World War I and the Church

we're gonna spend this lecture looking at the First World War and its impact on the church and one of the reasons for this lecture is that so very often in the context of the 20th century with so many of the wars and the fights and all the nationalism that came with it feels so very normal in the context of the modern world for anyone alive today the instinct is always to believe that nations have always been fighting over turf wars they've always been fighting over resources and energy and that there have always been political and ideological differences that drive nations to engage with war sometimes not only with each other but also bringing in their allies to the point that you have global strife and what feels like a global catastrophe on the verge particularly when you get into the era of atomic and chemical warfare and the church had a role to play in this whole process but we do want to say at the outset that what we're dealing with now is more how the church engaged that time supported and eventually came to have criticisms of the way that the world engaged in its own hostilities in its fights in other words while in times in the past whenever we're looking at very sensitive problems things like the Crusades or some of the wars in the Middle Ages or even in the modern world at times we're having to deal with the fact that the church was either instrumental in causing the fight or at times was very much in the front lines defending ones out of the other as it went to war when we're looking at the first world war and later when we look at the second world war we're not talking about as much of an involvement with the church with the culture at large here by the early 1900s of course the church still has a role to play still is a voice in culture but it would be wrong in the extreme to suggest that the church either propelled the First World War or that it had some central role to play as each side came into conflict with each other now often what we're dealing with here in the first and second world war is a church on either side where the Catholic or Protestant that is attempting to stress some good some bad either the need for the cessation of hostilities though in most cases the church played a role in supporting the cultural energy you might say needed to propel people to enlist and to go off to war so while we're gonna be looking at some sensitive problems some of the issues where the church gets a bit too in bed with the political regimes yet again what we're talking about here is again not so much an issue of the church instigating problems but rather the church coming to a conclusion eventually that it's going to have to have some serious conversations internally about how it supports or rejects some of the cultural issues of their day so as we come out of the 20th century we could go ahead and give the context here what we're looking at is ongoing evolution of fights that began four centuries before the actual outbreak of the first world war the war of course begins officially on the 28th of July 1914 and the cause of the First World War was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria the heir to the Austrian Hungary in line the war then ends on the 11th of November 1918 and this was a very serious war when the guns finally went silent that when the peace treaties were finally signed some 9 million to 10 million soldiers that service people had lost their lives also somewhere in the neighborhood of seven million citizens throughout Europe had lost their lives we are in other words talking about one of the more serious loss of life in the entirety of Western or even world history itself and there are a number of factors that caused this serious number of fatalities in the First World War the first of course is the fact that we have all of the major players of Europe and around the world contributing some to a greater sum to lesser extents troops to fight in the great trench wars there in Europe and we'll get into some of the complexities of the war here in a minute but what's going on is millions and millions of people are coming together from around the world to fight these fights other nations are drawn in sometimes more or less against their will but you have this clashing of enormous manpower in fact the First World War is one of the last wars that still feels at times very much like an older maybe 18th or 17th century fight you still have for example men charging in on horseback into the battlefield what's changing though here in the early 1900s is as a result of the technological revolution there are a number of advances in chemical and biological warfare that allow for in particular gassing of troops they're on the front lines this is one of the main reasons why the Germans were often propagandized as being so awful and heinous and the epitome of the Antichrist because they were amongst the first to wait for the wind to be blowing down when onto their enemies and then they would release a number of chemical or nerve gas agents that would then disperse themselves amongst all these troops in the trenches and you had enormous loss of life as a result now all sides eventually engage in this type of warfare but the enormity of this problem the so-called problem of weapons of mass destruction that we hear so much about in the modern world was really only beginning to rear its head here in the First World War so you have this amazing juxtaposition of on the one hand the older style of warfare which involved a lot of charges almost literally men throwing themselves against walls of other men as well as a real serious leap forward in terms the technology of mass destruction to the use of all types of different chemicals as well as advances in terms of bullets machine gunnery shells and mortars these types of things and so the First World War is one of the more important and disastrous wars to come upon Europe and the world itself the great problem with the First World War though is that for every one that was participating or at least nearly everyone participating they saw this as the utopian as Woodrow Wilson called it war to end all wars they honestly believe that this war and the complexity of it the extent to which all the nations were coming together to fight that they won that if the Allied powers won that in the end this would bring an end to war itself in part that explains the complexity of the First World War in its relationship to the church as the different powers arose the church often found itself pitching the case pitching the fight as a black and white either-or between either the good side of the bad side now this is true of all wars of course at least until probably the Vietnam War where you begin to see people on both sides saying that either side has problems and/or evil and that the war should to simply stop on its own and ever since then of course at least in the Western culture anytime there is a war anytime there's a fight it doesn't matter what the cause or what the issue there's always going to be people who decry and condemn it as simply totalitarian well in the first world war you might say the West in the world itself had not learned the lesson of using totalitarian propaganda black and white propaganda either or propaganda when it came to the annihilation of one's enemies so as the war gets going in 1914 what you see arise are a number of challenges to the way that the church would engage with the First World War you might say that the first world war is the real growing up of the church in the 20th century for so very long the church had always been involved to a greater or lesser extent with the culture around it they were preachers in the American Revolution preachers and Wars here and there all throughout