War Crime and Religious Nationalism

    In his dissertation, McCullough recounts (via Richard Welch's "American Atrocities") the brutal tactics used by the American military during the guerrilla campaign in the Philippines.  However, it is pointed out that "few in America realized the full extent of the regnant tactics in the Philippines" (213).  McCullough comes to the conclusion that "The dominant optimism described by Welch as so pervasive within American society, and as so decisive in shaping the response to events in the Philippines, was at the very least bolstered by the full-throated celebration of American identity offered by Christian leaders during the war with Spain." (214)

   Is the Christian aspect of this attitude the critical factor at work here? Would the same public apathy have occurred without the injection of Christian motivation? Does American civil religion lose its dangerous potency without the support of a more traditional religious identity?

A Racial Project?

Although I am not very familiar with the history of the Spanish-American war, most of the times I’ve come across it in academic literature, race has been an important part of the discussion.  In this telling, the Spanish-American war was America’s first step towards an imperial venture, an outlet for its anxieties over Frederick Jackson Turner’s closing of the frontier, and an opportunity to forge a new kind of white masculinity.  With this interpretation in mind, I am wondering what role the civil religion that McCullough talks about plays in this construction of race.  In Chapter 4, McCullough discusses how ideas of Anglo-Saxonism framed how Americans shaped this struggle.  However, people like Theodore Roosevelt, for example, saw the war as an opportunity to forge a new American race—a hybrid of the best of the European groups that would ultimately reinvigorate America, just as the frontier had done.   Thus, not only did ideas about race frame how Americans saw the war with Spain, they also saw the fighting of the war as a sort of racial project, from which something new and stronger could emerge.  Did civil religion have a function here?  Could it be the “glue” that would hold the new American race together?  

Spanish-American War Reponse

Both the primary source readings show an evolution toward American colonialism as a natural and healthy extension of the Nation.  Relying, at first, on ideas of providence to justify an American sense of exceptionalism new forms of “science” like social Darwinism further provide proof to justify a unique place for America in the world.

Dr. McCullough explains the process American Clergy went through from preaching caution and restraint to supporting military intervention.  The transition seen in the Clergy provides a microcosm of the improved ways America was presenting its new role in the world and its growing perception of war as policy.  Speaking to this evolution my favourite quote in the readings is from Our Country on page 210, “the world’s history thus far has been simply prepatory for our (Anglo-Saxon and specifically American) future, and tributary to it”.  In theory all of history has led to each subsequent moment.  Therefore, is each war the most important in history?  Does each conflict better represent all of American ideals and principals?  Does each conflict create/require a new justification for war?

Throw Me to the Wolves Because There's Order in the Pack

"America, like Captain Philip, displayed…the "Magnanimity of Strength." From this common perspective, by showing the same selfless sympathy for the Spanish that they had shown towards the plight of the Cubans themselves, the Americans in victory proved the true character from which they had been fighting all along, not vengeance but humanity."

"not vengeance, but humanity"

I am still so confused by the idea that killing is okay in a battle situation, but is not okay after the battle has ended. JWT baffles me. Rules of engagement don't make any sense. Why would Captain Philip be praised for treating their enemies so humanly after the battle, while also being praised for fighting during the battle? How can a country, like America, use violence to end violence? 

Oh, how little things have changed.

The idea of conversion still seems as relevant here as it did during colonial America. Now, in addition to religious conversion, the success of the American revolution in overthrowing tyranny and the trial of the Civil War has created a new passion for democratic "expansion" as McCullough puts it. It seems that iron sharpens iron, as the strength of both political rhetoric and religious rhetoric are increased by the blurring lines between of mission with "expansion." 

I wonder how religious groups like the ultra-American Mormons and Jewish immigrants added to the rhetoric and conversation. Mormons as a previously domestically persecuted developed an American rhetoric and were prominent in the contemporary practice of Mission while groups like Jewish immigrants, previously persecuted in past centuries by Spanish crusades, were attempting to assimilate American culture and I am sure had something to add to the conversation.

from oppresed fellow to guerrilla savage

In Dr. McCullough's dissertation, Filipino people began a guerrilla against "their" liberators; how was this setback faced by the American religious leaders? did they provide a theological answer to the anger of the once oppressed fellows? this uprising against the Christian redeemers, was it written as something to consider in the future by American historians?

