Kimberly Winston takes note of a growing movement to examine the Great War through the lens of religious history:
“You can’t understand the war fully without investigating the religious dimensions of the war,” said Jonathan Ebel, an associate professor of religion at the University of
Illinois whose Faith in the Fight: The American Soldier in the Great War has just been issued in paperback. … Ebel draws a line from the “masculine Christianity” of the early 20th century (evangelist Billy Sunday‘s enormously popular revivals often included military recruiting tents) to the way combatants and support workers thought of the war. Soldiers scribbled lines of Scripture on their gas masks, marked their calendars with a cross for each day they survived combat, and opened the pages of the Stars and Stripes military newspaper to read poems comparing them to the heroes of the Old Testament. “The culture of pre-war America gave America images, ideas, and beliefs perfectly tailored to war,” he writes.
That is echoed on a global stage in The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade by Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religion at Baylor University. The book pulls the lens back from individual Americans to highlight the religious imagery, rhetoric, and symbolism used by all sides in the war to further their goals. Several countries — especially Russia and Germany — saw the war as a fulfillment of their unique destinies as the kingdom of God. But Europe did not have room for so many countries with the same aspiration. “You can toss a coin as to which country to blame, but their two clashing visions made war inevitable,” Jenkins said. “If you do not understand the messianic and apocalyptic imagery used by all sides, and how wide-ranging those images were among all classes, all groups, all nations, you cannot hope to understand the war.”
(Photo of WWI Belgian solder’s crucifix by Flickr user Smabs Sputzer, who captions it: “It belonged to my Grandad and he wore it in the trenches during the First World War”)
The Dish 