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• W4379779908 abstract "Reviewed by: American Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity, 1860–1920 by Benjamin J. Wetzel Raymond Haberski Jr. American Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity, 1860–1920. By Benjamin J. Wetzel. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2022. Pp. x, 228. $47.95. ISBN: 9781501763946). Benjamin Wetzel has taken up a civic mission in his new book. He seeks to alert readers to the deeply problematic tradition of religion—especially Protestant churches—underwriting the patriotic ideology present in American wars. This problem has a long history, of course, dating back to the earliest European settlement and extending to our present day. At its core, Wetzel finds Protestant elites conflating Christianity with nationalism, associating America's enemies with the devil, and equating dead soldiers with religious martyrs (p. 2). While this intellectual [End Page 425] ground has been covered before by scholars such as Jill Lepore and Amanda Porter-field, Harry Stout, Jonathan Ebel, and Stanley Hauerwas, Wetzel contends that most studies have missed the relationship between confident white Protestants … [and] counterpoint groups [who] regarded racism, imperialism, and an unholy civil religion as sins in ways that the mainline establishment never could (p. 3). To make his argument, Wetzel does not attempt a grand sweep of American history, but rather chooses to focus on three wars from 1860 to 1920; and he emphasizes what he calls the social location of those who both dissented from and defended the dominant narrative of American religious nationalism in a time of war. In the end, Wetzel hopes to help readers better understand America by confronting the ways religion and war have reinforced and challenged each other (p. 9). Wetzel is a fine and careful historian, letting his subjects speak for themselves and tracking, as best he can, the significance of counterpoint groups. By following this tack, though, Wetzel has also demonstrated something he might not have fully intended—that different faiths, classes, and races largely agreed about the sanctity of war, especially after the fighting, killing, and dying had begun. Despite a cast of characters who opposed confident White Protestants, Wetzel's evidence clearly illustrates how patriotic influence overwhelms dissent and independent thought in a time of war. For example, in the Spanish-American War, Wetzel writes extensively about Catholic ambivalence and outright opposition to America's war against Spain in Cuba and especially the Philippines. But he also makes clear, writing about the Catholic population in late nineteenth-century America is a tricky enterprise—were these American Catholics or Catholics in America, or hyphenated Americans who were also Catholic? The tangle of class, ethnicity, and social locations of Catholics made it impossible to speak about a Catholic position or even to delineate opposition to the war from a profound unease with American providentialism. Wetzel's conclusion about Catholics echoed similar insights about the African Methodist Church in the Civil War and the Missouri Synod Lutherans in the First World War: Ultimately, the debate in the American Catholic Church was only partly about the war itself. … Instead, American armed conflict provided the impetus for a larger discussion of the church's relationship to the American nation-state as a whole (p. 95). In a sense, the counterpoint positions Wetzel highlights in his book remind his readers that in a time of war, we rarely debate the valor of those who fight and die, but should consider the integrity of those who order them to do so. Throughout my reading of this book, I couldn't help but consider how Wetzel's argument related to the one made by Andrew Preston in his history of American religions in war and diplomacy, Sword of Spirit, Shield of Faith. Like Wetzel, Preston wrote extensively about those who questioned and even opposed aspects of the Spanish-American War and concluded (not unlike Wetzel): Some Christian leaders may have opposed the war, but most did not (p. 224). The inability of Americans to sustain opposition to war, imperialism, Christian nationalism, and providentialism, is a remarkable lesson to take from [End Page 426] Wetzel's book. Even Mark Twain felt the pressure; he declined to publish his essay The War Prayer, written in 1905, out of fear that his scathing indictment of..." @default.
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• W4379779908 title "American Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity, 1860–1920 by Benjamin J. Wetzel (review)" @default.
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