Abstract
Political deliberation is hardly done in a historical vacuum, and when talk is rife about ‘new wars’ and ‘new threats’, a historical perspective may clarify the coordinates of the various default positions. The present collection of essays, the result of a two-day colloquium in Winchester in 2010, introduces the specific English context of a legally established Church, one often also part of the establishment. But the relationship between military conflict and the Church of England since the late nineteenth century has been complex, and each essay here fills a historiographical gap. A loose and complicated narrative emerges, beginning with the Church’s overall support of the Boer War and leading to overwhelming critique vis-à-vis nuclear disarmament and Iraq.
Mark Allen focuses on the Boer War, the ‘first “total war” in modern history’ (p. 15). It is widely assumed that the Church blindly supported imperialist state policy and the government’s jingoism (a term coined by J. A. Hobson at the time). But a case study of clergy responses in Winchester uncovers the cracks in the late Victorian consensus. Randall Davidson, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘agonized over the war’ in private correspondence and ‘was constantly weighing the case for it’ (p. 23). Still, public opposition was met with significant hostility. William Stephens, Dean of Winchester, joined the South African Conciliation Committee, called the Jameson Raid ‘a crime and blunder’, and noted Britain’s ‘arrogant and menacing tone’ in pre-war negotiations. G. W. Kitchen, a former Dean, took the same stance. Both clergymen caused a media storm and raised suspicions of treason. Other dissenters were violently attacked. Eventually Stephens was sidelined and pushed into the contradiction between calling the war ‘repugnant to Christianity’ and ‘hailing the soldiers for having “so many of the purest and noblest examples of Christian character…self-sacrifice…devotion to duty…unquestioning obedience and submission to authority”‘ (p. 26). Allen concludes with the truism that the Church ‘entertained a variety of attitudes to war’ (p. 31). Much more important is his insight that, despite the strong bond between the establishment and church congregations, such maverick figures along with Charles Gore and Christian socialists show ‘the seeds of the Church that dominated in the 1920s…germinating at the time of the Boer War’ (p. 31).
Stuart Bell underlines Allen’s findings in his chapter on the First World War: ‘The Church of England was simply too close to the state for its leader [Randall Davidson] to take a prophetic role’ (p. 55). Bell introduces the setting of a comfortable establishment in which politics and clergy shared simple public school and Oxbridge attitudes, and late Romantic images of medieval knights defending St. George and ‘Merrie England’. He also sketches the intense theological debates raised by the assumption that liberal German Protestantism had led to German militarism. What is striking here, besides the better-known (self-)critical voices of a ‘Church in the Furnace’, is an ecclesial militarism. The ‘engine of war’, as the Chaplain General wrote emphatically, had given the military chaplains ‘dreams and visions of a great spiritual fighting machine, which, if realised, may overcome the spiritual foes of humanity – and allow the Kingdom of God to operate on the earth’ (quoted on p. 46).
A comparatively large portion of three chapters is dedicated to the role of the Church in the Second World War. The triad begins with Parker’s study aiming to show that the War was used by the Church as a catalyst to secure its own post-war influence through compulsory religious education via the 1944 Education Act. Although Parker is concerned with ‘the spiritual issues’ of war, national identity and religious education, his focus somewhat reduces the conflict and its stakes to competing interests of state and church, albeit within a heavily ‘spiritualizing discourse’ (p. 72). This historiographical approach of discourse analysis risks downplaying the theological dimension raised by fascism itself. If, for example, the war is interpreted as ‘an historic conflict about the foundations of European values’ (p. 64) and the defence of Britain’s national interest, then it is difficult to take fully into account the scope and effect of claims such as Hitler’s that he was the ‘Führer-pope’, or a German cleric’s that ‘Christ has come to us as Adolf Hitler’. In any case, as Parker reminds us, the institutional closeness between state and church in post-war religious education was won at a cost to ‘both denominational and broader Christian interests’ (p. 78). The school syllabus could cover only a lowest common denominator version of Christianity. In the long run this led to a watered-down, abstract religion removed from cultural life (p. 79).
In ‘Preaching Morality: Sex, the Church and the Second World War’, Andrea Harris argues that the moral preaching of the Church on venereal disease (VD) during the war ‘prevented a clear and straightforward policy for the control of VD’ (p. 83). Most notably, Harris’s study invites reflection on the usus legis. As remedies to the epidemic spread of VD, the Church advocated only sexual abstinence and marital fidelity based on heartfelt inner conversion. Even when the number of infections was sky-rocketing, it rejected the distribution of condoms. But in seeing the VD crisis as a catalyst for moral improvement, the Church largely abandoned reflecting on the place, need and usefulness of remedial measures towards the same end. Yet, contra Harris, it is not quite clear whether the Church actually prevented an adequate policy, especially given its insistence on non-coercion. The army did hand out condoms, even if ‘grudgingly’ (p. 97). Harris also cites a 1943 Mass Observation survey, according to which people were well aware of legislators’ concessions to the Church and the hypocrisy of a VD campaign that didn’t mention prophylactics (p. 97).
