American Society of Church History

The Imagined Crusade: The Church of England and the Mythology of Nationalism and
Christianity during the Great War
Author(s): Shannon Ty Bontrager
Source: Church History, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 774-798
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4146192
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 The ImaginedCrusade:The Churchof
Englandand the Mythologyof Nationalism
and Christianityduring the GreatWar1
SHANNON TY BONTRAGER

The Church of England, being the state church of an imperial nation

of diverse peoples and creeds, had to contend with provocative con-
troversies in the early twentieth century leading up to the First World
War. Perhaps the greatest was secularization, which gained momen-
tum 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, insin-
uated church attendance was much lower in Great Britain than
previously perceived. Causing more anxiety, the State Church consis-
tently lost authority over many of its traditions, including adminis-
tering burial grounds and the last rights ceremony.3 Additionally
Ecclesiastical courts gave up authority to the civic courts of British
society.4
The Church of England was enduring a condition that affected the
rest of English authority. Industrialization, urbanization, and popu-
lation increase, among other forces, transformed the British bureau-
cracy. Robert Colls claims this alteration created political anxiety
forcing State institutions to compete for power, which caused further

1. I would like to thank Ian Fletcher, Timothy O'Neil, and Timothy Hall for their time and
energy reading and criticizing this paper.
2. See Frank M. Turner, "The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith That was Lost,"
Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular
Society:Lambeth,1870-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), Herbert Schloss-
berg, The Silent Revolution and the Making of Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State
University, 2000), Hugh Mcleod, Religion and Irreligion in Victorian England:How Secular
was the Working Class? (Bangor: Headstart History, 1993), 28-32, and Mark Smith,
Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1994).
3. Deborah Elaine Wiggins, The Burial Acts: CemeteryReform in Great Britain (Ph.D. diss.,
Texas Tech University, 1991), abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International 52/05A
(1991): 1867.
4. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade:The Church of England in the First World War (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974), 10-11.

Shannon Ty Bontrageris a doctoralcandidatein the Departmentof History at

GeorgiaState University.
@ 2002,The AmericanSociety of ChurchHistory
ChurchHistory71:4 (December2002)
774
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 775

tension. "The real fissures in the political culture between 1880-1920

lay not in political parties but along a line to do with attitudes to the
state. Nearly all the emergent political groupings wanted some form
of more State responsibility."5 The Church of England competed with
other State institutions to regain power in an environment of what
Colls calls the "Soft View" of English Imperialism.6 In 1914, operating
in such a milieu, the Great War and the accompanying nationalistic
impulse gave Anglicans an opportunity to reclaim English cultural
authority and social power through media images and texts of myth-
ology.
This study looks at wartime articles from Anglican journals, the
Church QuarterlyReview and The Quiver, to evaluate the Church of
England's attempted usurpation of secularization from 1914 to 1918.
This effort exploited a crisis of gender and national identity, in which
Anglican leaders employed mythology to anchor British morality in
conservatism. They hoped this effort would help them regain cultural
authority, which they had lost to the process of secularization. This
was a three-phased process. The first phase, or precrisis stage, saw
Anglicans justify Great Britain's participation in war against another
Christian nation. At the outbreak in 1914, church leaders attacked the
Christian nature of Germany, labeling it the perverted antithesis of
ennobled English Christianity.
But by 1915-16 the lingering war created the second phase or crisis
stage of the British attack on secularization. This was the most intense
period as it suggested that the first offensive had failed. During the
crisis, many church leaders again became anxious about secular
power. The ongoing military campaigns and the huge number of dead
soldiers seemed to discredit Anglicans who declared God was on
Britain's side, for if the divine favored the island nation, why had the
war continued? This apprehension caused Anglicans to turn their
attention from attacking German Christianity to critiquing British
Christian morality. Some wondered if the war was continuing be-
cause Britain was immoral. If so, Anglican moral justification of the
war lost potency. In reaction to this dissonance, the Church of En-
gland launched an attack on wartime social change using mythology
as a conservative language of nationalism to attack liberal definitions

5. Robert Colls, "Englishness and the Political Culture" in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd,
eds. Englishness: Politics and Culture: 1880-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 50.
6. Ibid. This Soft View, as opposed to the "Hard View," which tried to maintain and
extend nineteenth-century British colonialism abroad, sought to guarantee "the free-
dom, diversity, and continuity" of nineteenth-century English Imperialism in the United
Kingdom. The Hard View and the Soft View worked together to guarantee English
dominance over others.
776 CHURCHHISTORY

of gender, morality, and theology. This status quo antebellum defini-

tion of English national identity was an attempt to regain cultural
power and political influence from secular forces. As the end of the
war drew closer, the crisis phase climaxed, and church officials aban-
doned their former strategy and focused instead on asserting their
conservative influence in the postwar world. In this postcrisis phase,
any leverage gained was quickly lost because in the aftermath of war,
secularization dominated, and the Anglican conservative revolution
failed.
Before the war began, however, it seemed unlikely that the Church
could accumulate more political or cultural influence. By 1914, the
Ulster controversy, the Women's Suffrage Movement, and labor is-
sues caused the Church to lose more of its grip on British society.
Historian Samuel Hynes wrote, "A civil war, a sex war, and a class
war: in the spring of 1914 these were all forseen in England's imme-
diate future, and with a kind of relish. Rhetorically speaking, they
were already being fought, the language of war had become by then,
the language of public discourse." As a response to these challenges,
the Church of England took the side of the state against Irish auton-
omy, female suffrage, and labor.8 Perhaps the most potent, or at least
the most reassuring, way of coping with these crises was by promot-
ing nationalism, a precedent established in the nineteenth century. As
Graham Dawson suggests, nationalism was based on gender. English
soldier-heroes, such as the Christian adventure-war-hero Sir Henry
Havelock, were primarily determined by masculine roles although
definitions of femininity also contributed to British nationalism.9 Nev-
ertheless British masculine identity stressed Victorian Imperialism
and Christian behavior. According to Dawson, young British men
gained value in society if they exhibited Imperialistic and Christian
behavior. Dawson claims this "adventure-hero" was based on specific
memories-"psychic" or unconscious-and "cultural economies."
The memory of the adventure-hero was a coping discourse, an
alternate perception, to rationalize the anxiety that encroaching
feminism and secularization brought to traditional masculinity.
This was manifested in Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Bur-

