During Israel's military operation in Gaza in the summer of 2014 the commanding officer of the Givati infantry brigade, Col. Ofer Vinter, called on his troops to fight "the terrorists who defame the God of Israel." This unprecedented call for religious war by a senior IDF commander caused an uproar, but it was just one symptom of a profound process of religionization, or de-secularization, that Israeli society, including the Israeli military, has been going through since the turn of the twenty-first century.

The process of consolidation of the new civil religion is known in...