CHAPTER 2

THE LAST BATTLE

British historian C. V. Wedgwood, writing twenty years after the conclusion of the First World War, produced a sweeping survey of a conflict that created a human catastrophe for Europe. She drew her wounding observations to a close with an economy and power of language that has few rivals: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”¹

Wedgwood’s account, however, was not about the deadly conflagration that had engulfed the Continent just a generation earlier. The war she had in mind was fought in the early seventeenth century. It has been called Europe’s last religious war: the Thirty Years War.

The Protestant Reformation not only shattered the religious unity of Europe: it set in motion a long period of sectarian violence that divided the Continent into rival political-religious empires. What began in 1618 as a conflict between Catholic and Protestant forces in the German province of Bohemia spiraled into a vast, Machiavellian struggle for dynastic power and real estate.

The wretched memories of the conflict, real or imagined, never left the European mind. “The Thirty Years War became the benchmark to measure all later wars,” writes Peter Wilson in The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. “Soldiers fighting in the trenches along the eastern front of the First World War believed they were experiencing horrors not seen in three centuries.”2

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) not only ended the conflict, but sought to remove religion as a source of political strife. Westphalia set a new political foundation for the West, based on the sovereignty of the state, the right of non-interference in internal (religious) affairs, and the idea of international law to settle disputes. Pope Innocent X rejected Westphalia for limiting the authority of the Church, calling the treaty “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”³

The pope lost the argument, though, and the Treaty of Westphalia essentially created “a new charter for European relations” that survived up until the First World War.4 Under Westphalia, the secular interests of the state would set the course of international affairs. The nations of Europe had finally put an end to wars motivated by religious belief.

DUTY, PATRIOTISM, AND MUSCULAR RELIGION

Or had they? In fact, Westphalia failed to permanently tame the passions of sectarian religion. Almost from the outbreak of hostilities, the First World War became a conflict infused with religious themes. What might have remained a regional skirmish over ethnic self-determination became something like an apocalyptic contest between the forces of Good and Evil.

“Whatever the local agendas, Christians in all combatant nations—including the United States—entered wholeheartedly in the spirit of cosmic war,” writes Philip Jenkins in The Great and Holy War. “None found any difficulty in using fundamental tenets of the faith as warrants to justify war and mass destruction.”⁵ The zeal of Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the influential Bishop of London, was not unusual among the clergy of Great Britain: “I think the Church can best help the nation first of all by making it realize that it is engaged in a Holy War, and not be afraid of saying so,” he wrote. “Christ died on Good Friday for Freedom, Honor and Chivalry, and our boys are dying for the same things . . . MOBILIZE THE NATION FOR A HOLY WAR!”⁶

J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis became part of this mobilization. They were drafted as officers into the British army, trained for combat, and dispatched to France in 1916–17. As young boys, they had been sent away to English preparatory schools: Tolkien at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, while Lewis went to Cherbourg School in Great Malvern. These institutions were incubators of Victorian virtues: duty, honor, patriotism, and religion. Christianity and love of England went hand in hand, but the emphasis was on duty—duty to king and country—not on belief.7

England’s public school system reinforced these values in various ways, not least of which occurred on the soccer field. Sportsmanship was a means of maintaining a martial spirit, tethered to patriotic duty. “The sports field was an arena for feigned combat,” writes biographer John Garth. “In the books most boys read, war was sport continued by other means.”⁸ Sportsmanship was an expression of “muscular Christianity,” an assertive form of faith that reinforced the manlier civic virtues. “The sporting spirit, at its best,” according to one chaplain, “is the highest form of the Christian spirit attainable by men at our present stage of development.”⁹

Lacking interest or ability in athletics, Lewis rejected the martial culture of Malvern College, where he had begun studies in 1914. “These brutes of illiterate, ill-managed English prefects,” he wrote his father, “are always watching for an opportunity to drop upon you.”¹⁰ Lewis found sanctuary in the school library and threw himself into literature and the arts. “We shall not understand Jack,” writes biographer George Sayer, “unless we can appreciate his gift for being utterly absorbed in the imaginative world of a great writer, artist, or musician.”¹¹ It was during this time that Lewis developed this gift, and it soon drew him into all kinds of works, from Dante’s Inferno to Norse mythologies to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. After he began reading Homer’s Iliad in the original Greek, he wrote his friend Arthur Greeves: “Although you don’t know Greek and don’t care for poetry, I cannot resist the temptation of telling you how stirring it is.”12

