For decades, the religious history of Great Britain in the two World Wars has languished in the shadows. Despite the impetus generated by the centenary of the First World War, there is no single, book-length study of British religion during either of these cataclysmic conflicts. As illustrated by Clive Field's recent bibliographical research, the popular and academic literature on British religion from 1914 to 1918, and from 1939 to 1945, is extensive but disparate and distinctly patchy. For example, the historiography of Scottish and Welsh Christianity in the Second World War is extremely meagre, even in comparison to what little coverage exists for the First. (In this regard, the emergence of new research on religion in Northern Ireland – which is not a focus of this book – during the Second World War seems an encouraging sign.) In addition to a common, regional focus, much of the existing literature concentrates on specific denominations, on church leadership, or on the growth of progressive causes such as Christian pacifism and the ecumenical movement, tendencies reflected in Andrew Chandler's recent British Christians and the Third Reich (2022). Though such studies are illuminating, this nevertheless means that a broader, more integrated national picture remains elusive for both conflicts.

However, if religion has at least been retrieved from the periphery of the historiography of the First World War (a function of the decades-long ‘War on Terror’, as well as its centenary), the same cannot be said of the Second. From a global perspective, and whereas the three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War (2014) included a wide-ranging essay by Adrian Gregory on ‘Beliefs and Religion’, the three-volume Cambridge History of the Second World War, published the following year, confined itself to an essay on ‘The Muslim World in the Second World War’. Even where historians have grappled with the Christian world, and with Christian Europe especially, the results have shed little light on the British situation. Lacking the added drama of totalitarianism, occupation, and the unfolding horrors of the Holocaust on the ground, Andrew Chandler's essay for the nine-volume Cambridge History of Christianity (2006) considered ‘Catholicism and Protestantism in the Second World War in Europe’, but mainly to the exclusion of Great Britain, while Jan Bank and Lieve Gevers’ Churches and Religion in the Second World War (2016) consciously restricted its coverage to the continental side of the English Channel.

This essay challenges tenacious ‘orthodoxies’ held by historians, moralists and religious pundits alike – namely that, ever since the British army came into being around the turn of the eighteenth century, the British soldier, and especially the ordinary or ‘common’ soldier, has had scant use for organised or even orthodox religion. What religion he possessed (and it was, overwhelmingly, a case of ‘he’) was suffered as an imposition (in the form of the unsolicited attention of chaplains, forced attendance at public worship or the notorious rigmarole of the much-resented ‘church parade’); or was nurtured through the ministry of zealous evangelical ladies (operating from their evangelising and civilising soldiers’ homes); or was so promiscuously eclectic as to be wildly at odds with orthodox standards of belief (as manifested in colourful discourses and practices centred on fatalism and luck).

Introduction

In the previous chapters, we have seen how religious life in America's armed forces in World War II was shaped and influenced by their chaplaincy systems, by their commanders, traditions and institutional cultures, by political imperatives surrounding the draft, and by a plethora of concerned civilian organisations. We now turn to the sixteen million men and women who served during the war, the overwhelming majority of whom were not military professionals and whose wartime religious outlook and experience owed at least as much to their civilian backgrounds as to the conditions of service life. Consequently, this chapter shows how key features of civilian religious life were reflected in the military, sometimes to a degree that belied the image of the US Army in particular as an all-American melting pot. Hence, this chapter will draw attention to such constant factors as the relative religiosity of Catholics, of African Americans and of women, the fundamental importance of home and family to American religious life, and the effects of inducting large numbers of the religiously committed into the army and navy. The chapter also examines how devotional tastes and religious traits – notably hymn-singing, scripture-reading and self-reliance – translated into military life and even flourished under wartime conditions. Finally, it illustrates the limits to which the military environment could influence civilian habits and preconceptions, showing that the insistent military rhetoric of religious tolerance was often much more in evidence than its reality, and that the cross-currents of religious conflict posed a persistent problem throughout the war years.

Civilian imprints

Despite the efforts of the chaplaincy services, the American armed forces in the interwar years had not been widely recognised for their piety and clean-living. While soldiering in particular, with its oppressive emphasis on conformity and subordination, was widely regarded as ‘a fundamentally un-American activity’, the mores of army life were hardly those of respectable society. Paydays at army posts were often marked by binges of gambling and drinking (the latter unchecked by Prohibition), and by the descent of droves of prostitutes. As if to highlight the army as a staging post to hell, at Clark Field an illicit gambling racket was even run by an erstwhile Franciscan who was known to his clients as ‘Padre’.

TEN years after the end of World War II, the Jewish theologian and sociologist Will Herberg published Protestant–Catholic–Jew, a seminal study of religion in contemporary America. As Herberg saw it, and although there had been no federal census of religious bodies since 1936, there was every indication that organised religion was booming by the mid-1950s. ‘That there has in recent years been an upswing of religion in the United States can hardly be doubted’, he wrote, ‘the evidence is diverse, converging, and unequivocal beyond all possibilities of error.’ With Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism now functioning as ‘equi-legitimate’ expressions of American religion, a prime indicator of national religious vitality was the pervasiveness of religious self-identification. When requested to state a religious preference, ‘95 per cent of the American people’ chose to identify themselves as Protestants, Catholics or Jews; in other words, so Herberg explained, ‘virtually the entire body of the American people, in every part of the country and in every section of society, regard themselves as belonging to some religious community’. Nor did the irreligious – or simply reticent – pose any kind of threat to this strong religious consensus, for the dominant trend of religious belonging had ‘led to the virtual disappearance of anti-religious prejudice’; as Herberg put it: ‘The old-time “village atheist” is a thing of the past, a folk curiosity like the town crier.’

However, the key indicator of what Herberg billed as ‘The Contemporary Upswing in Religion’ was the growing number of Americans who were now deemed to be church members. By 1953, they amounted to 59.5 per cent of the population, ‘marking an all-time high in the nation's history’. However, even this landmark statistic failed to do justice to the true vitality of American religiosity for, as Herberg stressed, ‘considerably more Americans regard themselves as church members than the statistics of church affiliation would indicate’.