Observing British Christianity after the Great War

Books reviewed in this article: The Americas: Dictionary of Canadian Biography , Volume VI 1821 to 1835 . Edited by Francess G. Halpenny and Jean Hamelin. The Americas: Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 . By Stuart B. Schwartz. The Americas: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 . Edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden. The Americas: Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut . By Jackson Turner Main. The Americas: The American Revolution . By Edward Countryman. The Americas: The American Revolution . By Michael Heale. The Americas: Franklin of Philadelphia . By Esmond Wright. The Americas: Saving the Revolution: the Federalist Papers and the American Founding . Edited by Charles R. Kesler. The Americas: A Machine That Would Go Of Itself: the Constitution in American culture . By Michael Kammen. The Americas: The American Constitution: the first two hundred years 1787–1987 . Edited by Joseph Smith. The Americas: The Whiskey Rebellion . By Thomas P. Slaughter. The Americas: The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 . By William E. Gienapp. The Americas: From Slave South to New South: public policy in nineteenth‐century Georgia . By Peter Wallenstein. The Americas: Judah P. Benjamin: the Jewish Confederate . By Eli N. Evans. The Americas: Embattled Courage: the experience of combat in the American Civil War . By Gerald F. Linderman. The Americas: Sheffield Steel and America: a century of commercial and technological interdependence, 1830–1930 . By Geoffrey Tweedale. The Americas: The Limits of Power: great fires and the process of city growth in America . By Christine Meisner Rosen. The Americas: Origins of the Federal Reserve System: money, class and corporate capitalism, 1890–1913 . By James Livingston. The Americas: The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and his legacy . By Stephen Fox. The Americas: Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era . By Kevin Starr. The Americas: From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society . By Neil A. Wynn. The Americas: The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers , Volume III September 1920‐August 1921 , Volume IV 1 September 1921–2 September 1922 . Edited by Robert A. Hill. The Americas: Strength for the Fight: a history of black Americans in the military . By Bernard C. Nalty. The Americas: American Indian Policy and American Reform: case studies of the campaign to assimilate the American Indians . By Christine Bolt. The Americas: Harry Hopkins: ally of the poor and defender of democracy . By George McJimsey. The Americas: China Reporting: an oral history of American journalism in the 1930s and 1940s . By Stephen R. Mackinnon and Oris Friesen. The Americas: Hollywood Goes to War: how politics, profits, and propaganda shaped World War II movies . By Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black. The Americas: America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 . By John Lamberton Harper. The Americas: No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada, the United States and the origins of North American Air Defence, 1945–58 . By Joseph T. Jockel. The Americas: Ideology and US Foreign Policy . By Michael H. Hunt. The Americas: Selvages and Biases: the fabric of history in American culture . By Michael Kammen. The Americas: The Legacy of Conquest: the unbroken past of the American West . By Patricia Nelson Limerick. Ancient and Medieval: The Rise of the Greeks . By Michael Grant. Ancient and Medieval: Personal Enmity in Roman Politics, 218–43 BC . By David F. Epstein. Ancient and Medieval: The History of Cartography , Volume 1 Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean . Edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward. Ancient and Medieval: The South‐West to AD 1000 . By Malcolm Todd. Ancient and Medieval: Medieval Thought: the western intellectual tradition from antiquity to the thirteenth century . By Michael Haren. Ancient and Medieval: Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe . By Janet L. Nelson. Ancient and Medieval: Religion in the Medieval West . By Bernard Hamilton. Ancient and Medieval: The Gospels in the Schools c1100‐c1280 . By Beryl Smalley. Ancient and Medieval: The Preaching of the Friars: sermons diffused from Paris before 1300 . By D.L. d'Avary. Ancient and Medieval: Anglo‐Norman Studies , IX Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1986 . Edited by R. Allen Brown. Ancient and Medieval: The Governance of Norman and Angevin England 1086–1272 . By W.L. Warren. Ancient and Medieval: Castles in Wales and the Marches: essays in honour of D.J. Cathcart King . Edited by John R. Kenyon and Richard Avent. Ancient and Medieval: Saint Hugh of Lincoln . Edited by Henry Mayr‐Harting. Ancient and Medieval: Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III 1216–1245 . By R.C. Stacey. Ancient and Medieval: Women in the Medieval English Countryside: gender and household in Brigstock before the Plague . By Judith M. Bennett. Ancient and Medieval: Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland . By Timothy O'Neill. Ancient and Medieval: The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis . By Joseph Canning. Ancient and Medieval: Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson . By D. Catherine Brown. Ancient and Medieval: Royal Intrigue: crisis at the court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 . By Richard C. Famiglietti. Ancient and Medieval: Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke . By Michael Bennett. Early Modern: Pienza: the creation of a Renaissance city . By Charles R. Mack. Early Modern: The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: essays on perception and communication . By Peter Burke. Early Modern: The Renaissance . By Peter Burke. London: Macmillan, Studies in European History. Early Modern: The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation . By Alister E. McGrath. Early Modern: The French Reformation . By Mark Greengrass. Early Modern: The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe . By Brian P. Levack. Early Modern: Highroad to the Stake . By Michael Kunze. Early Modern: Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: the witch in early modern Europe . Early Modern: The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe . Edited by Anthony Pagden. Early Modern: Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe . By Yves‐Marie Bercé, translated by Joseph Bergin. Early Modern: Renaissance and Revolt: the intellectual and social history of early modern France . By J.H.M. Salmon. Early Modern: The French Peasantry 1450–1660 . By Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, translated by A. Sheridan. Early Modern: History of Wales , Volume III Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c1415–1642 . By Glanrnor Williams. Early Modern: Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth‐Century England . Edited by Peter Lake and Maria Dowling. Early Modern: Elizabethan Parliaments, 1559–1601 . By Michael A.R. Graves. Early Modern: A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation in Elizabethan England . By G.J.R. Parry. Early Modern: Court and Country: studies in Tudor social

Book Review: Michael Snape and Stuart Bell, <i>British Christianity and the Second World War</i> British Christianity and the Second World War. Edited by SnapeMichaelBellStuart. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press2023. Hbck; 242 pp.; £80. ISBN 978-1-83765-019-4.

