Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade

By Philip Jenkins

The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism.

Connecting numerous remarkable incidents and characters—from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide—Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as never before and shows how religion informed and motivated circumstances on all sides of the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780062105103

Philip Jenkins

Philip Jenkins is the Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He has published articles and op-ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe and is a regular on radio shows. He was educated at Cambridge and has written over twenty books including The Lost History of Christianity, Jesus Wars, and The Next Christendom and over a hundred articles and reviews. He has won several book prizes in both the Christian and secular arena.

Reviews for Great and Holy War

[Guy Cabell · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to decide how to properly evaluate this book. I don't agree with the author's statement that World War I was a holy war. No doubt religion was involved, as he explains, but it wasn't a matter that Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia saw their opponents' religion as evil, only the opponents themselves were evil. This is a very common way of getting people to kill other people, which most people aren't inclined to do, as the author summarizes. And if the increase in the number of religious devotees in Africa and Asia has its roots in the war, we must also accept that the decline in religious participation in Europe also has its roots in the war. Still, it was good to find out many of the things that Dr. Jenkins wrote about, since I didn't know anything about them before, especially the loss of the controlling caliph of Islam has led to the development of extremely radical versions of it today.