Tolkien, on the other hand, served as captain of the rugby team at King Edward’s, and he and many of its members became cadets in the recently established Officer Training Corps. It was at King Edward’s, where Latin and Greek formed the backbone of the curriculum, that Tolkien developed his love for languages. “It was just as the 1914 War burst upon me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong,” he wrote later. “But a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition.”¹³ Tolkien became absorbed by Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language (and later was tutored by Wright). He read in the original Old English the warrior poem Beowulf, a medieval tale of “a man at war with the hostile world,” a theme that would define his literary career.¹⁴

Although both men read and enjoyed stories about war, about armies clashing in a great moral contest, they did not think of themselves as “holy crusaders” when the First World War got underway. Tolkien did not get swept up in the war fever of 1914. When tens of thousands of young men volunteered for service in the British Expeditionary Force, he continued his studies. In August 1916, shortly after being deployed to France, Tolkien experienced the “universal weariness” of war and the “bitter disillusionment” of discovering that his military training had not prepared him for the conditions of actual combat.¹⁵

Some of Lewis’s journal entries during this time record his anxiety about being wounded in the war.¹⁶ Almost until the day of his enlistment, in fact, he hoped he could avoid military service.¹⁷ He remarked wryly to his father that one of the most serious consequences of the war was the survival of those least fit for survival. “All those who have the courage to do so and are physically sound, are going off to be shot: those who survive are moral and physical weeds—a fact which does not promise favorably for the next generation.”18

Based on their letters and journals, it is certain that neither man saw himself as a potential martyr in a holy war, or even viewed the conflict as an opportunity for martial glory. What Tolkien and Lewis probably absorbed from their education was an understanding of England’s role in defending the ideals of Western civilization. Britain’s common-law tradition, judicial system, parliamentary government, and Bill of Rights were among the great contributions to human progress. Its alliances in Europe served not only British national interests, but helped to safeguard the peace and security of the Continent. “It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas,” writes Niall Ferguson. “Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since.”¹⁹ As one war veteran described it: “I suppose at no time did one live so much with a consciousness of the past.”²⁰

British history made patriotic duty plausible to most Englishmen. “I could not pray for a finer death,” wrote J. Engall, serving on the Western Front with the 16th London Regiment, “and you my dear Mother and Father, will know that I died doing my duty to my God, my Country, and my King.”²¹ Whatever their other motivations, British soldiers in the First World War believed they were defending the values and institutions essential to human flourishing. “In Britain and France duty was associated with honor and loyalty and a fight for civilized and civilizing values, such as justice and dignity and freedom from tyranny,” explains historian Modris Eksteins. “Hence duty was not an abstract notion at the beginning of the war. It was a practical imperative.”22

Germany’s unprovoked aggression in Belgium created the imperative. Britain had signed a treaty with Belgium in 1839, guaranteeing its neutrality in the event of a European conflict. After Germany declared war on France, London issued Berlin an ultimatum not to invade Belgium. But the Kaiser ignored the warning and masses of German troops poured across the border.

Within hours Great Britain was at war with Germany. Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, addressing the House of Commons on August 6, 1914, emphasized the nation’s political and moral commitments: “I do not believe any nation ever entered into a greater controversy . . . with a clearer conscience and a stronger conviction that it is fighting, not for aggression, not for the maintenance of its own selfish interest, but that it is fighting in defense of principles, the maintenance of which is vital to the civilization of the world.”²³ If the First World War became something like a religious war, it did not begin this way.

A MODERN CRUSADE

The ethos of patriotism and muscular faith could serve a noble purpose. It conditioned a generation of young men for the unprecedented sacrifices of the First World War. From the opening days of the conflict, however, British clergymen seized upon this ethos and transformed it into something more: the doctrine of the holy war.