7. Ibid., 7.
8. Albert Marrin, "The Coming of the Great War," The Last Crusade. See Samuel Hynes,
"Homefront Wars," A War Imagined:TheFirst World Warand English Culture (New York:
Atheneum, 1991) and Thomas Jefferson Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981.
9. Graham Dawson, SoldierHeroes: British Adventure, Empireand the Imagining of Masculin-
ities (London: Routledge, 1994).
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 777

den."'1 Of course, Protestant Christianity in Britain, which Have-

lock's Christian ethos symbolized, was instrumental in building
the chivalric adventure-war-hero of the Great War.11
This gendered nationalism was part of what Historian George L.
Mosse describes as the "Myth of the War Experience," which started
with the changed status of soldiers during the French Revolution.12
Soldiers no longer fought solely for their King, but after 1789, fought
for the nation-state and its people. And the heroic warrior who died
in battle became a patriot-martyr. Mosse points to the evolution of
graveyards, which became replete with monuments, as evidence of
these changed attitudes, which Christianity incorporated into denom-
inational services. Thus churches placed themselves in position to
turn fallen soldiers into heroes, which often incited nationalism. How-
ever, this nationalistic impulse was more complex than the masculine
force that Mosse suggests, claiming the Myth of the War Experience
"included women only in passive and supportive roles."13Feminism
too was more influential than Graham Dawson's claim that the
adventure-hero was only partially defined by domestic femininity.
Women were directly influential in defining femininity and mascu-
linity. Susan Grayzel's comparative study of French and British
women during the war suggests females affected nationalistic gender
definitions through the maternal body as much as men affected the
national consciousness through the soldier's body. In fact, women
served the state by giving birth to a new generation of soldiers.

10. Preben Kaarsholm, "Kipling and Masculinity," in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking
of British National Identity vol. 3, ed. by Raphael Samuel. (London: Routledge, 1989).
Kaarsholm wrote, "No figure epitomises the impact of imperialism on British culture
like Rudyard Kipling. And no writer was probably ever more the prisoner and victim
of his period than he." 225.
11. See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes. See also Anne Summers, "Edwardian Militarism,"
in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 3, ed. by Raphael
Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989). According to Summers, popular British militarism
was developed in the nineteenth century and Protestantism fueled the flames through
messages of masculinity and the so-called "White Man's Burden," which also became
manifest in World War I. One of the main organizations was the National Service
League, which was promilitarism even in youth culture.
12. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990). See also George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the
Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germanyfrom the Napoleonic Wars
through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973) and George L. Mosse, Nation-
alism and Sexuality: Respectabilityand Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1985). See also Paul Fussell, "Myth, Ritual, and Romance," The Great War
and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Fussell looks at the
Great War to examine how the war generated new myths through literature and
memory. This literature placed a new importance on myth and romance that contrib-
uted to British national culture.
13. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldier, 61.
778 CHURCHHISTORY

Additionally women provided a "moral force" that worked together

with male soldiers' "physical force" in the construction of wartime
nationalism.14 Grayzel contends warfront and home front boundaries,
or male and female domains, were fluid and osmotic, not rigidly
separated as Mosse claims or marginally joined as Dawson contends,
with femininity only defining masculinity in its opposition. Feminin-
ity and masculinity jointly created the nationalistic pre-World War I
condition, and although the Church of England viewed feminism very
conservatively, any attempts to construct a national identity through
mythology would inherently exploit gender.
When the guns of August 1914 sounded, British society was fully
participating in a matrix of secularization in which nationalism was a
strong stabilizing force. The chaos of the Great War initiated the
precrisis stage, giving religious agents the opportunity to press na-
tionalism deeper into the consciousness of Britons. All the problems
for the nation and the State Church seemed to disappear, but only
temporarily. In this short-lived condition, the Church turned its at-
tention from domestic crises to explaining the militaristic actions of
Christian Germany. Many Anglican clerics, though they initially
championed peace in 1914, quickly became militaristic.15This dra-
matic change had to do with their acceptance of Great Britain's
participation. To explain how one largely Protestant nation could
wage war against another, Anglicans depicted German national char-
acter as corrupt. One of the first to do this was Miss Hilda D. Oakeley,
who served as the Warden of King's College for Women. Her article
in the Anglican ChurchQuarterlyReviewin October 1914, the first issue
since the outbreak of violence, exclaimed that the war was not a
surprise. "The most cursory perusal of the literature to which our long
reluctant attention has at last been compelled reveals that the attitude
of mind and the deeds which have hurried Europe into the whirlpool
were imbued with something of that terrific force which comes from
possession by an idea, even if the idea itself be lacking in beauty and
splendour."'16Oakeley's article encouraged Anglicans to examine the
tenets of the "Pan-German idea (to call it by the least equivocal
name)," which she labeled as corruptive forces of modernism.17 An-

14. Susan Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender,Motherhood,and Politics in Britain and
Franceduring the First WorldWar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999),
189. Also see Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workersin the
Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
15. See Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade.
16. Hilda D. Oakeley, "German Thought: The Real Conflict," Church Quarterly Review 79
(October 1914-January 1915): 96-7.
17. Ibid.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 779

glicans believed that liberal theology influenced by Darwinism had

debased German morality causing Christians to embrace modernism-
an Anglican description of a materialistic system that accepted mili-
tarism and the vices of sexual immorality, gambling, and alcohol,
while valuing science and evolution over faith.18Oakeley continued,
"There has no doubt existed a vague consciousness of something
superficial and inadequate in the optimism, of, say, the period 1850-
1890, with its boundless confidence in the idealistic influences of
Science."19A similar version of German modernism existed in Britain
but "The war had virtually stopped the English Modern movement"
as historian Samuel Hynes claims.20 Oakeley's antimodern response
to this Modernism was to imagine Great Britain in the same spirit as
that of the democratic, moralistic, nonmaterialistic, and antimilitaris-
tic Greeks, who she perceived as defenders of the truth (which could
be construed as faith to a religious audience). "Ultimately it [the Great
War] is a fight for truth, the issue is the true interpretation of history,
and thereby the true destiny and task of man. In the end it must be
tried, whatever the outcome of our great war. The values for which
the Greeks fought the Persians at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Sala-
mis were more and spiritual."21The Greeks preserved their antimil-
itaristic ethos by fighting the Persians to defend the truth and became
symbols for Anglican antimoderns.
According to Oakeley, the architects of German Modernism, who
became symbols of putrefaction for Anglicans, were the German
historian Treitschke and before him, the German philosopher
Nietzche. They created the scientific "optimism of 1850-1890," which
evolved into "Pan-Germanism," an antithetical idea for Anglican
Christianity. "Since then the philosophy of Pan-Germanism must in
self-consistency admit the materialism of its foundations; the battle
which has to be fought against it in the world of ideas is the battle for
the faith in an idealistic interpretation of history."22 Thus Anglicans
turned the Great War of Germany versus Britain into the Greater War
of Science versus Faith.
Many Anglicans believed that Science plagued German Modernism
and German theology and that it was Britain's duty to inoculate
Germany by force. In the January 1915 issue of the ChurchQuarterly
Review, Friedrich von Hugel, a German living in Britain, blamed the