Future America

Our two primary sources for the week, Strong and Winton, are both intelligent and congenial to a fault. Optimism for the future pours out of their prose like sunshine. They are prophets for the Anglo-Saxon future of Liberty, Jesus and the English language. They would be happy, sanguine rulers.
 
I want to try to avoid cynicism here. It is easy to look back from a post-Iraq, post-Vietnam future and laugh at the hopeful marks set down by men swept up in their times. Strong uses the word “progress” as synonymous with good, and while I would agree with him that it’s good that we don’t sell our wives at auction anymore, I hesitate to conflate the two notions. Winton does the same with “individualism.” What would Winton make of a collectivist giant like Japan? The Strong and Winton readings are interesting because of what they say about the attitudes of certain men and newly non-fungible women at the dawn of the twentieth century.

There is something quaint about the notion of “ruling the world” that giddily underlies Strong and Winton’s extracts – it’s the realm of cartoon villains and madmen. They seem too enthusiastic and anglophile to be the heirs of Hegel’s telos; one senses a beginning in their writing rather than an end. If they are prophets, they are prophets of boundless expansion and the endless desire that such growth would necessitate; in short, they are a strange type of prophet, the rare type who would ring in motion rather than rest. Of course, neither Strong nor Winton refer to themselves as prophets, certainly not as prophets of desire and excess; rather it is myself reading the future into their words.
 
The Spanish-American War was an incredible victory for America, but I find myself wondering not so much about the Americans, who, like Strong and Winton, seem so sure of themselves and their glorious future. I cannot help but wonder about the Spanish. How does it feel to be on the other side of the hyphen? What is left to write when you no longer have a hegemony on interpretations?

The Unity of Christian Humanitarianism?

We see in our primary sources the idea that Christian spirituality and civil liberty were essential to America’s impetus for declaring war on Spain. Strong states that “… the two great needs of mankind, that all men may be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization, are first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and second, civil liberty. (202, Strong)  Winton states that “the United States is the home of individualism…. his religious beliefs must remain unchallenged, his worship unmolested, his domicile inviolate, his civil privileges unhampered.” (Winton, 665)

McCullough states that with the war came “a new definition of national purpose, a mandate to extend the blessings of liberty and Christian civilization wherever possible” (McCullough, 29) Referring to Senator Proctor’s report to Congress, McCullough states that it “laid the foundation for the central Religious argument for an unprecedented American foreign policy:  intervention was justifiable not for national self-defense, revenge, or conquest, but only in the interests of the oppressed” (31)  McCullough goes on to state, “And a holy war this was, for many, because it was waged for humanity” (37) “Now war -- this war -- seemed the very definition of Christian humanitarianism” (43)

Faust in This Republic of Suffering... suggested that the North and South possibly did not truly start to mend fences until after the Spanish American War. Referring to McKinley's 1898 speech in Atlanta regarding the honor paid to Confederate soldier graves, "the sons and grandsons of 'these heroic dead' had in the preceding year risked their lives in a new American war; the brave Confederates should be officially honored alongside their Union counterparts." (Faust, 269)

Given the fact that so much animosity existed between the North and South in the postbellum years, was this “new definition of national purpose” the exact combination needed to gather both ideological sides together?  Could the North and South come together for a war that was not fought for “Christian humanitarianism?”

The Times, They Aren't A-Changin'

     Messianic interventionism, as McCullough has fashioned the term, plays the part of connecting the Christo-nationalist tendencies of Western imperialism, throughout history, with the current American policy of world police force. The Spanish-American War marks the beginning of this new era of American foreign policy, and is the framework for interpreting America's global conflict involvement as providential. As McCullough contends, in borrowing Ernest Tuveson's words, this may be the dawn of the great American voyage as a "redeemer nation"--one that, while being notably isolationist, is concerned with justice, and the general well-being of humanity abroad.[1]
     McCullough's dissertation is helpful here in the way that it provides primary source examples and critiques of rhetoric that are contemporaneous to American civil religion at the close of the 19th century; however, it is precisely these inclusions that provide me the most pause. The most grievous citation for me was that of Baptist minister Robert S. MacArthur and his divinely-inspired sermon, "The Hand of God in the Nation's Conflict."[2] Within the sermon, MacArthur expresses an immutable grouping of Christian motifs: Commander Dewey bears an inspiring resemblance to Christus Victor (albeit he did not die), or, at the very least, he is depicted as an anointed man of God, in whose conflict Godself is actively present.[3]
     My trouble then, comes from the lack of progress that we, as civically religious citizens, have experienced since the time of the Spanish-American War. I wonder how this civil religion is any different from our current gods? Ultimately, I wonder if American civil religion is inseparable from the idea of messianic interventionism? Has any war, before or since, lacked this understanding?





[1] McCullough, Matthew, "My Brother's Keeper": Civil Religion, Messianic Interventionism, and the Spanish-American War of 1898 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Graduate School [dissertation], 2011), 6.
[2] Ibid., 60.
[3] Ibid.

"In the Interests of the Oppressed"

Given the state of America at the time of the Spanish-American War, we can more easily understand why discriminatory practices and racist divisions were still occurring contributing to long standing oppression of African Americans. Thanks to Faust, we well know that the Southern slave-holders had to be utterly defeated in America's bloodiest war and forced to allow slaves their freedom a brief time before this. A Southern Civil Religion had formed and treatment of African Americans had not much improved by the late 19th century. However, the Christian argument for the war on behalf of Cuba was one of humanitarian aid and dutiful intervention "in the interests of the oppressed" (McCullough, 31).
I find J.H. Garrison's remark terribly ironic: “no Protestant nation under heaven would treat a subject people as Spain has treated Cuba" (McCullough, 80). How do Americans reconcile their still discriminatory treatment of slaves with their humanitarian "missionary" efforts toward Cuba? It was publicly acknowledged that, "The rule, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ is for nations as well as individuals, and all questions of public policy must be settled by that rule" (McCullough, 47). If Cuba is America's "brother" or "neighbor," how are African Americans not? Was this because American Civil Religion was essentially still Northern Civil Religion? Despite what they said, perhaps the Christ-like,  humanitarian effort was only recognized on an international scale?

Furthermore, would America not have considered Cuba an un-progressed people under any other circumstances? Did America not due to the fact that "most barely knew the location of the islands, much less anything about their history, topography, or population" (McCullough, 102)? Wouldn't that typically mean that America would automatically "other" them?

Providential interpretations of the Spanish–American War inevitable?

Dr. McCullough frames much of his dissertation as a narrative of U.S. Christian responses to the development of the Spanish–American War, and as such necessarily addresses the religious interpretations of the Battle of Manila Bay and the Battle of Santiago de Cuba. These interpretations, which Dr. McCullough convincingly tethers to the development of American religion more generally, may well seem jingoistic in the extreme, emphasizing as they do the ways in which the will of God is plainly manifest in American victory.

As distasteful as these interpretations may be at present, it seems to me that they were very nearly inevitable. Given that Admiral Dewey won the Battle of Manila Bay with only one casualty (to heat-stroke) and that Admirals Sampson and Schley won the Battle of Santiago de Cuba with only one U.S. fatality, would any non-providential interpretation have seemed even remotely plausible? To state the same question less formally, can we blame American ministers for seeing the hand of God in the comprehensive victories won by the U.S. Navy during 1898? The American public had no reason at all to expect that Spain, which had been fighting various wars throughout its far-flung empire throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, would have permitted its navy to lapse into such mean estate. Expecting a competitive adversary, could Americans have come to any other conclusion than that some sort of destiny or providence favored their cause when that adversary's forces were utterly routed?

Messianic Interventionism, Crusading, and Syria.

In reading McCullough’s first chapter a funny thing happened to me: I found myself agreeing with the arguments for American intervention in Cuba against the Spanish. Intervention into a situation like the one that was occurring in Cuba seems to me to be one of the few instances where the sum of the arithmetic of jus ad bellum ends with a positive number. 

Just as I was in our reading of Ebel’s book last week, I was struck by the use of the word crusade to describe America’s military action against Spain. While the word crusade at this point in our history has very negative connotations, this obviously was not the case in the not too distant past.  However, I am unaware of the usage of the word in the primary sources of the Civil War, nor do I remember hearing about its usage surrounding the Revolution, the War of 1812, etc.  A search online came up with little of use.