Under this vision, the aims of the state became almost identical to those of the church. Practically speaking, this meant that political and military objectives were given a religious rationale, backed up by the Bible. Britain was by no means unique in this regard: every combatant nation adopted more or less the same posture. Religious leaders across national and religious lines became fervent defenders of the war effort. “Clergymen dressed Jesus in khaki and had him firing machine guns,” writes one historian. “The war became one not of justice but of righteousness.”24 In sermons, books, articles, and pamphlets, they portrayed the conflict as a holy crusade: a spiritual battle against a demonic foe with whom no compromise was possible.

How do we explain it? The reasons were complex; the influence of Christianity in society, of course, looked different in Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless, the European states all had long traditions of “national” or “established” churches, meaning state support for a favored Christian denomination. The alliance of church and state allowed the secular goals of government to get mixed up with spiritual goals of Christianity.

Add to this the rise of the most potent political ideology of the hour: nationalism. The nation-state was replacing religion as a powerful source of meaning and identity in people’s lives. “Nationalism effortlessly incorporated some of the major themes of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” writes Michael Burleigh in Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War. This included “the belief that a people had been chosen to fulfill a providential purpose.”²⁵

For devoted nationalists, their patriotic faith was equivalent to membership in an alternative church. For religious believers, nationalism offered a grandiose political outlet for their faith commitments. The result was the birth of Christian nationalism, the near sanctification of the modern state.

In his classic critique of British foreign policy, Imperialism (1902), J. A. Hobson accused the Church of England of invariably giving its blessing to the nation’s military adventures. “In England the State Church has never permitted the spirit of the Prince of Peace to interfere when statesmen and soldiers appealed to the passions of race-lust, conquest, and revenge.”26 Although not accurate—church leaders could take the government to task for its moral lapses—the charge was by no means groundless. As the established church, the Church of England was integral to the British state and most often sided with King and Parliament on issues concerning the national interest.

The situation was much the same in Germany, where Protestant clerics received government support and, in turn, tended to support the state in its domestic and foreign policy. Thus, in September 1914, a group of ninety-three leading German intellectuals, including many theologians, issued a declaration endorsing without qualification the Kaiser’s war policy as essential to the defense of Christian civilization.²⁷ Catholic clergy in France followed a similar pattern. Even ministers in the United States, with no established church, caught war fever. Such was the crusading mood on both sides of the Atlantic that even religious groups active in the peace movement at the turn of the century gave themselves fully to the cause.

The Christian nationalism that characterized the religious communities of Europe, however, only partly explains this enthusiasm. To it must be added The Myth of Progress that, as we’ve seen, functioned for many like a substitute faith. Many religious believers—especially those drifting away from historic Christianity—adopted its secular aims and assumptions. “One thing is clear: the future of the world is democratic, and nothing can stop it,” proclaimed a London minister. “Progress is by Divine authority, by Divine necessity; God is the great innovator.”28

ENGLAND AS THE SALT OF THE EARTH

As Christian clergy transformed themselves into holy warriors, one theme appeared in common among the combatants: the belief that their nations were specially chosen by Providence to accomplish his progressive purposes on the world stage. Fidelity to God demanded fidelity to one’s country as God’s instrument, especially in wartime. Cross and Crown must be kept together.

In England, this idea could be traced as far back as the English Reformation, launched in the 1530s under Henry VIII. Once Protestantism, embodied in the Anglican Church, became the nation’s official religion, church and state joined in common cause against Catholicism. As such, they represented a new and vital front in the advance of God’s kingdom. “This schema,” writes historian John Spurr, “gave a leading role to the godly prince, the new Constantine, whose task it was to further the Reformation, take on Antichrist and hasten the final apocalypse.”²⁹

By the time of the Glorious Revolution (1689), Great Britain’s self-identity as an exceptional nation—as a nation chosen by God for holy purposes—was secure. The First World War revealed that the concept was alive and well, at least among many of the clergy. “Who are we?” asked John Hancock in God’s Dealings with the British Empire (1916). In answering, Handcock piled one biblical image on top of another. “We are God’s chosen people, His inheritance, the salt of the earth, His loved ones, His glory, the people He delights in, His sons and His daughters. What more can we wish for?”³⁰

