November 11, 2018, marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, a conflict that claimed the lives of nearly nine million soldiers and civilians, with more than three times that number wounded, taken prisoner, or gone missing. One century later, national boundaries redrawn by the war are still points of conflict and tension, particularly in the Middle East. But what of its impact on religion?
Did WWI undermine the moral authority of Christian denominations—as well as the faith of their members—and begin a process of secularization in Europe that continues to this day?
HDS Dean David N. Hempton, a social historian of religion with particular expertise in populist traditions of evangelicalism in Europe and North America, says that the question is a complicated one because of the enormous differences in the religious characteristics of the combatant nations. There is little doubt, for example, that Orthodox Christianity was badly damaged in Russia or that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire had serious repercussions for Islam, but in France and especially Britain there’s little evidence that people fled from their churches during or after the war—and some evidence that they may have clung to them. Nonetheless, Hempton says that the “psychic shock” of the sheer horror of the war reverberates through the decades and remains with us today.
HDS: The conventional wisdom about the war is that it began the process of secularization in Europe—that because most of the nations involved were predominantly Christian, the slaughter and suffering made something of a mockery of the Church’s moral authority—not to mention the idea of a benevolent God. Does that narrative hold up to scrutiny?
Dean David Hempton: Well, of course the war was a seismic event. Some historians like Philip Jenkins argue that the war was partly a Holy War in which participating nations drew inspiration and moral affirmation for their cause. But there is no easy correlation between the war and secularization in Western Europe. The war’s horrors persuaded some at all social levels that a loving God could not permit such terror, but there is also plenty of evidence to show that popular folk religious beliefs were ubiquitous amongst the combatants. Recent work by the English historian Mike Snape and others has shown that chaplains and clergy had an impact in reinforcing traditional Christian beliefs among the troops and the civilian populations. There is also an argument that suffering and war may increase the need for the consolations of religion and ritual. We see it in the Cenotaph in London, in the memorials of the war, and in the recorded experiences of military clergy.
I think we have to be careful when we talk about a key decade or key events in secularization. We can see the structural changes in religions and denominations and churches much earlier than 1914, especially in France and Germany, and the war itself did not necessarily accelerate those changes. Some French historians even suggest that the war may have led to a temporary restoration of the fortunes of the French Catholic Church, owing to the influence of the priests who were not spared military service.
So there's a complicated debate about secularization in twentieth-century Europe. Some historians argue that the decade of the 1960s or the 1980s played a bigger role in the decline in religious affiliation, and that the cultural threats of drugs, sex, and rock and roll or the rise of feminism were more corrosive than the war in terms of impacting traditional Christianity and its values. So I think it’s too easy to see wars, even one as horrific as World War I, as inexorably secularizing events.
HDS: What about the popular notion that religious divisions play a part more generally in fostering war? In the American Civil War, for instance, Christians in the North believed that slavery was a moral abomination, while Christians in the South thought it was ordained by God. Both sides felt a sense of righteousness that helped drive them to war. Did religion play that kind of role in the WWI?
Dean David Hempton: Perhaps not as clearly, but some historians do see religious ideology as a contributory factor to the conflicts. In Britain, for example, there was a sense that theirs was a Protestant empire and soldiers and resources were mobilized from all parts of the empire in defense of a righteous cause. Then there was the idea that this was somehow in defense of small nations like Belgium and was a righteous cause. The war was also seen as a repudiation of Prussian militarism. What the American Civil War and the First World War have in common is that they both lasted so long because each side thought they could win, feared the consequences of defeat more than the perils of continuing the conflict, and have left indelible images in our minds based on film and photography.
HDS: Finally, beyond the ongoing geopolitical tensions, what’s the human impact of the First World War 100 years later? How is it still with us?
Dean David Hempton: There is no question that World War I saw a major reconfiguration of the world order. The German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austria-Hungarian empires were effectively ended, the British and the French reconfigured the Middle East with disastrous consequences, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia took place during the war, and the postwar determination to make this the war to end all wars—as reflected in the League of Nations—proved to be a mirage. Many of the problems we still wrestle with in the world order have deep roots in the events and consequences of the Great War. In that sense, it lives on in often pernicious ways.
The war also dealt a blow to notions of human progress, which had enormous ramifications in the postwar art, literature, and popular culture. Europeans still memorialize the war in sometimes unexpected ways. I was watching the English Premier League soccer games last weekend. They all had a minute's silence for the war dead. The Last Post was sounded. People were in tears even after all these years.
In the part of the world I come from, Northern Ireland, the 36th Ulster Division experienced cataclysmic losses at the Battle of the Somme that still plays a part in the provincial psyche. When I was a boy many years later, I was still raised on a diet of First World War anti-war poets like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon. I learned some of these poems by heart.
In the last two or three years there's been anniversary after anniversary in the killing fields of the war, remembering the battles of the Somme, Ypres, or the First and Second Battles of Passchendaele. You can see how it’s still with these communities. It’s deeply embedded in the psychology of the people. WWI was an enormous psychic shock that still reverberates today.
-Paul Massari