The title of Dr. McCullough’s dissertation includes the words “Messianic Interventionism,” and the last subheading of his conclusion includes this term in relation to the Great War, where the word crusade was used often to describe America’s efforts in the war.  I would be curious to know Dr. McCullough’s opinion on whether or not the idea of the crusading solider is essential in understanding the “Messianic Interventionism” that he sees as a theme in the historiography of American Religion and War.

I also have a second question.  McCullough describes the arguments of Ernest Tuveson, stating, "Writing in the midst of the Cold War, facing the early days of Vietnam, and looking back to both World Wars, Tuveson perceptively labeled this “active messianism” a “recessive gene”: “in the right situation” he argued, “it could become dominant. Here Tuveson captured the lasting relevance of the conception of American identity articulated with such devotion in 1898, as it has survived in albeit chastened forms."[1]  With our seeming recent loss of nerve in intervening in the use of chemical weapons in Syria, does Dr. McCullough still see the idea of this “messianism” as being alive and well?

[1]McCollough, Matthew. ““My Brother’s Keeper”: Civil Religion, Messianic Interventionism, and the Spanish-American War of 1898.” PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2011, 225.

The Odd Civil Religion of the Great War

Ebel spends more that a couple of pages illustrating a belief in a battle field salvation that was seemingly believed in by enlisted men, and strongly advocated by officers and even some YMCA chaplains.  Ebel describes a "doctrine of immediate salvation for the fallen," meaning that when an Allied solider dies in battle, regardless of any other circumstances, that the fallen solider will immediately be saved of his sins and find himself in paradise.[1] Ebel quotes a Stars and Stripes article that even criticizes American evangelicals for coming to France to attempt "to save the souls of our boys," because the boys are already saved for fighting the good fight of the Allies. [2] A few pages later, however, Ebel quotes a YMCA chaplain who wrote an angry letter into the Stars and Stripes criticizing both the article and this doctrine of immediate salvation, who states that "The religious belief that every solider who goes over the top thereby redeems his soul is not American, but Turkish-German."[3]  In other words, the idea of a solider becoming a martyr for the cause and receiving immediate rewards in paradise was not a Christian doctrine, but a doctrine instead of Islam.

While I was pondering this odd appropriation of Islamic doctrine by members of a so-called "Christian Nation," it struck me that the way that Ebel religiously frames much of the Great War is through the lens of Crusade, in part, because the areas of the Holy Land (along with much of the land of the Ottoman Empire) was involved in the theater of war.  Including in the footnotes, Ebel uses this word no less than ten times to describe America's entrance and participation in the war. [4]  The irony of this, to me, is that the editors of the Stars and Stripes, the officers bidding young men off to war, and Protestant YMCA chaplains were all preaching the same doctrine that Pope Urban II declared in 1095 when he bid the young men at the Council of Clermont to pick up their swords to go off and fight the Muslims for the Holy Land for the first time.[5]

Seeing then there iterations of the same doctrine across time and space, my question is this: Is a doctrine of immediate salvation on the battlefield a consistent and necessary motivator to send people off to their very probably deaths?  If no, then is the presence of this doctrine a way to gauge whether a war should be considered "a holy war?"

[1] Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 99
[2] Ibid, 98
[3] Ibid, 101
[4] Ibid. See pages 32, 34, 36-38, 95, 219, 225, 237, and 250.
[5] Pope Urban II, “Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095,” Medieval Sourcebook, October 24, 2013, accessed October 24, 2013, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html.

Ebel's work presents us with what we might consider a backdrop for our current national situation. Namely, it is a calculated description of a country that is concerned with, at least nominally, doing God's will upon the earth. Here, in our day and age, we witness the commercialization of war and military force. Images of "god," country, and family are juxtaposed next to one another as if unified by a common, Christian bond. Certainly, we are familiar with the following sentiments: "[...]the most striking dimensions of the wartime literature is the extent to which Americans involved in the Great War embraced violent death in the war effort as salvific."[1]

How did we arrive at our present position?
The content of Ebel's book marks the starting point of a nation bound for significant international interaction, and, moreover, a uniquely distinct view of the American people as a policing people--persons concerned with the good of the world, so to speak. The shift from the Civil War to World War I is a shift from internal to external, from national to nationalistic, and from killing in the face of death to death in the face of killing. Ultimately, it is the American experience of the Great War that has paved the way for America, not only as a "world power," but as a "Christian nation."



