The Great and Holy War

How World War I changed religion for ever

Philip Jenkins

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745956749
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War, and the lasting impact it had on Christianity and world religions more extensively in the century that followed. The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. A steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was served to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Philip Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels, apparitions, and the supernatural, was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the Abrahamic religions - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism. Connecting remarkable incidents and characters - from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide - Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis. We cannot understand our present religious, political, and cultural climate without understanding the dramatic changes initiated by the First World War. The war created the world's religious map as we know it today.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: From Angels to Armageddon

1. Arthur Machen, The Angels of Mons (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kemp, 1915), 19–24; David Clarke, The Angel of Mons (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004); and for the battle itself, see Terence Zuber, The Mons Myth (London: History Press, 2010).

2. Machen is quoted from Machen, The Angels of Mons, 17; Ralph Shirley, The Angel Warriors at Mons (London: Newspaper Publicity, 1915); and Harold Begbie, On the Side of Angels (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915).

3. The fighting dogs are described in Harry Patch and Richard van Emden, The Last Fighting Tommy (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 104–5.

4. J. C. Squire, The Survival of the Fittest and Other Poems (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916).

5. Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier (New York: Routledge, 2005); John Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914–1918 (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992); Richard Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); and for Russia, see Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 43–44.

6. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Random House, 1980), 47.

7. Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011); and Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

8. “Proclamation of Sultan Mehmed V, November 1914,” www.firstworldwar.com/source/mehmed_fetva.htm.

9. Paul Claudel, La Nuit de Noël de 1914 (Paris: A l’Art Catholique, 1915), 27–28, my translation.

10. McKim is quoted from Ray Hamilton Abrams, Preachers Present Arms (New York: Round Table Press, 1933), 55.

11. Lyman Abbott, “To Love Is to Hate,” Outlook 119 (May 1918): 99–100; Dieffenbach is quoted from Abrams, Preachers Present Arms, 67–68; and Alan Seaburg, “Albert Dieffenbach,” Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/albertdieffenbach.html.

12. Newell Dwight Hillis, The Blot on the Kaiser’s ’Scutcheon (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1918), 59.

13. For a debunking of claims about war fever in 1914, see Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Gerd Krumeich, “‘Gott mit Uns’: La Grande Guerre Fut-Elle Une Guerre de Religion?” in 1914–1945: L’Ére de la Guerre, eds. Anne Duménil, Nicolas Beaupré, and Christian Ingrao, vol. 1 (Paris: Noêsis, 2004), 117–30; Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); for war enthusiasm in various countries in 1914, see Lothar Kettenacker and Torsten Riotte, eds., The Legacies of Two World Wars (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); for popular culture and media, see Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Michael Hammond, The Big Show (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2006); and for the process of learning and internalizing official ideologies, see Michael S. Neiberg, Dance of the Furies (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 2011).

14. Ritzhaupt is quoted from Wilhelm Pressel, Die Kriegspredigt 1914–1918 in der Evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967), 153, my translation; John A. Moses, “Justifying War as the Will of God,” Colloquium 31, no. 1 (1999): 3–20; and Günter Brakelmann, “Der Kriegsprotestantismus 1870–1871 und 1914–1918,” in Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten in Deutschland (1870–1970), eds. Manfred Gailus and Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005).

15. Dietrich Vorwerk, Hurra und Halleluja (Schwerin in Mecklenburg, Germany: F. Bahn, 1914), my translation.

16. Snape, God and the British Soldier; Annette Becker, War and Faith (New York: Berg, 1998); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the Fight (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

17. For “Debout les Morts!” see Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 72–75.

18. Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1992); Bernard McGinn, Antichrist (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Catherine Wessinger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

19. The manifesto is quoted in Frances Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 279.

20. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 414–17.

21. Roger Ford, Eden to Armageddon (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010); and Scofield is quoted in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 102.

22. Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes (New York: HarperPress, 2006), 38–122.

23. The Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. Hugh McLeod, vol. 9, World Christianities c. 1914 – c. 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith (New York: Knopf, 2012).

24. Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (New York: Paulist Press, 1920); and World Christian Database, www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/.

25. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

26. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Perfidious Albion,” review of The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Jonathan Schneer, New Statesman, August 23, 2010, www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/08/arab-palestine-jewish-rights.

27. The New Cambridge History of Islam, ed. Francis Robinson, vol. 5, The Islamic World in the Age of Western Dominance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

CHAPTER ONE: The Great War

1. The First World War continues to attract a vast scholarly literature. Throughout this book I have used Martin Gilbert, The First World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1994); John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2004); Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); John Horne, ed., A Companion to World War I (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Lawrence Sondhaus, World War I (Cambridge: Ca...