A Church Militant
Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War
By Michael Snape
Oxford, 512 pages, $115
Michael Snape, Durham University’s Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies, has published a fifth book on religion and war in the Anglophone world. In A Church Militant, Snape examines the relationship between Anglicans and the armed forces, the military heritage and history of the Anglican Communion, and the changing cultural landscape from the mid-Victorian period to the 1970s.
The author takes the challenging legacy of the Church of England seriously in the 21st century, engaging imperial expansion, colonization, and various culture wars. In this book, based on his 2020 Hensley Henson Lectures at Oxford University, Snape charts a historical perspective on the Anglican experience of war and conflict in a century or so between the first and 11th Lambeth Conferences, a period in which the world changed so dramatically, and the Anglican Communion with it. As a postscript, Snape gives a current analysis of the war in Ukraine.
Snape surveys two centuries of Anglo-American military history and breaks it into five sections: “The Nineteenth-Century Inheritance,” “The First World War,” “The Second World War,” “The Cold War,” and “Remembrance and Memorialization.”
The first section deals with the imperial identity of Anglicanism and the growing strength of “Christian Militarism” in the late Victorian period within the Church of England, the Church of Ireland, and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.
The second section examines the Anglican episcopates’ vast ministerial oversight of large and remote expeditionary units during World War I, with bishops and military chaplains traversing the globe to support sailors and soldiers in various theaters of war.
The third section considers the pacifist and anti-war sentiments that swept Western Anglicanism during the interwar period (1918-39) leading into World War II. Snape convincingly argues here that, though the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt gave symbolic strength to inter-Anglican and Anglo-American resolve, it was the leadership of World War I veterans (including chaplains) that gave credibility to Anglican ministry among civilians, as well as in the armed forces.
The fourth section delves into the loosening relationship between Western Anglicans and their respective armed forces in light of changing modern warfare with the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher successfully bound Anglicanism in Britain’s nuclear-era armed forces more closely to the life of the civilian Church of England. For the Episcopal Church, the “long 1960s” — and the Vietnam War in particular — helped to undo its historic ascendancy in America’s armed forces.
The final section focuses on the role Anglicans played in shaping the culture of Remembrance in Great Britain, the Dominions, and the United States, especially in the decade after the Armistice of November 1918.
Snape masterfully draws us in by chronicling the many faithful and courageous military chaplains who played a vital role in curing souls in their charge. He spotlights the efforts of Frank Russell Barry, Bishop of Southwell and Temporary Chaplain to the Forces on the Western Front (1916-18). Barry’s gallantry and devotion to duty earned him a Distinguished Service Order during the Battle of Somme for his attending to soldiers under heavy fire with courage and determination.
He also underscores the ministry of Harry William Blackburne, Royal Army chaplain (1903-24), whose sharp ecumenical spirit led to the spiritual readiness of sailors and soldiers of all denominations. Blackburne reimagined chaplaincy with the Royal Flying Corps, whose airfields, often scattered far behind enemy lines, did not easily fit into the evolving structures of Anglican chaplaincy.
Snape’s book concludes with a lament of the “lurid, flimsy stereotypes and patent misrepresentations about the church’s record in these war-time conflicts.” In our current cultural milieu, “there has been a growing dissonance between the style and idiom of Remembrance conceived after the First World War and the prevailing temper and orientation of a very different, twenty-first-century church.”
Burdened with a heavy sense of post-colonial guilt, views on war, peace, and the armed forces, in addition to nuclear-era pacifism in the wake of the Cold War, modern believers have found it all very complicated. In a Battle of Britain memorial service, Snape recalls Archbishop Robert Runcie saying, “Together, love of country, God, and mankind compose a vision which is worth working for and struggling for. This vision is never an anachronism.
”Snape calls the church to reconsider the evidence. In war, as in every other circumstance, God is ceaselessly at work, bringing some unique good out of the evil that has come to pass. Forced, like all human beings, to work out their destiny within a particular historical context, with only limited room for maneuvering, Anglican ministers have shown courage, nobility, and pity.
He quotes Michael Howard M.C., decorated veteran of World War II and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford: “The trouble is that if Christianity really is incompatible with war, we have to turn our backs on two thousand years of warring Christendom and assume that during those centuries, God was unaccountably withholding His Holy Spirit from His Church. No: God can only work through his creation. … The Church is inexorably part of its background, and of the society around it. It reflects and expresses the changing values and the conflicts of that society. God did not give any of us the power to transcend the cultural limits of our own times. He finds us as we are, and uses us as He sees fit.”
I found this book a rich, thoughtful, and compelling examination of Anglican chaplains in the armed forces and their lasting contribution to the larger church. Snape argues that chaplains working within the military are providing and revealing examples of God’s presence, activity, and above all love, in the most unexpected and unpromising circumstances.