Likewise, T. W. Crafer, vicar of All Saints Church, Cambridge, saw England, like Israel, as the apple of God’s eye. “We believe that we are a nation wondrously favored by God, and we like to think of ourselves as a chosen people, whose name stands in the world for righteousness and peace.” An empire as powerful as Great Britain, he reasoned, fighting to defend the weak against the strong, “must be a precious instrument for good in the hands of God.”31 The wartime advocacy of Bishop Winnington-Ingram, as described by his biographer, probably applied to the majority of English clergymen: “There was for him a sacredness about England which was beyond argument. . . . His instinctive judgment was that the national cause must be right.”³²

Britons of all classes could point to their empire’s many accomplishments: its lead role in abolishing the international slave trade, its expanding panoply of human liberties, its united commonwealth, its civilizing influence wherever the Union Jack found safe harbor. Under this view, England was “the polished arrow” in the quiver of the Almighty, a nation with a special task in the world.³³

It was the English clergy, though, that transformed the political-military task of punishing German aggression into a righteous crusade: a struggle between Christianity and paganism. Ministers of the Church of England, as servants of God and of the state, became some of the most effective recruiting agents during the war.³⁴

AMERICA AS A CITY ON A HILL

The concept of America as an exceptional nation is as old as the republic, and older still. Ever since John Winthrop and his band of Puritans landed at Massachusetts Bay in 1630, Americans have thought of themselves as pilgrims on a divine “errand in the wilderness,” destined to establish a holy commonwealth and “a city on a hill.”

Preaching before the Connecticut General Assembly, Ezra Stiles used Deuteronomy 26:19 to address “the political welfare of God’s American Israel.”35 The most rationalistic of the American Founders—including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams—argued in much the same terms. “Their God was intimately involved in the events of American history,” writes Conrad Cherry in God’s New Israel. “Divine Providence was the force that moved the United States to liberty; eventually providence would, through the example of the United States, direct the world to the same end.”³⁶

Thus, on April 2, 1917, when Woodrow Wilson delivered his brief to Congress for American intervention in the First World War, he echoed the themes of American Exceptionalism that had inspired virtually every president before him. He said it was America’s privilege to “spend her blood and her might” for the principles of liberty and justice upon which the nation was founded. Leading a concert of peace-loving nations, the United States “shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.” Paraphrasing Martin Luther’s rebuttal to ecclesiastical tyranny at the Diet of Worms, he concluded: “God helping her, she can do no other.”³⁷

Wilson came to office promising to keep America out of a European war. His conversion set off the equivalent of a tent revival meeting among the nation’s clergy. Monsignor C. F. Thomas, speaking at St. Patrick’s Church in Washington DC, saw the Divine hand at work in America’s historic commitment to democratic ideals. “The Providence of God destines this nation to last—indefinitely, we confidently trust,” he said. “The whole world looks to us to carry to the future what will save the future from disorder, confusion, anarchy, perhaps dissolution. But our trust cannot be fulfilled without the loyalty, love, personal and patriotic efforts of each and every individual.”38

Samuel Zane Batten, a Baptist preacher and secretary of the Northern Baptist Convention’s War Commission, attached deep spiritual significance to America’s engagement: “This war for the destruction of injustice of inhumanity is a holy crusade and a continuation of Christ’s sacrificial service for the redemption of the world.”³⁹ Likewise, Randolph McKim, a Presbyterian minister in Washington DC, put the war in essentially apocalyptic terms: “This conflict is indeed a crusade. The greatest in history—the holiest. It is in the profoundest and truest sense a Holy War. . . . Yes, it is Christ, the King of Righteousness, who calls us to grapple in deadly strife with this unholy and blasphemous power.”⁴⁰

GERMANY: GOD IS WITH US

Germany under the Kaiser was even more brazen about associating its political claims with the Divine Will. In Berlin, Emperor Wilhelm II, who also served as supreme bishop of the Prussian Church, delivered this message to his troops at the outbreak of war: “Remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On me, on me as German Emperor, the Spirit of God has descended. I am His weapon. His sword and His visor. . . . Death to cowards and unbelievers!”41

The problem in Germany went much deeper than an eccentric Kaiser. Taking Christian nationalism to its logical conclusion, many pastors equated Christianity with the German Volk. “The German national soul is saturated with the spirit of God,” proclaimed Gottfried Naumann. “We fight for this soul on behalf of the world, because we know that it is a work of God and contains God’s blessings for the entire world.”⁴² Theologian Ernst Troeltsch made no distinction between the will of a “divine world ruler” and German culture. “Our faith is not just that we can and must defend our state and homeland but that our national essence contains an inexhaustible richness and value that are inexpressibly important for mankind, a value that the Lord and God of history has entrusted to our protection and development.”⁴³

In Earthly Powers, historian Michael Burleigh suggests that liberal Protestant theologians, by emphasizing the “immanence” or immediate presence of God, were prone to confuse the Volksgeist with the Holy Spirit. Their theology “meant that He was manifest in the intense emotions of August 1914, directing the movements of German armies at war.”⁴⁴

The outpouring of support among the German people for war—and the apparent return of worshippers to formerly empty churches—seemed to signal a New Pentecost. Ministers spoke of an Offenbarung, or “revelation,” as well as Verklärung, or “transfiguration,” to describe the war’s effects on the national climate. The slogan Gott mit uns (God with us) became a favorite expression of the German people.⁴⁵ “Germany’s Protestant preachers and theologians frankly exulted in the outbreak of war,” writes Philip Jenkins. “Christian leaders treated the war as a spiritual event, in which their nation was playing a messianic role in Europe and the world.”46

THE BEAST OF BERLIN

If the nations of Europe and the United States were indeed engaged in a holy war, then their enemies were God’s enemies as well; they were the minions of the Evil One. And if Scripture was any guide, there could be no surrender, no compromise with the forces of evil—only a total war to defeat them.

As leader of the Central Powers, the German “Hun” became the principal object of vilification among the Allied nations. In a popular war tract, American writer Elbert Hubbard pressed home this question: “Who lifted the lid off of hell?”⁴⁷ Fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday, as incendiary as a Molotov cocktail, spoke for clerics on both sides of the Atlantic: “If you turn Hell upside down, you’ll find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.”

Before examining the contribution of the churches to the demonization campaign, we should remember that Germany authorized numerous acts of aggression and vindictive violence that outraged the democratic Allies. After German troops invaded Belgium, reports of atrocities against civilians filtered out of the country: massacres, the use of women and children as human shields, rape, the mistreatment and execution of prisoners, and other war crimes. C. S. Lewis wrote his father in October 1914, mentioning a friend who was “employed at his camp the other day in unloading a train of seriously wounded soldiers from the front: from whom he learned that the newspaper stories of German atrocities (mutilation of nurses, killing wounded, etc.) were not in the least exaggerated.”48

Exaggeration or not, to the English clergy this was “savagery reduced to a science.” Britain established the Bryce Commission to investigate the allegations. Though its assessment of German guilt was severely criticized after the war, the commission was essentially correct in its major conclusions. “These were not just the actions of soldiers out of control of their officers,” writes Dan Todman in The Great War: Myth and Memory. “German atrocities were a matter of policy, not just panic.”⁴⁹

The Germans blackened their reputation further when they sliced their way into northern France. German troops savaged the historic library of Louvain and destroyed the Gothic cathedral of Rheims, known as “the Parthenon of France.” In February 1915, German U-boats attacked commercial vessels, essentially declaring that Germany would make no distinction between military and civilian targets.

Germany was also the first nation to use chemical weapons on the battlefield. On April 22, at Ypres, the Germans released 168 tons of chlorine gas along a four-mile front. French troops watched “awestruck and dumbfounded” as a grey-green mist washed over them, filling the eyes, nose, and throat with a noxious odor.⁵⁰ By preventing the lungs from absorbing oxygen, chlorine causes its victims to slowly drown in their own fluids. Thrown into a panic—none of the French soldiers knew what the gas was—men fled for their lives. The advancing Germans were stunned by the scene: five thousand enemy soldiers on their backs, gasping for air, suffocating in agony and terror.⁵¹

To the Allies, all of this symbolized a German assault on the values of Western civilization. By May 1915, when the Bryce Commission report was translated into thirty languages, an image of German militarism, barbarism, and realpolitik run amok was set in stone.

