The Great War and the Expiration of Religion
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 …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
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 …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