[1] p. 76

A hegemonic project?

At the beginning of his work, Ebel states that he was surprised that he did not find more soldiers critiquing the religious framing of the war.  While he expected more soldiers to be ambivalent about the use of religion to condone violence, for the most part, “realizations of war’s horrors occurred within a widely held, compelling, eventually blood-soaked framework of meaning” (3).  Thus, Ebel ultimately presents the religious understanding of war as a hegemonic project—most soldiers who fought in the war framed their experience in a sort of masculinized religion.  The war, according to Ebel, “reasserted” religious ideals.  However, it seems that the scope of Ebel’s project necessarily limits his findings.  Ebel focuses on soldiers, but what about conscientious objectors—those who declined to fight based on their own religious ideals?  While only a very small minority, conscientious objectors clearly understood religion and war in a very different way.  Looking at how they understood their own reasons for refusing to fight might not challenge Ebel’s overall thesis, but exploring an alternative may help to remind us that the particular way in which religion and war coalesced in World War I was not inevitable.

Ebel Response

Since most historians have a hypothesis when they begin to study an era or event, I appreciated Ebel stating his original assumption that, “I began research for this book hoping to find an unequivocal soldierly critique of the mythic religions framing of the war, hoping to find that solider were troubled by the coming together of faith and violence, perhaps deepened in their resolve to be less violent, and more and differently faithful.”  However, Ebel discovers that soldiers reorganized troubling images and contrary ideals of Christian civilization and “the warrior’s experienced the affirmation and strengthening of pre-war faiths.” (3)  Ebel illustrates this reconstruction of faith in light of the fight particularly well in the chapters on redemption and the after-life.  I appreciated that Ebel did not attempt to attach an orthodoxy or Aristotelian logical structure to the soldiers’ theology but rather let them stand on their own, even when illogical.  Each individual constructed their own theology and Ebel merely identifies themes amongst them.  Ebel insightfully and cleverly calls this process of reconciling pre-war faith with the realities of war “a story of reillusionment”(18), not of disillusionment as he originally expected to find.  What was the result of this “reillusionment” on American military policy?  Did this “reillusionment” create a new twentieth century conception of a just war?  Just how deep was this “reillusionment” if President Wilson was slandered as an “idealist” so soon after?

Let me make sure I'm getting this right...

In regards to war, I think that the stark contrast in the shift of American attitude from Faust's to Ebel's work was a bit jarring and hard to settle into. I had to rely on a bit of previous reading about post-civil war America to make the connection and fill in the blanks between the two periods. The further along I read in Ebel's work, especially in the few chapters prior to his conclusion, I found his discussion on religion seemed to be tabled a bit, so I just want to make sure I am understanding his conclusions. Here is what I have deduced; please offer any thoughts,  corrections and/or guide me as I theorize:

During the post-civil war period of great industrialization in America, as men left the home to work women were left to tend to domestic duties creating a new gender dynamic, defined binary roles for the man and woman in a household. This left the woman responsible for religious education, creating a more effeminate version of Jesus. Men had a hard time connecting with this Jesus, and the churches that adopted this Christ, therefore pushing away men from the church and raising a new generation of young boys with a motherly Christ as their savior. This combined with the threat of the over-civilization, urbanization and the "threat" of African-American manual laborers to white masculinity created a demand for a more masculine warrior Jesus. The Great War offered a way for men to either connect with this new warrior Christ, or substitute war (and death) as a heroic, salvific measure in opposition to the religion of the effeminate Christ??? This latter seems to be the lasting impression this war gave to American Civil religion; Duty to country as duty to God.

What Makes Americans in WW1 So Different?

