The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade by Philip Jenkins
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Love Is Hate

According to Philip Jenkins, religion probably didn’t cause the Great War with its 10 million dead, four destroyed empires, and a continuing legacy of international instability, but it certainly prepared for and sustained it. As a consequence, religion itself, particularly Christianity - Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic - was fundamentally transformed even if it took several generations to understand what that transformation entailed. Christianity revealed itself to be as subject to corruptive manipulation and profound evil as any other human institution. It is not an exaggeration to say that this revelation inspired several new (and often contradictory) theological drives.

Christendom, however one chooses to define that conceptual entity, had been badly damaged by the Protestant Reformation but Christianity continued to dominate European culture in its various national forms. The French Revolution and its aftermath further undermined the Church by demonstrating its intimate connection with national power. But it was the Great War which proved beyond doubt that the spirit of Christianity had become, if it was not always, one of extreme national violence. As Jenkins summarizes the situation: “Christians in all combatant nations—including the United States—entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of cosmic war. None found any difficulty in using fundamental tenets of the faith as warrants to justify war and mass destruction.”

Somewhat surprisingly, the blatant and almost universal encouragement of the Christian churches to engage in the war from 1914 onwards did not immediately cause a reduction in mainstream church membership. But the experience of both the war and the inherent contradictions in Christian teaching had two highly consequential effects that were masked by this apparent stability: The rapid growth of parallel spiritual movements both within and without Christianity; and an equally rapid development of alternative institutional theologies. The effects of these movements would only become apparent from the 1960’s to the present day.

The immediate ‘beneficiaries’ of the trauma of the Great War were those previously relatively marginal sects and cults - Pentecostals, charismatics, and non-charismatic Evangelicals. Unsurprisingly perhaps, since these have a minimal reliance on formal doctrine and therefore can be perceived as a reaction against the intellectual Christianity which had so avidly promoted the disaster. Other groups with some distance from the established churches - Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various occult and spiritualist cults, for example - also grew rapidly. The prevailing religious sentiment according to Jenkins was one of apocalypticism, that is, of the approach if not imminence of the Final Judgment. This feeling would become a dominant force in the dispensationalism and its political manifestation in the latter third of the century.*

The war also catalysed a fundamental re-direction of Christian theological thought, particularly ecclesiology, the religious theory of the Church itself. The Swiss, Karl Barth, arguably the most influential European religious thinker of the 20th century, constructed his so-called dialectical theology as a direct attack on the existing ‘liberal’ theological arguments for war and the widespread support for it among clerical leaders on all sides (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). The Catholic Church was somewhat slower off the mark, but it too permitted and eventually fostered the creation of a rather radical practical theology of the relationship between religion and the world. The most dramatic result of this new thinking by scholars like Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, among many others was the Second Vatican Council which effectively ‘re-institutionalized’ the Church.

Jenkins’s study does not claim to be a detailed sociological analysis of the Great War. Nor does it attempt to trace the specific emotional or intellectual threads which emerged from the conflict. It is therefore more suggestive than definitive. Nonetheless his overall conclusions are significant. Clearly Christianity was not destroyed in either an institutional or personal sense; but it became something that no one anticipated: “Europe’s Christianity survived the Great War, but in ways that would have startled and often horrified the church leaders of the previous centuries. The war sparked a religious and cultural revolution within the faith”

Jenkins also recognizes what might be called the extreme vulnerability of Christianity to not just the power of the state but also to virtually unlimited self-rationalization. He makes it clear that this is not a temporary condition: “As we examine the mainstream assumptions of the greatest churches at the time, we repeatedly see just how close to the surface of the Christian and biblical tradition such patterns of state alliance and militancy actually lie, and how easily ideas of the church militarist emerge in times of crisis. A study of history, up to and including the twentieth century, must make us question any attempts to dismiss such uses of Christianity as a crude distortion of the faith.”

Living as we do now in the Age of Trump and Putin it is obvious that the danger posed by Christian involvement in politics is not limited to the issue of war. Christianity, if anything, has become more tribal since the Great War. But it has become no less emotionally powerful and intellectually self-serving.


*Jenkins published in 2014, thus to early to include an account of the Evangelical/Trump phenomenon or the Orthodox/Putin alliance.

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