The Church in the Modern Age

The I.B.Tauris History of the Christian Church

Jeremy Morris

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780857735614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Given the diversity and complexity of developments in the twentieth century, a history of the Christian Church in the modern period is in some ways the most challenging volume of all to write. But Jeremy Morris succeeds in presenting a coherent account of the Church. He emphasises the changing relationship of Western churches to the many forms of Christianity in other parts of the world, while also departing from the Eurocentric worldview of previous histories. His volume offers three major perspectives. The first is political, in which the history of the modern Church is assessed through a prism of international conflicts and international relations. The second perspective is regional, in which coverage is given not only to Europe and the Americas, but to Christianity in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Rim and Australasia. The author's third major perspective is institutional, in which he discusses particular Christian traditions and their relationships with each other, with other faiths and with wider cultures. An epilogue evaluates the future and prospects for Christianity in the new millennium.

PART I

1914 TO 1945: THE CRISIS
OF IMPERIALISM

CHAPTER 1

From Imperial Wars to
Wars of Ideology

The outbreak of the First World War

The First World War was the greatest of the wars of European imperialism. Turkey’s alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary drew it into conflict with the ‘Entente Cordiale’ powers of Britain, France and Russia in the Middle East. There was fighting in Africa because Germany had four African colonies. There was little fighting in Asia, although Japan seized the opportunity to invade a clutch of small German colonies. Naval warfare carried fighting around the globe, and the entry of the United States into the war in 1917 widened the conflict even further. The nature of the ‘Great War’ as a war between imperialisms was confirmed by the presence of colonial troops on the Western Front. Nearly half a million French colonial soldiers fought alongside French troops. Few troops from British territories in Africa, with the exception of South Africa, fought in Europe, partly because they were engaged in prolonged fighting against German colonial forces. Britain’s great source of overseas manpower was India, which supplied almost a third of the troops fighting in France by the end of 1914. Over a million Indian troops fought for Britain outside the sub-continent during the war. Even more troops came from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada.

It was also the greatest of the wars of imperialist Christianity. Churches lined up solidly behind their governments. In Russia, Orthodox clergy blessed icons carried by regiments departing for the front, said prayers for the protection of Holy Mother Russia and spurred on their congregations in support for the war. An American reporter on the Eastern Front in 1914 was mesmerized by the impressive figure of an Orthodox priest blessing an assembled regiment of Russian soldiers:

With golden hair hanging down to his shoulders, and a head transfigured with the light of one lifted above earthly matters, he stood in all his gorgeous robes before six stacked rifles, the bayonets of which served to support the Holy Bible and the golden cross that symbolizes the Christian faith. With eyes turned in rapture to the cold leaden heavens above him, the priest seemed a figure utterly detached from the earth.

In their systematic persecution of Christianity, the Bolsheviks later were to make much of the Russian Orthodox Church’s unquestioning support for the Tsarist regime and its entry into the war. The shifty, obsequious, bearded Orthodox priest was to be a staple caricature of Soviet anti-religious propaganda, from the crudest broadsheet to the films of Sergei Eisenstein. But much the same point could be made against the clergy in Germany, in Austria-Hungary, in France and in Britain. If church leaders had any doubts about the wisdom of the conflict, mostly they were silent. The fervently militaristic Bishop of London, Winnington-Ingram, preached in military uniform to departing troops and notoriously called on them to kill the Germans, good and bad. All the French bishops, declares one historian, were united in their conviction that the war was holy. The Bishop of Arras told troops in December 1917, ‘You are modern crusaders. … You fight with God’.¹

One of the most disturbing aspects of the war to later generations was that it was fought mostly by religious people. Both sides used the language of crusade, the French and British in defence of innocent Belgium against the barbaric ‘Hun’ invaders, the Germans and Austrians in defence of Christian civilization against the barbaric hordes of Russia and the mixed race barbarism of the British Empire. These sentiments were not restricted to Europe. They were shared throughout the church elites of overseas colonial possessions, though these elites were mostly white and European themselves. In Australia, for example, the leadership of the Anglican Church (which called itself the ‘Church of England in Australia’ until 1962) wholly accepted the common British view of imperial destiny. As one Tasmanian bishop put it in 1923, ‘If there is a feature in the British character upon the possession of which we pride ourselves, it is our instinctive love of freedom and truthfulness.’ A manifesto in support of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German war aims was signed by 93 German intellectuals, including many leading Protestant theologians, on the day war broke out. The appalled Karl Barth, noting the names of many of his theology teachers among the signatories, was later famously to comment that ‘they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war’.²

