This is altogether a handsome production. Michael Snape, Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University, begins his odyssey in the Durham Light Infantry Chapel in the cathedral there. The text that follows grows from the Hensley Henson Lectures given at the University of Oxford in 2020. A substantial introduction frames the study extensively, acknowledging the changing tides of time and theme, from imperial ambition to world wars and the Cold War, and also charting the developing geography of the Anglican communion, emanating from England and spreading to North America and Australasia and across the Anglophone world, usually on privileged terms. In what ways did Anglicans speak of war, or experience it? Often it was at very close quarters, and not least because military and ecclesiastical careers were frequently entangled within the same families. If there is little evidence to show that in their minds war was a thing to be justified it was very largely because such matters belonged within the province of the state to which Anglicans naturally deferred. The book, Snape writes, seeks to ‘represent an attempt to rethink and reinterpret the history of western Anglicans and the armed force, showing how a once intimate alliance helped to shape the nature and fortunes of the armed forces and the character of the Anglican churches in the English-speaking world’ (p. 31).

Such an object is realised in five long chapters, observing myriad patterns of association and interconnection. Each age presents its own distinctive directions, qualities and emphases. The ‘Christian militarism’ of the Victorian Church is found in many places: in the very fabric of Anglican family culture; in the parishes and their festivals and in the pages of their magazines; in the public schools (so often overseen by clerical headmasters); and in the profusion of new voluntary organisations, institutes and guilds, not least the Church Army (an obvious emulation of the Salvation Army). Indeed, as Snape remarks, ‘the centrality of Anglicanism in Britain's armed forces, and their place within British Anglicanism’, can hardly be denied, so explicit and insistent had it become (p. 104). If the Church of England showed a preference for the Royal Navy, its army chaplains were to be found very much at large in those distant campaigns which extended or confirmed the imperial map. Here lay the beginning of many future dilemmas. After the Waikato War of 1863–4, Bishop Selwyn was left to reflect that his army chaplaincy had lost the Church much credit in the eyes of the Māori population. In the post-civil war United States, where Anglicans remained a small, if conspicuous, minority, young men of the Protestant Episcopal Church were to be found enrolling in striking numbers in the famous military academy at West Point. From there much more would be heard.

Perhaps the most formidable chapter of the book addresses the First World War. Here Snape is thoroughly at home, casting a sceptical but still generous eye over earlier historiographical myths and revealing a tremendous campaign of church ‘mobilisation’ with a cast of vivid characters who bring life and movement to the picture. He shows how many senior officers were indeed Anglicans to the core (emphasising Sir Herbert Plumer and Sir Henry Horne); how chaplains laboured in the field, established Toc H and earned soldierly respect; how archbishops and bishops toured the lines of battle and even crossed the Atlantic to gratify Episcopalians there and to cultivate American sympathies. He also discusses the many debates which occurred over conscription (which was widely supported by Anglicans), conscientious objection (which was often viewed with incomprehension), poison gas (which was criticised by Archbishop Davidson but on which the bishops were divided) and the ruinous blockade of Germany (a humanitarian tragedy which was only later acknowledged). In short, ‘the role of Anglican affinities and networks had seldom been as subtle, or as significant’ (p. 186).

There is much in the chapter on the Second World War that shows a repetition of earlier mobilising patterns – Snape adopts the term ‘Remobilization’ – rather than a reaction against them, as has often been proposed. Again, the patchy quality of the existing historiography is acknowledged – but perhaps this time it proves more difficult to escape. Snape is understandably resistant to earlier emphases on a rather predictable cast of luminaries but, even if he keeps Bishop Bell at something of a safe distance, he spends a good deal of time in their company. Indeed, as he observes, a high number of the new recruits to the House of Bishops presented impressive military credentials. There are, again, military tours and foreign tours (not least to Moscow, where Archbishop Garbett proves a particular success). Most of all there is Field Marshal Montgomery, the son of a bishop, insisting loudly that Christianity was a vital element of military morale. Australasian and South African forces proved that loyalty to the mother country remained vigorous where the Anglican Church was strong. As for the United States, Snape observes that President Roosevelt was throughout his presidency Senior Warden at St James’s Episcopal Church in New York, adding – tantalisingly – ‘his Episcopalian background and sympathies inevitably played to the advantage of Great Britain’ (p. 2007). Indeed, across the global theatre of war Anglicans made their mark, not least in Singapore and in Burma, where the Karen people fought a long campaign of insurgency against the Japanese.

The post-colonial age and the unfolding Cold War brought important reconsiderations and reconfigurations. Archbishop Fisher framed a briskly constructive approach to much of this, not least in transferring ecclesiastical power across the new Commonwealth and fashioning a new picture of the Anglican communion itself. Snape finds that ‘there can be no doubt that Fisher succeeded in his strategy of integrating the armed forces more closely into the life of the Church of England’ (p. 294). This postwar world proved to be far from pacific, above all in Korea and not least in the Malayan Emergency (in which appears the intriguing figure of the missionary May Griggs). But the old alliance between Church and the Armed Forces was by now beginning to run out of steam and there was a discernible loosening of ties. In July 1946 compulsory church attendance disappeared in an amendment to the King's Regulations. If Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic prospered in the 1950s the following decade told a very different story. Nuclear weapons presented a solemn reckoning and provoked earnest debate, and some controversy – particularly when the diocesan bishop, a former Royal Navy chaplain, turned up to officiate at a ceremony on a new Polaris submarine. With intervention and then escalation in Vietnam a great deal fell apart very badly. Perhaps it did not help that two successive Chiefs of Staff, Johnson and Westmoreland, were committed Episcopalians. As the war faltered, bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church argued with each other; pacifism and draft-avoidance broke out amongst the young; beleaguered Episcopalian chaplains, far too few in number, came under scrutiny after two were caught up in the inquiry into the My Lai massacre. In such turmoil the very idea of military chaplaincy received a new, intense, scrutiny. No longer a noble profession of arms devoted to a palpable just cause, the vision of war itself had changed into something dubious, compromised, degraded and futile. All these issues reverberated, painfully, across the Anglican communion. It is, certainly, a very different moral landscape from the one with which the book began.

A final chapter explores the relationship between Anglicanism, remembrance and memorialisation. This survey presents a new, often creative and sometimes awkward dialogue between religious and secular understandings, expressed across a hundred years in the design of tomb stones, public buildings and regimental chapels, and also in the careful crystallisations of public language. Here, too, Snape finds the Anglican Church a ‘hugely formative’ presence (p. 411) before the restless 1960s represent a retreat. A discursive ‘afterword’ brings the reader into the twenty-first century, to Iraq and to Archbishop Williams. If the relationship between Anglicanism and the Armed Forces was by now plainly waning, it had certainly, as Snape remarks, enjoyed a long ascendency. An alert, parting postscript, written in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, shows all too clearly that none of the themes which define the book have gone away – even if a great number of ‘self-identifying’ Anglicans apparently have.

A Church militant speaks well of many years of concentrated study and reflection. And there is within it, now and then, more than a glimmer of an historiographical casus belli, for Michael Snape acknowledges – and laments – the ‘unduly secular’ treatment of his subject by historians at large (p. 297). It may be hoped that such a book may represent a modest advance against a superior force which has, for many years, enjoyed an entrenched position on the commanding heights of the historical profession.