‘THE GREAT AND HOLY WAR:’ HOW WORLD WAR I BECAME A RELIGIOUS CRUSADE AND RESHAPED THE RELIGIOUS LAND
Wilson County News, TX
Nov 5 2014
By Dr. Robert H. Clemm
Historian Fritz Stern once remarked that the Great War was the
“first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all
other calamities sprang.” On the centenary of World War I there
is an overwhelming sensation of futility in the war’s outbreak,
its nature, and its legacies. WWI seems to have encapsulated the
brutality, emptiness, and fatalism that would become the hallmarks
of the 20th century.
The war destroyed the world that existed in 1914; it toppled four
empires, created the first communist state, and destroyed the
confidence of western civilization. An entire generation seems to
speak with one voice in Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the
Western Front” that “the war has ruined us for everything.”
Working against this conventional wisdom is Philip Jenkins. In his
masterful book, “The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a
Religious Crusade,” Jenkins argues that WWI was not only a “thoroughly
religious event” but an event which drew the global religious map as
we understand it today.
The religious character of WWI has often been seen in the polarization
of either extreme secularization or extreme spiritualism. One
view sees the Christian church as morally compromised by the
conflict–Jenkins himself noting a 1916 poem describing the “church
dead or polluted.” Frequently, 1914 is viewed as the tipping point to
the secularization of the 20th century. The other view is ascribed to
spiritualist sightings of angels in “No Man’s Land” or in the post-war
fascination with seances. Jenkins moderates these extremes through a
global examination of religion both before and after the war. While he
does not dismiss secularization as a trend within western Christianity,
he contextualizes the European response and suggests it was more the
exception rather than the rule.
As soldiers rallied to the colors to defend their nations, so
did churchmen stand ready to drape those soldiers in religious
iconography. Pastors readily painted their enemies as being in league
with the devil while also clothing their soldiers in the language of
the martyrs. Germany depicted their soldiers as crusaders defending
their homeland, while the Allies saw religious significance to their
capture of Jerusalem. As the war dragged on and seemed to unleash the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, clerics easily saw their figurative
specter galloping across the globe as well.
What might be most jarring for American readers, steeped in the
Jeffersonian ethos of separation between church and state, was how
readily American churches adopted this crusading rhetoric. It was not
a militarist or politician who declared that he “would have driven my
bayonet into the throat or the eye or stomach of the Huns without the
slightest hesitation,” but a Methodist minister. Jenkins traces how
these close associations discredited religion. This led to gradual
secularization and two wildly different trends. In Germany and Soviet
Russia, the religious aspirations and rhetoric became affixed to the
new “secular messiahs” of these two regimes in the post-war period.
The collapse of the old church-state model, however, laid the
groundwork for Christian Democrats and Catholic politicians to chart
a future along a non-national path of European identity.
It wasn’t just Christianity but all of the Abrahamic religions that
were changed by the war. The religious center of Christianity began to
shift towards Asia and Africa. In fact, Africa may become the largest
Christian continent in the world by 2030. As much as the Christian map
expanded it also contracted during governmental persecution of Armenian
and Russian Orthodox religious enclaves. The war was a double-edged
sword for Judaism. Zionism became practicable with the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire and acquired the enthusiastic support of American
evangelicals who, even today, see the state of Israel as fulfilling
God’s providential plan. But the war also laid the groundwork for
the Holocaust in the establishment of the “stab in the back” myth
within Germany and the spread of “Protocols of the Elder of Zion”
by Russian emigres fleeing the Soviet Union.
Lastly, modern Islam is a byproduct of the collapse of the organized
caliphate. Separate from an organized state, Islam was refashioned
into a force of colonial resistance and political mobilization. This
new-fashioned Islam would help create the state of Saudi Arabia and
whose legacies extend today to the caliphates proclaimed by ISIL and
Boko Haran.
Jenkins draws on a poem by J.C. Squire which underscored the
difficulties religions faced during WWI:
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout,
“Gott strafe England!” and “God save the King!”
God this, God that, and God the other thing.
“Good God!” said God, “I’ve got my work cut out!”
God’s role aside, Philip Jenkins firmly establishes that WWI did not
just reshape the political landscape, but it created the religious
world we exist in today.
Dr. Robert H. Clemm is an assistant professor
of history at Grove City College. – See more at: