World War One and Faiths – Then and Now

Sunday 16th November 2014

Friends Meeting House, Norwich

The First World War

A Multifaith Conflict
Chris Wood
Chair
Norwich InterFaith Link

Why Did it Happen?

World War One was sparked off by long-standing local tensions, but was the result of empires
expanding and contracting. The governments of Europe expected war, but did not understand
the deadly consequences of mechanised conflict. This was ‘total war’ and it came as a shock
to Europeans who had largely become detached from warfare since the days of Napoleon.

Two particular factors influenced Germany’s militarization. One was the fact that, since the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, Germany and France could not talk to one another without
rattling sabres. The other was that Germany felt hemmed in by the other European
superpowers and, along with Italy, saw empires like those of Britain, France and Russia as its
natural right. Those imperial powers felt threatened, but did nothing politically to suggest to
Germany that there was another option, as they would not have wanted to admit it themselves.
Britain’s economy had become dependent on its empire, not that the average worker here felt
the benefit, which is why the period before the First World War was marked by campaigns for
better social and employment conditions – causes that were set back rather than accelerated
by the war and the subsequent economic hardships.

Yet the age of national empires was in decline. There would be a further phase of superpower
empires – those of the USA and USSR – but the world was changing. Globalisation was
advancing. Indeed, German industry and commerce was developing an international trade
network of its own, a network that saw no advantages to war (except for the armaments
industry), and indeed was severely damaged by it. Had Germany been the victor in Western
Europe, the economic result may well have been a Prussian Customs Union writ large.
Parallels have been drawn between that prospect and today’s European Union. The big
difference is that the EU is not really competing against rival economic empires or
federations, but trying to survive in a world economy where money has been allowed to
rewrite the rules. Today’s empires are not geopolitical blocs, they are corporate octopuses,
with intertwined financial tentacles enmeshing the world.

In the Balkans by contrast, the situation in 1914 was more complicated than that in the West,
but the region was essentially pulled between three decaying empires: Austria-Hungary to the

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North, Russia to the North-East, and the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the South-East. The first
two of these were themselves also involved in the machinations of wider Eurasian power
politics. Into this tinder-box, on 28th June 1914, walked Gavrilo Princip and his comrades.

It is easy to use words like ‘terrorist’. After all, what to one person is terrorism, to another is
guerrilla warfare, resistance or a freedom fight. Indeed, the excuse the German occupying
forces in Belgium used for many of their atrocities, was that there were civilian resistance
fighters present. In the twisted rules of war, to their minds, you had to be part of a recognised
military in order to resist. Can we really blame those who, in the words of Jackson Browne,
“finally can't take any more, and they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone”? 1

But, however you look at it, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Sophie,
Duchess of Hohenberg, was, to say the very least, unfortunate. The Archduke was perhaps the
worst of the Austro-Hungarian imperial family to target, being less belligerent than the rest. It
was also the excuse for Austria-Hungary to invade Serbia and Germany to invade Belgium en
route to France.

The war aroused and still arouses diverse emotions, from hatred and fear, to sadness and grief,
to celebratory jingoism, but also love. For me, three quotes stand out that focus the
maelstrom:

“Ils ne passeront pas” (“They shall not pass”)

General Robert Nivelle, 23rd June 1916, Verdun.

“I know now that patriotism is not enough. It is not enough to love one’s own people: one
must love all men, and hate none.”

Edith Cavell, 11th October 1915. 2

“We shall have to fight another war all over again in 25 years.”

Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 1919, Versailles

Religion and Faith in the First World War

Religion was integral to the conflicts of World War One. The tensions in the Balkans were
coloured by religious adherence and religion was used for secular, geopolitical ends. Back in
1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany exhorted Russia to help fight a supposed “yellow peril”
in order to “keep Europe Christian”, a threat ostensibly demonstrated by the Chinese ‘Boxer’
rebellion, suppressed by the European powers in 1900. In 1914, he was happy to urge
Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and India to jihad against Britain. For Turkey’s part, it was
easy to portray Armenian Christians as the ‘other’, allowing their massacre, but the real
purpose was to remove a population which might side with Russia rather than the Empire. At
the same time, Islamicists were kept out of power.

People of many races and faiths were affected by the war, whether as combatants or non-
combatants. Even on the Western Front there were African and Indian soldiers. After the war,
when a permanent memorial was planned for Whitehall, Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Cenotaph

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deliberately avoided any reference to Christianity or any other specific religion, as those that
died were of diverse faiths. 3 This was the world’s first truly global conflict – or rather set of
conflicts, as the European conflagration touched and fuelled war in other theatres, particularly
South-East Asia and Africa.