Even so, G. A. Studdert Kennedy, one of Britain’s best-known chaplains, encouraged soldiers on the front by applying the Bible in ways that offend modern sensibilities: “A traitor friend betrayed the Christ . . . a traitor nation has crucified the world!” As Studdert Kennedy saw it, the Germans had debased Christian morality and replaced it with the values of brute force and paganism: “The god the German leaders worship is an idol of the earth—a crude and cruel monster who lives on human blood.”52

James Plowden-Wardlaw, Vicar of St. Clement’s in Cambridge, accused the Kaiser and his army of worshipping Satan in the form of a Prussian tribal god. “How angels must weep,” he said, “to see the tragedy of the fall, the moral fall, of Germany.”⁵³ Many ministers insisted that the war bring about “a complete end” to the German system: “The world can never be safe until this new cancer is cut clean out of the body of humanity.”⁵⁴ As the war dragged on, references in sermons and religious literature to the biblical end times grew more frequent. H. C. Beeching, Dean of Norwich, offered a typical indictment against Germany and its allies: “We are fighting for others as well as for ourselves . . . for Christ against anti-Christ,” he wrote. “And so the battle is not ours, it is indeed Armageddon. Ranged against us are the Dragon and the False Prophet.”⁵⁵

Once the United States entered the war against Germany, American clergymen became as zealous as their British counterparts. For many, the German chancellor represented a unique embodiment of moral evil.

George Holley Gilbert, a Congregational minister, saw “a thoroughly militarized Christianity, like that of the Kaiser, as the lowest and most harmful religion ever developed on earth.”56 Methodist bishop Richard Cooke explained that “the real reason for the war” was “to vindicate God Almighty against the brutal philosophy of damned men.”⁵⁷ Even academics such as James Day, chancellor at Syracuse University, could not resist using religious language to condemn German militarism. “It would be a blessing,” he said, “if we could turn the beast of Berlin over to God and say, ‘Lord, inflict violent wrath upon this creature.’ ”⁵⁸

POLITICAL AND SPIRITUAL REDEMPTION

A holy war against an unholy power: the result, according to the Allied clergy, would be nothing less than the political and spiritual rebirth of Western culture. The autocracies and petty kingdoms of Europe would give way to the self-governing ideals of liberal democracy. Materialism would yield to the spiritual values of Christianity.

Some churchmen viewed the war as God’s verdict on the growing secularism and materialism of the West. “Perhaps God has allowed us to pull down the temple of modern civilization over our heads,” explained Percy Dearmer, “in order that the survivors may be cured of the modern habit of regarding man as a calculating machine.”⁵⁹ For others, the war would propel the steady evolution of democratic societies.

Returning from a diplomatic mission to Russia in 1917, former U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root went on a nationwide lecture tour, telling audiences that America was destined to lead “the upward progress of humanity along the pathway of civilization to a true Christian life.”60 David Cairns, professor of apologetics at Aberdeen, suggested that a new era of international peace was dawning. “We cannot see the world-situation tonight, or indeed at any time, unless we dream a little about the future,” he said. “I am willing to dream that we are going to have not only a concert of Europe, but a concert of the world for a great common end.”⁶¹

Advocates of the social gospel were especially hopeful: they imagined the war as a cleansing experience, a means to purge entire societies of their sub-Christian loyalties. An Allied victory would ensure a progressive future for the United States and Europe. Lyman Abbott, one of the best-known liberal theologians of his day, envisioned “progressive redemption” as a result of the war. Americans were working hard “to banish those crimes against humanity from our civilization,” he said, and to bring about “the triumph for Christianity such as the world has never before known.”⁶²

In The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, historian Richard Gamble argues that progressive clergy were particularly prone to convert the conflict into a culturally and spiritually transformative event. “They seized upon the war as an opportunity to reconstruct the churches, America, and the world according to the imperatives of the social gospel,” he writes. “Their peacetime crusade became a wartime crusade.”⁶³

The expectation of widespread cultural renewal was broadcast from America’s “bully pulpit” on January 8, 1918, when Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points for the establishment of global peace and security after the war. At the moral center of Wilson’s vision was a global political community based on trust and mutual regard: the diplomatic application of the Golden Rule.

Almost without exception, church leaders became tireless evangelists for Wilson’s gospel of peaceful internationalism. “The world that existed before the War has disappeared forever,” declared John Mott. “For the world it is a new birth, a great day of God such as comes only once in 100 or 1,000 years.”64 Joseph Fort Newton, a famous minister at London’s City Temple, likewise discerned “a new chapter in the social, political, intellectual and spiritual life of mankind.”

