World War I at 100: New books examine the battle of beliefs behind the ‘Great War’

(RNS) Some called it “The Great War.” Others called it “The War to End All Wars.” History proves it was neither.

As the world marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I — a conflict that left 37 million dead or wounded and reshaped the global map — a number of scholars and authors are examining a facet of the war they say has been overlooked — the religious framework they say led to the conflict, affected its outcome and continues to impact global events today.

More than that, they argue, today’s religious and political realities — ongoing wars, disputed borders and hostile relationships — have their roots in the global conflict that began when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914.

“You can’t understand the war fully without investigating the religious dimensions of the war,” said Jonathan Ebel, an associate professor of religion at the University of Illinois whose “Faith in the Fight: The American Soldier in the Great War” has just been issued in paperback.

“I would be the first to tell you the Great War was not a war of religion, but I think a big part of people’s understanding of what they were doing in the war, or why the war made sense to them, comes from religion.”

“Faith in the Fight” explores how American soldiers, field nurses and doctors and other aid workers used their religious experience to face the war. Reading through letters, memoirs and other contemporary accounts, Ebel discovered that rather than disillusioning those who fought the war, it somehow reinforced their ties to religion.

“The experience might have been something that knocked people off their beliefs, made them question,” Ebel said. “But based on the material I was able to draw on, the war for many Americans was not a disillusioning experience. Rather, it confirmed the illusions — if you want to call them that — of why they entered the war.”

Ebel draws a line from the “masculine Christianity” of the early 20th century (evangelist Billy Sunday’s enormously popular revivals often included military recruiting tents) to the way combatants and support workers thought of the war. Soldiers scribbled lines of Scripture on their gas masks, marked their calendars with a cross for each day they survived combat, and opened the pages of the Stars and Stripes military newspaper to read poems comparing them to the heroes of the Old Testament.

“The culture of pre-war America gave America images, ideas and beliefs perfectly tailored to war,” he writes.

VIEW: SIX MUST-READ BOOKS ON RELIGION’S ROLE IN WORLD WARS I & II

That is echoed on a global stage in “The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade” by Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religion at Baylor University. The book pulls the lens back from individual Americans to highlight the religious imagery, rhetoric and symbolism used by all sides in the war to further their goals.

Several countries — especially Russia and Germany — saw the war as a fulfillment of their unique destinies as the kingdom of God. But Europe did not have room for so many countries with the same aspiration.

“You can toss a coin as to which country to blame, but their two clashing visions made war inevitable,” Jenkins said. “If you do not understand the messianic and apocalyptic imagery used by all sides, and how wide-ranging those images were among all classes, all groups, all nations, you cannot hope to understand the war.”

Jenkins gathers numerous examples of biblical images of angels, demons, apocalypse and righteousness and shows how both sides in the war used them to justify the fight and rally support at home. It is no wonder, he writes, that the war was frequently referred to as “apocalyptic,” or even as Armageddon, the final battle the New Testament says will restore a heavenly kingdom.

“I could almost rewrite my book in terms of angels,” he said, citing one of the most frequently used — and believed in — images of the war. The most famous example are the so-called “Angel of Mons” — ghost soldiers from the 15th-century Battle of Agincourt led by St. George who supposedly appeared on the the British lines in France.

But the ghost soldiers were the post-Mons invention of Welsh poet Arthur Machen. Yet when he pointed out they were a fiction, people accused him of suppressing the truth.

“You don’t get anything like that in World War II,” Jenkins said of the belief in angels on the battlefield. “In World War II, there were hundreds of depictions of angels, but they were all in films and books that were clearly fantasy and fiction. But the angel stories in World War I were taken seriously.”

But if the angels were fictions, the new realities established at the end of the war in 1918 were very real and still affect global religion and politics today, Jenkins writes. After the war, Jenkins said, Jews felt a more urgent need for a land of their own. The push for a Jewish homeland gained momentum and led to the establishment of Israel in 1948 — and to the conflicts between Israel and some of its neighbors today.

Adolf Hitler, too, latched on to the widespread humiliation that permeated a defeated Germany to establish his Third Reich, sowing the seeds for the Holocaust that would leave 6 million Jews (and millions of others) slaughtered.

