Faith on the World War II Home Front: Objectors, Refugees and Incarcerated Buddhists

The Nazis' persecution of Jewish people lies at the center of the story of World War II — but the history of religion and the war reaches far beyond the Holocaust. At home, Americans turned to their many faiths to make sense of the world, and many relied on them to guide how they acted in a time of upheaval.

Christian conscientious objectors

Most American Christians supported the war. But some members of the "peace churches" objected to military service on religious grounds and registered with their draft boards as conscientious objectors (COs):

• some served as noncombatant medics or chaplains;
• some — like the future civil rights leader Bayard Rustin — went to jail;
• many joined a new program, Civilian Public Service, doing "work of national importance" for the National Park Service and other agencies at camps such as Patapsco Camp near Baltimore — serving their country while keeping their convictions. At one camp in a Pennsylvania mental hospital, COs pushed to change how patients were treated.

Jewish Americans and refugees

American Jews were at the forefront of resistance to the Nazi regime, opposing antisemitism with protest and public mourning at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Some European Jews became Americans in desperate circumstances. About a thousand began their American lives as the war's only Jewish refugees, housed from 1944 to 1946 at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York — saved from death, but met by a nation still hostile to immigration. (A lesson on Fort Ontario.) At Hyde Park, a former tobacco plantation in Burkeville, Virginia, 25 German Jewish refugees found shelter.

Japanese American Buddhists and Shintō

Japanese American Buddhists faced incarceration and persecution, and authorities viewed Buddhism with extra suspicion.

• Temples such as the Hawaii Shingon Mission in Honolulu survived harassment and even violence from non-Buddhist neighbors.
• In incarceration camps such as Minidoka and Topaz, Nikkei Buddhists defended their religious freedom and created new forms of practice for harrowing conditions.
• At Manzanar, master stonemason Ryozo Kado, a Catholic, and Buddhist minister Shinjo Nagatomi designed the cemetery monument in 1943 as a lasting tribute to those who died there.
• Haruko Takahashi, a Shintō priestess, was imprisoned for part of the war at Honouliuli Internment Camp on Oʻahu.

And more

Restoration of St. Paul's Church during the war cemented its reputation as a center of American values. National Park Service programs recognize many historic places that carry these stories.

Sources

Based on "Religion on the World War II Home Front," National Park Service, and the pages it features; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Its photographs, including Ansel Adams's 1943 picture of the Manzanar monument, are not reproduced.