G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion

Jonathan Ebel has long been interested in how religion helps individuals and communities render meaningful the traumatic experiences of violence and war. In this new work, he examines cases from the Great War to the present day and argues that our notions of what it means to be an American soldier are not just strongly religious, but strongly Christian.  
 
Drawing on a vast array of sources, he further reveals the effects of soldier veneration on the men and women so often cast as heroes. Imagined as the embodiments of American ideals, described as redeemers of the nation, adored as the ones willing to suffer and die that we, the nation, may live—soldiers have often lived in subtle but significant tension with civil religious expectations of them. With chapters on prominent soldiers past and present, Ebel recovers and re-narrates the stories of the common American men and women that live and die at both the center and edges of public consciousness.

• While God Is Marching on: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Modern War Studies)
• American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Western Histories)
• Discovering Girard
• What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars
• From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America
• Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War
• Terror in the Mind of God, Fourth Edition: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society)
• Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War
• Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution
• Armageddon in Retrospect