   I was originally going to ask a different question, but something on the class blog caught my attention to make a different comment.
    In his blogpost for this week, Lucas commented that "I was constantly catching myself judging the quoted American soldiers as twits," an experience that I could very much relate to.  This got me wondering what set this war, or these soldiers, so apart from the others?  Partly I suspect that the propagandist language one normally encounters when reading about war was so jarring this time around because we have jumped ahead from a much more morbid book covering a more morbid (at least for Americans) war: the Civil War.  Whereas the Civil War soldiers were (through the lens of Drew Gilpin Faust) much more concerned with dying, and uncertain about killing, the soldiers in Ebel's book were much more enthusiastic and optimistic about the prospect of war.
     Is it the enthusiasm that is jarring? Certainly we've dealt with propaganda and pig-headedness before (conspiracies of popery, reduction of natives to brutes), but each time this propaganda has had an uphill battle.  In Faith in the Fight the soldiers did not need the same sort of convincing, soldiers who jumped the gun and signed up before America was even at war were common sources for Ebel. 
     Perhaps this enthusiasm stems from the fact that WW1 was fought on foreign soil? I imagine that hypothesis will be tested when we read about the later wars in this course...
      What's going on here? Is this purely the work of the historians involved, and the selections of sources to serve the narrative they sought to tell? Or is there some sort of fundamental difference between this war those previous in American history?
     

War is Heaven

It would be easy if, under the aegis of war, redemption was as simple as a body count. It would be easy if lived theology, the very stuff of meaning, could be reduced to a gnostic certainty of Us vs. Them. It would be easy to squelch doubts and dissenters under heavenly banners slung low and sanguine across a cratered moral landscape – for who knows? War, as portrayed in Jonathan Ebel’s Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War is nothing if not the suppression of nuance and the reification of those thick block-lettered words hanging transcendent, namely Good and Evil. As Mr. Ebel points out, the Great War was, at least from the perspective of many Americans, a war with metaphysical implications.

 It is somewhat ironic, then, that the War is largely portrayed via the denizens quoted in Mr. Ebel’s book as simultaneously a rift along a transcendental moral plane and a unifying, centripetal force allowing for a new unification of an old covenant. Ironic, perhaps, but not contradictory; the idea being that a common enemy (those German Huns) would provide the impetus needed to render whole again a divided country. Has this supposed-salutary transference of hostility, so common in American culture even to the present day, ever actually worked? If my wife and I are having a disagreement, should I cobble together a pretense to attack the neighbors under the guise that the temporary alignment of our purposes will palliate a poisoned matrimonial past? Perhaps, if nothing else, it would cure me of my accursed effeminacy and neurasthenia.

I found Jonathan Ebel’s book very difficult to comment on, and I’m curious if the rest of the class will share my opinion. I was constantly catching myself judging the quoted American soldiers as twits, especially in the second chapter. Something about their eager attitude to kill and die irked me, and I’m not sure I ever got past it – not to mention the dragging in of religion as a kind of justificatory gilding atop their martial enthusiasm. This may be, and in fact probably is, due to my own lack of knowledge of historical context. Yet, coming on the heels of Drew Gilpin Faust’s devastating enumeration of misery I could not but keep a frustrating relation to Mr. Ebel’s text. Did anyone else have a similar problem?

War, huh, yeah...

In undergrad I had to read a book called War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I don't remember much about it other than the title. But the title has stuck with me and I have been thinking about that statement during this semester. Ebel's book, Faith in the Fight, has me wondering something related: Is religion a force that gives war meaning? After the assigned readings from this class I might argue that most, or all, of America's wars prior to this were religiously shaped wars or religiously based wars. While Ebel admits that "the Great War was not a war of religion," he argues that religion was a cause of America's involvement. He gives many examples of how religion effected the soldiers and workers on the ground, whether it be an anxious letter from a soldier, ready to fight for "God and humanity," to his parents or an ode to Death with the knowledge that God will welcome one who dies fighting.

The Enemy in Heaven?

Ebel states, “Good and evil did not exist only in the abstract for soldiers and war workers… The Allies were synonymous with Good and were cast as fairly uniform in their Christianity.  The Central Powers were, predictably, cast as apostles of a godless militarism when they weren’t portrayed as minions of Satan.” (30)  However, many people, like Woodrow Wilson, believed that “war was not against the German people but against their government.” (31)

Ebel goes on to state that many soldiers viewed their deaths as a “sacred duty”.  “Sacrifice for the nation had been and continued to be noble, that the call of duty was sacred, and that to heed this call as Union and Confederate soldiers had, was to share in a sacred American tradition.” (45)

Ebel goes on to provide three characteristics of heaven in soldierly accounts: 1) that they “will be welcome in heaven”; 2) they “did not incorporate the ‘thrilling’ aspects of war and struggle,” and; 3) they “understood heaven to be a place of reunion and repair.” (153)

Given the fact that many on both sides were Christian – sometimes even the same tradition or family tree – and that many did not see the problem lying with the German people themselves, how did many of the American troops view the enemy dead?  While it is obviously “helpful” in combat to demonize the living enemy, I can’t help but imagine that many soldiers contemplated the afterlife of many of their enemies.  Did many soldiers go beyond just demonizing the living enemy to associating the enemy dead with their concept of the afterlife?  If so, how did these concepts "assist" the soldiers in fulfilling their "sacred duty?" 

