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?