Perhaps no word is more deeply associated with World War I than "disillusionment." In the compulsive attempts of the second half of the 20th century to tell secularization narratives, one prominent version had religious faith never recovering from the shell-shock it got in the trenches, 1914-18. Jonathan H. Ebel, in his well-researched and persuasively revisionist study Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War, convincingly demonstrates that this loss-of-faith story is wrong, at least for Americans.

Ebel's well-chosen focus for his study was to uncover the lived religion of ordinary people, especially soldiers and war workers such as nurses, as they experienced World War I. What he found is that they actually pursued the war effort with buoyant faith. The Marine aviator Walter Poague wrote home in February 1918, "This is not a terrible war. It is the most wonderful war in the world. It is the war which means the real salvation of the world." Another soldier reported, "I have made my Communion, and go with a light heart and a determination to do all that I possibly can to help in this fight against evil, for God and humanity." In a breath-taking spiritualization of the situation, a nurse defiantly pronounced, "I believe there is more real peace on earth in men's and women's hearts now in the midst of this world turmoil than has ever been known before."

While these sentiments might reflect attitudes before disillusionment set in, such a change in regard to the conflict (if or when it came) did not usually extend to weakening religious convictions. After the war had been over for a year, the state of Virginia began conducting a survey of its veterans. Most usefully, it included the question: "What effect, if any, did your experiences have on your religious belief?" The responses are filled with affirmations that the war had made their faith "stronger," or taught them to "serve the Lord better," or led them to "believe more firmly."

Its considerable achievement notwithstanding, Faith in the Fight is also marred by not insignificant weaknesses. It is bad form for a reviewer to criticize an author for not writing a different book, but it might be permissible to point out that the kind of books that do get written are a sign of the times. Ebel is preoccupied with issues of race and gender and includes entire chapters on each. These are important themes, and adding them in could make for a better study: as I try to explain to my British wife, the American watchword is, "More is more." Still, in this case it is not more; rather, the ostensible main subject, religion, gets somewhat displaced.

Particularly regrettable in this regard is "Ideal Women in an Ideal War." This chapter is about gender attitudes during the war, with religion simply dropping out of the discussion for the duration. (Again, gender is inherently interesting: one story in this chapter is of a doughboy who was upset, not because he had just lost his leg, but rather that another soldier—barely conscious and in excruciating pain—was muttering profanities in the presence of a female nurse.) Another chapter, "Christ's Cause, Pharaoh's Army," does keep faith in view, but strangely offers no primary source evidence to demonstrate that African Americans thought of the United States armed forces as belonging to "Pharaoh" despite this being its conceptual frame.

Meanwhile much is ignored that ought to interest a historian of religion. Ebel is fundamentally unconcerned with religious identities. There is not a single Jewish voice in the whole book. While some of these labels are sprinkled into the text incidentally, the index tellingly has no entries for Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, or Baptists. Ebel asserts in the introduction that "men and women, black and white, Protestant and Catholic saw the war in remarkably similar religious terms," but while the voices for the first two dichotomies are concertedly presented, one must take his word for the last one, despite the fact that this is billed as a book about religion rather than gender or race.

At one point Ebel claims that a major soteriological impact of the conflict was to cause soldiers to reject any notion of works or merit and to embrace thoroughly sola gratia. Is it too much to ask whether or not this was equally true for Protestants and Catholics? Again and again, ministers are quoted as saying surprising things without the reader being informed of their denomination. (One thinks of the Revd Earl Blackman, whose idea of identifying with the troops was to issue a boastful challenge to all the other chaplains to a fistfight.)

Although there is no entry in the index for "incarnation" and only one page is listed for "atonement," nevertheless Ebel does provide some illuminating theological explorations. One of these is in regard to attempts during the war to dispense with any distinction among doughboys between the redeemed and unredeemed. The official editorial policy of The Stars and Stripes was that all American soldiers killed in action were automatically saved, whatever irreligious tendencies or vices they might have had.

It is stunning to read how tenaciously this all-dog-tag-owners-go-to-heaven theology was insisted upon. This is pathetically underlined by the case of Caspar Burton, who would eventually die of his wounds, but who managed to linger on as an invalid with a looming death sentence for over a year after the armistice. Burton was deflated to realize that his get-out-of-hell free card had expired before he had, and was clearly miffed that, unlike his more promptly dispatched comrades, he was obliged to be responsible for the state of his soul once again.

Another theme is how strongly the soldiers were drawn to Christ's suffering and death. One poem juxtaposed parenthetically Jesus' experience with that of the soldier:

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back.) …
My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come.)

Walking among the battlefield wounded, infantry officer Hervey Allen became aware that for the first time he truly understood the words, "This is my body which is given for you." In a particularly resonant detail, the wounded had the letter "t" marked on their foreheads with iodine to indicate that their treatment in the field had included anti-tetanus serum, making them look like the cruciform faithful on Ash Wednesday. A theologically thoughtful poetic meditation by Major Brainerd Taylor posited that soldiers were not like Christ, but were rather sinners alongside whom Christ suffered, like the thief on the cross.

The Federal Council of Churches of Christ commissioned the Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook to examine what lessons the churches needed to learn from the experience of the war. Here is Ebel's summary of their conclusions: "Old images, doctrines, and methods of teaching had been tested and found wanting, and the Church had been exposed in its failure to stay current." This was to get it exactly wrong. The churches had spent several decades before the war downplaying the atonement as unpleasant and problematic, replacing it with an ever more central focus on the incarnation, understood in cloying terms—sweet baby Jesus. The lesson of the war was that the crucifixion was a central component of the Christian message. Likewise, although the churches before the war had been speedily draining away any need to believe in miracles, Ebel demonstrates that soldiers' response to the fighting was to re-appropriate a firm conviction of the reality of the supernatural.

Cheating on his commitment to ordinary voices, Ebel draws heavily in one chapter upon a work, of German academic theology: "Rudolf Otto published his landmark work, The Idea of the Holy, in 1917—the year the United States entered the war." Actually, Das Heilige was published in that year. Although Ebel elides this point, an English translation did not appear until years after the war, making it very unlikely that it influenced your average doughboy, and an awkward choice for articulating their views.

At the end of Faith in the Fight, Ebel offers a cautionary meditation on our tendency to see World War II as the quintessential American experience of war. We would have come at conflicts such as Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan better, he avers, if the messy realities of the Great War had been more clearly in view. The fight against the Nazis is more an anomaly than the template: "there has been exactly one World War Two-style military triumph since the founding of the republic."

Even though the Great War, at least in retrospect, has not held up as a clear fight against evil, it nevertheless did not lead to a widespread loss of faith. It also provided more than its share of haunting poetry, not least tributes to doomed youth—taut, muscular bodies impertinently made inanimate. In conclusion, therefore, here is the opening stanza of Archibald MacLeish's "On a Memorial Stone":

Now we are names that once were young
And had our will of living weather,
Loved dark pines and the thin moon's feather,
Fought and endured our souls and flung
Our laughter to the ends of earth,
And challenged heaven with our spacious mirth.

Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, is the author of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford Univ. Press). His A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians is just out from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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