It was only as the war ground to a halt on the Western Front late in 1914, and the casualties mounted relentlessly through 1915 and 1916, that public perceptions of the war began to change. Horror at the impact of the technology of modern war – the use of mustard gas from early 1915, for example, aerial bombardment, long-range artillery, the tank – gradually replaced a naive pride in technological progress. The staggering scale of losses sustained in trench warfare, when the machine gun ruled the battlefield, inevitably strained arguments about sacrifice, duty and honour. This was to engender cynicism about the motives of Christian leaders of all persuasions in due course, even though the common soldier often voiced his horror and fear in explicitly religious terms. One British soldier, facing the prospect of action on the Western Front in 1917, prayed and ‘gathered strength and a little calmness from the thought that in greater Hands than man’s lay the decision of life and death’. That was a common enough sentiment. But it did not include respect for the Church as an institution. Mounting criticism of church leaders was offset by admiration for the work of military chaplains and priests at the front, but only partially so. In the armies of secular France, for example, priests were obliged to serve as regular soldiers (if mostly in the non-combatant role of nurse, stretcher-bearer or chaplain), an arrangement that in principle was at odds with their canonical standing, but which enormously enhanced their standing with their fellow soldiers.

Yet for all that the war was defended and justified by church leaders on both sides, one of the most salient facts about it was that it was not a war about religion. On the Entente side, an officially secular France with a predominantly Catholic population was allied to Orthodox Russia and to religiously pluralist (if mainly Protestant) Britain. On the other side the predominantly Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire, which included substantial Orthodox and other minorities, was allied to the religiously mixed German Empire and to the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The war arose from international rivalries and mutual suspicions that had little or nothing to do with religion and everything to do with national security. Its origins lay above all in Austrian fears about Russian intervention in the deeply unstable countries of the Balkans, and in the growing German conviction that its only sure defence against encirclement in Europe was to initiate a ‘two front’ conflict and knock out France before the cumbersome Russian armies could mobilize fully against the German Empire. In these circumstances, nothing church leaders could say or do would have had much effect on events. Even the Vatican was divided over the war, with a strong pro-German and Austrian faction counterbalanced by Italian nationalist suspicions of Austria.

Even so the religious effects of the war were considerable. The catastrophe of defeat and social disintegration in Russia led to the collapse of the Tsarist regime in early 1917 and then the Bolshevik Revolution in October of that year. This was to pitch the Russian Orthodox Church into a situation of prolonged and savage persecution. It also prompted an Orthodox diaspora throughout the non-communist world. In Central Europe, if the collapse of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern empires did not fundamentally challenge the existence of the churches, still it marked in Germany itself the ending of vestiges of state Lutheranism (but not the church tax), and more importantly it created an acute resentment of defeat that was to simmer into radical, right-wing nationalism. So entrenched was the resentment of defeat, and the accompanying conviction (which had some merit) that the Versailles settlement of 1919 was unjust to Germany, that the churches were to find it extraordinarily difficult to recognize Nazism for the cult of hatred and murder it was until it was too late to do much about it. Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, later to die at the Nazis’ hands and thereby to earn a reputation as a modern martyr, shared the almost universal German dismay at defeat and the injustice of the settlement. As Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a theologian exiled from Germany during the Nazi years, was to say of the Great War: ‘[It] educated our German people to peace, [but] this peace educated it to war.’ ³ In Italy, if military honour was partially salvaged after the disastrous Battle of Caporetto in 1917 by territorial gains as the war ended, the losses of the Caporetto campaign helped to create the mood of disillusionment on which Mussolini’s fascisti would draw. In Britain and France the terrible losses on the Western Front may have engendered among soldiers themselves a deepening scepticism about the competence and motives of their superior officers. But back home, after the war, they were folded into a national cult of heroic sacrifice that drew much on Christian culture and iconography. Many thinking Christians were appalled, retrospectively, by the way the war seemed to have spiralled out of control, and lent their support to movements of pacifism and internationalism – laudable in themselves, but hardly the material out of which serious resistance to fascism might have been moulded. In Britain the Peace Pledge Union, launched by the former army chaplain Dick Sheppard in 1934 – the year after Hitler came to power – achieved over 100,000 members by 1937 and undertook ‘to renounce war and never again support another’. Were the lessons of history ever misread so disastrously?

