Jonathan Ebel's book, Faith in the Fight, discusses the forgotten religious lives of American soldiers during the forgotten war. Ebel brings a storyteller's skill to what was an eight-year research project of public literature including the newspapers of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and the more valuable private literature of the letters, diaries, and memoirs of American soldiers and war workers. His research and storytelling reveals how faith motivated isolationist pre-war America to turn its industry, politics, and soul toward the fight to end all war.
In addition to helping us remember the forgotten war and the forgotten men and women who fought it, the book is important for several reasons, including much needed historical context to Americans' complex use of faith and religious language in war as well as in comforting the trauma and critiquing the necessity of it. Most intriguing for me was how eschatological Americans were when they entered the war in the spring of 1917. Having braved several German provocations like the sinking of the Lusitania, Americans finally entered, at least from the American soldiers' perspectives, when the war served their desire for international, national, and personal redemption.
The muscular Christianity of the early twentieth-century drove the American soldier and war worker to read the Great War's traumatic events not just on a geo-political scale but on a cosmological, metaphysical one such that one war worker desired, “to kill this power of evil, this brute beast of Germany, to drive this thing forever off the earth and out of our children's future” (29). This desire for a metaphysical final solution was echoed in the diary of an artillery man who wrote that “If I could only explain the strong sense that comes over one of the personality of the evil we are fighting. The Personal Devil: The Unseen Powers of the Air” (29). This reading of events as the final eschatological fight with the demonic powers demanded one pilot to use “all the God-given strength he had . . . to save civilization” (32).
Ebel also captures some Americans who fought for an eschatological redemption of the nation. In two enlightening chapters, Ebel shows that many African American soldiers and many women war workers were fighting, as one African American soldier wrote, “for the benefit of my people at home” (117), that is, for equal rights. A woman war worker said, “We are crusaders on a quest for Democracy” (36), not just for Europe, but more importantly for all Americans.
Americans' eschatological vision also turned inward. A Red Cross nurse who had already seen so much unanswered suffering still wrote that “no greater thing can ever come into any one's life than this chance of ours–to get away from little things and self and to know what the things of the Spirit are, and what true values really are” (52–53).
By listening to the faith of American soldiers and war workers through their letters and diaries as well as the official military newspapers, Ebel argues that the Great War was viewed by many Americans as creating not just a new political map but also in reality the fulfillment of the apocalyptic vision of the Book of Revelation. For example, in the Allies' campaign against the Ottoman Turks in the Holy Land, the newspaper of the AEF described the fight as the eschatological battle of Armageddon “In Fact and In Allegory.” The Allies were not just like but truly were the “embattled Israelite host fighting for the land and liberty . . . after generations of slavery and oppression” and were creating a “new heaven and a new earth” (35).
Perhaps faith in the fight on this eschatological scale suffers from a problematic hermeneutic, but we must remember the global ferociousness of the war's twentieth-century technology facing nineteenth-century tactics. The American soldier turned to faith to make sense of the purpose of this epic suffering. A cartoon from the time makes the point. The caricatured Crown Prince is laughing with Kaiser Wilhelm as he points to the crucifixion of Jesus dying on the Cross and says, “Oh, Look, Papa! Another of those Allies!” Allied with the divine power, the American soldier was dying for the Lord who died for him and facing the demonic Central Powers knowing he fights for God's salvific redemption of the world.
Ebel's first book, which helps fill the vast empty spaces of American religious historiography, is a truly fine work that displays expert research and storytelling abilities. Significantly, Ebel's study revises the common view that after the Great War Americans underwent a great “disillusionment,” as if Americans had a great hangover after getting “drunk on the progressive, redemptive, bloody cocktail of war” (169). Instead, through his research of the origins and influences of societies like the American Legion, the YMCA, Knights of Columbus, and others, he argues that Americans underwent a “re-illusionment” (his term) of religious fervor and purpose. His unfortunate clunky terminology gets in the way of a bold and I think proven thesis about the reawakening of American religious faith after the war. The metaphysical crusade to rid the world of evil abroad returned home to rid the nation of evil and “stir into flame the gift of God” and “guard this rich trust with the help of the Holy Spirit that dwells within us” (2 Timothy 1:6, 14).
We should look forward to more of Ebel's work. His book on “trench religion” will become the standard book on religious faith of the forgotten men and women during the forgotten war. Yet, these soldiers were not just fighting to be remembered. They were fighting for an eschatologically redeemed world in which their stirred flame of faith fought for redemption at home and in their wounded hearts.
