G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion. By Jonathan H. Ebel

The freedom narrative and the War on Terror: Civil‐religious idolatry for the 9/11 generation

“… 8 8 Whereas Marvin and Ingle analyze totemic sacrifice in American civil religion from above, in his 2015 book, G.I. Messiahs , the scholar of religion Jonathan H. Ebel unpacks the role of the sacrificial soldier from the ground up. Presenting the soldier as a central symbol of American civil religion, Ebel describes a nation that thinks of its soldiers “not simply as protectors and preservers of the nation and its ideals, but as incarnations of those ideals—the Word of the nation made flesh—whose willingness to suffer and die brings salvation to an often wayward but nevertheless chosen people” (p. 2).…”