It is hard to calculate the damage Christianity suffered during the first half of the twentieth century through its association with specific nationalistic agendas. This is especially paradoxical when one bears in mind that from its very beginning Christ’s message of peace and love was for allpeople: Jews and Gentiles – Galileans, Greeks, Romans, and by extension Africans, Asians, and then indigenous Americans, and the rest of the planet. And it was the nineteenth century that took Christianity to the furthest corners of the world via Protestant and Catholic missionaries. Missionaries who were no doubt wary of each other, nonetheless, as they remembered 200- or 300-year-old grudges, which included the York-born Catholic convert traitor Guy Fawkes on the one side and Sir Francis Drake’s burning of the Cadiz fleet along with Spanish settlements in the New World on the other. Guy Fawkes was destined to become one of the enduring bogeymen of English culture, and is still burned in effigy on 5 November today (the date in 1605 when he attempted to blow up Parliament), while it was said that long after his death, in 1596, Spanish mothers would try to frighten naughty children into obedience by threatening them with “El Draco”, or Drake!
But on the whole, Christendom was at peace with itself by the nineteenth century, as hostility between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox became largely limited to name-calling, tract-writing, depriving men of university chairs, and the occasional black eye. What came to matter much more was taking the faith to all people in all places, and by 1910 this enterprise had been a spectacular global success. And perhaps nowhere more than in Africa, as the peoples of the southern half of that vast continent in particular became passionate in their new faith. And they still are, as Islamic jihadi persecution produces modern-day Christian martyrs in Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. Persecution still steels the Christian soul, just as it did in the days of Nero and Diocletian. Rome now has its black, Asian, and Latin American cardinals; while by 2010 two of the Church of England’s most popular, plain-speaking and controversial bishops were the Ugandan, the Most Revd Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, and the Pakistani-born former Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Revd Dr Michael Nazir-Ali: the spiritual children of former missionaries, and now themselves missionaries in “secular” Britain, and both of them victims of anti-Christian and anti-libertarian persecution in their home countries.
But what circumstances led to Africans and Asians becoming missionaries to Christian Great Britain and Europe? Back to that small piece of the earth’s surface, in fact, which little more than a century ago was the missionary powerhouse of the planet? We will be returning to this subject in Chapters 8 and 9, but suffice it to say at present that full-scale warfare between two of the great Christian nations and their allies in 1914 played a major part.
No one in 1901 could have reasonably foreseen World War I, for in that year Queen Victoria’s son, grandsons, and one close relative by marriage either already ruled, or would soon rule, three countries which, with their empires, controlled millions of square miles of the earth’s surface. They were King Edward VII and King George V of Great Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas of Russia. Three deeply Christian countries, two with the most advanced technological economies in history, and a third which was struggling to reform and “come up to date”.
London and Berlin had so much in common. Both were essentially Protestant, yet with sizeable integrated Roman Catholic and Jewish minorities. And in addition to long-standing royal ties of blood and religion, Great Britain and Germany had many other links in business, science, technology, education, art, culture, and general understanding. Rather more, in fact, than Great Britain did with France, against whom she had fought regularly across the previous 800 years. We had never exchanged a shot in anger with Germany, and in several previous wars British troops had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Germans – and the Dutch – against Philip II of Spain, and Louis XIV and XV and Bonaparte of France. A war with our devout, hard-working, and honourable Teutonic cousin and friend seemed impossible.
And then all suddenly went mad in August 1914, as the two nations began to blow each other, and each other’s allies, to bits in the fields of northern France. Then Russia came in, was beaten by the Germans, its royal family summarily murdered by the Bolsheviks, with Lenin, Trotsky, and others proclaiming atheism, communism, and Marxist Revolution.
It is hard for us, a century later, and almost desensitized by the subsequent genocides of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and the other hordes of hell, to fully appreciate the numbing horror of the years 1914–18, when high Christian civilization suddenly seemed to commit suicide. And apparently out of a clear blue sky!
But it is not my purpose here to explore the causes of World War I, so much as to emphasize its spiritual damage. Why had God let it happen, people asked? Was not God a good Englishman, a good German, or the heavenly Father to the “Little Father”, the Czar of Holy Russia, depending on the flag you flew? Had he not empowered his earthly children in northern Europe, and their cousins in North America, to take the light of the gospel to the “darkest corners” of creation, and in most cases, had not the inhabitants of those lands come to embrace it with a passion? And would not a global Christian Europe be an insurance policy for peace and prosperity into the future?
So what had gone wrong, when scarcely a single family on either side of the North Sea had not lost one or more of its beloved sons in the madness? Were the atheists right after all? Was it to freethinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Bertrand Russell that we should be turning for fresh direction? To philosophical pessimism, to the “Will”, to dialectical materialism, to scientific rationalism, to atheism? For the Christian imperial insurance policy had apparently crashed in our darkest hour!
This “nationalistic Christianity” and its sudden failure to maintain peace even within heartland Europe, I would argue, would become a major feature of anti-Christianity in the twentieth century.