Australian Anglican Leaders and the Great War, 1914–1918: The “Prussian Menace,” Conscription, and National Solidarity

Abstract

The existing studies of the behaviour of the Australian churches during the First World War fail to evaluate adequately their perception of the war, in particular, that of the Anglican hierarchy. The latter were the leaders of the then largest denomination in Australia and they were in general highly educated and well informed about the causes of the war and in particular about Prussian-German political culture, and hence German war aims. Failure to take this into account results in a flawed assessment of the Anglican Church's stance on recruitment and conscription. During the war, especially, the Anglican hierarchy cultivated an ideal of national brotherhood or solidarity, something it had hoped would begin to grow with the advent of Federation. Consequently, in judging the situation at the time one connot avoid drawing attention to the sectarian issue. To pass over it as though it played no part in shaping the mind-set of groups of Austalians is to treat a major contentious issue in Australian social/intellectual history as irrelevant in explaining attitudes and tensions. This essay draws attention to the ideas and values promulgated by the Anglican leadership at the time leading up to and including the crisis engendered by the armed conflict between the British and German Empires. These ideas were effectively the continuation of attitudes that resulted form the importation of British liberal values that gained currency in the second half of the nineteenth century when W. E. Gladstone set the tone for British imperial policy and church-state relations. In questions of colonial/dominion autonomy the Anglican bishops were virtually to a man Gladtonian liberals. The empire presented to them a God-given opportunity to spread the Gospel under its protection. Indeed, the empire was threatened one had an inescapable duty to defend it. In the lignt of the findings presented here, the previous judgment about Australian Anglicanism that it uniformly pursued an essent