In the years leading up to and during the Second World War, the senior clergy and lay leaders of the Church of England drew upon long-standing ethical traditions of war and peace to contribute to national debates on British foreign and military policy. My aim in this book has been to explore their participation in these debates from the threefold perspective of Anglican studies, Christian theological ethics, and the broader study of diplomatic and military history.
This book, then, is first of all a project in the field of Anglican studies. Many previous works dealing with the subject matter have taken, by contrast, a multi-denominational approach.1 And for good reasons. The Church of England’s bishops, clergy, and lay leaders in the 1930s and 1040s were deeply ecumenical creatures, who responded to the era’s political, diplomatic, military, and humanitarian challenges in constant dialogue and cooperation with their colleagues in other denominations at home and abroad. Any study of Anglican social engagement during this period cannot avoid due attention to the British and international ecumenical context. I have done my best to keep this wider context always in view. Nonetheless, this book has been written in the conviction that an Anglican focus remains valid and helpful in elucidating how the Church of England’s leaders drew upon and developed longstanding traditions of theological ethics in addressing the period’s public policy debates.2 My hope is that this book will be helpful to students of Anglicanism interested in exploring a key period in the Church of England’s history.
My use of the term ‘Anglican’ requires a caveat at the outset. Concentrating on the Church of England alone risks overlooking global Anglicanism. The descriptor ‘Anglican’ more properly refers to a worldwide communion of churches than to a single national church. Four recognised Anglican Churches, not one, existed in the United Kingdom in the 1930s and 1940s, and still do today.3 In the proper sense of the word, a comprehensive study of Anglican responses to the Second World War would embrace sermons, speeches, and writings produced in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.4 However, space constraints and the sheer volume of material have limited my scope to the Church of England. The expedient of using ‘Anglican’ as a convenient but inaccurate shorthand for ‘of or pertaining to the Church of England’ has been regrettable but unavoidable.
One justification for this focus, however, is that alone among the provinces of the Anglican Communion during this period, the Church of England remained an established national church.5 The legal and customary mechanisms of establishment gave its bishops and clergy an official role in national life unparalleled in the rest of the Anglican world. In this respect, the Church of England may have had more in common with established non-Anglican churches in such countries as Sweden and Greece than with non-established Anglican churches in such countries as Australia and Canada. One of my goals has been to assess how far the Church of England’s bishops were able to leverage this constitutionally privileged position to bring Christian principles to bear in influencing government policy in matters touching on the nation’s very survival.
This book is offered, secondly, as a case study in the Christian ethics of war and peace. My academic training at the doctoral level was in Christian social ethics. So, while I have made extensive use of what I hope are sound methods of historical research, this book represents an exercise more in applied theological ethics than in ecclesiastical history per se. My approach thus diverges from the emphasis of social historians who have recently contributed to our understanding of the critical role played by religion in British life during two world wars.6 Crucially, their ‘religion and society’ approach has demonstrated that the processes of secularisation, while already well under way, were not nearly as advanced by the Second World War as has often been supposed. Valuable as these contributions have been, my focus is instead on the history of theological and ethical ideas. Specifically: how did the Church of England’s leading bishops and theologians draw upon and develop historic traditions of Christian theological ethics to respond to the challenges of twentieth-century total war?
The concept of ‘ethical traditions’ is thus central to my approach.7 Traditions may be defined as patterns of thought and argument that exhibit sufficient consistency and family resemblance to be grouped meaningfully together. Traditions are broader than ‘theories’ or ‘schools’. As implied by the Latin traditio, ‘to hand down’, traditions persist over generations, evolving dynamically over time in response to changing historical contexts and problems. Adherence to a tradition may be explicit or implicit. Some adherents consciously identify themselves with a tradition after reading its foundational texts or studying under its authoritative living teachers. But other adherents may be drawn to positions or attitudes associated with a tradition without ever becoming aware of that tradition’s name, history, texts, or leading exponents. Similar situations recurring in different times and places can elicit structurally similar patterns of thought.8 This book presupposes that Christian responses to the problems of war and peace are often identifiable, whether explicitly or implicitly, with overarching traditions which can serve in turn as paradigms for analysing and categorising those responses.9 This approach admittedly carries the temptation to distort the historical material to fit a paradigm, which becomes in turn a kind of procrustean bed. It is thus crucial to be attentive to how a particular writing or utterance not only conforms to but also diverges from the relevant tradition’s expected forms. In this way, we can begin to glimpse the tradition’s evolution and development in history.
This book aims, thirdly, to help foster the dialogue between Christian theological ethics and the social sciences, particularly international relations theory and diplomatic and military history. Such a dialogue is much to be desired. Switching between mainstream histories of the Second World War and more specialised studies of the period’s religious life often feels like moving between parallel universes. Sir Max Hastings’ otherwise excellent Inferno (2011) makes no mention in 651 pages of any of the belligerent countries’ churches or religious leaders.10 While purporting to be a ‘moral history’ of the Second World War, Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat (2010) devotes a mere four of its 562 pages to a summary of Anglican criticisms of the British area bombing of German cities, commenting dismissively that Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang ‘had the good sense to know that clerics had no special competence to comment on these issues, a humility lost on some of his contemporaries and successors’.11 Such marginalisation of the churches’ contributions risks overlooking a vital component of the public life of societies at war by reading back into the 1940s a perspective shaped by the secularisation of more recent decades.