People were affected by the war in many ways. Non-combatants could still be civilian
casualties (of warfare, pogroms or ‘ethnic cleansing’), become forced labour, be made
refugees, suffer economic hardship, lose homes, livelihoods, loved ones, cultural heritage and
cherished landscapes, or succumb to disease, particularly so-called Spanish Flu after the war.
Whether or not they themselves fought, the faiths and beliefs of those affected by the war read
like a check-list of world religions.

 Christians, of all denominations

 Jews
 Muslims
 Baha’is
 Sikhs
 Zoroastrians
 Hindus
 Buddhists
 Jains
 Chinese traditions
 Indigenous traditions of Africa, South-East Asia, Australasia, Oceania, Japan (Shinto)
and North America
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 Theosophists and even a few Pagans.

To the list should be added non-religious belief systems, especially perhaps Humanism and
Revolutionary Communism, the latter being particularly important in what became the Soviet
Union.

Religion and War

Most of these religions favour the avoidance of conflict, foster goodwill between people, and
oppose killing. However, many (though not all) of them actually have a contradictory concept
of a just war, even if interpretations vary. This is not surprising, as there are two sides to
religion, which generally overlap: 1) the spiritual connection to and striving towards
something beyond mundane experience, whether Nirvana, God, the gods, the Universe,
Ancestors or the land, and 2) organised religion. Whilst the second of these provides a
gateway to the first, in terms of the development of human societies, it probably evolved to
promulgate those societies’ values, which usually included distancing themselves from other
societies. 5 War gods are found in most polytheistic pantheons.

The tension between the spiritual and mundane sides of religion is most confused in the realm
of morality. How do you equate “Thou shalt not kill”, or love for all of creation, with “God is
on our side”? Perhaps Wicca has the best code: “As long as it harms none, do what you will”.
Of course, we cannot live our lives without harming something, even if that is vegetable foods
and fibre-plants, or the bacteria and viruses that our bodies constantly fend off. However,
rather than being nonsense, this is a call thoroughly to think through the consequences of our
actions.

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But, how was the moral conflict balanced for people ‘of faith’ a hundred years ago? What
made people with strong religious beliefs fight? Even in British Non-Conformist Christianity,
with its strong anti-war polemic, only the Quakers and Unitarians had significant numbers of
Conscientious Objectors during the First World War. 6

1 Conscription
To start with, many people in many countries had no choice; they were conscripted. The next
speaker will discuss Conscientious Objection, but whilst the legal and popular sanctions
against Britons who refused to fight were severe, the situation was worse elsewhere.
Similarly, those at the front line who challenged orders to undertake suicidal attacks or
atrocities against the enemy were often summarily murdered, the worst cases probably being
in the Italian army. The famous 1914 Christmas Truce on the Western Front never happened
again, not because of renewed hatred, but because on both sides officers were ordered to
execute those who fraternised with the enemy. After all, one could not have the great war
effort, on which so much political posturing was built, undermined by people recognising
their common humanity and refusing to kill each other, could one?

2 Duty
Established religions tend to inculcate a sense of duty. Again there are two sides to this. On
the one hand, duty to one’s fellow human beings and to society generally aid social cohesion,
as well as helping those in need. On the other hand, there is often a duty to those in authority.
Kaiser Wilhelm II’s continued belief in the Divine Right of Kings may have been
anachronistic a hundred years ago, but even in today’s democratic Britain, there are people
who still feel a moral duty to ‘one’s betters’ and defer automatically to authority.

3 Defence of Homeland, Loved Ones and Small Nations

It is natural to want to defend oneself, one’s friends, family and loved ones, and the place in
which one was born and in which one lives. There may be non-violent ways of doing that, and
were those more readily explored, without going so far as appeasement, we could probably
avoid much conflict.

An extension of this defence is coming to the aid of those against whom aggression is
directed. Even the peacekeeping role of the United Nations employs the military. In the First
World War, for Britain’s part, this would have been a major justification for involvement,
given the invasion of Belgium by Germany and, particularly, Britain’s commitment to defend
the country. However, Belgium was not the reason Britain went to war in 1914. The main
reason was the defence of its dominance of the sea and trade thereon, and thereby defence of
Empire. Britain’s involvement was based on economics, not humanitarianism.

