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The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, by Philip Jenkins
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The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the twentieth century.
The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism.
Connecting numerous remarkable incidents and characters—from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide—Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as never before and shows how religion informed and motivated circumstances on all sides of the war.
- Sales Rank: #404843 in Books
- Published on: 2014-04-29
- Released on: 2014-04-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.37" w x 6.00" l, 1.40 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Sounding like a medieval priest galvanizing eleventh-century Crusaders, a twentieth-century Yale theologian urges his countrymen to “buckle on Christian armor and take their place in the fighting ranks” of doughboys up against German heathens. What is more, Jenkins finds such religious rhetoric in the mouths of countless combatants on both sides of the Great War. In Germany, Russia, Britain, America, and the Ottoman Empire, readers hear fervid sermons urging attacks on devilish foes and promising divine deliverance to righteous warriors. Jenkins recognizes the incongruity between ancient scriptural phrases and modern weaponry—machine guns, mustard gas, tanks, and airplanes. Yet he finds the archaic language of godly violence pervading even officially secular France and infecting even America’s most liberal clergy (one of whom calls for the extermination of the German people!). Readers see how political and ecclesiastical hierarchies join forces in rallying their followers with holy-war appeals, but they also see how the war incubates apocalyptic and superstitious popular beliefs that fracture the elites’ orthodoxies. Indeed, in what was once Christendom, these fantastic war-born beliefs incubate the pseudo-religious impulses of Nazism and communism, and in the world of Islam, they foster a dangerous new extremism. An astonishing chronicle of intense piety inciting acts of terrible carnage. --Bryce Christensen
Review
“This sweeping, carefully researched book makes sense of a global conflict... [that] redrew the global map and reshaped all the major faiths involved.” (Christianity Today)
“An astounding chronicle of intense piety inciting acts of terrible carnage.” (Booklist, starred review)
“Jenkins’ vividly written synthesis [on World War I] belongs at the top of reading lists on the conflict.” (Christian Century)
“In his masterful book Jenkins…firmly establishes that WWI did not just reshape the political landscape, but it created the religious world we exist in today.” (The Catholic World Report)
“A painstaking, densely layered study of a time when religious themes underpinned the militarism and nationalism of the embroiled nations. Indeed, as Jenkins carefully portrays, the war changed everything, from the collapse of the old order to the compromising and weakening of world faiths. A work of intensely nuanced research.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“If you care about religious diversity and the role of faith in global war and peace—then you must get a copy of The Great and Holy War. [A] unique and important look at how the First World War reshaped global conflicts we are still wrestling with a century later.” (ReadTheSpirit)
“As thoroughly researched as it is readable. Even scholars well versed in the field will learn much from this work. Possessing a superior grasp of the political and military history, the author…presents a perceptive and engaging view of the war …[Jenkins] sets a high standard.” (Anglican and Episcopal History)
From the Back Cover
The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the twentieth century.
The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural, was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the Abra-hamic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism.
Connecting numerous remarkable incidents and characters—from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide—Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as never before and shows how religion informed and motivated circumstances on all sides of the war.
Most helpful customer reviews
33 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
The Great War and religion
By Jill Meyer
This year - 2014 - marks the centennial anniversary of the beginning of the Great War. There have been many books issued to mark this anniversary - books about politics, warfare, societal changes - but American author Philip Jenkins's book, "The Great and Holy War: How World War 1 Became a Religious Crusade, is the first book I've seen focusing on the influence religion had on the war and the countering influence that the war had on religion.
Philip Jenkins divides his book - roughly - into two halves. The first, concentrating on the actual war years - 1914 to 1918 - and the second, which looks at the post-war period into the 1930's and 1940's. In August,1914, the soldiers of France, Germany, Great Britain, and the other combatants marched off to battle. "God, King, and Country" was a rallying cry and most soldiers - and their leaders - thought they'd be home for Christmas, 1914. They were "home for Christmas" - those who survived the carnage - but not until Christmas, 1918. Most leaders, on both sides, thought this war would be like the two that came before it, 1866 and 1870, short and sweet. And, in fact, the Germans made it almost to the outskirts of Paris in 1914, before being turned back. The war settled into bunkers and trenches for four years, opposing armies facing each other through barbed wire and bullets.