We should not neglect the wider political and economic consequences of the war. Four empires of the old Europe fell – the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman. In their place new national states came into being. But many of these were inherently unstable, containing minority groups rapidly disillusioned with government by the dominant ethnic and linguistic communities of their lands. The British and French empires appeared, on the contrary, not simply victorious but augmented by acquisitions in Africa and the Middle East. But this was illusory. The real story of the First World War was the beginning of the emergence of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The economic indices pointed relentlessly that way. The war exhausted the financial reserves of Europe, but it was a major benefactor to America. In 1914 the American economy was already the largest in the world. The four economies which had led the world in economic growth in the early years of the twentieth century – Belgium, Britain, France and Germany – suffered ruinous losses. War thus handed America a huge business opportunity. Its surplus in international trade soared from $56 million to $352 million during the war years, and it became a net exporter of capital for the first time in 1919. This change in the balance of economic power was fraught with implications for the future. So too was the emergence of the Soviet Union, with its huge reserves of manpower and raw materials. But the significance of these developments was concealed by the withdrawal of the United States from European affairs after the war, and by the exclusion of Germany and the Soviet Union from the new League of Nations. Nevertheless the end was in sight for European imperialism. That much was evident too in the colonies themselves, where independence movements began to gain momentum in the years after the war. The Christianity of old Europe, rooted by missionary endeavour in the soils of overseas empire, faced a bleak future there.

The postwar settlement

The ‘Versailles’ settlement of 1919 was a series of treaties and agreements that varied greatly in scope and in durability. Its prospects were undermined almost from the very beginning by the one-sided burden of reparations imposed on Germany, by the (self-willed) exclusion of the Soviet Union from negotiations and by the failure of Woodrow Wilson to convince the United States to join the new League of Nations as guarantor of international peace and stability. At the centre of the settlement in Europe was the principle of national autonomy. It is difficult to see the years 1918 to 1939 as anything other than a troubled interlude in one long period of worldwide conflict. But in the early years after the Great War it looked as if a new era of internationalism was in prospect. Soviet aggression, after the ending of the civil war in Russia, was halted by Marshal Pilsudski’s Polish armies in Eastern Europe in 1920. The ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ for the time being protected the newly created nation states there from Bolshevik interference. In Ireland civil war led to partition and the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Everywhere in Europe it looked as if the principle of national autonomy and democracy, combined with the new internationalism of the League, could create the conditions for stability and prosperity.

If European politicians were often slow to make the connection between national autonomy in Europe and the possession of overseas empire, their subject peoples were not. One of the war’s more sobering lessons was that the European peoples had no intrinsic moral superiority. The emergent nationalist leaders of Asia and Africa were appalled at the use to which European states put their overseas troops on the Western Front. For all the evident fervour of colonial elites in 1914, by 1918 it was difficult for them to portray the war as anything other than a costly, futile conflict of no immediate concern to the peoples they ruled. The effect was clearest in India. Mahatma Gandhi returned there in 1915, after 20 years of fighting British imperialism in South Africa, where he developed his principle of passive resistance, satyagraha. Initially written off even by Indian politicians as an eccentric phoney, Gandhi’s genius was to turn specific acts of peaceful resistance into a widening circle of protest. British attempts to suppress rising nationalism in India faltered after the massacre of nearly 400 protesters at Amritsar in April 1919, an event disastrous for British standing in India. China was another instance. There, nationalist resentment at the European powers had already sparked the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Japan’s aggression against China during the First World War only heightened tension, and whereas European influence in China waned after 1918, Japanese influence grew in strength. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 echoed an earlier age of European imperialism and was a striking sign of the changing balance of power in Asia. French territories in Indochina were also increasingly under threat from nationalist sentiment. The formation of the Vietnamese National Party in 1927 owed much to the influence and example of Chinese nationalism. The influence of communism was particularly strong on Asian nationalists, especially with the example of the Bolshevik Revolution before them. Ironically all these colonial nationalist movements thrived on European influence and education: their leaders were usually educated in Europe and their model of political and social revolution owed much to European revolutionary history.

It is not difficult to imagine what all this implied for the churches. Colonial nationalists were often wary of Christianity for the very obvious reason that they had experienced it in a European form. The immense missionary activity of the European churches did not collapse overnight but the churches found themselves having to work in ever more volatile and unsympathetic contexts. This was more evident in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s than it was in Africa, where the grip of colonialism was more vigorous. But it was enough to shake the presumption of European religious supremacy even there. An early sign was the short-lived revolt led by John Chilembwe in Nyasaland in 1915. Chilembwe was a Baptist minister, who objected to the savage treatment meted out by plantation owners on their employees; his rebellion was crushed after it had killed several of the owners. This seemed an isolated incident. Ironically it was above all in Africa, later in the twentieth century, that a generation of African nationalist leaders was to emerge whose members were influenced by what they saw as the true spirit of Christianity to cast off the European cloak with which it had been clothed. But in the period between the two world wars, in Africa the work of the missions and the consolidation of church life went on much as before, under the scrutiny of the European colonizers. This is not to say that Africans simply accepted European colonization willingly; the growth of African independent churches from early in the century was an expression of a desire to find an authentic Christianity separate from the Christianity of the colonizers. It was an independence movement, but a religious one, without specific national aspirations.