18. See Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined:The First World Warand English Culture (New York:
Atheneum, 1991).
19. Ibid.
20. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined, 65.
21. Hilda D. Oakeley, "German Thought," 99.
22. Ibid., 114.
780 CHURCHHISTORY

German theologian Friedrich Naumann for mixing materialism with

Christianity. Of course, Naumann himself could not "corrupt"Chris-
tianity, but von Hugel presented Naumann as typical of a general
movement in Germany instigated by a plethora of like-minded Ger-
man religious leaders. More specific than Oakeley's indictment of
"Science," von Hugel blamed Naumann for engaging in "Darwin-
ism." Naumann's intellectualism was also allegedly heavily influ-
enced by paganism. Von Hugel beckoned to the original pagan ide-
ology of German ancestry, which he believed was not fully exorcised
from German Christianity. "Thus Naumann is deeply wistful over his
own divided unbridged soul-half Christian, half Pagan; half love,
half violence."23 This internal dialectic became Paganist-Christian
modernism, and Naumann became both a disciple and a master of
German national culture. Von Hugel accused the German State of
similarly lacking Christian morality. The ideal state should operate
"not as a ruthless machine, a tornado, a fate, a physical law, a pack of
wolves, a monkey horde, but as essentially human, springing from
man, operating through man, leading to man-man who is man only
everywhere, only as a creature of flesh and spirit, of force and of justice
and even of love."24 According to Anglican writers, valuing human-
ism over materialism was what made Britain superior to Germany.
Von Hugel examined Naumann's theology as a case study on the
way that immoral German clergy and the German nation-state had
perverted true Christianity. But how did von Hugel view Britain's
participation? For him, war was unfortunately a part of human nature
and true Christianity could only hope to fulfill the ethos of the Sermon
on the Mount. "Ifnot the Sermon on the Mount at its culmination then
at least its presupposition, the Golden Rule, or some approach to this
Rule appears thus recognized as binding, even in War, and the divine
gentleness of Jesus can put out timid blossoms even there, in various
approaches to the ideal of 'a very perfect Knight' such as Chaucer
strove to picture.25 Britain's Christian duty then was chivalric in
nature, defending humanism in the face of barbaric materialism.
Three things should draw the reader's attention. First, if Oakeley
and Von Hugel's rhetoric can be seen as typical, Anglicans tried to
devalue German Kultur by labeling it as modernist and materialistic.
Further the figures Treitschke and Nietzche gave this strategy bite as
readers had tangible symbols to blame for Germany's cultural mal-

23. Friedrich von Hugel, "Christianity in the Face of War: Its Strength and Difficulty,"
Church Quarterly Review 79 (October 1914-January 1915): 275.
24. Ibid., 278.
25. Ibid., 283.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 781

aise. Second, this strategy had a spirit of self-righteousness, in that

Anglicans analyzed the German ethos without criticizing British
morality. Anglicans assumed Germany's perverted evolution could
only be corrected by a Chaucer-esque British nation, but Anglicans
simply asserted, rather than critically examined, the morality of their
own cause. Third, von Hugel attempted to characterize the British
constitution as a chivalric Christian Knight, something Anglicans
defined as inherently English.
Even the contentious Dean of Durham (and later Bishop of Here-
ford) Hensley Henson supported war against Germany, declaring,
"We are all of a mind in thinking that if the waging of war be in any
circumstances permitted to Christian men, then this war is from a
Christian point of view legitimate. If war be in itself evil and demor-
alizing, it can hardly be sufficient to point to the excellence of the
objects for which it is waged as justifying the use of so sinister a
method."26 And in this war Hensley believed that "the manly and
chivalrous qualities which are developed and displayed by soldiers"
typified the British Expeditionary Force. The Church's duty in such a
war was to raise "moral standards for soldiers" and the "standard of
humanity in warfare," and to seek avenues for peace as soon as
possible.27 Thus Britain's moral obligation to usurp immoral forces
allowed churchmen to turn militaristic almost immediately after
Great Britain declared war on Germany. Historian Albert Marrin
observed, "If Anglican laymen were poorly represented in the pacifist
ranks, their spiritual leaders were absent altogether."28
Thus the state church celebrated the moral superiority of the En-
glish as the guarantor of eventual victory. Elizabeth Wordsworth's
"The English Church and the English Character"declared, "When the
history of the present war comes to be written, perhaps some fifty

26. Hensley Henson, "Christianity and War," Church Quarterly Review 79 (October 1914-
January 1915): 120. For a biography of Henson see Owen Chadwick's Hensley Henson
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). Henson was a maverick in the Church of England, a
modernist who cherished reason. Extremely talented as a preacher, viewed with sus-
picion by Archbishop Davidson, later cherished by Prime Minister David Lloyd George,
Henson proved a conundrum. He was an intense militarist who chastised Archbishop
Davidson for gaining exemption from conscription for Anglican clerics yet preached
about the greatness of Germany while criticizing the government's treatment of con-
scientious objectors. He disliked the initial increase in church attendance brought on by
the war because he believed such circumstances produced fanaticism, cultism, and
mysticism while limiting reason, yet grew depressed when his Durham congregation
later dwindled. Chadwick argues Henson also vehemently supported the Church of
England as the State Church of the nation and fought to keep the church's status in the
postwar period.
27. Ibid., 121.
28. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade, 147.
782 CHURCHHISTORY

years hence, the attitude of the historian will be very different from
our own ... he will doubtless observe that one of the greatest [forces]
is national character, and more especially the English character."29
This national character of the English resembled that of the ancient
Athenians; a democratic spirit formed both. The geography, climate,
and ethnic diversity of the British Isles endeared the "English" with
qualities far better and more superior than anything "German."
Wordsworth exclaimed, "In the same way the traditions of personal
bravery, the comparative refinement of manners, the chivalrous atti-
tude towards the weaker sex (though we cannot forget the tragedy of
Joan of Arc) are characteristics of the English gentleman of all classes
for which we may, partly at least, thank our Norman inheritance. That
the Teutonic blood, much less mixed than our own, is lacking in some
of these elements, seems to be shewn by some cases of hideous
maltreatment of women in the present war.""30 She not only made a
virtue of the supposedly hybrid racial nature of the British stock, but
also singled out the status and treatment of women as the gendered
differential that distinguished the "English" from the Germans.
Stressing this propaganda, Anglicans pushed men to fulfill their des-
tinies, enlist, and become true Britons.
Anglicans used the war to preserve their own masculine definitions
and demonize Germany. The "White Man's Burden" of the nineteenth
century now seemed to include continental Europeans whose mod-
ernism seemingly made them barbaric. Now that Anglicans had
firmly supported the government in its pursuit of war, the state
church used its position to encourage laymen to enlist and become
soldier-war-heroes of the twentieth century. As Marrin claims, the
Church's prowar stance, "translated into political terms, meant that
the primary obliqation of the patriot was to enlist in the armed forces
of his country."
However, Wordsworth also brought a female definition to the
English character, albeit a conservative discussion of gender. She cast
the Church as a matriarchal institution holding moral suasion over
men. "The Anglican Church has an unapproachable glory of her own
in moulding characters and in training human lives. The English
gentleman is what he is, to a great extent because she has ruled over
his home, his boyhood and his adolescence."32 "The women of En-