There is a widespread and automatic assumption that the armed services are defending our
country. When they defend us against attack, that may be true. When they fight wars in far off
lands to serve economic interests, the best that can be said is that they are defending our way
of life. Whether that way of life is itself defensible is another matter. In 1914, our way of life
was based on the exploitation of Empire; today it is based on an even more unsustainable
oligopoly of international capitalism.

4 Fear of the Other

Religions play their part in maintaining the distinctions between people, especially when they
indoctrinate their adherents into the belief that they are the one true way. The press has taken
on some of this role, sensationalising and generalising, painting entire faiths as evil: until

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recently it was Witchcraft and Paganism, now it is Islam that is the target. The media has
taken on the mantle from established religion.

This fear goes back to the origins of organised religion with our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
There is some evolutionary logic to it, in that if someone adopts a radically different way of
life in an inhospitable environment, it could in extremis threaten the whole group, but we have
failed to grow out of this element of our social adolescence.

Here in Norwich in 1144, the death of a twelve-year-old boy by the name of William was
blamed on the local Jewish community, one of many such slurs around the country. It was
part of an increasing anti-semitism that resulted in mass-murder in Norwich in 1190, and the
expulsion of professing Jews from England a hundred years later, in 1290.

In 1209, Simon de Montford’s Crusader army attacked the town of Bézier, in the Languedoc,
following papal orders, and slaughtered the population. They were hunting adherents of the
Cathar sect and were quite prepared to kill Catholics as well. It is where the quote “Kill them
all, God will know His own” is supposed to have been uttered.

As already mentioned, in 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany exhorted Russia to help fight a
supposed “yellow peril” in order to “keep Europe Christian”, yet in 1914 he was also keen to
present himself as a friend to Islam, at least in as much as he could sow division and incite
hatred towards Britain.

We in Britain sometimes have a simplistic view of religion in relation to World War One. Our
focus is largely on the Western Front, where the commonest religion on both sides was
Christianity. Yet elsewhere, in Eastern Europe in particular, the situation was more
complicated and nastier. Also fighting on both sides were people of the Jewish faith and it is
important to remember that, contrary to the situation in World War Two, the Jews were in a
far better position in Germany than elsewhere, particularly Russia. In Eastern Europe, World
War One was characterised by pogroms against and official ‘ethnic cleansing’ of, variously,
Jews, Muslims and Christians, or Serbs, Greeks and Armenians.

5 Martial Traditions
Related to this fear of the other, there has always been a martial or warrior tradition within or
endorsed by most organised religions. Far from being something that died out with the advent
of civilization, it is there in modern world faiths, from Christian church parades to Japanese
state Shinto. However, this war was different, a factor brought home by the recent exhibition,
The Sikhs and the First World War, at London’s Brunei Gallery. 7 Sikhs made up a fifth of
the British Indian Army at the start of the war (but they were only 1% of the population of the
sub-continent). Young Sikh men were encouraged to join up by older women, expecting the
conflict to be over quickly and gloriously, mirroring the martial traditions of the former Sikh
Empire. The young women were more likely to want their husbands and brothers to stay,
fearing the worst. As it turned out, the war was protracted and loss of life higher than
expected. Perhaps there was greater wisdom in youth on that occasion.

6 Cognitive Dissonance
For many British men, going to war meant greater freedom than staying at home, as long as
you ignored the fighting. The discipline of military life was no worse than that of agricultural
labour or factory work, and not necessarily more dangerous. It was probably as dangerous on

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a daily basis for those women at home, who worked in munitions factories, as it was for men
at the front.

This freedom is one reason why many veterans looked back fondly to their time in the war;
they were taken away from all the restrictions of home life and given a whole new set of
friends with whom to expand their horizons. Put aside the risk of being killed or maimed,
easily done until it happens to you or to those around you, and the fact that you are there to
kill and maim other people, easily done if the enemy is demonized, and you can treat the
whole thing as a holiday.

A Perspective on the Aftermath and Legacy of War

Coming from my own, Pagan perspective, I cannot claim to be a pacifist. I would like to be
and I admire those who can make that claim, but I would be prepared to resist attack or
invasion. Furthermore, peace is not possible without justice and that requires people to stand
up and say ‘no’; sometimes that is not without violence, however undesirable.

Norwich has its own example of this, in Kett’s Rebellion of 1549. A popular call for justice
turned violent, largely because of the attitude of the royal herald, and resulted in over 3000
deaths. But it did also effectively force the tentative beginnings of national poor relief. 8

There is no such thing as a just war: sometimes justified, but never just. It is always an evil
thing, but sometimes, rarely, it is the lesser of two evils. Was World War One justified? For
the Central Powers? No. For Britain? Maybe, in as much as it was in defence of Belgium. In
as much as it was in defence of Empire, no.

