The First World War ended 100 years ago. This is how Christianity, religion played a role in The Great War | Faith + Values

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War – also known as the "Great War" and "the war to end all wars".

This was triggered by the assassination of the Austrian-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

National alliances have led countries to mobilize. When Russia mobilized to defend Serbia, Great Britain and France were drawn into the Triple Entente. On the other side were Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire – the Triple Alliance.

By the end of the war, 17 million people had died and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were resigned to the dustbin of history. The United States, which only went to war on April 6, 1917, lost 116,516 soldiers in combat and disease.

The role of religion

Although the First World War was a geopolitical conflict, the role played by Christianity has been gaining popularity in recent years.

"Countries with established churches, such as Britain or Russia, with officially secular states like France, religious leaders and believers in every country have described war as a spiritual mission or a holy war for the count of an innocent and invaded people, "said Maria Mitchell, a professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College, teaches and writes on religion and conflict.

"It was not a religious war, but it was religiously framed," added Randall Zachman, emeritus professor of reform studies at the University of Notre Dame and assistant instructor at the University of Notre Dame. church history at the Lancaster Theological Seminary.

State churches existed in Europe and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, was at the head of the Prussian Church – a union of Lutheran and Reformed denominations.

Zachman said the growth of Protestantism and nationalism in the years leading up to the First World War fueled the conflict.

It started with the victory of Prussia over France during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). This effectively ended Catholic domination in the German states that made up Prussia.

"This puts an end to the Habsburg domination, which is fundamentally Catholic domination in Germany," said Zachman, "and (Chancellor Otto von) Bismarck is the Protestant."

Under Bismarck, the German unification intensified and had cultural and national implications.

Tanya Kevorkian, an associate professor of history at the University of Millersville, said that Germany had elevated Martin Luther to the rank of hero during this period – nearly 400 years after the Reformation. When German forces invaded a stronghold of Catholic France at the beginning of the First World War, "they gave (J.S.) Bach's concerts to plant the flag in a cultural way."

"Muscular protestantism"

Zachman described it as "muscular Protestantism. Religious nationalism is developing alongside the development of nationalism ".

And this belief that Protestantism was the dominant cultural force in the world was not confined to Germany.

"That's when we started to think about the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world," he said. "There was this cultural and religious unity between Protestants in England, Protestants in Germany and Protestants in the United States, and this triumvirate would be a dominant cohort."

Some have seen this religious affiliation as a way to end the war in a negotiated way. Nathan Soderblom, Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala, Sweden, tried in vain to bring together religious from the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, Mitchell said.

Catholics also fought during the war. Pope Benedict XV, elected in September 1914, pleaded with the warring parties for peace negotiations, but his request was rejected.

Political alliances – and not religious ones – have now shaped the mutual perception of Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

The British stereotyped the Germans as barbaric "Huns" after Belgium's invasion of Belgium. Propaganda posters depicted Protestant Germans crucifying prisoners of war and cutting off children's hands.

Christian Crusade

The soldiers, Mitchell noted, "were described and even saw themselves as martyrs of a Christian crusade".

The symbols of mourning, she added, "were explicitly Christian".

People of other religions also fought in the war. The Muslims fought with the French and the Jews fought on both sides.

"There were a lot of German Jews who boasted of being very good Germans," Kevorkian said.

But the seeds of anti-Semitism, which existed long before the war, began to surface. In 1916, Mitchell said, Germany conducted a "count of Jews" that "led to unfounded suspicions that Jews were fleeing military service."

On the Allied side, the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish captain in the French army was falsely convicted for passing on military secrets to the Germans, also led to the marginalization of the Jews.

The end of the war marked a religious awakening in the West, but the conditions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles were scarcely Christian.

Germany had to disarm, make territorial concessions and pay reparations to countries that were part of the Entente powers. The total cost of repairs is over $ 31 billion.

Zachman said that some free churches in the United States – Mennonites, Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists, all opposed to the war – were seeking to temper Jingoism after the war, but that Protestantism Muscled allies called for "a catastrophic Germany for what they did. "

Ten months after the end of the war, the Weimar Constitution was promulgated, creating a parliamentary democracy in Germany.

This mandatory separation of church and state, Protestant churches were therefore no longer state churches. From 1919, various church councils and synods led religious bodies in Prussia and other German territories.

Day of the Armistice

On November 11, 1918, at 2:50 pm Eastern Time, the US State Department announced in one sentence that the war would officially end at 11:00 am the same day.

Shortly thereafter, sirens sounded and church bells rang in the city of Lancaster to announce the end of the war. At 4 am, residents of Reamstown and Akron in Lancaster County had formed impromptu parades.

The Great War was over. But he failed to live up to his nickname "war to end all wars".