29. Elizabeth Wordsworth, "The English Church and the English Character," ChurchQuar-
terly Review 80 (April 1915-July 1915): 159-7.
30. Ibid., 162.
31. Ibid., 179.
32. Ibid., 165.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 783

gland have the matter to a very great extent in their hands. The old
saying is still true-'A man is what a woman makes him,' and if this
war leads more women to teach their children to say their prayers, to
read their Bibles, to prize their church and her services, and to hallow
their Sundays, the great sacrifices it entails will not have been made in
vain."33
Nevertheless, Wordsworth also recognized the Church as a mascu-
line institution despite its nurturing role. "The Church may well be
spoken of by the endearing name of 'Mother.' And yet there is
something truly manly in the way in which she emphasizes the moral
claim."34 Wordsworth looked for symbols that would bring assurance
and stability; she found the chivalric Christian knight.
The war which at present occupies all our minds is one, as has often
been observed,of thrillinginterest,because the situationsin it are
almost as primitiveand simple as those of an old-fashionedfairy
tale. We have St. George, with the bloody cross upon his shield,
engaged in deadly combat with the dragon; we have the maiden
Sabra,who may not unaptlystand for Belgiumand otheroppressed
lands, bound to a tree and looking to him for deliverance; we watch
every strokeof the good knight's sword, every thrustof his spear,
and we feel that-however bloody the combat-it can only end in
the ultimate triumph of righteousness. Viewed in this light every
young fellow in khaki whom we see marching through our streets
has somethingof the glory of knight-errantryshed on his common-
place figure, and it would be hardly too much to say that in many
cases the cause seems to make the hero; and when we read of "the
magnificentconductof our troops at the front"we thankGod with
tearsin our eyes.35
The Church of England also looked for assurance and stability. It
was undergoing a chaotic experience and its clerics built a structure of
steadiness. Of course the war generally caused chaos, but it initially
was not disorienting. The commotion of 1914 and early 1915 was
organized chaos. It revolved around mobilization and had a purpose,
namely to get soldiers to the battlefield as quickly as possible. But
demand outweighed supply for Great Britain, which operated a vol-
unteer military force, while the continental forces largely conscripted
its troops. The disorienting chaos, or the crisis stage, started when
British authorities recognized voluntary enlistment was ineffective.
Military leaders did not identify this until well after the war com-

33. Elizabeth Wordsworth, "Woman and the War," Church Quarterly Review 80 (April 1915
and July 1915): 73.
34. Ibid., 170
35. Ibid., 33-34.
784 CHURCHHISTORY

menced. No war had ever been fought at the scale of World War I, and
so Britain was unprepared to supply the number of men needed
under its volunteer enlistment system. When people questioned this
traditional system, they were recognizing the grand scale of death on
the battlefield, especially after the resounding failure in the Dard-
enelles, which initiated the transformation from the volunteer adven-
ture-war-hero to the conscripted Tommy, an abrupt change in na-
tional identity. This was the crisis--organized to disoriented chaos for
English society and the Church of England. This shift jeopardized the
entire traditional English ethos, and it brought more dissonance to the
collective consciousness.36
The first attempt to increase the supply of soldiers was the Derby
Scheme. As historian Arthur Marwick suggests, the Derby scheme
was "a gigantic engine of fraud and moral blackmail, but, given that
the Government had to find soldiers somehow, it was a very astute
piece of political tactics."37Perhaps astute, but the scheme was not
successful, and the British Government was forced to institute a draft
in January 1916.
As if the draft was not enough, 1916 also saw the Battle of the
Somme and the Battle at Verdun, two of the most costly battles of the
war. These battles sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives and the
psyche of confidence that accompanied the early years of the war. In
the words of Hynes, "The war spirit was running down; only the
momentum of the war itself continued undiminished."38 The image of
the adventure-war-hero that Dawson described no longer seemed
viable. "Once upon a time putrefaction of war could be concealed in
the salt of glory and conquest. Now conquest seldom extended be-
yond a few hundred yards of mud or the desolate stones of a shat-
tered village: the salt had lost its savour."39

36. See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes and Ilana R. Bet-El, "Men and Soldiers: British
Conscripts, Concepts of Masculinity, and the Great War," Borderlines:Genderand Iden-
tities in War and Peace, 1870-1930, ed. by Billie Melman. (New York: Routledge, 1998).
37. Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Polity,
1985), 77. Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914-1918
(London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 180-82. The Derby Scheme allowed the government to
identify eligible men for fighting from the National Register. Once men were identified,
authorities approached them and asked each to "affirm his willingness to accept
military service when called upon to do so." Only men involved in "essential work"
were excluded. The hope behind this strategy was that government would not have to
expend valuable time recruiting volunteers from its population. In turn this would help
men postpone enlistment as it guaranteed that people in the scheme would not imme-
diately be called up for service. See also John Bourne, Britain and the Great War,
1914-1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1989).
38. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined, 101.
39. Arthur Marwick, The Deluge, 80.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 785

Paralleling the conscription and military events of 1915 and 1916,

the Church of England also moved from a state of organized to
disoriented chaos. The mass numbers of lives lost and the ideological
implications of a changing masculinity and secularized society caused
the Church to become introspective, turning its focus away from the
denigration of Germany. The early moments of the war saw Church
rhetoric focused on the "evilness of German militarism." Anglicans
believed God was clearly on Britain's side for it was the righteous
defender of Belgium and truth. But if God was on Britain's side, why
were British troops ineffective? Why had Britain instituted a draft?
How could God allow so many deaths? Was Britain somehow un-
righteous? Was God allowing the war to continue because Britain had
some moral flaw? Some thought so and pointed to the apparent
increased alcohol use, sexual improprieties, gambling, and other
forms of escapism.40Anglicans had justified the war in terms of a pure
English Christian duty to put down the immorality of German Mod-
ernism, but Britons' indulgence in immorality suggested modernism
had regenerated in Britain, threatening the superiority complex An-
glicans had constructed. The Church of England set out to reform
these habits and validate Britain's cause by regulating the nation's
moral behavior. This attempt was unrealistic since the Church held
little or no influence over much of the population, especially over the
working classes and the non-Anglican majority in Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales. This, however, did not stop the Church, so Anglicans
turned their focus away from demonizing Germany and toward
fashioning a repentant Britain. This attempt should be viewed as part
of the introspective mood that the unending war and the crisis stage
initiated.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Thomas Davidson, started
this religious introspection when he convened a small conference in
July 1915, to which he invited twelve trusted men of differing theo-
logical opinions "to think and pray and deliberate upon our present
life in England and its spiritual needs and then to give me such
counsel as God and the Holy Spirit should put into their hearts."41
The conference recommended the launch of a National Mission of
Repentance and Hope. After further consultation, he reported to the
diocesan bishops of England and Wales and the Archbishop of York
in October 1915. All of them discussed the proposal and created a