Examines the role of Christianity in British statecraft, politics, media, the armed forces and in the education and socialization of the young during the Second World War.

10. British Christians and the Morality of Killing in the Second World War

British Christians and the Morality of Killing in the Second World War

British Christians and the Morality of Killing in the Second World War

British Christianity and the Second World War

Examines the role of Christianity in British statecraft, politics, media, the armed forces and in the education and socialization of the young during the Second World War. This volume presents a major reappraisal of the role of Christianity in Great Britain between 1939 and 1945, examining the influence of Christianity on British society, statecraft, politics, the media, the armed forces, and on the education and socialization of the young. Its chapters address themes such as the spiritual mobilization of nation and empire; the limitations of Mass Observation's commentary on wartime religious life; Catholic responses to strategic bombing; servicemen and the dilemma of killing; the development of Christian-Jewish relations, and the predicament of British military chaplains in Germany in the summer of 1945. By demonstrating the enduring -even renewed- importance of Christianity in British national life, British Christianity and the Second World War also sets the scene for some major post-war developments. Though the war years triggered a 'resacralization' of British society and culture, inherent racism meant that the exalted self-image of Christian Britain proved sadly deceptive for post-war immigrants from the Caribbean. Wartime confidence in the prospective role of the state in religious education soon transpired to be ill-founded, while the profound upheavals of war -and even the bromides of 'BBC Religion'- were, in the longer term, corrosive of conventional religious practice and traditional denominational loyalties. This volume will be of interest to historians of British society and the Second World War, twentieth-century British religion, and the perennial interplay of religion and conflict.

Michael Snape and Stuart Bell, eds. British Christianity and the Second World War. Studies in Modern British Religious History 45. The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2023. Pp. 242. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 63 Issue 1

British Christianity and the Second World War

I was hoping that this book might end one of my most enduring classroom group research activities. At the beginning of my introductory module in black theology, I send the class to the library to search for all the books written by British theologians on ‘race’, since the First World War. Students return an hour later and acknowledge that there are none. Then I send the group back again but this time to search for books on the subject of ‘animal theology’ (by the same intellectual demographic). On their return each group announces, sometimes in triumph, that there were at least a dozen! I then respond by asking them to reflect on what we are to make of a theological community that appears to be more interested in the souls of animals than British Christianity's sojourn with racialised oppression?

Living in a multi-cultural, and particularly in a religiously pluralistic, society is a new and challenging experience for most British Christians. What this new situation asks of us, however, is only a further extension of a toleration which has been developing in British civic and religious life since the late seventeenth century. Prior to that time Protestants and Roman Catholics generally found it impossible to accept one another as permissibly different; and each religious community was persecuted, and many of its leaders hanged or burned at the stake, under monarchs of the other faith. Even after the Church of England had become finally established the legal disabilities suffered by Catholics and Nonconformists only fully ended in 1871. But it is only in the present century, and particularly since the Second World War, that we have learned a more or less complete mutual acceptance. Catholics and Protestants, Anglicans and Free Churchmen now, for the most part, genuinely acknowledge one another's right to be different. Instead of each seeing the others as enemies or as rivals, they are now seen simply as members of different traditions within the one ecumenical Christian movement.KeywordsReligious CommunityReligious LifeChurch LeaderChristian ChurchWorld ReligionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

From 1938 to 1947, a period of escalating international tensions and armed conflict, Christian intellectuals in Great Britain formed and engaged in various discussion groups, debating responses to such challenges as totalitarianism, warfare, peacekeeping, international and domestic social order, and the place of the church in society. Although neglected in the historiography of such groups, Christians in Northern Ireland engaged in similar discussions, most notably through the “Davey commission,” a group of Presbyterians under the leadership of J. Ernest Davey. By examining the work and findings of that group, this article contextualises Northern Ireland in the historiography of British Christian thinking during the Second World War. Until recently, historians of twentieth‐century Protestantism in Northern Ireland have emphasised the region's disconnectedness from Christianity in Britain and interpreted its development in terms of binary opposition between evangelicals and ecumenists. The article evaluates recent scholarship which has suggested the limits of these earlier perspectives, showing that, at least in terms of Presbyterianism, mid‐twentieth century Protestantism in Northern Ireland was indeed closely connected to British Christianity and characterised by evangelical and ecumenical co‐operation. In so doing, the article also suggests new directions for the study of Christianity in mid‐twentieth century Northern Ireland.

Since the 1990s, Andrew Chandler has published a series of important studies of the reactions of leading figures in the Church of England to Nazi Germany. In articles and essays, he has described and assessed their attitudes towards the persecution of Jews during the 1930s, the British government’s foreign policies during the decade, the Munich settlement of 1938, and the ‘obliteration bombing’ of Germany during the Second World War. In books and editions, he has been especially concerned with the deep engagement of George Bell, bishop of Chichester, with the pastors of the Protestant ‘Confessing Church’ who resisted Nazi attempts to create a comprehensive state church. In this new book he draws together, broadens and extends these earlier studies, to produce a wide-ranging account of the practical and moral responses of British churchmen to Nazi policies from Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 to the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Although Chandler might not welcome an allusion to a once-controversial work, this is an investigation of the ‘impact of Hitler’ on the British churches.

Book reviews