Are we talking here about faith in God, in fellow human beings, or in one's self? Perhaps it's unavoidable that we think about all three in times of war.

Despite the old adage about a supposed lack of atheists in foxholes, I do think personal claims to religion can suffer terribly in wartime. How could they not?

Some years back, an Anglican bishop told me that he believed a part of the Church of England's decline was directly related to British soldiers' experience of World War I--living months, even years, in trenches while continually subjected to random sniper shots, raking machine gun fire and high-intensity artillery bombardments.

You get a flavor of this in (if I remember right) Sebastian Faulks' novel, "Birdsong," which paints a vivid scene of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, when British troops were ordered to make a direct assault on heavily fortified German positions. Twenty thousand men in this assault--60 percent of all officers and 40 percent of those in the ranks--died on a single day. Faulks has a chaplain witness the opening minutes of this madness; overcome, the character tears a cross from his uniform. (And, think about it, if humans are made in God's image, as Christians and Jews are taught, then such murder runs perilously close to blasphemy.)

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