the centuries and there had been preachers in the Civil War as well who had instilled on one side of the other a certain perspective on the gospel and how it ought to be applied to the challenge around it you might say that the problem wasn't so much as to what the gospel is they all by and large throughout American history believed that the church was founded on the sacrifice of Christ the cross for our sins the challenge isn't so much whether or not Christ is our Savior but they're often in the church particularly in the context of the West in the last say a century and a half the question is what does the guy will do to make a difference to our engagement with the world around us does it cause us to get more involved or does it cause us to get less involved with whatever politics or issue that is going on right now you might say that even in the 21st century the church has not quite come to grips as to what the answer is as to our engagement with the challenges of the world and the advent of social media has only made us more aware of the complexity in the variety of different opinions within the church as to how to engage positively or negatively with the world around us well again you might say that a lot of the complexity here is brought about by the first world war you see because in the first world war there was so much religious fervor on one side of the other so much propaganda and so much of the belief that God was on our side or if he were in the German austria-hungary side you of course believed that God was on your side and so the propaganda that was employed and the myth making that was employed stories of special divine providence to save one set of soldiers or another became sort of the hallmark of the First World War now this is important to note because so very often in the modern world right now it is said that the first world war was the time when everyone lost their faith that the war itself somehow ruined the faith of Europe and of America well that is certainly true on some level there was a crisis of faith as a result of the first world war but I think as we've already seen the loss of faith was some people was already there decades or generations before the First World War the loss of faith you might say as a result of the first world war came at the end of it when both sides paused to realize how much of the propaganda of their faith had been used by governments to back the enlisting of men for the military or the support financially of all their citizens for the war and we can cite just one example this the angel Amal were the angel of Mons if you just want to anglicize it frankly but this is a story entirely mythical story of a set of soldiers who were being chased down by the German forces and who calling upon Saint George were suddenly saved when a series of angels dressed in the least in some of the stories as the 15th century hindered the 5th armies who had conquered France before these archers these Archer angels of all things showed up and protected the soldiers as they escaped well again this is entirely myth making and this is entirely using some element of the biblical faith I'll be it very obscure Liso and weaving it not only into the war as it was going along in their day but hearkening back to the 15th century war between England and France it's this type of engagement this type of muddying up of the waters between culture politics nationalism and religion that is almost impossible times to disentangle in the first world war everywhere you look in the first world war there is religious propaganda religious imagery crucifixes hovering above fields where soldiers lay dead priests of all kinds out ministering to those who almost seemed to want to claw their way into the saving arms at the church to say nothing of the propaganda against the German Huns as they were called at a very sort of slanderous way the Beast Antichrist who was challenging the opportunity of freedom in particular religious freedom and who was seen as the scourge of all that was good and true and beautiful this level of propaganda and engagement within the church was just simply assumed as something that was allowable and good by the church and you might say that the First World War is the full epitome of the entanglement in particularly in America of Christian values with the welfare and the progress of the state itself the ongoing belief the church was somehow part and parcel to the culture itself or that it was a supporter of all that was part of the American good is on display here and it's true of Catholics and Protestants the Archbishop of Chicago for example the Catholic Archbishop stress that all good Catholics should enlist he also encouraged churches to even consider going into debt to make a display for all their neighborhoods and their surrounding environs to see that they were supporters of the war other Protestant churches did many of the same kinds of things you begin to see for example the flying of the American flag within the sanctuary becoming a more or less common thing in fact even the creation of the Pledge of Allegiance itself was begun here in the early 1900s in the context of the run-up to the first world war by a Christian man who believed that patriotism and good Christian virtue were things that were not synonymous but things that were hand in glove to be a good American meant to be a good Christian man or something like this and so he creates the first sort of kernel of what will become the pledge of allegiance as we know it today and in part what he's saying is if we could instill in people the heritage of the virtues of the American Republic then built within that is some of the same kernel the seeds of a good biblical faithful man or woman the story of those who resisted the first world war though of Quakers the Amish and the Mennonites in particular those who were called upon to enlist or who were drafted and yet who because of their religious principles going all the way back to the Reformation and the Anabaptist movement itself they stood pretty united against the idea that they had to enlist and become part of this war many of them were thrown into prison and they were treated very poorly as a result of standing up for their beliefs that those in the church ought not to so fundamentally identify with the Wars of Nations that they themselves believed that they could not fight and so really the story of the Quakers and the Amish and the Mennonites particular in the first world war is really an under told story underappreciated story about the complexities of the church in a world that is now engaging in something that you might call total war where every energy every ounce of strength is being leveraged all of our money all of our blood sweat and tears goes to the war and this means that those traditions within Protestantism that do not believe in participating in war or in the army or the military were often being persecuted for their beliefs in the end the ongoing struggle of the war came to an end and as the war drew to a close many of the propaganda pieces and the slanderous pieces against the Germans and against Europeans as a whole began to come back to the Americans as being superficially based off of a certain amount of racism or anti-german sentiment and so as a result Americans had to realize that a lot of that propaganda and a lot of their using of their energies to entangle the church with the First World War were now somewhat embarrassing and there were a number of people who began to abandon the over reliance on patriotism as a vehicle for theological and Biblical interest within the church and as we'll see in our next lecture this leads dramatically into the context of not only the depression but the rise of Nazism in the Second World War