In The Sword of the Spirit: Britain and America in the Great War (1918), Newton likened the war to the Christian Crusades of medieval Europe. Just as the earlier crusaders had unified Europe, he predicted, “so this, the greatest humanitarian crusade in history, will unify the world.” The advance of humankind would proceed “slowly, surely, inevitably” as national hatreds and sectarian pettiness “yield to the pressure of world-obligation and community of interest.” In the end, Newton assured his readers, “men will think in terms of one humanity and one Christianity.”⁶⁵

The attainment of such a world, of course, depended on the utter defeat and humiliation of the enemy. There could be no room for compromise or limited objectives. The Christmas truce along the Western Front in December 1914 would never be duplicated. All this helps explain the opposition of many church leaders to peace proposals that would have left Germany undefeated and unpunished. Concludes Gamble: “It was a war for absolutes that combined the armies of heaven and earth into the ultimate battle.”⁶⁶

Here, then, is one of the most striking effects of the Myth of Progress. Even war itself—a process inherently destructive to human life and human societies—was believed to have regenerative properties. The assumption of religious leaders in England and the United States was that war would advance the ideals of Christianity and democracy. More than that, it would give birth to an epoch of peace and righteousness: the “last battle” before the dawn of a new world. Whatever the religious beliefs of the combatants, the secular idealism of the Myth was driving attitudes and expectations about the conflict’s outcome.

The problem, of course, was that none of these holy predictions would come to pass. The gulf between the prophecies of the clergymen and the realities of the conflict would overshadow many souls in the postwar generation. Paul Bull, a minister and former chaplain, spoke for many of them: “The Age of Progress ends in a barbarism such as shocks a savage. The Age of Reason ends in a delirium of madness.”67

FAITH IN THE TRENCHES

Two young soldiers, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, managed to survive this delirium with their souls intact. It is not easy to say how the temper of the times shaped their attitudes as they went off to war; no person fully escapes the assumptions of his age. Nevertheless, neither man ever expressed the crusader mind-set, much less the apocalyptic views of the clergy. Their goals were much more practical and earthly: to fight honorably, survive the trenches intact, and pick up their academic careers where the war had interrupted them. “Before I went to the last war I certainly expected that my life in the trenches would, in some mysterious sense, be all war,” wrote Lewis years later. “In fact, I found that the nearer you got to the front line the less everyone spoke and thought of the allied cause and the progress of the campaign.”68

In this, Tolkien and Lewis probably shared the sentiments of the majority of their fellow soldiers.⁶⁹ Many were outraged by German atrocities and loathed the idea of German hegemony in Europe. Yet there is little evidence that the ordinary soldier was animated by intense religious idealism. A story circulated in France, for example, about a clergyman in a carriage of men on their way to the front line. He cheerfully asks them, “So, you are going to fight God’s war?” After getting no reply, he repeats the question. “Don’t you believe in God’s war?” A soldier looks at him wearily and replies: “Sir, hadn’t you better keep your poor Friend out of this bloody mess?”⁷⁰

Unfortunately for the Church of England, many chaplains were out of sight and apparently out of touch during the war. Ordered to remain safely behind the lines, at hospitals or field ambulances, they often seemed incapable of relating to the men fighting for survival.

“The key to the whole thing,” wrote Theodore Hardy, a chaplain who later won the Victoria Cross, was for ministers to serve in the combat zone: “If you stay back, you are wasting your time. Men will forgive anything but lack of courage.” Most Protestant ministers, however, followed orders and avoided the front. “There is only one Front here and few Chaplains ever get there, and then not during engagements,” complained David Railton. “It is a mistake on the part of the authorities which will cost the Church dearly.”⁷¹

Perhaps it did. Many Anglican chaplains worked courageously to serve the men under their care. Of the two thousand Anglican clergy attached to the British army at the time of the Armistice, eighty-eight died in battle, while four were awarded the Victoria Cross.72 Nevertheless, war poet Robert Graves—his cynicism aside—seemed to capture a common perception of clerical cowardice and hypocrisy: “If they had shown one-tenth the courage, endurance, and other human qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival.”⁷³ Despite great hopes to the contrary, no widespread revival occurred.⁷⁴