Ebel's analyses of poetry

Early on, Ebel acknowledges that appealing to the poetry composed by soldiers during the First World War may strike some of his readers as strange, and that the poems in Stars and Stripes were not likely to be raw repudiations of war. It is at once consistent with Ebel's stated intentions and a disservice that, when he considers a poem crafted with above-average care and talent (Alan Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death"), Ebel analyzes it with the same relentless determination to garner psychological insight as he does the other poems, neglecting some of the ambiguity in Seeger's work. (81-82) But when Ebel takes up poems that might charitably be characterized as primarily historical in value, he occasionally permits himself an adverse aesthetic judgment (e.g., page 25, last paragraph). It is not quite scholarly objectivity to ride over aesthetic merit and poetic ambiguity when they are present but to mock poems that lack both. At the same time, Ebel seems quite right to call attention to a form of expression that found broader application at the time than a present-day reader might expect. Would a computerized, statistical analysis of the frequency of certain substantives (e.g., "the Father," "the Son," "crucifixion," "the Cross") and their coincidence in poems with other selected words (e.g., "hero," "to purify") have helped Ebel remain consistently indifferent to aesthetics? Given the relatively short publication run of Stars and Stripes, feeding all of the poems it published into a database would seem to be a manageable task. In fact, the Library of Congress has already done the hard part.

As an aside, did anyone else catch any analysis on Ebel's part of the quasi-pagan (more specifically, traditional Roman) tropes that crop up in the poetry and other reflections of the soldiers (e.g., page 154, first paragraph)? If Ebel delves into such analysis, I must have read right past it, but I'd have been interested to see what he made of it. I doubt that any of the soldiers would have consciously identified as traditional Roman pagans, but sometimes their commitment to Christian orthodoxy seems equally doubtful.

Let the Little Children Come

As I was reading the chapter "The Same Cross in Peace" from Faith in the Fight, one question kept nagging at me. Do Americans or does American Civil Religion always require a foil, an enemy on whom we can pin immorality? Many would argue justification in vilifying British monarchs, pro-slavery advocates, and Hitler's Germany, but to read of the continued fight back home after armistice startles me. I understand that these fighting men and women wanted to keep their identity, find their worth, and defend their ideologies, but many of the idea and the actions of the American Legion seem overkill (note the creation of the Dies Committee/ House Un-American Activities Committee, 181).
I was dumbfounded to read that the American Legion would encourage the support of French orphans, but was actively against the adoption of Jewish orphans. Ebel said it best, "that they looked upon suffering children and saw not suffering children but a looming enemy to be defeated" (190). Can America only view its own morality based on the immorality of another? Is this need for a foil so extreme that America would evade acting out the very beliefs that it advocates in order to maintain that division? Must America always identify an enemy to be fought or converted?

Civil Religion and the Nation

So far in this class, we have focused on how religion could be a motivating factor for war and how it could frame how participants saw the war.  However, both of this week’s readings reversed that dynamic, asking us to look at how the practical exigencies of war forced contemporaries to reassess their religion and their worldview.   Ultimately, both seem to struggle with an underlying question: what role does civil religion play in the imagined community of the nation?

For Stout, the Civil War, through its shared experience of conflict and destruction, gave rise (Stout uses the term “baptized”) to an American civil religion, the legacy of which still exists today.  Faust similarly gives weight to the impact of the shared experience of loss.  However, I found her argument more nuanced in how it dealt with the South.  Stout did little to differentiate between Northern and Southern civil religion.  While it is true that both experienced loss on an unprecedented scale, it was unclear to me why both sides should unite in some sort of civil religion immediately after the war.  (And, indeed, the history of Reconstruction attests to the enduring sectional resentment after the war.)  Faust, on the other hand, shows how religion evolved to cope with the war, but also realizes she must reckon with Southern nationalism.  The federal government, for example, took care of burying Union soldiers, thus enlarging the role of the state.  But it was left to Southern private organizations to take care of Confederate soldiers, and this became a “means of keeping sectionalist identity and energy not just alive but strong.” 

