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| The photography of Walter Kleinfeldt (d.1945), discovered three years ago by his son, Volkmar. Walter fought at the Somme at the age of 16. ©BBC/Keinfeldt. |
One hundred
years ago today Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were both assassinated by
Gavrilo Princip (1884-1918) in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914. In just over a month, Europe was thrown into
the cataclysm that was the Great War, otherwise known as the First World War.
The centenary
won’t be marked in the United States the way it throughout Europe, particularly
in the United Kingdom. (The United States
didn’t enter the war until 1917.) WWI is
often in the shadow of the Second World War, both in terms of scale and significance,
as least for Americans. (There’s still
no national memorial on the National Mall to honor the Americans who served and
died in WWI.) And, yet, as historians look back from the present vantage point
it becomes clear that WWII was in many respects an extension of WWI. Indeed, for the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, much of the 20th century
and now the 21st century has been spent addressing the residual geo-political and
ideological conflicts left unresolved by the Great War. It is striking that even now Iraq, whose
borders were created by the League of Nations in 1920, is daily disintegrating into
three provinces (Shia, Sunni, Kurd), to basically what the region looked like prior to
the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
Thousands of
volumes have been written on the origins of the Great War. Military and
political historians are still trying to figure out how one gunshot in Sarajevo
hurled Europe into the abyss—leading to 10 million military personnel and 7
million civilian deaths—devastating lands, peoples, cultures, destroying the youth
of an entire generation.
In
1920 there were 525,000 war widows in Germany, 200,000 in Italy, 600,000 in
France, 240,000 in Britain, and millions of orphans. It's inconceivable that so-called “civilized” nations could allow themselves to
engage in this gross, collective act of self-annihilation. This is mind-blowing
enough.
What makes the war even more scandalous is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the
people in the nations/empires at war—Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany,
Austro-Hungary, Russia (and later, the United States)—were Christian. Japan and the
Ottoman Empire and India were, of course, non-Christian states; nevertheless,
they were all, together, deeply influenced by centuries of Christian thought
and practice, Christians now ripping themselves to shreds. This is an aspect of the war usually overlooked
by historians. Two recent works—Jonathan
H. Ebel’s Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton University Press,
2010) and Philip Jenkins’ The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (HarperOne, 2014)—are
significant exceptions.
Remembering the
faith dimension is critical as we begin to commemorate the First World War,
especially for Christians. In many ways, World War I was, and remains, a
scathing indictment of Christianity. Or,
better said, an indictment of large portions of the Church, on both sides of the conflict, with both clergy and laity who
thought they were being faithful Christians, fighting to save “Christian
civilization,” and slaughtering millions to do so, all in the name of God.
How
did “Christian” Europe allow this to happen? Was there something within
Christianity at that time which helped fan the flames of destruction and war? Is it still within Christianity, latent and in shadow?
Probably.
How
exactly do adherents who claim to follow Jesus—the Prince of Peace, the one who
said before he was arrested and eventually executed, “Peter, put away your
sword” (Matthew 26:52)—become the Church militant?
For God, Country and King. This was the banner cry heard in the High
Streets of Britain and in trenches of the Somme. One can read these same words today on countless war memorials all over the United Kingdom, in churches and in
village squares in the most remote corners of the British Isles. Belief in God and patriotism were inseparable.
Every nation made a similar claim: God is
with us. Dieu est de notre côté. Gott ist mit uns. Churches—on all sides—supported the war.
It’s telling
that when, on the eve of war, 1 August, as a vast crowd gathered on
Alexanderplatz in Berlin, people started to spontaneously sing, not Deutschland über alles (Germany over all), but the Lutheran
chorale Gott, tief im Herzen (God,
deep in my heart).
On Sunday, 2 August,
the court chaplain conducted an open-air service in Koningplatz to celebrate
the declaration of war with France.
Then, on 4 August, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1849-1941) made a famous speech in Berlin, which was really more like a sermon. “German faith and German piety," he said, "are ultimately bound up with German civilization.” The sermon/speech was written by the prominent Lutheran theologian and church historian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), a towering figure in the history of Christian thought, who left his imprint on generations of pastors and theologians in Germany, Britain, and the United States.
Across the English Channel, Arthur Winnington-Ingram (1858-1946), Bishop of London, preached in 1915 that Britons
“are banded in a great crusade” and are therefore called, “…to kill Germans; to
kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good
as well as the bad, to kill the young as well as the old…to kill them lest the
civilization of the world be killed.”
Similarly passionate appeals were heard from many pulpits in Europe and
the United States throughout the war. Not all, certainly, but many.
Which God or god (s) were being served by these statements, sermons, actions?
The difficult
truth, as Jenkins and others make clear, is that after the war Christendom was
in ruins (which was probably a good thing).
WWI spawned a religious and cultural revolution within Christianity that
continues to do this day.
Religion, per se, is not the problem (although it,
too, is not always innocent). The real threat surfaces when nationalism and
patriotism—competing deities that have an enormous sway over our thoughts,
actions, and feelings—harnesses the benevolent power of faith to serve its own ends,
often with ghastly results. Religions of
compassion become grotesque. Consider the aims of the radical Islamicist group
ISIS/ISIL now devastating Iraq.
If the ghosts of
Verdun and the Marne, Gallipoli and Ypres could have their say today they might
warn us: Beware the bizarre alchemy of
Christianity and patriotism. The macabre marriage of nationalism and
religion often yields a deadly poison. Its toxin permeated most of the 20th
century and it’s still with us today. It
never ends well.
