or possessive pronouns, e.g. “The difference between their civil religions,” indicating that a president or theologian – and presumably a common citizen – can have her or his own civil religion, that civil religion can be personalized (20, 246).

There are fruitful discussions to be had about each of these conceptualizations of civil religion and the ways that they inform each other, but by not engaging a question raised frequently within the covers of his book, Haberski sometimes allows the amorphous state of the field and the term too much control over his analysis. It is clear throughout the narrative that there are types of civil religion: patriotic, ironic, “prophetic,” “affirmational,” and that some leaders, (Reinhold Niebuhr and Ronald Reagan), settle comfortably into a particular camp, while others, (Eisenhower, Obama) move around a bit. By working to describe such categories or types and then being more explicit in categorizing his subjects, Haberski could have strengthened an already strong book and perhaps provided much needed clarity to the field.

In the end, though, God and War provides scholars and students with an excellent chronicle of the last seven decades in American history and of myriad attempts to wrestle with the demands of God, the demands of nation, and the perils of civic life in a violent world.