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Angels in the Trenches: British Soldiers and Miracles in the First World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
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In their interactions with the soldiers during the First World War the British military chaplains were afforded the opportunity to see the Christian body in microcosm. The chaplains’ frontline experiences shaped their positions on popular religion and the sincerity of Christian belief and practice amongst Britain’s youth. A comparative assessment of clerical responses to soldiers’ claims of the miraculous not only demonstrates a critical divide in clerical understanding of the supernatural – a divide which is more appropriately separated along theological rather than denominational lines. It also indicates that many of the differences between Catholic and Protestant evaluations of popular religion were, fundamentally, differences of clerical perception rather than popular practice and belief.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005
References
1 See especially D. S. Cairns, The Army and Religion (London, 1919); Charles Plater, ed., Catholic Soldiers (London, 1919); Anon., Catholics of the British Empire and the War (London, 1916); Arthur Herbert Gray, As Tommy Sees Us: a Book for Church Folk (London, 1917) and Stephen H. Louden, Chaplains in Conflict: the Role of Army Chaplains since 1914 (London, 1996).
2 See Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (1st edn, London, 1978; 2nd edn, 1998), 169–96; Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: the Church of England in the First World (Durham, NC, 1974), 135–42; Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform?: War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–1945 (London, 1986), 33–6; Stuart Mews, ‘Religion and English Society in the First World War’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1973, 173–87; Thomas Johnstone and James Hagerty, Cross on the Sword: Catholic Chaplains in the Forces (London, 1996), 100–90; Adrian Hastings, History of English Christianity 1920–1990 (London, 1991), 30–140.
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20 Ibid.
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35 Cairns, Army and Religion, 42.
36 The Tablet, 19 August 1916, 229.
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