40. See John Williams, The Other Battleground: Home Fronts, Britain, France, and Germany,
1914-1918 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972).
41. J. A. Lichfield, "National Mission of Repentance and Hope," Church Quarterly Review 82
(April 1916-July 1916): 37.
786 CHURCHHISTORY

council of seventy bishops, priests, laymen, and women, which offi-

cially launched the National Mission of Repentance and Hope in the
spring of 1916. Anglican J. A. Lichfield described the ideological
purpose as follows: "We are calling people-ourselves in the Church
first, and then the nation-to cast off self-complacency to get on our
knees and to humble ourselves before God, but before a God who is
'the God of Hope,' and who is ready to renew our lives from the
infinite resources of Truth and Grace that are in Jesus Christ."42The
scope of the mission was national; editor of the Church Quarterly
Review, Arthur C. Headlam, seemed to believe the movement would
start with Anglicans in England but eventually spread to non-
Anglicans throughout Britain. "Would that the whole nation might be
converted to God! We are not so faithless as to deem it impossible. But
we look for so splendid a consummation not from the National
Mission itself, but rather from the mighty working of the Spirit of God
for which our Mission may humbly (if it be God's will) prepare the
way."43 Church officials claimed that humility and repentance pow-
ered the mission's spirit, but these were theological terms rationaliz-
ing antimodernism. To be a repentant Briton meant embracing faith,
high morality, and nationalism, while despising materialism and
science.
The timing of the National Mission of Repentance and Hope and of
its relationship to national events and the war is important to con-
sider. Reverend Headlam wrote "The National Mission: Where does
the Defect of the Church Lie?"Perhaps the title is most telling because
no defects seemingly lay in Britain in late 1914; the abnormality,
according to Anglican writers, was in Germany. However in 1916,
Church leaders were inquiring about the malady of the Church of
England and the nation of England. "Where then do our deficiencies
lie? We believe that here again-and possibly more particularly
here-they lie in just this absence of mental keenness, in intellectual
sluggishness."44 Headlam, an intellectual theologian, blamed the local
parish vicar for this inadequacy. His article was moderately modern-
ist for Headlam believed science could coexist with faith, albeit as an
inferior. He assumed, "It is because our church has tended of recent
years to suggest that the spiritual life is something opposed to the
intellectual life that many of its failures have arisen."45Headlam did

42. Ibid., 39.

43. Ibid., 42.
44. Arthur C. Headlam, "The National Mission: Where does the Defect of the Church Lie?"
Church Quarterly Review 83 (October 1916-January 1917): 5.
45. Ibid., 6.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 787

not argue that Anglicans should embrace scientific modernism, as

Anglicans perceived German theology had, but believed the church
should conservatively embrace intellectualism and use elements of
scientific reasoning to invigorate spirituality. Headlam tried to recon-
cile the traditions of the Church of England with moderately mod-
ernist intellectualism. "Fundamentally our religion consists in pre-
serving a tradition. It is easy to preserve our tradition and forget that
we must use that tradition in relation to the circumstances round us.
We believe that, for the most part, the clergy of the Church of England
have tried faithfully to preserve their tradition.... But there has been
an absence of clear intellectual life and interest in applying it to the
needs of the day."46He believed the Church of England's vicars had
lost their intellectual edge and dulled the morality of the parishioners.
Pragmatically, the National Mission of Repentance and Hope tried
to reverse trends. Church attendance had stagnated and in many
places dropped. The number of men training for the clergy had
decreased dramatically, and many members of the clergy voiced
strong concerns over the Great War's influence on the church and
church attendance. According to Anglican clergyman Denis Crane,
the war's "most serious feature is undoubtedly that the quickening of
religious interest which marked the earlier stages of the war-
amounting in some instances to a revival that flooded every depart-
ment of Church life, but in others continued to a renewed faith in the
efficacy of prayer-has practically passed away."47 Crane advocated
the National Mission of Repentance and Hope. He detailed the com-
mittee's plan to nationalize the movement and called for the clergy
and the laity to reach out both to Christians and to non-Christians. "It
is an attempt to discharge for the first time the permanent Mission of
the church as a whole to the nation as a whole." Crane clarified this
concept of religious nationalization: "The message is to the nation,
and to the individual first and foremost as citizen; if he is to serve his
nation as a citizen he will need conversion and consecration himself,
and the appeal to individuals will be not less strong, but rather
stronger, because it is through his national and social responsibility
that the appeal will come."48 They hoped to appeal to individuals
who loved Britain and through this patriotic love could hope to find
purity and salvation through religion.

46. Ibid.
47. Denis Crane, "Can the Church Bring England Back to God?" The Quiver 51 (September
1916): 967-71, quote on 968.
48. Ibid.
788 CHURCHHISTORY

Crane later discussed the implementation of this movement. The

mission's council planned "Special Celebrations" in homes of the laity
and in various parishes around the nation. They also planned confer-
ences for the betterment of the clergy and sponsored written forms of
Christian national propaganda: "Artistic posters will be displayed
throughout the country and a wise use will be made of the cinema.
This is a new departure, so far as England is concerned in religious
propaganda. A series of messages from leaders in Church and State is
being prepared for use in picture palaces. This is a shrewd method of
reaching the outsider." Crane calculated, "such a message shown in
five hundred selected houses, six nights in the week, would reach at
least two and a half million people."49
But according to Marrin, the National Mission of Repentance and
Hope was a failure.5sIt was not developed or conceived very well and
accumulated very little social power. It was unlikely that the mission
enabled women to access offices traditionally held by men, such as
preaching and teaching.51It may have empowered the small number
of women who served on the mission's seventy-person council, but
overall few women were actually affected. When one notices
Elizabeth Wordsworth and Hilda Oakeley, who among others were
already contributing to Anglican publications well before 1916, it
seems the National Mission of Repentance and Hope reflected the
traditional Anglican view of a few women in public office. Rather,the
most important meaning to be gleaned from the National Mission was
that it was a national attempt to influence British morality by the
English church. It was also the official religious expression of doubt in
English moral superiority. In seeking a national repentance, Anglicans
wondered aloud if Britain's apparent justified cause was jeopardized
by Britons' immorality. This meant Archbishop Davidson and the
Church of England officially recognized the cultural transformation
brought on by the ongoing war and believed Britain might be losing
the war against Germany, modernism, and more importantly, secu-
larization.
It was here that the Church of England tried to revive a conserva-
tive definition of Christian "Englishness" and impose this tradition on
British society. Although the horror of trench war was changing how

