1 - Introduction

Summary

For decades, the religious history of Great Britain in the two World Wars has languished in the shadows. Despite the impetus generated by the centenary of the First World War, there is no single, book-length study of British religion during either of these cataclysmic conflicts. As illustrated by Clive Field's recent bibliographical research, the popular and academic literature on British religion from 1914 to 1918, and from 1939 to 1945, is extensive but disparate and distinctly patchy. For example, the historiography of Scottish and Welsh Christianity in the Second World War is extremely meagre, even in comparison to what little coverage exists for the First. (In this regard, the emergence of new research on religion in Northern Ireland – which is not a focus of this book – during the Second World War seems an encouraging sign.) In addition to a common, regional focus, much of the existing literature concentrates on specific denominations, on church leadership, or on the growth of progressive causes such as Christian pacifism and the ecumenical movement, tendencies reflected in Andrew Chandler's recent British Christians and the Third Reich (2022). Though such studies are illuminating, this nevertheless means that a broader, more integrated national picture remains elusive for both conflicts.

However, if religion has at least been retrieved from the periphery of the historiography of the First World War (a function of the decades-long ‘War on Terror’, as well as its centenary), the same cannot be said of the Second. From a global perspective, and whereas the three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War (2014) included a wide-ranging essay by Adrian Gregory on ‘Beliefs and Religion’, the three-volume Cambridge History of the Second World War, published the following year, confined itself to an essay on ‘The Muslim World in the Second World War’. Even where historians have grappled with the Christian world, and with Christian Europe especially, the results have shed little light on the British situation. Lacking the added drama of totalitarianism, occupation, and the unfolding horrors of the Holocaust on the ground, Andrew Chandler's essay for the nine-volume Cambridge History of Christianity (2006) considered ‘Catholicism and Protestantism in the Second World War in Europe’, but mainly to the exclusion of Great Britain, while Jan Bank and Lieve Gevers’ Churches and Religion in the Second World War (2016) consciously restricted its coverage to the continental side of the English Channel.