Jonathan H. Ebel. G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion .
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 121; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ahr/121.5.1680
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoThe first paragraphs of Jonathan H. Ebel’s outstanding second book, G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion, suggest a study rather different from the one he actually delivers. In the introduction, he writes that his subject will be the “religious dynamics of soldiering” from the Great War to the War on Terror, and that he intends to excavate the experiences of the “men and women without whose bodies no wars could be fought” (1). These words imply something like a social and cultural history of religion in the American military, a march through the wars of the twentieth century and a treatment of the ways soldiers used their faith to manage the rigors of combat or comprehend the purpose of their sacrifices. Such an approach more or less drove the author’s excellent first book, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (2010). But readers of G.I. Messiahs very quickly learn that Ebel’s scope is narrower yet more expansive and intriguing than that. He writes not of soldiers in general but of several illuminating, creatively conceived, and brilliantly interwoven episodes—a fight between the Industrial Workers of the World and the American Legion in 1919; the burial of the Unknown Soldier and the suicide of the Lost Battalion’s Charles White Whittlesey; memorialization of the dead in America’s two world wars; the Moscow trial and troubled homecoming of downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers; the demonstrations of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and other signs of a “Christological crisis” in the 1960s and early 1970s; and the abrupt retirement of the football player Pat Tillman to enlist in the post–9/11 army, only to die in Afghanistan in 2004.
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