49. Ibid., 971. Media such as the cinema could extend the church's influence to those who
read little or not at all.
50. Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade, 210.
51. Jacqueline R. Devries, "Challenging Traditions: Denominational Feminism in Britain,
1910-1920," Borderlines:Gender and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 ed. by Billie
Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998). DeVries argues the National Mission of Repen-
tance and Hope gave women more status in official ecclesiastical affairs.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 789

people imagined the adventure-war-hero, the transformation was

incomplete during the war. There was some lag time; in fact Dawson
suggests that this change occurred in the postwar period with the
popularity of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) in Britain.52During the war,
traditional ideas of the volunteer captured most imaginations despite
the reality of conscription. As Ilana R. Bet-El claims, the myth of the
volunteer arose precisely at the moment conscription became British
national policy in 1916. "According to this myth, the British soldier in
the Great War was a man who enlisted in a spirit of intense patriotism:
a brave knight who took himself off on a crusade of chivalry and
sacrifice; who fought for liberty and the innocent population of
women he left behind in Good Old Blighty."53Bet-El's essay discusses
how this myth of volunteerism enforced traditional definitions of
masculinity. But the Church of England used this same myth to revive
English identity and place itself in a position to accumulate power and
influence.
Mythology was a powerful structure that appealed to the masses.
Mythologist Bruce Lincoln suggests myths have more authority over
society than history precisely because the audience believes myths
directly affect their lives. He contends that the criteria for labeling
stories as myth are not based on their content but on the meaning
storytellers and people listening to the narratives attribute to them.54
Church of England leaders responding to war, Christianity, and na-
tionalism sought to dominate meaning by demonstrating authenticity
and authority in appealing to Britons.55 In addition to the ailing
National Mission of Repentance and Hope, they tried to become
authoritative by influencing Britons with stories of familiar content
but altered meaning. This was what gave Anglicans power over
anyone who believed in a similar meaning of the myth. In light of the
chaos of the war, more people looked to mythology for security,
which seemed like a powerful tool for Anglicans. As historian Mark
Girouard suggests, prewar British society cultivated the discourse of

52. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes.

53. Ilana R. Bet-El, "Men and Soldiers: British Conscripts, Concepts of Masculinity, and the
Great War," 73.
54. Bruce Lincoln Discourse and the Construction of Society (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 25-26. See also Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge, England:
Polity, 1992).
55. For an example of authenticity and authority in the historical process see T. H. Breen
and Timothy Hall, "Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience in
Eighteenth-Century New England," American Historical Review 103 (December 1998):
1411-38.
790 CHURCHHISTORY

chivalric mythology that became prevalent during the war.56 This

discourse enhanced the adventure-war-hero as the icon of the
ultimate British man and the ideal spirit of British culture. Arthurian
myths were authentic in that they were created in England and
authoritative in that the people believed them. So when leaders in the
Church of England engaged in defining England through its myths,
they were attempting to establish themselves as storytellers, who told
believable stories about morality, nationalism, and militarism. As
mythologist Wendy Doniger writes, "a myth is like a gun for hire, a
mercenary soldier: it can be made to fight for anyone."57 In this
position, the Church of England could accumulate power and define
cultural traditions.
In the same introspective climate that spawned the National Mis-
sion of Repentance and Hope, a series of articles and images appeared
in the Anglican journal, The Quiver, in the spring of 1916. These
articles analyzed myths of King Arthur and St. George. Writers of
these articles had four main purposes. The first was to support the
state and the war effort. The second was introspective; it was an
attempt to purify England from immoral behavior that sullied Great
Britain'sjustified participation in the war. The third was an attempt to
define what it meant to be English, and the fourth was an attempt to
accumulate power in British society as cultural and moral storytellers.
For example, Anglican Charles Brown's "The Modern Call to Knight-
hood" in the May 1916 Quiver admonished Christians to do their
traditional duty against modern worldly sacrilege. Brown called for
men to display chivalric characteristics, which included fighting on
behalf of the oppressed, implying that it was Britain's modern duty to
defeat Germany's Modernist immoral government with traditional
English virtues. He supported the state and created a cleansed English
identity saying, "The modern call to knighthood-to play our part
with Christ in winning the world, righting its wrongs, healing its
woes, destroying the works of the devil, building up the Kingdom
which is righteousness and peace and joy. That call comes to us all."
Brown's focus on chivalry attempted to define English consciousness
as that of repentant and holy Christians involved in a military mar-
athon against an immoral enemy. Of course, this was viewed in the
metaphorical terms of the masculine adventure-war-hero rushing to

56. See Mark Girouard, "The Great War," The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English
Gentleman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). Girouard argues mythol-
ogy became meaningful in many arenas of British society during the war.
57. Wendy Doniger, "Minimyths and Maximyths and Political Points of View," in Laurie L.
Patton and Wendy Doniger, eds., Myth and Method (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1996), 119.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 791

the aid of exploited virgins. Brown reflected antimodernism by reviv-

ing traditional definitions of gender and nationalism in texts of chiv-
alric Knighthood. He was trying to control the meaning of traditional
Englishness. The more people who believed his version of these
symbols, the more power Brown accumulated. But these gender roles
were in the process of changing, and Brown's attempt to accumulate
power as a storyteller was mistakenly placing an obsolete meaning on
the content.58
Anglicans did not realize they were playing the game of power with
an outdated strategy. But church leaders clung to antimodernism for
cultural stability. Their anxiety about immoral Britons wrecking An-
glican justification for war led church leaders to tell stories of mythol-
ogy. Reverend J. D. Jones penned another article pertaining to Sir
Galahad of Arthurian myth as praise of British temperament and a
criticism of German character. He used Sir Galahad's search for the
Holy Grail as "an allegory of the spiritual life" and claimed that it
disclosed the secrets to spiritual success during a time of great stress.
A vision that no other knight could see came to Galahad while seated
at the "Round Table." The illustrious Knight, Sir Lancelot, could not
see the vision because he had committed adultery in his heart with
King Arthur's wife, Guinevere. Nor did any of the others have the
stainless constitution needed to seek the Holy Grail;only Galahad had
the purity and courage to see the vision and succeed in the search.
Jones's example of victory rested on the integrity of the individual and
the nation. "Courage and purity-these are the conditions of spiritual
victory." He then tied this concept to the Christian struggle, which
included Christian conduct during the Great War. "To the man who
'lives pure, speaks true, and follows the Christ' there will be given a
better vision than that which Galahad saw, for he shall see his Lord as
He is, and that same Lord shall crown him king in the far spiritual
city." Sir Galahad's example gave individuals a chivalric Christian
model to stand up against the impure vices of society and Germany.
A good Christian then, according to Jones, should make him or herself
pure and in doing so, God would give them the vision of the Holy
Grail: the defeat of Germany, modernism, and secularization.59
The stories of chivalry and mythology went beyond King Arthur
and Sir Gawain. Members of the clergy extracted virtuous elements
from Christian saints too. A. C. Benson, a cleric, described "An Ideal
of Christian Chivalry" through the example of St. George. Benson
identified St. George with the biblical prophet Elijah, both as messen-