Philip M. Coupland’s essay is perhaps the densest in the collection. He attempts nothing less than an intellectual history of Christian (proto-)fascism in England, focusing on the Christendom Group between 1939 and 1945. Its main figures such as Maurice Reckitt and William Peck had deep roots in Fabianism and socialism. Rather than studying the CofE’s public institutional responses, this chapter delves into English and German dreams of ‘national renewal’ within a theo-political whole permeating the continent. If one extends the meaning of fascism beyond a singular historical phenomenon and takes into account Hitler’s continuous admiration for the (seemingly organic) aristocratic and hence selective nature of English society, then what Coupland calls the ‘valency’ (p. 102) between the Christendom group and fascism is perhaps no coincidence.
The next two chapters on the Cold War complement each other. Despite the First World War’s centenary drawing attention to that period, it is arguably the Cold War paradigm centred on apocalypticism and eschatology that continues to shape current warfare, whether the war on terror, the surveillance state, or the emerging war against climate change through technological fixes. Dianne Kirby picks up on the Cold War as a religious war – after all, the Truman administration invoked a narrative of conflict between godless communist materialism and the god-fearing Christian West. Truman’s highly publicised exchange of letters with Pope Pius XII in 1947 marked the beginning of a strong Western alliance between the Vatican and the US; the Church of England was then involved through Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the US. Whilst the Anglican network with Orthodox churches was drawn on to secure political influence in Soviet Russia, clerical anti-communism was rife: Communism was seen as ‘anti-Christian’ to be met with ‘mortal hatred’ (quoted on p. 130). Even Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher’s attempt to tone down attacks on the collaborating Russian churches was anomalous. Towards openly Marxist clergy such as Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury who since the 1940s had seen the communist project as a sign of hope for workers and democrats, the Church ‘reverted to its…traditional method of ostracism and malign neglect’ (p. 138). So instead of using the post-war opportunities to create a better social order, Kirby remarks critically, the Church ‘came to share Britain’s post-war decline and subordination to the United States of America’ (p. 145).
Nothing crystallises the Cold War more than the (moral) question of nuclear weapons, and Matthew Grimley’s chapter on ‘The Church and the Bomb: Anglicans and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’ deepens the uneasiness about a theo-political situation in which the background threat of nuclear annihilation and communist apocalypse disfigured all moral talk of peace. On the one hand, there was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – a middle-class protest movement that brought together Anglicans and non-believers (p. 150). A haven of unilateralism and left activism, it was often chided as utopian, even a political liability. On the other hand, there were the ‘lesser evil’ arguments and the ‘realist’ endorsements of deterrence (or multilateral-ism), even the belief that this brought peace. This stance was fuelled by anti-communist sentiments and the astonishing belief, expressed also by Archbishop Fisher, that ‘nuclear annihilation might actually be part of God’s plan for mankind’ (p. 151). Under the influence of a revived just war theory, the Anglican response to the Thatcher government’s nuclear policy in the 1980s became broader and more refined. Nevertheless, the line of archbishops defending Britain’s nuclear deterrent only ended with Rowan Williams in 2002.
Cliff Williamson’s study of the Falklands War connects back to the first chapter, since he begins by retracing the historical connections between the Conservative Party and the CofE, long dubbed ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’. Although accompanied by outright dissent regarding Thatcher’s economic policies, the Church’s toned-down, circumspect assent to the Falklands War perhaps exemplifies what is often expected to be the attitude of just war ethicists: Yes to the war, but No to triumphalist hubris. Nevertheless, this could not cover up a fundamental discomfort about what seems now like an anachronistic colonial war. Archbishop Robert Runcie’s Thanksgiving Service after the victory was seen as insufficiently triumphalist. And even though Runcie had been Thatcher’s personal choice as Archbishop and they had known each other at Oxford, she mentioned him not once in her memoirs – ‘there were no great church things during my time’ (quoted on p. 183).
Peter Lee’s final chapter unfortunately goes no further into the present than the 1999 Kosovo War, though his recent (highly recommended) analysis of moral debates on Iraq, Blair and the Illusion of Morality (2011), leans into this chapter. Lee shows that in the 1990s the Church of England (much in tune with e.g. the German Evangelical Church) largely embraced the UN and its legal procedures (p. 191). This almost reflexive, occasionally positivist deferral to international secular authority at times is a comfortable Ersatz to explaining ‘Judge not, that you be not judged’ without straightforward pacifism. Hence, since the mid-1990s moral arguments for the Responsibility to Protect and ‘humanitarian intervention’, even against international law, have challenged the Church on its own turf. (This challenge became more pronounced during the 2003 Iraq War, where the choice was given between a global[ist] legalism and an antinomian American empire thriving on oil and weapons.)
On one hand, the book’s focus on the relationship between England’s established Church and the British state allows for acute observations: that closeness between them was won at the cost of committed church membership and even of the church’s ‘prophetic voice’; or that there are pitfalls in moral arguments about sacrifice, lesser evils, and unquestioning obedience. On the other hand, there is a tendency simply to state the obvious: that the Church was not a homogenous block of opinion. Perhaps this historical plurality of voices shows that there is no straightforward historiographical answer to the question of who or what, or even where, the Church of England actually is. This said, there is a continuing need for greater historical awareness of its nature and position vis-à-vis the state, especially when the ‘just war theory’ is invoked today. This collection of essays provides a valuable historiographical gateway into twentieth-century wars that presently continue in various new guises. It is highly recommended.