I return to the three quotes from before:

 “They shall not pass”;
 “I know now that patriotism is not enough. It is not enough to love one’s own people:
one must love all men, and hate none.”
 “We shall have to fight another war all over again in 25 years.”

Lloyd George was being optimistic. War came again just 20 years later. And the Second
World War was in so many ways a result of the first. The nationalistic tensions in the heart of
Europe remained unresolved; the world economy was plunged into recession as a result of
war expenditure and destruction; and the shock of industrialised total war produced a new,
nihilistic, unfeeling modernism. All of these contributed to the rise of totalitarianism.

This perhaps made another war inevitable and there was certainly greater justification for the
involvement of the Allied Nations in containing totalitarianism, even if one of those was itself
a totalitarian empire. But had there not been a First World War, would there have been a Nazi
Reich? Perhaps by fighting the First World War we ensured that there would be a second. We
did not have the vision, in 1919, to see beyond the hatred and recriminations, and find a way
of moving beyond war as a tool of international politics.

And it is not just the Second World War that can be traced to the first. That other totalitarian
empire, the Soviet Union, an ally when convenient, became the bogey man afterwards. The
Cold War lasted nearly half a century and then the collapse of the Soviet bloc allowed old

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enmities to resurface. There are worrying parallels between the activities of the Russian
Federation today and those of Germany before the First World War.

Furthermore, the lines drawn in the Middle East after World War One, to the benefit of
European powers, left a legacy of nationalistic and imperial tensions that have festered ever
since.

Whether, collectively, we could have had the necessary vision in 1919 is a moot point. A
hundred years on, there is no excuse. The two World Wars – or indeed ‘The War of the
World’, as Niall Ferguson describes the period between the start of the Russo-Japanese war in
1904 and the partitioning of Korea in 1953 – marked a turning point in human history.
Previously, the human race was able to behave selfishly without irreversible damage to its
future prospects. However bad the injustice, inhumanity and environmental degradation, the
effects were localized and we could move on to another place, another resource, another new
frontier. We could plunder unashamedly and the world would carry on, for those fortunate
enough to be in the ruling elite at any rate. We could react to resistance by waging war.

These are not luxuries we can afford any longer. There are too many of us and too few new
frontiers. We are overloading the Earth’s natural resources and capacity to adapt. The issues
that used to be regional are now global. Everything is inter-linked. That is nothing new – all
of life has always been linked together – but recognition of this fact is now critical to our
survival as a civilized species.

Sadly, that recognition is slow to dawn. Instead of holding back the devastating climatic
changes we have engendered, we choose to wage war to ensure supplies of fossil oil, and
claim it is humanitarianism. We invest power in global corporations and take it from the
hands of people trying to earn a living from the soil. We spend scarce resources on machines
to deal death, on fast travel for the well-off, on bio-technology to keep profits in the West, but
it seems we can’t afford healthy food, decent healthcare, meaningful education and personal
self-fulfilment – even in this country, let alone for the majority of the world’s population.

The Consequences of Our Actions and Our Assumptions

Everything is linked on a spiritual as well as a mundane level. We each add our threads as the
destiny of humanity is woven. We must weave with care, for seemingly small variations can
alter the entire cloth, there are so many of us involved. If the pattern becomes too chaotic, the
cloth may be unwoven and the threads dispersed.

An example of such lack of care can be seen in the language we use, in relation to the current
situation in the Middle East, promulgated unthinkingly by our news media. There is in fact no
such organisation as ‘ISIS’. The actual Arabic name is al-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fī al-Irāq wa-
al-Shām, which translates as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’. 9 The ‘S’ used in ‘ISIS’
comes from al- Shām, actually an area much larger than Syria. The organisation now, in any
case, goes by the simpler name of Islamic State. Far from being a pedantic concern for
accuracy in translation, this is an issue of inter-faith concern, as Isis is the name of the Great
Goddess of the Eastern Mediterranean and the use of the name for an organisation
specialising in terror and fundamentalism causes a great deal of bad feeling amongst Her
modern-day devotees. As an analogy, if the organisation were called something like the
‘Jihadist Empire of Syria Under Sharia’, would we be so free with the acronym?

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This is a microcosm of a wider issue: a widespread assumption that Britain and Europe are
essentially Christian. An assumption of European Christianity (formally, if not at heart) led to
the Kaiser calling for suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The rebellion was a
reaction against Western imperialism, which brought Christianity with it, and was indeed
barbaric, but whether more so than the German invasion of Belgium 14 years later is a matter
for debate.

