Churches, chaplains and the Great War

Abstract

When in 1914 the European nations mobilised for war, the churches followed suit. Notwithstanding pre-war church peace conferences and close international cooperation, most churches and churchmen immediately and whole-heartedly supported their nation’s participation in war and provided the religious justification for it. Interpreting the war as part of God’s plan for humanity, churches gave secular war a sacred meaning – making compromise an impossible solution. This study proposes an explanation for the churches’ passion for war and clarifies the way the military chaplains tried to realise the church’s high hopes at the front. It does this through a comparative approach, looking at differences and similarities between the French Catholic, British Anglican and German Protestant interpretations of the church’s wartime role. In this way, this study aims to go both beyond national histories and simultaneously gain more insight into the very national contexts these churches were part of. Before the war, each of these churches had its own problems. All worried about secularisation, even though their responses varied because of their different relation to the state – a state church with a controversial relation to the people in Britain; a pillar of the Protestant understanding of the Empire in a religiously plural nation in Germany; an antagonistic force against the militant laïcité of the Third Republic of France. In each of these cases, the church leadership saw the outbreak of the war as a window of opportunity to defend or even promote its standing in society. Yet these large-scale cultural and institutional controversies and objectives were fought over on the ground, in, or at least behind the trenches, by military chaplains. Their work is central to this study – it is here that the expectations of church, state, military and society in the shape of the soldier met and clashed. In their work, we can see reflected the relations between church and state, church and society and church and nation. The position of the military chaplain at the centre of the expectations of church, the military and the possibilities and impossibilities of working in a war zone made them specialists in the diverse and sometimes clashing interests of church, army and soldiers at the front. They had close contact with their military superiors and the soldiers they served and got to know them intimately. Many British and German chaplains increasingly realised that war was not a simple religious opportunity for the churches. Instead, war revealed the weaknesses in the relation between church and state, church and society and church and nation. To them, war showed that the church was too dependent of the state, too out of touch with the ‘common man’, too hierarchical, dogmatic and divided. The religious opportunity could only be grasped after the war by learning from mistakes. The French chaplains were more positive about the direct change that war brought. It had offered the Catholic Church the chance to proof its unreserved patriotism by sacrificing the lives of the soldier-priests for the nation after the example of Christ.