Thursday, April 6, 2017, marks 100 years for the reason that United States entered World War I. World War I doesn’t occupy the identical space in America’s cultural memory because the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II or the Vietnam War.
The men and girls who fought “the Great War” would likely be shocked at this relegation. For them, “the war to finish all wars” was the most consequential war ever fought: a struggle between good and evil.
As an writer of two books, “Faith within the Fight” and “G.I. Messiahs,” I actually have spent a part of the last 15 years fascinated with the place of faith in America’s experience of the Great War.
From the start of American involvement within the war to the development of cemeteries in Europe for America’s war dead, Christian imagery framed and simplified a posh, violent world and encouraged soldiers and their family members to consider the war as a sacred endeavor.
America as a Christian nation
Writings by and for American soldiers used religious imagery and language, to contrast “progressive,” Christian America and “barbaric,” anti-Christian Germany.
Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division
The June 14, 1918 issue of Stars and Stripes, a weekly newspaper written by and for American soldiers in France, featured an editorial cartoon that drew this stark division. In it, the crown prince of Germany and the Kaiser stroll casually past Christ as he hangs on the cross.
The prince, wearing black with a skull and crossbones on his hat, smiles at his father and says,
“Oh, look, Papa! Another of those allies!”
The cartoon affirms that America’s cause is Christ’s cause at the identical time that it argues that Germans are so morally perverse that they’d recrucify Jesus if given the prospect.
American pilot Kenneth MacLeish was just as blunt in a letter to his parents. (His mother collected his wartime correspondence and published a memorial collection after his death in combat.) He defended his decision to go to war with a really different image of Jesus, but conveyed an analogous lesson concerning the German foe. He wrote,
“Do you’re thinking that for a minute that if Christ had been alone on the Mount with Mary, and a desperate man had entered with criminal intent, He would have turned away when against the law against Mary was perpetrated? Never! He would have fought with all of the God-given strength He had!”
MacLeish left no room for doubt as to which side must be imagined as Mary’s rapist, and which must be seen as her Christ-like defender. He was equally clear that waging war was morally acceptable. Writing in the identical letter, he stated,
“Religion embraces the sword in addition to the dove of peace.”
The Christian imagery that filled the pages of Stars and Stripes and the letters and diaries of American soldiers erased Germany’s Christian history and made a religiously diverse and conflicted America right into a virtuous, Christian nation.
In fact, Germany, just like the U.S., had large numbers of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, and had given rise to many spiritual movements and denominations that were thriving on American soil. Yet within the eyes of many American soldiers, the war confirmed that Germany was profoundly vicious.
In a letter home, Charles Biddle, one other American pilot, reacted angrily to an aerial attack on a field hospital. In response, he cited a French postcard that inverted Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Luke: “Do not forgive them, for they know what they do!”
Christian imagery for the war dead
Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division
World War I got here to an end on Nov. 11, 1918. American losses were small by comparison to other combatant nations, but still exceeded 100,000, including 53,000 who were killed in combat. (A big percentage of the opposite 57,000 died consequently of the global influenza pandemic.) By contrast, France lost 1.2 million soldiers, Great Britain lost 959,000, and Germany lost over two million. As individual American soldiers and the nation considered how best to memorialize the fallen, they turned again to Christian imagery.
In May of 1919, Stars and Stripes published a picture of Joan of Arc and an accompanying poem. Saint Joan hovers over a brief burial ground, keeping watch over graves marked by crosses. Sergeant Hal Burrows of the Marine Corps signed the drawing. Second Lieutenant John Palmer Cumming wrote the poem.
“The kiss the wind may bear will stir the tranquil leaf.
And lay it softly on the mounds we made.
And we will labor within the mart or bind the sheaf.
The while her spirit guards their quiet glade.”
The poem and the image confirmed that America’s war dead wouldn’t be alone. They would have a saint to look at over them. In dying for the nation, they’d proven themselves worthy of such attention.
When the United States government set to work designing and constructing cemeteries in France, England and Belgium, they created environments that look very very similar to the “quiet glade” picture above, though on a much grander scale: The largest American cemetery, Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery near the French town of Romagne, incorporates 14,246 graves.
White marble crosses dominate these cemeteries, making a far more explicitly Christian space than the veterans’ cemeteries situated within the United States, where headstones are small, rounded rectangles.
Remembering the range
The crosses at Meuse-Argonne and America’s other overseas cemeteries don’t call American soldiers to fight, because the Stars and Stripes imagery did. They call Americans to recollect. But the crosses work in ways just like the Stars and Stripes images.
As my research has shown, American men and girls who died in the midst of World War I got here from many walks of life. They differed in terms of spiritual identity, ethnicity, race and sophistication. Some were brave and morally upright. Others, likely, weren’t.
America’s Great War cemeteries make this diversity difficult, if not unattainable, to discern. The cemeteries that the United States built overseas after World War II use much more pervasive Christian imagery, leaving no room for non-Christian soldiers among the many unknowns.
As the crosses rise ramrod straight from tightly manicured lawns, they project American virtue and America’s alignment with Christ. They admit little, if any, moral complexity. The crosses bear the names of the individuals who lie beneath them, but that individuality and the complexities that went together with it are subsumed by a collective identity defined by near uniform Christianity and by nearness to Christ.
The truth is, World War I used to be not a war of faith. Men from different religious backgrounds fought alongside one another and killed men with whom they might have, in one other circumstances, shared a Christian hymn. But within the United States, and in Europe as well, Christianity shaped the experience of the war and memories of it.
As Americans look back across the hundred years for the reason that nation entered the war and take a look at to recollect and honor those that fought, they’d do well each to notice the role of Christian imagery in making a world of violence and to achieve for the varied voices and experiences that those images all too often obscure.