Jenkins also traces the contemporary push for an Islamic caliphate — or Muslim kingdom — by contemporary groups such as The Islamic State and al-Qaida to World War I. In many ways, the Middle East map we know in 2014 has its origins in the aftermath of World War I.

“The end of the caliphate (after World War I) removed the certainty of faith and state for Muslims,” Jenkins said. “It was an uncharted wilderness. And what most of them have tried to figure out for the last 90 years is how do you live in that wilderness?”

He also tracks the rise of African Christianity to World War I, which he said exposed the previously isolated continent to new ideas and new faiths as they fought alongside or supported their European colonizers in the war.

“This was an era of mass movements, healings, religious risings, nationalist Christian restructuring, Marian visions,” Jenkins writes of Africa in 1918 and beyond. “When the newer churches write their history, they will give pride of place to those critical years after 1915, when believers tried to make sense of a world plunged into destructive insanity.”

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Pope Francis appeals for peace with Shimon Peres, Mahmoud Abbas

VATICAN CITY (RNS) As Israel continued its ground offensive into the Gaza Strip, Pope Francis urged Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to end the spiraling conflict.

Pope Francis reviews the honor guard with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during an arrival ceremony at the presidential palace in Bethlehem, West Bank, on May 25, 2014. Photo by Paul Haring, courtesy of Catholic News Service This image is available for Web and print publication. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.

The pontiff telephoned the two leaders on Friday (July 18) to express “his very serious concerns” only six weeks after both joined him at the Vatican for a historic prayer meeting.

Francis said he was concerned about the “climate of growing hostility, hatred and suffering” that was claiming many victims, resulting in “a serious humanitarian emergency,” the Vatican said in a statement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who did not attend the Vatican prayer meeting in June, has said he is prepared to “significantly widen” Israel’s action against militants in the Gaza Strip.

Thousands of troops moved into areas of Gaza on Thursday night, backed by tanks and artillery fire, while Hamas, the Palestinian organization that controls Gaza, has warned Israel will “pay a high price” for the invasion.

At the end of the joint prayer service with Peres and Abbas in June, Francis urged the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to act with courage and seek peace in the Middle East.

Given the rapidly degenerating situation in Gaza, the pope’s plea now seems like a very dim prospect.

The Vatican said the pope considers the two men to be “men of peace” and Francis reminded the two leaders of the need for both sides and those who hold political office to work to end the hostilities and promote peace.

The pope also sent a personal message to 200 Catholic missionaries working in Gaza to express his support and tell them he was praying for them, according to the Italian daily La Stampa.

KRE/AMB END McKENNA

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Obama to employers: Notify workers if you’re dropping contraceptive coverage

WASHINGTON — Employers that intend to drop coverage for some or all forms of contraception in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision must notify employees of the change, the Obama administration said Thursday (July 17).

The Obama administration, through the U.S. Department of Labor, has announced that employers who intend to drop coverage for some or all forms of contraception in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision must notify employees of the change. Public domain image

The notice was posted on the Department of Labor website as a new “frequently asked question” about the Affordable Care Act, the health care law passed in 2010 and still being implemented.

The Supreme Court ruled last month that closely held corporations whose owners have religious objections to offering certain types of birth control in their health plans must be allowed to opt out of the government’s contraception requirement. The case was brought by Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, and Conestoga Wood Specialties.

The timing of the notice came after the Senate failed Wednesday to pass Democratic legislation that would have reversed the high court’s ruling. Faced with Republican opposition, the measure failed to get the 60 votes needed to clear a procedural hurdle.

Under the health care law, most corporations are required to provide 20 forms of birth control to female workers without cost-sharing. Churches and other religious organizations are excluded. Religious non-profit groups are allowed to sign a form indicating their objection, triggering a process in which employees still will get the coverage — but that accommodation is being contested in court.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling, which came on the last day of its term, more companies are likely to drop coverage of some or all contraceptives. The Labor Department notice is intended to warn employees.

“For plans that reduce or eliminate coverage of contraceptive services after having provided such coverage, expedited disclosure requirements for material reductions in covered services or benefits apply,” the department said.

(RIchard Wolf writes for USA Today)

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COMMENTARY: Why evangelicals’ love for Jews is a case of unrequited love

(RNS) According to a new survey, white evangelical Christians feel a lot of warmth toward Jews.