58. Charles Brown, "The Modern Call to Knighthood," Quiver 51 (May 1916): 653-54.
59. J. D. Jones, "Sir Galahad," Quiver 51 (May 1916): 661-63.
792 CHURCHHISTORY

gers of God, an attempt to claim divine providence through a linear

progression from the Hebrew prophets to the English saints. Benson
even cited St. George's birthday as 23 April, which coincidentally, he
pointed out, was the great Englishman William Shakespeare's birth-
day "and probably.., .his death." Thus, divine providence moved
from biblical to hagiographic figures and even permeated English
cultural heroes. In antiquity the prophet Elijah had been ordained by
God to destroy pagan worship that abounded in Israel. In this exam-
ple, St. George was delineated as receiving the same ordination and
moral legitimacy that Elijah obtained from divine intervention. This
not only added to the righteousness of both Elijah's and St. George's
actions, but also showed that God favored them to fight against
wrongdoers. Thus, St. George illuminated the finest ideals of England:
a great national symbol ordained by God to destroy corruption and
depravity.6o
After describing the divine and nationalist characteristics in the
patron of England, Benson discussed the militaristic aspect of St.
George. "The beauty of the figure of St. George is that he represents an
ideal of Christian chivalry." Benson defined that representation as a
combative one. "Chivalry is a Christian conception of the dignity and
nobility of combat. No amount of pacific argument can persuade us
that it is a Christian attitude to stand by and see a wrong done." Here,
Benson denied Jesus' ambiguous pacifism and labeled chivalry and
militarism as tenets of Christianity, which brought moral authority,
nationalism, and militarism together through the example of the
mythological dragon slayer, St. George. Benson then defined the
British attitude concerning the war with Germany and praised the St.
George-like examples of British Tommies. He believed the Tommies
were fighting a terrible war, but they were acting in the spirit of holy
English individuals who had gone before them. Benson's ideal British
soldier was a latter day Knight: "The young Christian soldier, high-
hearted and courageous, who regards a great fight not as the carrying
out of a brutal and aggressive programme, but as a great and noble

60. A. C. Benson, "St. George," The Quiver 51 (May 1916): 611-12. 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.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 793

adventure, may still be a worthy example of knightliness and stainless

valour, who is willing, if need be, to make the last sacrifice of love, and
to lay down his life for his friends." Benson's chivalric hero was not
degraded by the violence of war, but elevated by a struggle cast in the
religious-nationalist terms of what he perceived as British righteous-
ness versus German immorality.61
In an attempt to further legitimize chivalry and gain authority, the
Quiver sold advertising space to British commercial interests that
promoted English nationalism and chivalric notions of Arthurian
myth. The war had driven the costs of printing higher, and TheQuiver
incorporated a few more advertisements than normal in 1916. One
such advertisement was a full-page advertisement for Monkey Brand,
a Benjamin Brooke company that made and distributed cleansers and
polishes (see image 1).62 English Professor Anne McClintock's cultural
study looks at cleansing companies' media advertising campaigns in
the nineteenth century as evidence of commercialized colonialism.
Her highly interpretative work suggests that companies, such as
Benjamin Brooke, infiltrated colonial markets with literal and sym-
bolic representations of soap cleansing the inferior races of uncivilized
society. "Soap offered the promise of spiritual salvation and regener-
ation through commodity consumption, a regime of domestic hygiene
that could restore the threatened potency of the imperial body politic
and the race."63
In the 1916 image, a man with the head of a monkey was polishing
a Knight's helmet. The armor sparkled after the man cleaned it with
Monkey Brand polish. The advertisement's artist placed the chivalric

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, Chris-
tianity, 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 Battle-
ground 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.
62. Advertisement, "Monkey Brand," The Quiver 51 (July 1916): xxiii.
63. Anne McClintock, "Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertis-
ing," Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 211.
794 CHURCH HISTORY

MONKEY BRAND.

CHIVALRY REVIVED WITH MONKEY BRAND.

IMAGE1. Advertisement, "Monkey Brand," The Quiver, July 1916, xxiii.

Knight beside a picture of Tommies on the frontlines, thus reminding

Anglicans to support militarism, chivalry, and England by buying
Monkey Brand polish. The Knight's body armor stood erect with a
lance in one hand and a shield with a Christian cross in the other. The
caption underneath the image stated, "Chivalry Revived With Mon-
key Brand." Beneath the caption the advertisement included a poem:
On head-pieceworn in ancientdays,
See, quicklysuch a shine I raise
Thatsoon it looks like new;
As new as head-pieceworn to-day
By Allies in the greataffray,
To whom all honourdue.
According to McClintock, in the nineteenth century these com-
mercial representations legitimized social hierarchy by relegating do-
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 795

mesticity to the underlings of society. "Monkeys were seen as allied

with the dangerous classes: the 'ape-like' wandering poor, the hungry
Irish, Jews, prostitutes, impoverished black people, the ragged work-
ing class, criminals, the insane and female miners and servants, who
were collectively seen to inhabit the threshold of racial degenera-
tion."64 A half-man, half-ape figure using Monkey Brand cleansers
seemed to suggest that Britain could figuratively cleanse the inferior
with Monkey Brand soap and literally regenerate the primitive
through colonialism.
In the wartime advertisement, nineteenth-century primitivism be-
came twentieth-century German Modernism, and the "ape-like" be-
came German soldiers and citizens. The message of the advertise-
ment: Britain was regenerating German Modernism with English
chivalry. The advertisement tied British chivalry through a mytholog-
ical caricature to the righteous actions of British involvement for the
sake of regenerating civilization and the ideals of the volunteer ad-
venture-war-hero or, in other words, reviving antimodern tradition-
alism. In fact, according to the image, the British Tommies had already
done so on the battlefield; it was up to civilians to do the same on the
homefront. This type of advertising campaign claimed the answer to
ending the war was chivalry, a peculiarly English antimodern moral
code. Reconciliation was completed. The answer to German Modern-
istic militarism and Britons' improprieties was English antimodern
chivalry. That such an image appeared in The Quiver suggested that
Anglicans proselytized and commercialized their antimodern ideol-
ogy. Either with commercial aid or without, church leaders believed
they could popularize this antimodern meaning and infuse British
people with chivalric cultural morality. The legitimacy of their justi-
fication as a Christian nation endorsing war against another Christian
nation depended on this process. So did any hope of regaining cul-
tural authority in a secular world. The only concern was whether the
audience would accept Anglican stories.
It was difficult to tell how much influence this strategy wielded.
However, Anglican storytellers did have some influence. A section of
The Quiver was devoted to its young readers; during the war this
section became known as "The League of Young British Citizens." Its
object was "The cultivation personally, and the extension in all pos-
sible ways, of the highest ideals of Citizenship, and of love and service
for our Empire." The picture that adorned "Our Young People's
Pages" was a medieval knight holding a lance and a shield with a