Similarly, there was popular disquiet at the absence of Christian religious references on the
Whitehall Cenotaph. Still today there is a widespread assumption that Britain, if it has to
acknowledge this superstitious thing called religion at all, is basically Christian, despite the
fact that Western culture owes as much to pre-Christian, pagan influences as Christian, that
much of its architectural splendour was financed by Jews, and that much of its wisdom and
scholarship was transmitted to the Renaissance through Islam, to say nothing of the influence
of more recent and more exotic cultural streams.

Last Thoughts: A Commonwealth of Faiths?

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the British Empire, involvement in World War One
brought a new sense of common purpose to British colonies. The Empire was in terminal
decline, but it would be replaced by a Commonwealth of nations.

It was to the credit of the British Government in 1920 that Sir Edwin Lutyens’ permanent
Cenotaph was not required to refer to any specific faith, as the dead were of many faiths.
Today we live in a still more multicultural society, but one in which religion itself is
challenged by fundamentalist materialism. The ‘one true way’ approach is no longer tenable.
Every route to the Divine is valid and the enlightened approach surely is to help the seeker to
find the right path for them.

If the challenge of scientific materialism has done one good thing for religion and community
cohesion, it is that it allows us to see our sacred truths as true in a different way to scientific
truth – which means that other people’s sacred truths can also be true at the same time.

Perhaps the new religions of the State are money and scientific materialism (an unholy
combination, perhaps). If so, that at least allows us the freedom to celebrate the diversity of
our religious traditions and take common cause with one another, without secular power
supporting one or other fundamentalism.

Whether we can set aside confessional differences to forge a ‘Commonwealth of Faiths’ and
so make a difference on the world stage, or whether we are doomed to see yet more sectarian
warfare, I will leave to later discussion.

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Notes
1 Jackson Browne (1986) Lives in the Balance, from the album of the same name,
Elektra/Asylum/WEA 7559-60457-2.
2 There are other versions of this quotation; this one comes from Katie Pickles' book
Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007, p. 40. She is citing the account of Rev. H. Stirling Gahan from the
archives at the Imperial War Museum.
3 See Andrew Crompton (1997) The Secret of the Cenotaph, AA Files 34, pp. 64-67 (the
journal of the Architectural Association School of Architecture); available in updated
form from http://www.cromp.com (accessed 23rd November 2014).
4 Whilst the flowering of modern Paganism occurred after the Second World War, there
were people following consciously Pagan paths even in the late 19th century, for
instance many members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Like
Theosophists at the time, most would have practised dual observance and expressed
their religion publicly as (generally) Christian.
5 See Nicholas Wade (2009) The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it
Endures, Penguin.
6 Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform (below).
7 See http://www.empirefaithwar.com/exhibition (accessed 23rd November 2014).
8 After the Rebellion, a compulsory Poor Rate had been established in Norwich to calm
tensions, following the example of one in London in 1547. When Catholic
sympathisers staged a revolt in 1570, the Mayor, John Aldrich, rapidly established a
new Poor Rate to pay for institutional poor relief in a direct challenge to what was
perceived as indiscriminate ‘popish’ almsgiving, and to reduce the perceived threat
that the revolt would gain momentum by attracting the support of the many vagrants
that were perceived as coming to Norwich as an easy place to get hand-outs (in
popular politics plus ça change…). The political success of this measure led, just two
years later, to its architect being given the opportunity to make the Norwich system
the model for the first national Poor Law, at the instigation of the Archbishop of
Canterbury – Norwich-born Matthew Parker, who had preached (against rebellion) in
Kett’s camp in 1549. See Matthew Reynolds (2005) Godly Reformers and their
Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich c. 1560-1643, Boydell.
9 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant (accessed
23rd November 2014) as a starting point.

General Sources and Further Reading

 Cowles, Virginia (1963) The Kaiser, Collins.
 Ferguson, Niall (2006) The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the
Descent of the West, Penguin.
 Ferguson, Niall (1998) The Pity of War, Allen Lane / Penguin.
 Kramer, Alan (2007) Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First
World War, Oxford University Press.
 Strachan, Hew (2014) The First World War: A New History, Simon & Schuster.
 Wilkinson, Alan (1986) Dissent or Conform: War, Peace and the English Churches
1900-1945, SCM Press.
 Willmott, H.P. (2014) World War 1, second edition, Dorling Kindersley.