Michael Schulson is a freelance writer based in Durham, N.C. RNS photo courtesy Michael Schulson

As for Jews, they feel colder toward evangelical Christians than they do about any other religious group.

Cue the Taylor Swift ballads: We have here a serious case of unrequited love.

To gauge the interreligious emotions of the American public, the Pew Research Center asked thousands of Americans about their religious identification, and then asked them to rate other religious groups on “a feeling thermometer,” where a zero was “the coldest, most negative possible rating” and 100 was “the warmest, most positive” response.

With a wildly subjective metric and results that invite massive generalizations, the survey deserves a skeptical look.

Still, the discrepancy in the Jewish-evangelical relationship is too large to dismiss. White evangelicals gave Jews a full 69 percent of emotional warmth (very high, by the survey’s standards), while Jewish respondents gave evangelical Christians a frosty 34 percent — one of the lowest ratings in the entire Pew data set.

Jews rated Catholics pretty favorably, so we can’t explain this result as a response to Christianity as a whole.

Heavy-handed efforts to convert Jews — such as the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1996 resolution on Jewish evangelism — have not endeared certain evangelical denominations to their Jewish neighbors. And some Jews may struggle to forget anti-Semitic comments made in the past by evangelical leaders, including Billy Graham.

But the real issue here is not that evangelicals don’t love Jews enough. It’s that certain evangelical communities sometimes love Jews way, way too much — or, more accurately, love an image of what they believe Jews to be.

Seeking a return to pre-Christian roots, churches hold Passover seders and blow shofars during services. Evangelical support for Israel is legendary. Liberty University, the evangelical school in Lynchburg, Va., even has a Judaic studies program that, as its director told the Liberty student newspaper, “tries to communicate to the Liberty community that we as Christians owe a debt of gratitude to the Jewish people.”

An employee of a Jewish federation recently told me about the letters, overflowing with praise for the Jewish people, accompanied by donations that occasionally arrive from eager Protestants.

There’s a term for this flavor of affection: philo-Semitism, or the love of Jewishness and Jewish culture. For some, this kind of love may represent an unmitigated good — especially in contrast to the anti-Semitism that has haunted so much of Jewish history.

More often than not, though, evangelical upwelling of philo-Semitism seems to have little to do with actual Jewish people, and more to do with Jewishness as an abstract theological concept.

A lot of evangelical support for Israel, for example, grows out of certain strains of dispensationalist theology, in which the Jews’ return to Israel is seen as a prerequisite for the Second Coming.

Meanwhile, in a 2004 address, televangelist Pat Robertson didn’t even try to hide the degree to which his understanding of Jewish history served his own theological ends: “You are the living witnesses that the promises of the Sovereign Lord are true,” he told an Israeli audience, after suggesting that the last 2,500 years of Jewish survival served as “primary evidence” for the existence of God.

Elsewhere, in an essay at the orthodox Christian magazine First Things, Joe Carter examined “our philo-Semitism” and concluded “we evangelicals have a special affection for our Jewish neighbor” in part “because we know that God had a special affection for them too.” The sentiment, while kind, should be familiar: Jews are likable because of their role in Christian theology.

When evangelicals speak about Jews this way, they shouldn’t be surprised if their love goes unrequited. At its core, philo-Semitism has much in common with anti-Semitism. Both approaches view Jewishness as an abstract monolith, and both endow Jews with particular historical roles — roles, it seems, that are rarely of the Jews’ own choosing.

For centuries, the powers that be defined Jewish people in terms of New Testament themes and archetypes. The modern world has offered remarkable opportunities for Jews themselves to figure out what, exactly, Jewish peoplehood might look like.

As a young Jew, I can’t help but see expressions of evangelical philo-Semitism as an attempt to keep Jewishness in its New Testament box, and to continue the old fallacy of conflating the Jewish people (of Bible fame) with living Jewish people — a diverse bunch of folks, muddling along, who have not always benefited from being evaluated in light of ancient Scriptures.

Fortunately, for those evangelicals who find themselves prey to an unreciprocated philo-Semitism, the annals of unrequited love may hold some useful advice: In relationships, you really can’t start out trying to change someone. And if you genuinely want things to work, you have to court an actual person, not just a projection of whoever you wish them to be.

(Michael Schulson is a freelance writer in Durham, N.C. He writes about religion, science, and culture.)

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