In Western Europe and in America, the First World War did not mark as much of a catastrophe in church life as is sometimes thought. In a way that may strike us as odd today, given the horror of the war through which they had just passed. Church people across Europe simply returned to the old ways, attending church, running schools and Sunday schools and campaigning on any number of moral issues that long predated the war, such as teetotalism and opposition to prostitution. It was as if the horror could only be managed by being pushed back into the familiar rhythms of local life. In villages and towns across Europe memorials to the dead appeared, lovingly tended by local people and blessed by priests or pastors. The iconography of these memorials was resonant with the theme of sacrifice, and time and again they concentrated on the suffering of the common soldier. They might speak of the glorious dead, but there was little triumphalism in that. They expressed an implicit theologia crucis, identifying the suffering of the soldier with the suffering of Christ, and not a theologia gloriae. This was a theme fit for mass democracy, but the rituals of remembrance that sprang up in the interwar years were sober, disciplined and mostly accepting of social realities. For all the continued anxiety over church decline, in fact the social geography of European religion had changed little. In North America, by contrast, the long period of church growth continued unabated.

But it was in America, paradoxically, that the apparent stability of the interwar years began to unravel. The United States was not uniformly prosperous in these years. Its agriculture in particular languished and farm incomes fell as European consumers were able once more to rely on their own produce. American industrial production soared, however, and surplus capital poured into the stock market. Yet the world economy had become too dependent on American capital, and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 triggered collapse in the world’s money markets. The democracies of America, Britain and France and their overseas dominions were robust enough to withstand the ensuing social unrest, but the same was not true of Germany and of many of the newly established states of Eastern Europe.

The rise of ideology

Social discontent in the interwar years played into the hands of two distinct forms of revolutionary, totalitarian ideology. Marxist-Leninism had a long revolutionary pedigree, dating back to the utopian socialist movements of the early nineteenth century. What little religious sympathy some of these early movements – such as Saint-Simonianism – had preserved had been purged by the rigorous philosophical atheism of Marx and Engels. How far Bolshevism truly represented Marx’s intellectual programme is questionable, but in Lenin it had found an astute but doctrinaire champion. Seeing itself as a harbinger of proletarian revolution the world over, Marxist-Leninism sought to recruit followers across the Western world. The churches offered nothing but an obstacle to its worldview. In Soviet Russia, soon after the October Revolution, a brief period of religious tolerance rapidly gave way to persecution. It was an ominous enough sign that the new Soviet constitution of 1918 permitted both freedom of religion and freedom of anti-religious propaganda. ‘Freedom of religion’ sounded fine in theory, but in practice it was non-existent. The printing of Bibles was banned, the Orthodox Church was stripped of its legal rights and its ability to own property, and thousands of churches were closed to worshippers. Orthodox clergy and monks were murdered in their thousands, and their bishops imprisoned or executed. Perhaps as many as 12,000 Orthodox clergy had been killed within ten years of the revolution. Anti-religious propaganda, on the other hand, was promoted relentlessly by the Soviet state.

Fascism, in contrast to the philosophical system and international ambition of Marxist-Leninism, was reactive and localized, fusing radical nationalism with varying degrees of racism. In Italy Mussolini’s coup of 1922 brought to power an authoritarian and militaristic movement that was sentimental in its view of Italian and Roman history but hardly racist in any systematic sense. It was, however, hostile to the Catholic Church, which it saw (with good reason) as a potential opponent of its military ambition. In Spain the name ‘fascist’ was doubtfully applied to the militarist nationalism of General Franco, who certainly indulged the sympathies of Hitler and Mussolini but who was also supported by traditional wealthy elites and the Catholic Church. His victory in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 was widely seen as a sinister prelude to a Europe-wide war, but Spain’s refusal to join Germany and Italy after 1939 has left the Spanish ‘fascist’ experience looking like a curious, ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: The Church and the World on the Eve of War
• Part I. 1914 to 1945: The Crisis of Imperialism
• Part II. 1945 to 1973: The End of Empire
• Part III. 1973 to 2000: The Rise of the Global South
• Epilogue: The Christian Church at the Beginning of the New Millennium
• Notes
• Bibliography