‘Aflame with Faith, and Free’

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the fraying relationship between Western Anglicans and their armed forces in the first three decades of the Cold War. While prompting closer engagement with the just war tradition, nuclear weapons fed an uneasiness with the British military among an influential minority, an attitude reflected in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The imperatives of decolonization also increased the scope for friction between Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher and successive Conservative governments in the 1950s. However, in the initial confrontation with atheistic Communism, Anglican approaches to war and military service remained robust. Given the existential threat to faith and freedom, the atom bomb was widely countenanced as a weapon of last resort. Some Anglican contributions to the military and ideological conflicts in Malaya and Korea proved highly effective. However, in the Protestant Episcopal Church, whose importance in the Communion increased with the rise of US hegemony in the non-Communist world, the ‘long 1960s’—and the Vietnam War especially—helped unseam its ascendancy in America’s armed forces. Amidst a more general crisis of identity, the profile of Episcopalian conscientious objectors and war-resisters rose, and with it a keen, outspoken hostility to military chaplaincy. These divisions were also felt by Australasian Anglicans, while the reverberations of Vietnam—compounded with the policies of South Africa’s apartheid regime—fuelled an ambient disquiet with the military (and especially the military chaplain) in the wider Anglican Communion. Consequently, by the end of the ‘long 1960s’, the historic relationship between Western Anglicans and their armed forces had never been weaker.