On the 28th of June 1914 in the Bosnian capitol of Sarajevo a young Serb, Gavrilo Princip, fired a pistol at The Archduke of Austria, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, killing them both. His actions lit a long time primed fuse that led to war. A war that, according to some scholars, did not end until 1945. A war that changed not only Europe, but the entire world as well. A war that is still with us, even today.

Philip Jenkins has written an excellent book on the role that religion played in World War I. Both sides invoked the name of God in championing their cause, both used biblical analogies and loaded medieval words to describe the other. Jenkins goes into detail to describe how and why this was done. With this being the centennial year there are already several very good books on the causes for and the stages of the war. In order to understand some of the emotional and spiritual motivation for the war, make room for this very good book. ( )

In "The Great and Holy War", Philip Jenkins, professor of history at Baylor University and one of the leading American scholars in religious history and the confluence of religion, politics and popular culture, provides a masterful study of the powerful influence of religion on those who waged and experienced the First World War. In his eloquent narrative, he cites numerous examples of religion being enlisted on behalf of the war effort on each side in the form of propaganda. He also shows how religious feeling, without deliberate state intent, sprang up among the people of the various nations at war. And he examines the effect of the Great War on religious thought and religious-cultural politics among the world's major monotheistic faiths, with consequences that persist to the present day.

Jenkins first describes the almost euphoric atmosphere that prevailed in Europe in August 1914 upon the beginning of the Great War. In each of the major combatant powers, there was a burst of nationalism and the assumption that the war would be glorious and short, culminating in victory for "our" side. At first, all the nations at war were Christian countries, even if some of them, such as France, did not have a state church, so they all asserted that God and Jesus favored them in the war. In the German army, the troops marched to the front wearing belt buckles engraved with the motto "Gott mit Uns" (God with Us). On each side, the war effort was soon elevated above mere nationalistic aims to the level of an holy cause, a crusade. The propaganda of the combatants began to depict their soldiers as Christian warriors fighting for a righteous cause and the enemy as evil and even satanic.

It wasn't long before mystical visions and spiritual apparitions began to stoke religious fervor on behalf of the war effort. The outnumbered British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fought a battle against the German Army at the edge of the Mons Canal in Belgium in August 1914, holding back the invaders for a day and inflicting heavy casualties on them before the BEF was forced to resume its retreat into northern France. About a month later, an account of the battle in a British newspaper mentioned that it was fought not far from the battlefield of Agincourt, where in 1415 on Saint Crispin's Day, the longbowmen in Henry V's badly outnumbered army had cut down the charging French knights and won the battle for England against all odds. This evocation the memory of the British archers at Agincourt was soon turned into the myth of the spectral longbowmen who appeared in the sky above Mons to help the BEF hold back the Germans. It also inspired the "Angel of Mons", attached to a statue above the ruins of a church in the village of Mons that was said to provide divine protection to Allied troops in the vicinity.

The Great War, as Jenkins illustrates, revived national memories of former religious causes. Although the French republic had formally established the separation of church and state in 1905, the Roman Catholic Church was still a powerful institution in France and Catholicism was revived as an element of national identity, even for the many non-believers and lapsed Catholics, during the war. The memory of Joan of Arc was particularly strong and was encouraged by the normally secular government. There was also a belief, held by many, that the souls of French soldiers killed in defense of the nation, would rise again to help their living comrades continue the fight to drive the enemy from the soil of France.

In Germany, where Martin Luther had launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517, there was a strong sense that German Christianity was superior to all other sects, such as Catholicism (although there was a large Catholic minority in Germany), the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Church of England. German religious propaganda portrayed France as godless, decadent and depraved and England as materialistic, under Jewish control and innately dishonest. In German propaganda, their soldiers were depicted as Christian knights, like those of crusader times, fighting to redeem Europe from barbarism.

As the war dragged on and the death toll mounted into the millions, apocalyptic visions began to enter into religious and spiritual thinking on the conflict. As Jenkins notes, several evangelists, novelists and film makers began to speculate that the Great War was the final battle known as Armageddon as shown in the Book of Revelations. The capture of Jerusalem by a British army commanded by General Allenby in November 1917 was interpreted by many as a sign of prophecy foretelling the approach of the End of Times.

Jenkins explains that the Great War touched on the lives of millions of Jews and Muslims- and Hindus and Buddhists and the religions of sub-Saharan Africa as well. He concentrates on its impact on the Jewish and Islamic world, as that caused the most significant events and movements that affected the entire world in the following century. Nowhere else in Europe were the Jews treated as badly as in Russia under the old tsarist regime. This would prove to be a fatal weakness for that regime, and for the Allied cause in Russia during the Great War. Jews, including Leon Trotsky, were a major element in the Bolshevik Revolution that removed Russia from the Allied coalition in the winter of 1918.

Part of the British effort to keep Russia in the war was the Balfour Declaration, a statement by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in early November 1917 that the British Empire favored providing a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This statement didn't move the Russian Jews to save the Tsar, but it greatly encouraged the Zionists- and was used by them 31 years later to justify the establishment of the state of Israel.

The British enlisted hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Sikh troops in their armies in the Great War. They had to be careful not to offend them by referring to the war as a "crusade" in their presence. The Turks tried to appeal to Muslim solidarity by calling their war effort a "jihad", but this had little effect on British Muslim troops or on the rebel Arabs. While promising the Jews a home in Palestine, the British also promised the Arab chieftains of Arabia, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia that the Allies would support their claims for independence in return for their help in fighting the Turks. The betrayal of the Arabs, except for the House of Sa'ud, and the Palestinian Mandate are echoes of the Great War that haunt us to this day. ( )

I've long been fascinated by World War II and it has provided a focus of what I might call my "hobby reading" (aka, stuff I don't teach and likely never will but still fascinates me to no end). A good bit of that reading has focused on the lead-up to the war rather than the actual conflict...books like David Faber's "Munich, 1938" and Lynne Olson's "Those Angry Days" (both fine reads).

