"Jonathan Ebel’s aptly titled GI Messiahs is the odds down finest study of the central role that American soldiers contribute to America’s 'civil religion.' Ebel persuasively demonstrates that American GI’s are literally the incarnation of a Christian tinctured civil religion in which they have come to embody the 'word of the nation made flesh.' Through a series of brilliant case studies, Ebel cuts to the heart of the unique role that soldiers play as the 'second person' of an American national godhead whose first person is the nation itself. Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the ways in which Christianity forged intimate connections between the military and American society.”—Harry S. Stout, Yale University

“Ebel, like most great historians, has a gift for discovering and narrating the event or person such that it helps us see what might otherwise go unnoticed. But in this case what he helps us see is the reality of the American civil religion, a religion that draws on fundamental Christological analogies, constituted by the American soldier. Readers of this sad and troubling book will hopefully find Ebel’s work profoundly sobering.”—Stanley Hauerwas, Duke  Divinity School

“This carefully-crafted, modest work packs a serious wallop. Ebel sensitively exposes the religious contours of American soldiering. A singularly insightful book for our time of seemingly unending war.”—Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

“With humility, grace, and stunning knowledge, Jonathan Ebel shows how soldiers from the Great War to the War on Terror have fought under and sometimes against the burden of civil religious incarnation. From its venturesome opening sentence to its shattering final lines, GI Messiahs is a breathtaking achievement.”— Tracy Fessenden, author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature