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.