For most men, it seems, God remained in the backdrop of the conflict, but not wholly absent. The oft-quoted critique by Graves—“hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind”—seems a self-serving projection of his own militant atheism.⁷⁵ As historian Richard Schweitzer argues in The Cross and the Trenches, a strong percentage of soldiers referred to religious belief in their letters and diaries, suggesting genuine piety.⁷⁶ Perhaps the observation of a Scottish officer was closer to the mark: “The religion of ninety percent of the men at the front is not distinctively Christian,” he wrote, “but a religion of patriotism and of valor, tinged with chivalry, and the best merely colored with sentiment and emotion borrowed from Christianity.”⁷⁷

CHASTENED BY WAR

On the eve of the Battle of the Somme, Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, wrote to his wife: “I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help.”⁷⁸ Haig was convinced that his soldiers shared his simple faith and were similarly inspired to bear the sufferings required to prevail.⁷⁹ Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister who fought at Ypres in May 1916, was not prone to expressions of sectarian zeal. Nevertheless, he wrote to his mother: “Many of us could never stand the strain and endure the horrors which we see every day, if we did not feel that this was more than a war—a Crusade. I never see a man killed but think of him as a martyr.”80

Did the experience of war transform Tolkien and Lewis into faith-based crusaders? Tolkien entered the war a devout Catholic, Lewis a lapsed Anglican and an atheist (his turn toward Christianity did not occur until much later). They shared a basic patriotism and sense of duty to King and Country, yet they were reluctant recruits into the war effort. As authors they sought to recover the romantic and mythic traditions based on the struggle between good and evil. But they declined to sanctify war as a divine undertaking. Rather, the characters in their works often display a great ambivalence toward conflict.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond grows somber as he reflects on the history of the wars that have ravaged his world. He has lived long enough to know that, despite hopes to the contrary, the forces of evil would not be eradicated by the next battle: “I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.”⁸¹ Tolkien denied that his Lord of the Rings was “just a plain fight between Good and Evil,” or that his protagonists represent untainted goodness. “But in any case this is a tale about war,” he wrote, “and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other.”⁸²

Lewis occasionally poked fun at his characters, such as Reepicheep in the Narnia series, for their bravado: “For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.”⁸³ In his science fiction trilogy, he created a mad Anglican parson, Mr. Straik, who naively endorses an earthly (and diabolical) attempt to realize the kingdom of God. “It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” intones Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”84 Straik might well have been modeled on any number of WWI ministers enchanted by the prospects of spiritual revival.

Indeed, what sets their works apart is how they avoid the triumphalism of the holy warrior. Tolkien deliberately submerged the Christian elements of his story, making even the idea of God only a suggestive aspect of the narrative. “Even when I was far away,” says Gandalf, “there has never been a day when the Shire has not been guarded by watchful eyes.”⁸⁵ Lewis was much more explicit about the biblical themes that frame his work. But even his protagonists—obedient to a Calling larger than themselves—are nonetheless flawed, fearful, and self-doubting. “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick,” wrote Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. “But that made no difference to what he had to do. He rushed straight up to the monster and aimed a slash of sword at its side.”⁸⁶

As we’ll see, the Christian faith of Tolkien and Lewis offered them a moral vantage point from which to grapple with the meaning of war. Their personal taste of combat, with all its troubling ambiguities, checked the impulse toward self-righteousness. Surely the daily routine of war, its moments of fear, boredom, exhaustion, hardship, and horror, saved them from ever romanticizing the experience. As Lewis wrote, many years after his wartime service:

For let us make no mistake. All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love.87

Nevertheless, belief in the existence of a moral order to the universe helped these authors to confront the human predicament: the diabolical and deeply rooted challenges to justice and peace in our world. Moreover, the inexpressible experience of war gave them a special empathy for the person who is asked to risk all for a noble cause. More often than not, their characters display an unexpected humility, a reticence about combat that can be overcome only by the prospect of a gathering storm of Evil.

Thus, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, we follow Frodo Baggins in near-constant peril as he pursues his mission as a foot soldier in a great war. We see his fear as well as his determination to overcome it and remain true to his quest: “There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow,” Tolkien wrote. “He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.”⁸⁸