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.