'Heroes in the cause of God': Faith, suffering, and American soldiers' experiences of the Great War

Between 1914 and 1918, in response to ideological and cultural challenges and less immediate threats to America's economic well-being and territorial integrity, American men volunteered, fought, and died in the Great War. As they did all three, they believed---believed in the righteousness of the cause, believed in the communal and personal value of their errand, believed they were answering the highest call of their faith. I draw on American soldiers' letters, diaries, and memoirs, and on the soldier-authored, war-time newspaper the Stars and Stripes, to argue that war-time experiences of powerlessness, frequently expressed theologically, shook but did not undermine soldiers' understandings of the religiousness of their duty and of the war. Encounters with industrial violence led soldiers to refine and reassert pre-war notions of martyrdom and redemptive suffering, the relationship between masculinity and religious authority, and the proper ordering of duties to God and nation. After the war, American soldiers responded to the peculiar mix of suffering, death, triumph, and disappointment by forcefully reasserting their vision of American Christian manhood and continuing their struggle against "evil" on American soil.