Prayers at Pearl Harbor

As my plane approached Honolulu, the pilot got on the intercom to point out different landmarks to the passengers. Although scattered vacationers glanced briefly out of their windows at a dreamy coastline that sandwiched kaleidoscopic green mountains between crystalline waters and brilliant blue skies, the obvious priority for most was consolidating belongings and stowing their electronics in preparation for landing. When the pilot said, “Pearl Harbor,” however, the reaction was different. Heads turned in unison, necks craned, strangers leaned over arm rests. Nearly a century on from the events that launched America into WWII, Pearl Harbor clearly retains the power to fascinate Americans.

In historical terms, this is pretty impressive. A military-aged young person today is as temporally distant from Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, as an American sailor stationed in Honolulu on that day was from the Bleeding Kansas skirmishes that presaged the Civil War. The throngs of visitors I saw when I visited the Pearl Harbor National Memorial on a busy July day are doubtless partly attributable to Honolulu’s own status as a tourist mecca. But I also recognized fellow passengers from my flight, who, like me, had made their way there directly from the airport. It’s hard to say for certain, but surveying the crowds, I’d wager that Pearl Harbor occupies more real estate in the American collective memory than Fort Scott did for the average citizen in 1941. The Pearl Harbor National Memorial only became a national park in 2019, and the name suggests something solemn and sacral. To be sure, there are places at the site where those descriptors apply. But it is also still a tourist spot, with all that that implies.

Much of the Pearl Harbor National Memorial is actually a museum. It presents a thorough account of the run-up to the attacks from both the American and Japanese perspectives. Visitors can read sailors’ and civilians’ eyewitness recollections of that day, when 183 Japanese planes executed a surprise attack on the U.S. naval presence in Honolulu just before 8 a.m. They can also view startling photos of the aftermath, which are where the true cognitive dissonance between Pearl Harbor the tourist spot and Pearl Harbor the memorial manifests. Mere feet away from an outdoor plaque displaying a black-and-white photo of a dead American sailor, face down in the surf, families laugh and teens pose for selfies in front of the ocean. Inside, an exhibit on identifying the dead informs readers that more than 72,000 WWII Department of Defense personnel remain unaccounted for. The last of the sailors and Marines assigned to the USS Oklahoma who died on Dec. 7, 1941, was only identified in 2021, after an exhaustive multiyear effort that involved multiple government agencies.

A quote from President Franklin D. Roosevelt appears on one of the museum walls. “Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy,” said Roosevelt, speaking just days before the attack, “forget in time that men have died to win them.” The line takes on added poignancy in this noisy place, where the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum gift shop is bumping swing music while visitors queue at Jake’s Food Truck, where the menu boasts “Mac Attack” macaroni-and-cheese-smothered burgers or a “fleet of chicken tenders.” I had imagined Pearl Harbor the way I remembered a visit to D-Day landing sites on Normandy beaches as a kid. I recalled lovely but still wild shorelines, which were largely untouched by kitsch. I was gratified to learn that, at least as recently as 2018, “the French have maintained this area like a holy shrine. Nothing commercial obtrudes. Nothing violates the stillness.”

The way the way the Allied countries remember WWII, especially in Europe, is so much a part of their respective secular civic religions that it is easy to forget that the 1940s were a more traditionally religious time, at least in public. By 1944, religious faith was explicit among the highest levels of American wartime leadership, with much of the run-up to D-Day assuming a positively sacral character. FDR delivered a lengthy prayer he penned himself on a live D-Day broadcast. Heard by more than 100 million people worldwide, including Anne Frank, the broadcast is by some reckonings the largest mass prayer in American history. General Dwight Eisenhower’s message to the Allied forces on D-Day also entreated the “Almighty God” to bestow his blessing “upon this great and noble undertaking.” General George S. Patton distributed 250,000 prayer cards to every soldier in the Third Army to pray for heavy rains to break. He also disseminated through his chaplain the following order to all other chaplains under his command: “Pray when driving. Pray when fighting. Pray alone. Pray with others. Pray by night and pray by day. Pray for the cessation of immoderate rains, for good weather for Battle … Pray for victory. Pray for our Army, and Pray for Peace.”

But while the men and women who went to war after Pearl Harbor might have been more comfortable with public expressions of (Christian) religion—95% of Americans born before 1940 who were raised Christian retained their childhood faith into their 60s—their children were not. The children of the postwar baby boom were much less likely to remain Christian in their 30s, and the trend continues. Only 83% of Americans born in the 1960s still identify as Christian today, down from 91% of 30-something Americans who said they identified as Christian in the 1990s.

Pew Research, from which this data is drawn, attributes this shift to numerous factors: politics, geography, gender. Another is transmission: “The share of Christians is in decline partly because religion is not always transmitted by Christian parents to their children.” Pew tracks parent-child transmission matrilineally, since women “more successfully” pass their religion onto their children than fathers. But a 35-year longitudinal study of religious transmission from parent to child found something different: Closeness with the father was correlated to religious transmission more than closeness to one’s mother. In a 2014 New York Times interview, study author Vern Bengston said he found that “fervent faith cannot compensate for a distant dad.”

The psychological effects of war on the men returning from WWII were such that within a year of the end of the war, President Harry Truman signed into law the National Mental Health Act of 1946, creating the National Institute for Mental Health. All the same, post-traumatic stress disorder was not well understood at the time, and cultural norms around masculinity often meant that many of the war’s predominantly male veterans kept quiet about their war experiences. Speaking of WWII veterans’ reticence after coming home for The Soldiers’ Heart, a PBS Frontline documentary, VA psychiatrist Andrew Pomerantz said, “the avoidance of dealing with it provides no help to the veteran. The life quality is significantly short-changed. The interaction with family is very distant.”

In some ways, the secular and almost carnivalesque atmosphere I encountered at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial may reflect the shift in religiosity between the two world wars. “The search for ‘meaning’ after the Somme and Verdun was hard enough,” wrote Jay Warner in his book Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. “After Auschwitz and Hiroshima that search became infinitely more difficult.” Walker notes that while WWI forms of memorializing the dead tended to evoke a nation’s religious and mythic past, “the same flaring up of older languages appropriate to a period of mass mourning did not take place” in WWII’s aftermath. Abstract and universal language and symbolism took their place. An “austere simplicity” now reigned as “older forms of the language of the sacred faded.”

With a little advance planning, visitors can reserve a boat trip across the harbor to visit the USS Arizona Memorial, a midcentury-modern structure on the water built over the ship’s wreckage below. An abstract “Tree of Life” motif appears on a monument outside, and in the structure’s windows, but it is difficult to find anything written on whether it was intended to be religious in nature. And while the USS Arizona Memorial does have a “Shrine Room,” it is a literal secular shrine to the ship’s fallen. VR headsets are available at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center to enhance the experience.

Much was made this past June during the D-Day commemorations in Normandy, as this was likely the last major anniversary observance of the battle that its veterans would attend. We will probably hear the same thing again in 2026, the 85th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Only a handful of American veterans survive from the attacks that took place on Dec. 7, 1941, as of this writing. The last Japanese air crewman from that attack died this year in October at 106. Allied victory in WWII as a net civilizational benefit has been one of the few remaining points of national consensus (although even that is showing signs of erosion). Among the noisy tourist crowds at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, there is not much evidence of a nation in search of the sacred. But for now, at least, they are there. They have not forgotten.