One of the Ten Commandments is "Thou Shalt Not Kill". But what were the church leaders on both sides saying as war broke out? Something like "Thou Shalt Not Kill...unless it's your enemy who are doing dreadful things to Belgian babies/Nurses/Nuns, etc." The war was greatly supported by the clergy - both Christian and Jewish - and soldiers marched off, blessed for battle by their religious leaders. Jenkins looks at how mainline religious institutions supported the war effort. And at how "sects" began to pop up, as well as the occult as mourning parents and wives sought comfort in trying to communicate with their dead loved ones.
Religion also played a part in the political processes of the war. In Germany, at the war's end and aftermath, the Jews were blamed along with other minority groups, as having "stabbed the soldiers in the back", thus bringing about German defeat. These sentiments, and the actions that followed them, were to play a part in the rise of the anti-Semitic Nazi Party in Germany. In the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church was sidelined as the Communist Party became almost the state religion. Jenkins also looks at the Armenian Massacres in Turkey in 1915 and after.
The second part of the book looks at other parts of the world influenced by the Great War. How Turkey and the other Muslim areas became political entities after the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the war. And how the Holy Land remained the political hot potato when the British and French began making arbitrary decisions of what areas became what countries, post war.
Philip Jenkins has written a lively book about a relatively unexamined part of the Great War and the later years. This book shouldn't be missed by any arm-chair historians.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
How WWI wrecked Christendom, catalyzed secularism, and unleashed global religious forces still at work today
By George P. Wood
The Great War (1914–1918) is a turning point in world history. It destroyed empires and created nations. It wrecked Christendom, catalyzed secularism, and unleashed global religious forces that continue to affect the world today. “Only now, after a century,” writes Philip Jenkins in The Great and Holy War, “are we beginning to understand just how utterly that war destroyed one religious world and created another.”
Many books have been published to mark the centennial of the start of World War I. Some narrate the history of the entire conflict; others study this or that aspect of it in depth. Jenkins’s book belongs to the latter category. It focuses on how European combatants framed the conflict using the holy war rhetoric of medieval Christendom. Nations used this rhetoric whether or not they had an established state church. Soldiers were viewed as martyrs. They claimed angelic and miraculous interventions on the battlefield. Among the heterodox, paranormal, occult experiences were common. Even radical social movements such as Soviet Communism, though they were avowedly godless, expressed their aspirations in apocalyptic and millenarian terms.
After surveying the religious dimension of the rhetoric and experience of the combatants, Jenkins then shows some of the global consequences that arose in the aftermath of war. The Great War was truly a world war in that the empires fought over their colonies and enlisted their colonized subjects to fight on European soil. As they enlisted this or that colonized group to fight for them, they unleashed forces such as Zionism, anticolonialism, Armenian genocide, African indigenous churches, and politicized Islam—forces that had sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit religious dimensions.
These forces continue to influence world events today. Consider the Israel-Gaza conflict. The British Mandate in Palestine came about because of the Entente Powers defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which until then had held sway in that region. The United Kingdom had promised Zionists that it would work to establish a national Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1917. But it also made promises to Arabs, and established Hashemite kingdoms in Transjordan and Iraq after the war. Facing Western dominance in their ancestral homelands, Arabs developed two contrary responses: a secularized Arab pan-nationalism and a politicized Islam. Secularism was the choice of many Arab Christians and other minorities, who longed for Arab statehood but did not want Muslim dominance. Politicized Islam, on the other hand, longed to reestablish the caliphate, the Muslim umma (peoplehood, empire), and sharia as the law of the land. In Palestine, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas represent these contrary responses.
