Despite dark fears of the totalitarian anti-Christ, the interwar Church of England actually believed that the primary danger to the civilised world came from war. Anglican leaders had been deeply scarred by the First World War, both by the complacency of their own nationalist rhetoric and by the horrors of the battlefield and the ‘lost generation’. As a consequence, the Church formed the backbone of anti-war feeling in Britain after 1920. This rejection of warfare culminated, in September 1938, in a celebration of the Munich agreement, both inside and outside the Anglican Church, as a divine deliverance from the ‘devil devised’ evils of modern warfare. Just a year later however, in September 1939, Britain and Nazi Germany were at war. The Church of England, in common with the majority of the wider nation, welcomed that conflict as righteous; Nazi totalitarianism had by then replaced war as the greatest threat to Christian civilisation.

This narrative raises many questions for our investigation of the Anglican understanding of Nazism. First, how did the Church reconcile its celebrations of Munich with the fact that it was, after all, an agreement with a force understood to be the enemy of Christianity? In other words how, in general, did Anglicans’ understanding of Nazism interact with their fears of war? Second, and more importantly, the Church's conversion from opponents to supporters of war requires explanation. What informed this moral revolution? What allowed Nazism to supersede war as the primary evil in the Anglican imagination? It has previously been argued that the violent attack on German Jews in November of 1938 precipitated the Anglican conversion; was this the case? And, if so, how did such violent antisemitism impact upon perceptions of Nazism as the antithesis of Christianity? By answering these questions, a fuller picture can be painted of the manner in which Nazism was publicly understood by the Anglican Church and set in the context of more general perceptions of the outside world. How far, for example, was the Anglican embrace of war symptom or cause of the more pessimistic view of the world that emerged from the crises of the 1930s?