4 - Foxhole Religion and Wartime Faith

Summary

Introduction

In previous chapters we have examined chaplaincy provision, the institutional strength of religion in America's armed forces, and the interplay of civilian religious tendencies and habits with the tenor and circumstances of military life. In this chapter, we look more closely at the effects of the threat, experience and aftermath of combat on religious belief and behaviour. Inevitably, we focus on the much-vaunted phenomenon of ‘foxhole religion’, locating it in the context of a national wartime culture of prayer and of other, more service-specific stimulants to religious belief and practice. We also examine how the perils of World War II fuelled a range of discourses and practices that were, at the very least, of doubtful orthodoxy, and we weigh their significance for more orthodox forms of religion. The chapter will go on to show how lengthening casualty lists, and the prospect of the war reaching its denouement in a cataclysmic invasion of the Japanese home islands, helped focus attention on the afterlife in 1944 and 1945, and we consider what common perceptions of death, judgement and the afterlife meant for the broader development of American religion. The chapter ends with a survey of the nature and direction of religious change in the American armed forces in World War II, assessing its manifestations and its implications for postwar religious life.

Foxhole religion

To a very great extent the intensity of religion in the military seemed contingent on the proximity or experience of danger. In April 1943 The Christian Science Monitor reported that Roy E. Bishop, an experienced, pre-war Methodist navy chaplain, had noticed that: ‘Ever since the outbreak of war in the Pacific the attendance at religious services and the interest in spiritual matters [had] shown a tremendous increase.’ At Bishop's own base on Samoa:

[A] fair estimate of the men attending services … was now 75 or 80 per cent compared to the old peacetime figure in the services of about 25 per cent. And, giving point to the pilot's expression of ‘coming in on the wing and a prayer,’ [Bishop] said the fliers seemed to be the staunchest churchgoers of all.