A key theme of this book is that the speeches, writings, and sermons of Anglican bishops such as Cosmo Gordon Lang, Herbert Hensley Henson, William Temple, and George Bell deserve to be taken seriously as Christian contributions to the period’s wider public discourse on politics, economics, diplomacy, war, and peace. These Anglican leaders engaged deeply with their academic and political contemporaries. Temple, Bell, and other ecumenical leaders participated in discussion groups with such scholars as Arnold Toynbee and Sir Alfred Zimmern. Bell developed his critique of the area bombing policy with the help of the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart. The recommended reading list at the end of Bell’s Christianity and World Order (1940) cites not only theological writings but also social sciences classics by such authors as E. H. Carr, Peter Drucker, and Michael Oakeshott.12 Students of political philosophy and international relations theory thus stand to benefit from studying the Church of England’s wartime leaders.
Considering these Anglican contributions in terms of the ethical traditions in play has necessitated a thematic rather than chronological organisation of the material. From chapter to chapter, a certain amount of going back to the beginning and starting all over again to examine the same period from different viewpoints has been unavoidable. Some chapters also lay essential groundwork for the topic at hand by reaching further back into the past to explore the relevant traditions’ development in Anglican history. This method is integral to my thesis that the Anglican leadership’s participation in the Second World War debates affords a valuable case study in the application of Christian ethical traditions to problems of war and peace. While eschewing a chronological approach, however, I have been mindful of Andrew Chandler’s admonition that ‘At any given moment we must hold the whole picture together and place every specific detail within it if we are to understand what was said and done.’ I have also tried, as Chandler urges, to allow the material to emerge and speak on its own terms.13 Early in my research, for example, it became clear that the received paradigms in the literature on Christian attitudes to war and peace failed to account for a theme of war as divine judgement clearly present in much of the period’s Anglican writing. This theme merited further investigation and ultimately its own chapter.
In a work intended to be an exercise in Christian theological ethics, some degree of normative evaluation of the Anglican protagonists’ interventions in the era’s debates has been appropriate and inevitable. But I have tried to avoid simplistic judgements of whether they were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to take the positions they took, showing instead how their positions made sense in terms of the ethical traditions that informed their thought. Thus, for example, in Chapter 8 I suggest that the disagreement between George Bell and William Temple on the bombing of German cities reflected the deeper difference between the jus in bello tradition towards which Bell inclined and the Christian realism of which Temple was a leading proponent. Again, in Chapter 12, I suggest that the disagreement between Percy Hartill and Vera Brittain on the desirability of ‘humanising’ warfare reflected the deeper difference between Hartill’s absolute pacifism and Brittain’s evolutionary abolitionism. Beyond this mapping of positions in the landscape of ethical traditions, it has seemed appropriate on occasion to express admiration or, conversely, disappointment with some of the figures concerned. Given the complexities of their situations, the restricted ranges of choices available to them, and the limitations of their world views, were the stances they took the best of which they were capable?
A further question is whether their witness can be instructive to us as we confront the political, diplomatic, and military challenges of today’s very different world. For example, does Bishop Bell’s February 1944 House of Lords speech against obliteration bombing have anything to teach us about the morality of present-day missile and drone strikes on targets in densely populated urban areas? Does the Anglican leadership’s advocacy of generous admission policies for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution have any implications for our attitudes towards today’s global migration crisis? Does the British Christian wartime advocacy of cross-blockade food relief for populations in enemy-occupied territory have any applicability to our responses to present-day famines resulting from the use of starvation as a weapon of war? The list of questions could go on and on. Given the vast political, economic, and technological changes of the past eighty years, the challenges confronting the Anglican protagonists in these inter-war and wartime debates were certainly of a different order from those confronting us today—but are they in any respects analogous? Although I have left such questions mostly in the background in treating the historical material, they have never been far from my mind, as I hope they will not be far from the reader’s mind either.
Seekonk, Massachusetts
October 2024
For example: Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform: War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–1945, corr. edn (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010; orig. publ. London: SCM, 1986); Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–2000, 4th edn (London: SCM, 2001); A. J. Hoover, God, Britain, and Hitler in World War II: The View of the British Clergy, 1939–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999); Andrew Chandler, British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); and Michael Snape and Stuart Bell (eds), British Christianity and the Second World War (Woodbridge, SFK: Boydell, 2023).
Previous studies focussing specifically on the Church of England in relation to twentieth century wars include Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974); Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War, 2nd edn (London: SCM, 1996; orig. publ. London: SPCK, 1978); Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism, Studies in Modern British Religious History, vol. 12 (Woodbridge, SFK: Boydell, 2006); Stephen G. Parker and Tom Lawson (eds), God and War: The Church of England and Armed Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Farnham, SRY: Ashgate, 2012).
The Church of England, the Church of Ireland, the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the Church in Wales.
A study of relations between the churches of the Anglican Communion and military establishments in English-speaking ‘Western’ countries is found in Michael Snape, A Church Militant: Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
The Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1869 and the Church in Wales in 1920.
Examples of this approach include Stephen G. Parker, Faith on the Home Front: Aspects of Church Life and Popular Religion in Birmingham, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005); Snape, A Church Militant (2022); and Snape and S. Bell, British Christianity and the Second World War (2023).
Alasdair MacIntyre has developed the idea of ethical traditions in such works as After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
See the contrasting approaches of Terry Nardin, ‘Ethical Traditions in International Affairs’ in Traditions of International Ethics, ed. Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, pp. 1–22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 2–8; and Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992), pp. 5–8.
Key works on historic Christian attitudes towards war and peace include Roland Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-Evaluation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960); Lisa Sowle Cahill, Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994); and John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, ed. Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009).
Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).
Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: A History of the World War II (London: Harper, 2010), p. 503.
George K. A. Bell, Christianity and World Order (Harmondsworth, MDX: Penguin, 1940), pp. 155–156.
Chandler, British Christians and the Third Reich, p. 6.