It is not especially hard to understand why the historiography of religion and war has begun to blossom. Studies on the intersection of these two global forces are topical today in ways that all can feel. Less widely perceived is the crying need for such studies. Despite the large and rapidly expanding bodies of writing on religion and on war as separate topics, very few scholars have considered the many spaces where they intersect. The range of potential topics is vast indeed. Religion and war propaganda; the religious lives of soldiers; the effects of war on religious movements; moral histories of war; and religion, nationalism, and memories of war are but a few. Two relatively recent books, Doris Bergen, ed., The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), and Richard Budd, Serving Two Masters: The Development of American Military Chaplaincy, 1860 –1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), have approached the question of religion's role in war by focusing on the military chaplain, easily the least understood fulltime clergy in the Western world. Military chaplains have been poorly understood in history and in our current moment because they do not fit easily into any one category. They are professional ministers with denominational affiliations, but they often do not serve churches per se and are plagued by questions of whom they ultimately serve. They wear uniforms and work in the military, but they are not soldiers and they have long been dogged by charges of military irrelevance. Scholars and students, contemporaries and comrades have often commented on the betwixt and between status of the military chaplain, speculating as to which of the many interests weighing on her or him is primary.

Into this conversation steps Michael Snape with his detailed, chronological study of the Royal Army Chaplains' Department (RAChD), the institution charged with assigning and managing chaplains in the British Army. From 1796 to 1953 (Snape's chronological frame), through the expansion and contraction of the British Empire, through two world wars, and into the early stages of the Cold War, Snape follows the development of the department and the stories of the men who shaped it and served in it. Snape draws on an impressive array of archival and published sources to describe the “broader military, religious, political, and cultural significance” (364) of the RAChD and to argue that in order to properly understand the department one must resist the urge to place it apart from British society. Given this goal, his decision to approach the topic using an institutional historical model makes a great deal of sense even when it leads the reader into apparent bureaucratic backwaters. As Snape ably demonstrates, the successes and the failures of the RAChD were those of an institution among institutions and were intimately connected to the changing religious and social climates of Great Britain. The RAChD rose, fell, and rose again in response to developments within the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and dissenting churches of Great Britain and to the demands placed upon it by the British army. The tug and pull of these organizations and the sometimes visionary, sometimes myopic leadership of the RAChD created the situations into which British clergymen were placed, determined the jobs they were supposed to do, and shaped the attitudes of those with whom and for whom they worked. Snape balances this institutional perspective with tales of the chaplains in action, never letting the reader forget that actual people with complex identities and varied experiences took on the often unenviable task of ministering (and preparing to minister) to men at war.

Snape's opening and closing salvos against the “pacifist” bias in past studies of military chaplains are somewhat dissonant with the tone of the rest of the book. This bias, he argues, has kept chaplains from getting a fair shake when it has not foreclosed consideration of them as subjects or redirected discussions of their work into articles that presuppose and then “prove” the illegitimacy of Christian ministry in the military. Snape's extended discussion of this bias adds little to the book that his careful and sympathetic presentation of his evidence does not accomplish on its own, and this reader wishes that he would have trimmed it back somewhat. For much of the twentieth century, voices calling out chaplains for hypocrisy or sycophancy have been matched in number and volume by voices emphasizing the importance of providing for soldiers' spiritual needs. For the bulk of its pages, Michael Snape's long-overdue scholarly look at British chaplains goes about the more important work of laying a foundation for future inquiries into the spiritual life of an empire and those who served it.