The Great War, characterized by its international scope, its incredibly underestimated duration and magnitude, and its completely unpredicted and enormous consequences, sits upon the human saga unlike any event previously recorded throughout all of history. Before 1914, Europe had not faced a notable war for one hundred years, much less one of comparable magnitude. As war-barren as Europe’s landscape was prior to the First World War, it was equally war-plagued in the following century, with each politically significant event linked, at least indirectly to the Great War. The American Great Depression, the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, who fed off of their countries’ losses in the war and used them as their political platform, the crisis of liberalism, the popularity of appeasement politics, the economic turmoil in Germany, and the eventual outbreak of the Second World War, accompanied by the Holocaust, can all by attributed to the Great War.
While those events do directly follow the Great War, even closer in proximity is the upsurge of the socialist Bolshevik Revolution under Lenin and the fall of the Sharia Law governed Ottoman Empire to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. These formerly theocratic regimes, the Russian and Ottoman empires, were replaced by secular ones. Across Europe, the ravages of war were unfathomable, and increasingly, religion was of no assistance to the grieving nations. Protestant and Catholic clergy struggled to explain the effectively senseless horrors of the war to their congregations. And how could they? With over 17 million deaths and 20 million wounded, the Great War ushered in an entirely new category of loss. In pre-war Europe, religion served as a comfort and held answers to almost all grief. …show more content…
Christian religions dominated the western scene, and religion was engrained in almost all aspects of European life. Though it is arguable that religion had been under attack for some time before the outbreak of the war, with philosophers such as Nietzsche and political theorists such as Marx and Engels already contesting the conceptions of God, the true downfall of religion did not occur prior to the Great War. There was a sharp decline, not only in the presence of theocratic governments, but also in the importance of explicitly religious sentiments felt by the entirety of Europe as an effect of the First World War. This essay will examine the rise in spiritualism, the use of religious vocabulary implemented to address patriotic war, and the inability of religion to help European nations to cope with grief as the causes of the post-war European religious decline. It is impossible to conceive how engrained religious dialect was in the early twentieth century. Some scholars have gone so far as to compare the discourse, syntax, and vocabulary used in the Great War to that of the religious crusades of the eleventh century. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker note: “In all the countries, the catchphrase was the same: ‘God is with us’, ‘Dieu est de notre côté’, ‘Gott ist mit uns’.” Belief in God and patriotic nationalism were essentially inextricable. It is crucial to note that just because the two are deemed inseparable, this is not to say that every nationalist must be an avid churchgoer or preacher of the Word of God. Rather, anyone that loves his country, and loves and supports what she is fighting for, deems her cause worth, in some skewed way, the death tolls it is causing, he must understand and take part in the religious undertones of the dialogue and discourse by which his country justifies the slaughter. The concepts of good and evil, sacred unity against a common enemy of malevolence, the mysticism that accompanies combat, etc. are all facets of the vocabulary that formed the religion of patriotism. This language saturated the landscape of war across the European continent. Toby Helm writes of his grandfather, a British WWI veteran, Cyril Helm’s experience leaving home for the battlefront: “a message is read out to all those on deck from King George V. ‘You are leaving home to fight for the safety and honour of my Empire, […] I pray God to bless you and guard you and bring you back victorious.’ Just two