Michael Snape is the Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University. He was invited to deliver the Hensley Henson Lectures in Oxford during 2020, and it is those lectures that give this book its shape and contents. As Henson, a controversial figure in the first half of the twentieth century in the Church of England was sometime Dean of Durham, Snape was an appropriate choice as the lecturer. As someone not a member of the Anglican Communion, Snape has the advantage of bringing the perspective of an outsider to the subject. Those prevented by the pandemic from hearing the lectures will find this book, A Church Militant: Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War, an excellent introduction to the subject of the relationship of the Anglican community and the military in the English-speaking world. Snape's previous works on British military chaplaincy and on religion in the United States forces have given him a formidable research base that is evident throughout this work.
The book follows the lectures by being organized into five thematic chapters: the nineteenth century “Inheritance,” the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War period, and a final chapter on “Remembrance and Memorialization.” The book concludes with an afterword and then a final postscript. The latter is entitled “Early Reflections on the war in Ukraine” and is dated March 24, 2022. In it, Snape reflects on how the Church of England appeared to be struggling with an idealistic theology on war when faced with the reality of a major invasion of one sovereign state by a larger neighbor with imperialistic ambitions. The functional pacifism that had become the hallmark of late twentieth-century Anglicanism, and indeed of many other churches, which was discussed in the afterword. suddenly no longer appears to be tenable.
The way that Anglican churches, and particularly the Church of England, moved from mid-Victorian identification with the aims of imperial ventures around the world to a position in which it was almost impossible to find a reason to justify any military campaign is a major theme of the book. In Britain, cathedrals and major churches are festooned with plaques that relate to the campaigns of the Victorian era. So far, as Snape points out, these have yet to be targets for the historical revisionists in the way that controversy surrounded, in 2017, the removal of windows dedicated to Lee and Jackson from the National Cathedral in the United States. The reflections of the final two sections of the book are among the most valuable parts of the work. They show that this is not merely a work of historical interest, although the quality of the scholarship means that it ranks high in studies of military chaplaincy in the English-speaking world, but also a reflection on the place of one part of the Christian church in the continuing debate about the justification for the use of force to settle disputes among the nations.
The extent of the change can be seen in the response of the Church of England to the gathering European crisis of the summer of 1914. There was little opposition to entering a European war once German armies had entered Belgium and Luxembourg. It was a question of legality rather than morality that was at the forefront of the argument. Archbishop Davidson, preaching in Westminster Abbey on the evening of Sunday August 2 was aware of the crisis and likely war. The service was disrupted by protestors, but they were not antiwar but rather a group of suffragettes who had chained themselves to the seats. Davidson preached on the text “Our Father.” Such evidence adds to Snape's critique of writers and historians who have tried to interpret Anglican responses to the outbreak of war in 1914 through the lens of later attitudes to war.
The breadth of the canvas and the emphasis on war means that there are aspects of the story being told that do not receive the attention that might have helped the argument. The absence of a mention of the 1867 Army Chaplains Act passed by the British parliament, together with other subsequent attempts to define the place of British military chaplaincy within the organizational structure of the Church of England, overlooks a theme that might have been a fruitful source of enquiry. As late as 1989, an “uncontroversial” attempt to repeal the 1867 Act resulted in a row in the General Synod of the Church of England that laid bare the ambiguities of military chaplaincy when provided within the United Kingdom—an ambiguity that remains unresolved. The earlier abolition, by archbishop Ramsey, of the Bishops’ Board overseeing military chaplaincy was another twist in the story of the governance of Anglican chaplains by their Communion.
Given the discussion of the criticism of Anglican chaplains in Robert Graves's polemical memoir, Goodbye to All That (Jonathan Cape, 1929), it is a pity that reference was not made to Robert Keable's Simon Called Peter (U.S. ed. E.P. Dutton, 1922), not least because of its mention in The Great Gatsby (Scribner's, 1925) and thus its resonance in the United States as a description of Anglican World War One chaplaincy in France. Another of Keable's books, Standing By (Nisbet, 1919), with its argument that Anglican chaplains would have been better to have become either Catholic chaplains or workers for the YMCA, is similarly overlooked. The debate about the efficacy of chaplaincy, particularly during the wars described in this book, remains live. The difficulty for Snape is that the debate is not merely about Anglican chaplains.
This is an Anglican book. Other churches receive only occasional mentions. The ecumenical aspect of the development of military chaplaincy is thus lacking. The importance to British army chaplaincy of the 1999 Spiritual Needs Study (unpublished Ministry of Defence paper, 1999) and the consequent adoption of an “all souls” ministry that allows the army to view all chaplains as interchangeable might follow a traditional Anglican model of chaplaincy but results in a theology of chaplaincy that is more “Church of Army” than “Church in the Army” that would merit more discussion. As Snape has shown, this is a vast subject with important questions for the contemporary world in the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As he would be the first to accept, there is still more research to be done in this field.