64. Ibid., 216.

796 CHURCHHISTORY

cross on it. A portion of every issue was dedicated to letters from the
group's membership. In one letter entitled, "Knights of the Garden or
Farm," an anonymous Briton wrote about a three-year-old boy who
did not know the difference between weeds and flowers. Finally an
adult explained to the boy that the weeds took away the nourishment
of the flowers. He then explained to the young one what each looked
like. After the boy recognized the difference, the writer resounded,
"He is a sort of knight rescuing beautiful flowers from their deadly
foes. He throws himself upon a weed, uproots it, and carts it away,
with the righteously indignant exclamation: 'Horrid old weed! Stop
eating the flowers' dinner.'"65
The anonymous Briton used the boy to draw attention of readers to
their duty to sacrifice during the winter for the sake of the soldiers in
the field: "Quite likely lots of you can be knights of the garden this
summer, rescuing not only flowers, but those vegetables we needs
[sic] must grow so plentifully. If you have no garden of your own,
perhaps your holiday time will be spent on a farm, or where there is
a garden in which you can show your knightly service."66The letter
used mythological figures to admonish others to practice knightly
character in the raising of fruits and vegetables. Although it was
difficult to know if the Church of England had a direct influence, the
fact that an individual mixed ideas of knightly service with nationalist
emotions and Christian service during the Great War showed that this
attitude existed in society. This individual saw the knightly task as a
Christian sacrifice that all could endure, which would allow everyone
to contribute to the war effort in the same Christian spirit that the
national heroes of their heritage practiced long ago.67
The conclusion of 1916 and the commencement of 1917 brought the
third or postcrisis stage. The Russian offensive coupled with the
already announced Declaration of War on Germany by the United
States moved the Church of England from its introspective mood to
an optimistic hope for peace. Potential victory caused societal prob-
lems to disappear. Contributors to the Church QuarterlyReview no
longer wondered what was ailing the Church, and writers of The
Quiver abandoned their engagement of mythology in favor of plan-
ning the postwar peace. The Bolshevik withdrawal of Russian troops
in late 1917 temporarily checked this optimism but it was quickly
renewed when the U.S. deployed its forces in early 1918. Optimistic
Anglicans no longer saw a moral crisis in Britain and started asking

65. "Our Young People's Pages," The Quiver 51 (August 1916): 928.
66. Ibid.
67. John Williams, The Other Battleground;John M. Bourne, Britain, 230, 202, 231.
THEIMAGINEDCRUSADE 797

how the church would deal with the spiritual lives of returning
soldiers? What peace should be dictated to the Germans? How should
the church view the League of Nations? Can the Church take advan-
tage of the war and unify the British nation? Church writers dealt with
all of these topics in the ChurchQuarterlyReviewfor the remainder of
1917 and 1918. But these were no longer introspective pieces defining
what was wrong with Britain;they were optimistic articles discussing
how Anglicans could direct postwar British society.
Many church leaders started to believe in 1917-18 that the Church
of England was in a position to influence the postwar period. Repen-
tance, based on Mythology and chivalry, seemingly would get Angli-
cans through the war and would make Britainvictorious. In the minds
of Anglicans, Britain had passed God's test and looming victory
proved God sided with Britain. If God had decided to aid Britain's
military war, perhaps God would help the Church of England defeat
secularization in postwar Britain. However, unlike the wartime anon-
ymous Briton who simplistically viewed gardening as a knightly task,
most postwar Britons, especially people outside of England were
unwilling to believe in Anglican stories laced with outdated Anglican
meaning. Even Anglicans became suspicious. As Anne Summers sug-
gests, "The many clerics who witnessed with delight the success of
their recruiting sermons were bitterly disappointed in their hope that
the war would offer Christianity in Britain a great opportunity for
revival and expansion. The British response to the call of arms was not
a victory for any of the ideologies of the day, and the hideous and
discrete experiences of the war years left them no political base on
which to build."68
Instead of religious revival, the pre-war controversies regained
their strength and the Church of England lost more authority with
each secular victory. Feminism, labor, and Ireland all gained auton-
omy; these were crucial battles in the war of secularization, which
the postwar state church had no chance of winning, even if it served
as an important wartime storyteller with cultural clout. Indeed the
National Mission of Repentance and Hope proved a fruitless
endeavor and a changing British audience desired different stories
told by different storytellers. The Church's grasp to gain status
and power after a long period of losing them quickly vanished in the
war's aftermath. Mythology then, for the Church of England, was a
nocturnal mirage that disappeared when the sun rose again in No-
vember 1918.

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

If the media and government propaganda promoted nationalism

and support for the war effort, the Church of England was also an
institution that exploited this process to gain power in English society.
This paper has examined the role Christianity played in the propaga-
tion of patriotic concepts. It suggests that the Church of England
amalgamated Christian constructs and mythological morality to call
for a movement dedicated to the defeat of Germany. Additionally it
maintains that the members of the clergy embraced this strategy and
incorporated mythological figures to stress Christian character in an
attempt to create a religious revival among Britons and regain author-
ity over them. As religion played a crucial role in the culture of the
country, it also contributed to the nation's identity. And it was in this
way that the Church of England tried to resist secularization by
redefining the traditional English identity through the guise of war in
response to German Modernism. However, the Church's strategy
failed.
The crucial event that facilitated the regeneration of this nostalgic
cultural identity was world war; it also made chivalry obsolete. The
Great War of 1914 to 1918 provided a battlefield where huge indus-
trial nation-states met as enemies to pound out the future of the
world. This four-year period also saw an accompanying ideological
war in which conservative cultural reformers of English society took
advantage of the military struggle to define who they were and who
they were not. Anglicans hoped to gain power over culture that they
could regulate in twentieth-century Britain. When Great Britain and
the allies forced Germany into an armistice, and later the Peace of
Paris, they cleared the path for the cultural victors to pursue patrio-
tism and power. But for Britain this meant returning to a tumultuous
peacetime environment of unresolved conflicts from the prewar pe-
riod. Church of England leaders had convinced themselves that the
ideas of English chivalry defined the superior civilization. But their
ideology became more obsolete as secularization gained power. An-
glican storytellers hoping to regulate culture in postwar Britain found
a new world that they were incapable of controlling and unprepared
to thwart.