8 - The Great War

Summary

Introduction

Despite its magnitude as a global event, the First World War has not been well served by historians of Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Although numerous studies have been published on the churches’ involvement in the war, they have tended to adopt a relatively narrow national or denominational focus, a tendency which has hampered the identification of connecting themes and which has served to obscure the wider impact of the war on Western Christianity as a whole.

If the coverage of these studies has also been uneven (much has been written on the churches in Great Britain and its dominions, for example, whilst little has been done to address the case of Catholics and Protestants in the Austro-Hungarian empire), these studies have also tended to pursue rather rigid and predictable lines of enquiry. With respect to the French experience of the war, for example, the energy of church historians has only lately been diverted from examining the myths and realities of the nation’s ‘sacred union’ to the impact of the war on the religious habits and beliefs of the French people.

In terms of the historiography of the churches and the war in Germany and the English-speaking world, even such modest progress has yet to be made. In Germany’s case, scholarly interest has been chiefly devoted to the ‘war preaching’ and ‘war theology’ of the Protestant clergy, a preoccupation that has been informed by guilt engendered by the Second World War and by a historical quest to locate the origins of the Third Reich in the temper and culture of Wilhelmine Germany.