My reading so far, limited and scattered as it has been, has been enough to reveal what others most assuredly already know: You can't understand World War II without understanding World War I. In fact, I might go so far as to venture a renaming of these conflicts as "World War, PART I and World War, PART II." To point to the most obvious reason for this claim: It was certainly the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles that ended WW1 that laid the basic groundwork for the next iteration of world war just over 2 decades later.

So, I picked up Jenkins' book driven by the curiosity to better understand the forces that erupted into WW2; it just seemed logical, given my formal training and area of expertise, to begin with a theological analysis. And I quickly discovered that Jenkins' analysis of WW1 was teaching me a LOT more about America's "war on terror" than it was about WW2 (in fact, in his conclusion, Jenkins points out that a key difference between WW's 1 and 2 is the virtual absence of a justifying apocalyptic/religious rhetoric in WW2 era).

It took my breath away to compare Jenkins' chronicle of WW1 headlines with current viral articles about radicalized Islam that are circulating endlessly in my Facebook newsfeed....and no one wants to talk about the medieval Crusades anymore (I wonder why THAT is...). Clearly, each side saw itself as THE representative of the divine will and purpose, and such deluded propaganda fueled many of the extremities of that first international conflagration.

Though Jenkins analyzes the ROLE of religion in both sparking and perpetuating WW1, he does not stoop to BLAMING religion for the war. This is not another book about why religion is so "bad" for the world. Rather, it is an attempt to show how religious language has been (and is still being) abused to achieve decidedly unrelated political ends.

Probably the most enlightening chapter was on the post-WW1 fortunes of Islam; Jenkins does a phenomenal job of illuminating the current politico-religious structure of the Mid-East especially as a post-Ottoman Empire reality. Again, the focus is not on glib explanations or easy answers but on providing important background that helps us to grasp the complexity of current issues.

That may have been what I appreciated most about this book: Jenkins has a fine way of retelling history in ways that illuminate but do not over-simplify or become some sort of cheesy 3-step, how-to manual for "world peace and happiness." Even though Jenkins is a religious historian, he clearly grasps the interplay of socio-economic factors with that history and explicates those relationships in a way that is as profound as it is easy-to-understand, providing a book equally valuable to theologians and historians. ( )

5-6/14 B&C review entitled “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Joseph Loconte of The Great and Holy War by Philip Jenkins—my sum: the lack of (Christian) religion and the filling of that void by “progressivism” (the Great Myth, the Myth of Progress, “the belief implicit in Darwinian biology and popularized by Spencer, that Western civilization is marching inexorably forward. Humanity itself is evolving, maturing, advancing: here is the soaring metanarrative at the dawn of the 20th century”) and perverted nationalism led to the Great War (WW I).

This is a guest column by Joseph Loconte, associate professor of history at The King's College in New York City. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West (Lexington Press) and of the forthcoming God and the Great War: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and the Crisis of Faith in the Modern Age.

The war she had in mind was fought in the early 17th century. It has been called Europe's last religious war: the Thirty Years War.

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that ended the Thirty Years War promised to remove religion as a source of political strife.

Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, has written extensively about the growth of global Christianity. More controversially, in a recent comparative study of Islam and Christianity, he concluded that the teachings of the Qur'an are "far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible." In The Great and Holy War, Jenkins explores not only the faith-based character of World War I but also its aftermath. Drawing on important primary material, Jenkins lays bare the apocalyptic rhetoric that attended and inflamed the conflict. He provocatively suggests how the war transformed 20th-century religion, and is sober about the staying power of religious faith. Nevertheless, his treatment suffers from a tendency to give too much credit—or blame—to religious motivations at the expense of other, more worldly explanations [also religious].

Importantly, Jenkins correctly emphasizes that the leaders of liberal and "progressive" Christianity enthusiastically embraced the war as a righteous crusade. Germany is the supreme example, where liberal Protestantism, having rejected the historicity and divine authority of the Bible, had come to dominate the theological schools. "Such an approach is liberal in its openness to changing ideas and standards," writes Jenkins, "but the lack of any external absolutes allows the church to be swept along with contemporary political obsessions."

This is an immensely important insight, yet it omits a vital element of the story. The destructiveness of the war and the ideologies which it spawned were much less the product of religion and much more the result of a very secular idea: the Myth of Progress. It is the belief, implicit in Darwinian biology and popularized by Spencer, that Western civilization is marching inexorably forward. Humanity itself is evolving, maturing, advancing: here is the soaring metanarrative at the dawn of the 20th century. Thus, even a force as inherently destructive as war, in enlightened hands, could have regenerative effects. This secular vision of human destiny captured the imagination of a generation on the eve of war. "I grew up believing in this Myth and I have felt—I still feel—its almost perfect grandeur," wrote C. S. Lewis in "The Funeral of a Great Myth."

It is certainly true that World War I cleared the ground for their rapid growth, but only because the "Christian" nations of Europe had nearly succeeded in committing mass suicide, leaving a generation of disillusioned Europeans ripe for the picking.

Aided by the Myth of Progress, the nation-state replaced religion as an ultimate source of meaning for many Europeans (and Americans) during this period.

This is a guest column by Joseph Loconte, associate professor of history at The King's College in New York City. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West (Lexington Press) and of the forthcoming God and the Great War: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and the Crisis of Faith in the Modern Age.