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The Imagined Crusade: The Church of England and the Mythology of Nationalism and Christianity during the Great War1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Shannon Ty Bontrager
Affiliation:
doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Georgia State University.

Extract

The Church of England, being the state church of an imperial nation of diverse peoples and creeds, had to contend with provocative controversies in the early twentieth century leading up to the First World War. Perhaps the greatest was secularization, which gained momenturn in the previous century.2 The last fifty years of the nineteenth century proved threatening for church leaders. Horace Mann's 1851 religious census in England and Wales, although controversial, insinuated church attendance was much lower in Great Britain than previously perceived. Causing more anxiety, the State Church consistently lost authority over many of its traditions, including administering burial grounds and the last rights ceremony.3 Additionally Ecclesiastical courts gave up authority to the civic courts of British society.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2002

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References

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7. Ibid., 7.

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27. Ibid., 121.

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30. Ibid., 162.

31. Ibid., 179.

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43. Ibid., 42.

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46. Ibid.

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49. Ibid., 971. Media such as the cinema could extend the church's influence to those who read little or not at all.

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60. Benson, A. C., “St. George,” The Quiver 51 (05 1916): 611–12Google Scholar. St. George ventured to Africa to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. While in Africa, he came across a tribe that perpetually offered young maidens as a sacrifice to a fire-breathing dragon. If the tribe could not produce a sacrifice to the dragon, it would destroy the tribe's village. St. George volunteered to fight the dragon and succeeded in slaying it. A. C. Benson was part of the “‘Edwardian’ literary establishment” as Samuel Hynes described him. Benson was summoned to the Department of Information, a government sanctioned propaganda office, by its head C. F. G. Masterman early in the war. Interestingly, this bit of information identifies Benson as part of the official British propaganda machine and his article in The Quiver should be seen as both church literature and government propaganda. Samuel, Hynes, A War Imagined, 26.Google Scholar

61. Ibid., 614. This message also included women. Mythological feminine figures further highlighted the moral righteousness of Britain. Men dominated as symbols of chivalric British soldiers, but women in mythology also symbolized a sense of chivalry, Christianity, and British nationalism. Numerous depictions of the “Angels of Mons” show apparitions of female angels guiding and defending Britain's finest in time of battle. There were several variations on this theme. Women carried the moral righteousness to the soldiers from God and were responsible to maintain and distribute that integrity. The male roles were to defend the nation against evil, but they gained that right to fight from divine intervention, which was delivered through virtuous women. Women in mythology typified anti-modernism; a spirit of purity and virtue, based in faith not science, that delivered to men the moral legitimacy to fight against immorality. But the image also commented on domestic immorality, as John Williams's The Other Battleground points out, large numbers of civilians trying to escape the spirit of war indulged in sex, alcohol, and gambling. As a response, the Church relied on Victorian feminine morality through mythological symbols to promote traditional gender identities rather than modern ones.

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65. “Our Young People's Pages,” The Quiver 51 (August 1916): 928.Google Scholar

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68. Anne, Summer, “Edwardian Militarism,” in Raphael, Samuel ed. Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London: Routledge, 1989), 1: 254.Google Scholar