This book explores the religious vision of American soldiers and war workers during the Great War. Unlike the focus on church leadership in other studies of American religion during the period (for example, Richard Gamble's The war for righteousness, 2003), Ebel writes about the combatants and workers, especially through literary analysis of their letters, diaries and memoirs (often relying on the popular, commercial publications that their families later produced for public consumption). American soldiers and war workers alike, Ebel contends, framed the war in unhesitatingly religious terms: they believed that the cause was righteous and interpreted their experiences in the language of Christian redemption. The commonplace reliance on images of Christ, the cross and martyrdom indicates that the Great War served as a ‘modern crusade’ for personal and national redemption in America. ‘Faith’, in Ebel's study, is less an explication of ecclesiastical responses to the war than a tribute to pervasive expressions of American civil religion in the twentieth century. For example, Kenneth MacLeish, writing in one letter, redefines death in the language of idealised service to the nation: ‘the finest miracle in life is to be able, in the last few moments on this earth, to revolutionize one's own entire existence, to forget a life of failure, and weakness, and to die a hero’(p. 80). Women and African Americans, the subjects of chapters iv and v, linked war service abroad to the reconstitution of social norms back home. Institutionalised racism in the United States, exemplified in segregated service for some 370,000 African American soldiers during the war, led German propagandists to question in one flyer the pretentious appeal to American ideals of democracy: ‘Do you enjoy the same rights as white people do in America … or are you rather treated over there as second class citizens? … Is lynching and the most horrible crimes connected therewith, a lawful proceeding in a Democratic country?’ (p. 108). In this way Faith in the fight unearths a story of paradoxical tensions in the American experience of civil religion: war writings elicit notions of ‘continuity in the midst of rupture’ (p. 18), muscular faith conveyed through poetic discourse, powerlessness reinterpreted as immortality, impotence merged with omnipotence, and divine intervention intertwined with the language of chance and fate (‘I did nothing – I left it all to Chance’ [p. 66]). Most significantly, Ebel finds that the ‘industrialized depersonalized violence of the Western Front’ (p. 54) produced not rampant scepticism, but renewed ‘faith’ as soldiers translated their experience of war into mythic visions of redemptive suffering. Despite the contribution that Ebel makes, challenging questions remain unaddressed. With respect to Ebel's sources, one wonders how reliable redacted writings are once they have been reproduced for public consumption? Moreover, if American soldiers wrote ‘to take the edge off of natural fears of death’ and ‘comfort the mourning’ (p. 104), as Ebel believes, then how trustworthy are these writings as sources of religious reflection? Finally, although somewhat beyond the scope of this study, how do responses to the Great War in the United States compare to the more famous British accounts of pervasive faith and profound (if occasional) doubt? One could fruitfully compare Ebel's Faith in the fight to Richard Schweitzer's illuminating but unmentioned The cross and the trenches: religious faith and doubt among British and American Great War soldiers (2004). The English account of the Christ-figure trapped and covered in muck in Siegfried Sassoon's poem ‘The Redeemer’ contrasts rather vividly with Joyce Kilmer's sanguine American portrait of the redeemer in ‘A soldier's prayer’: ‘My shoulders ache beneath my pack / (Lie easier, Cross, upon His back)’ [p. 90]). Although Ebel does not entertain these vital questions, Faith in the fight provides fertile resources for the ongoing recovery of the religious aspect of the Great War.