Holy War and Secularization

Philip Jenkins’s latest, The Great and Holy War, examines the religious dimensions of World War I. On all sides, he observes, it was characterized as a holy war, a comic battle that would culminate in Armageddon and perhaps usher in an eschatological order.

In fact it was, as Andrew Preston put it, “Christendom’s ultimate civil war” (quoted, p. 21), the last in a centuries-long parade of inter-Christian conflict. Its effect was to put a final stroke to the secularization of Europe. Christian divisions had already undermined the credibility of the faith, which had been so closely identified with European civilization. What shred of credibility was left was incinerated in the trenches all over Europe.

What died in World War I was a vision of throne-and-altar pseudo-Christendom. Jenkins writes, “Since the Enlightenment, Christian churches had struggled to determine their correct relationship to the secular state. Now, Christians confronted a state-centered modernity modernity rooted in nationalism and militarism, which demanded that religious bodies conform to these troubling waters. Many European churches succumbed to these temptations, which undermined their credibility and eventually opened the gates to secularization and pervasive skepticism” (23). Muslims for their part had to figure out what it meant to be Muslim without a caliphate.

As Christianity ran aground in Europe, it exploded elsewhere: “Islam has become a global force, and so have non-Western forms of Christianity. Besides secularization in Europe, any account of twentieth-century religion would also note the rise of decidedly anti-secular forces across much of the rest of the globe, including in the United States: charismatic, fundamentalist, traditionalist forms of faith” (20).

We live in the religious world made by World War I, the last great European war of religion.