Given the competing nationalisms that survive in Faust’s narrative, can we identify a single “civil religion” that emerged from the Civil War?  Or was this forged later?  To put this another way, which came first, nationalism or civil religion?

Otherside

Crying alone in my living room is not how I typically expect to interact with an assigned reading for a class. (Unless I am crying because I'm so stressed :) But Faust's book had an extreme emotional impact on me. As academics and historians, we often remove emotion. We talk about statistics and facts. We don't think about the raw humanity that was and is on the ground. Faust gives facts that stir emotion. So my question: Is it inappropriate to include emotion in historical scholarship or are we doing history an injustice if we exclude emotion?

My Triumph lasted till the Drums
Had left the Dead alone
And then I dropped my Victory
and chastened stole along
To where the finished Faces
Conclusion turned on me
And then I hated Glory
And wished myself were They.
...
A Bayonet's contrition
Is nothing to the Dead

Battle-Pieces by Melville

The U.S. civil war as epoch-defining horror

Faust marshals very compelling evidence in support of her thesis that the work of addressing death on an unspeakable scale profoundly shaped society and government in late-nineteenth-century America. I am thoroughly persuaded by her account of the impact this death had on the mid-nineteenth-century expansion of government. Nevertheless, as Faust's account winds down, Faust must surely have realized that history had put her in a strange place. The Civil War defined a generation, shaped its society and its government. But no sooner did that generation commence dying (of old age, this time) than did America recover its appetite for war. The Spanish-American War erupted in 1898, a war for the sake of having one if ever there were.

In his introduction, Stout discounts any desire to take up the role of Lord Acton, judging the wicked of history for what they were then and remain now; on the contrary, moral history is to be written for the historian's contemporaries, not with some claim to objectivity. For today, then, Stout writes, "At its most elemental, war is evil. War is killing. War is destroying." (Stout, xii) What Stout goes on to describe are numerous wartime decisions and policies that repel me and, I suspect, many other twenty-first century readers. And Stout acknowledges instances (e.g., Grant at Cold Harbor, 348) in which moral judgment flagged by contemporary standards. Stout seems to me to keep his acknowledged, present audience very much in mind throughout those selections we read.

Insofar as I have a question about the readings, it goes to the respective postures of Faust and Stout. Implicitly, of course, both must know that they are writing for a contemporary audience. Does Faust's extensive account of the sheer volume of suffering predispose her contemporary reader to grant that suffering cultural-historical reach beyond what, in fact, it seems to have had in the nineteenth century? Does Stout's explicit acknowledgment of his contemporary interests insulate him from analytical over-reach?

First Hint?

In her chapter entitled Killing, Drew Gilpin Faust quotes Frederick Douglass saying, "there is no more exemption for nations than for individuals from the just retribution due to flagrant and persistent transgression" (Faust, 52-53). While Douglass was referring to Confederate transgressions as seen by the Union-sympathetic American government, his statement represents a belief held by the American government today. I am interested to know if the Civil War the first hint that America would identify itself as a protector and punisher in the world?
Faust continues Douglass' quote: "But the Civil War's 'tears and blood'...may at last bring us to our senses" (Faust, 53). But has it? Has America realized this 'but' in the pursuit of the protector/punisher identity? Or has America ignored this due to the "physical distance between enemies [that] facilitates emotional distance from destructive acts" (Faust, 41)? Or perhaps by some other means of justification just as Harry Stout makes clear America has done for itself within and in retrospect of its moral history?

This Republic of Suffering

In her work This Republic of Suffering, D. G. Faust argued that even though America was being transformed culturally and intellectually, religion was still the main source for explanation for the mass death caused by the Civil War. So, the good death and religious convictions mixed with patriotism made killing, dying and mourning more easy, to the point that, as she remarks, many scholars believe that religion enabled the carnage. Again in the midst of the patriotic endeavor, the American “civil spirituality” presented by Thomas Kidd in his God of Liberty can be observed as the source for the ideals of the “good death” described by Faust.