Thou Shalt Kill: A Religious History of the Rifle and the Grenade in America’s Great War

Abstract:This article examines the intersection of religious ideas and movements with the development of weapons technologies during the First World War, arguing that soldiers’ ways of understanding and interacting with the rifle and the grenade were an extension both of the technology as a thing and of its meaning as a sign, and that the latter in particular needs to be woven into religious histories of the American experience of war in general, the Great War in particular.