God, War, and Politics: The American Military Chaplaincy and the Making of a Multireligious Nation.

[摘要] ;;God, War, and Politics: The American Military Chaplaincy and the Making of a Multireligious Nation” reveals how the modern American state was a religious state. It wielded power over and through religion, transforming the spiritual, racial, and gendered landscape of American society and using faith to support military and foreign policy goals. Steeped in the reality of American religious diversity, the military chaplaincy enabled the state to define theological ideals and innovate ritual practice. Against the backdrop of constitutional separation of church and state, the military intertwined religion and democracy as the ideological center of American values and empire. As ordained clergy serving as military officers, chaplains melded religious authority and state power; more specifically, they exemplified diffuse state power. Operating autonomously within the policy framework set by an administrative bureaucracy, chaplains made daily decisions that expanded or restricted the religious lives of Americans in the military. ;;God, War, and Politics” is therefore a socio-political history of religion and the state from World War I through the Vietnam War. Drawing on material from over 25 military, state, and religious archives, this project places myriad faith groups—including mainline and evangelical Protestants, Catholics and Christian Scientists, Jews and Mormons, and Seventh-Day Adventists and Buddhists—within the same frame. This comparative approach illuminates the experiences of multiple faiths within military space and shows how religious groups fared in contrast to one another. It also connects religious groups in the United States to their co-religionists abroad, thereby situating American religious change in a global context. By examining the politics, practice, and provision of religion in the armed forces, ;;God, War, and Politics” integrates religion into and amends the burgeoning historical literature on citizenship, civil society, and the modern state in mid-twentieth-century America. It re-periodizes the political history of American religion by showing that this state project began in earnest during World War I and continued to evolve over the twentieth century. By actively managing religious groups, the state molded American religion into an entity different than a single totalizing faith, but nevertheless contingent on a nationally exclusive set of ideas and praxis.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] American Religion

[关键词] Religion and Politics;American Religion;Political History;Law and Religion;State Power;History (General);Religious Studies;Humanities;Social Sciences;History