Or consider the depredations of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has been in the news of late for expelling Christians from their ancestral homelands. Until the Great War, the Middle East, though predominantly Muslim, contained substantial Christian minorities, groups that claimed direct links to the Apostolic Age and whose tenure in the land preceded the rise of Islam by centuries. This was especially the case in the region now known as Turkey, whose major cities were mentioned in the New Testament and which had been the Byzantine heartland in the 1100 years between Constantine and the fall of Constantinople. In 1915, fearing that the Entente Powers—who explicitly interpreted the Great War in terms of crusade and holy war—would destroy the caliphate and restore Christendom in Asia Minor, the Ottoman Turks began a genocide and expulsion of the Armenians, the Ottoman Empire’s largest Christian minority, as well as against Assyrian and Chalcedonian Christians. The genocide of the Armenians gave the Nazis hope that they likewise could murder the Jews with impunity. “Who, after all,” asked Adolph Hitler, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
It is easy for a Christian to point out these problems, which involve politicized Islam. But Christian readers of The Great and Holy War need to take to heart the lesson it teaches us about how easily biblical images and rhetoric, as well as the images and rhetoric of Christian tradition, can be used to incite, support, and sustain brutal warfare that kills millions. “[I]t is God who has summoned us to this war,” proclaimed Randolph McKim of Washington DC’s Episcopal Church of the Epiphany as the United States entered the war in 1917. “It is his war we are fighting.… 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 stifle with this unholy and blasphemous power [Germany].”
But just three years earlier, German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Vorwerk had reworked the Lord’s Prayer to say, in part, this: “Our Father, from the height of heaven, / Make haste to succor Thy German people. / Help us in the holy war…. In thy merciful patience, forgive / Each bullet and each blow / That misses the mark. / Lead us not into the temptation / Of letting our wrath be too gentle / In carrying out They divine judgment…. Thine is the kingdom, / The German land. / May we, through Thy mailed hand / Come to power and glory.”
Even granting, as Jenkins does, that the Entente Powers had more justice in their cause than the Central Powers had in theirs, the contrary rhetoric of the Christians on both sides of this conflict call into question whether God was truly on either side or whether each was simply using him to justify their nation’s actions. No wonder, in the aftermath of the war, Christendom died in Europe and secularism began to take its place. It had been killed by Christians.
For revealing the religious contours of a European (and American) religious world order now gone; for demonstrating that Christians—not just Muslims—have a history of politicizing their religion for violent purposes, even in recent times; and for showing how the religious world we inhabit is one birthed in the fires of the Great War, I highly recommend Philip Jenkins’s The Great and Holy War.
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
The Great War and Global Religion
By Clint Schnekloth
Jenkins offers in the first few chapters a straightforward account of the Great War, and examines the religious rhetoric of the war, the religious practices of the combatants, notions of apocalyptic resulting from the war, and the impact of this horrible war on the continuing religious faith of Europe.
Where things get really interesting, and in keeping with Jenkins' larger academic project, are the late chapters. In the ruins of Christendom, Jenkins notes that some of the most important results of this war include a new situation for Judaism (Zionism), spiritual liberation for those from below (subject people's of the world), under-reported genocide in Armenia, and the shift of Christianity to the global South, as well as a changing landscape for Islam in the absence of a Caliphate.
Jenkins writes, "Most Western observers [of the time] viewed affairs in Africa and Asia as colorful irrelevancies, and that was particularly true in matters of religion. Except for a handful of specialized academics, why should anyone care about the fate of Christianity outside its natural home in Europe and North America, or pay the slightest heed to the historical dead end that was Islam? A century later, such disregard looks very blinkered. So much of the religious history of the subsequent era does in fact focus on those twin facts: Islam, and Christianity outside the Euro-American sphere. So much of that story, in fact, is a continuation and sequel of the turmoil that began in 1914. Those from below would not always remain in the humble places that the empires assigned them" (285).
For any number of reasons this is the book to read on the centenary of the Great War. Whether readers are looking for a historical review, insights into the religious landscape of the period, or understanding of the war's continuing impact, this book is the place to start.
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