Published eighty years after the end of the Second World War, in this lengthy monograph John D. Alexander (an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Rhode Island) examines the positions and views of a selection of ‘senior clergy and lay leaders of the Church of England’ (p. xi) and their significance in relation to history’s bloodiest conflict. Furthermore, his aim is to do this ‘from the threefold perspective of Anglican studies, Christian theological ethics and the broader study of diplomatic and military history’ (p. xi). Originating in a paper on George Bell written while a student at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (p. xvii), and aided by Paul Avis (to whom Alexander expresses ‘an incalculable debt of gratitude… for hundreds of hours spent reading and discussing successive drafts’, p. xvii), his goal is to show that his subjects ‘drew upon long-standing ethical traditions of war and peace’ in making notable contributions ‘to national debates on British foreign and military policy’ (p. xi). Throughout the book, Alexander views his subject through the lens of Christian social ethics, his focus resting on those whom he terms ‘the Church of England’s leading bishops and theologians’ (pp. xii–xiii). Ultimately, he claims, ‘The Church of England’s wartime leadership fulfilled the indispensable role of conscience of the nation by questioning, probing, and testing precisely… relationships between ends pursued and means employed’ (p. 379). He adds: ‘Even when they failed to change policies, it was nonetheless crucial to put the questions on record, if only for the sake of future generations’ (p. 379). In sum, he maintains, their efforts serve as a model for our own turbulent times, exemplifying Martin E. Marty’s concept of ‘public theology’ in their attempts to draw out ‘a theological tradition’s implications for the civil community’s life’ (p. 376) and fulfilling Rowan Williams’s paradigm for an established Church in their espousal of an ‘incarnational theology’ that defied ‘the boundaries of ‘national interests’, eschewed fixations on ‘otherworldly spiritual concerns’ and exhibited ‘deep concern for this world’s well-being’ (pp. 378–379).

Alexander makes his case in the course of thirteen substantive chapters. He begins by reviewing ‘Christian Ethical Traditions’, including ‘Christian Pacifism’, ‘The Just War Tradition’ and ‘Holy War and Crusade’. He then proceeds to discuss the constitutional position of the Church of England; ‘soft power’, the Church of England and Nazi Germany in the 1930s; selected aspects of the Church’s role in wartime (including military chaplaincy and the use of church buildings for military purposes); ‘Justifying War: Jus ad Bellum and Christian Realism’; war as divine judgement; ‘The Struggle for Christian Civilisation: Holy War, Crusade, and Chivalry’; the area bombing of German cities; the ethics of internment, prisoners of war and blockade; ‘Peace Aims and Jus post Bellum’; ‘The Church of England and the Pacifist Conscience’; ‘The Pacifist Witness in the Church of England’ and, lastly, ‘The Church of England and the Holocaust’.

While it is without doubt an ambitious ‘exercise in Christian theological ethics’ (p. xv), the book’s success as a work of history is much more open to question. Weighing in at over 400 pages, much of what is discussed (for example, the Nazis and the German churches in the 1930s, the controversy over the RAF’s area bombing of Germany, and the Church of England’s responses to the Holocaust) is well-trodden ground. However, if these issues could have been dealt with more concisely, more significant are the questions which hover over the book’s perspectives and methods, not least of which concerns Alexander’s parameters. Britain’s participation in this colossal global conflict involved more than waging war against Nazi Germany in northern Europe, but little is mentioned about the British Empire’s war against the Axis powers in North Africa or the Mediterranean or its struggle against Imperial Japan in East Asia and the Pacific – despite the Church of England’s substantial investment in these distant mission fields. Consequently, for example, while the perennial debate over the area bombing of Germany is revisited, Alexander overlooks the bombing of the ancient abbey of Monte Cassino on the orders of his British (and Anglican) namesake, General Harold Alexander – an infamous and seemingly unnecessary episode of the war in Italy. More importantly, however, especially given the atrocious reputation of Stalin’s murderous and atheistic regime in the pre-war years, the moral dissonance of Britain’s nakedly pragmatic (and all too brief) alliance with the Soviet Union from 1941 – and its dire implications for Poland, for which Britain went to war in the first place – goes unremarked, despite Churchill’s bold admission that ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’ (http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill_papers/biography/, accessed 5 May 2026).)

This intrinsic selectivity, whether conscious or otherwise, is also present in Alexander’s use of key terms and concepts. The phrase ‘Anglican leaders’, for example, which crops up recurrently, is frustratingly vague and elastic, it being hard to avoid the conclusion that the term chiefly applies to those who best serve his arguments. For example, unlike Cosmo Gordon Lang of Canterbury, William Temple of York and Canterbury, George Bell of Chichester and Herbert Hensley Henson, the former Bishop of Durham, who remain very much to the fore throughout (p. 377), most of the Church of England’s wartime bishops (a growing number of whom, unlike the aforementioned, possessed the weighty credentials of being veterans themselves) remain in the shadows. Significantly, an oddly peripheral figure is Geoffrey Fisher, Bishop of London, the third Archbishop of Canterbury of the war years and chairman of the Bishops’ War Committee. Alexander’s bibliography indicates that he has eschewed both Fisher’s papers and the War Committee’s records, yet the remit of the latter was ‘any matter which affected the Church and was thrown up by a Britain fighting a total war’ (Edward Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher, Canterbury Press, 1991, p. 85). Perhaps Fisher’s pragmatic and abiding acceptance of the atom bomb sits too awkwardly with Alexander’s agenda. Similarly, and despite his formidable status as Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, George VI and his regular wartime broadcasts (a fixture of Christmas and of Empire Day, for example) get only a brief mention in connection with D-Day. Significantly, these renowned wartime speeches (most famously, on the declaration of war on Sunday, 3 September 1939) expressed – often in strikingly intimate terms – a traditional, patriotic theology of national (not to say imperial) righteousness and providential care. A good example is the King’s broadcast of Christmas 1941, which, buttressed with the language of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, declared:

‘We are coming to the end of another hard-fought year. During these months our people have been through many trials, and in that true humility which goes hand in hand with valour have learnt once again to look for strength to God alone. So – I bid you all – be strong and of a good courage. Go forward into this coming year with a good heart. Lift up your hearts with thankfulness for deliverance from dangers of the past. Lift up your hearts in confident hope that strength will be given us to overcome whatever perils may lie ahead until the victory is won. If the skies before us are still dark and threatening, there are stars to guide us on our way. Never did heroism shine more brightly than it does now, nor fortitude, nor sacrifice, nor sympathy, nor neighbourly kindness. And with them – brightest of all stars – is our faith in God. These stars will we follow with His help until the light shall shine and the darkness shall collapse.’

(King George VI to His Peoples 1936–1951, John Murray, 1952, pp. 29–30)

If Alexander’s vision of the war and his presentation of the Church of England’s leadership seem unduly circumscribed, then (as his handling of the King’s broadcasts suggests) this also extends to his treatment of ‘public theology’. Part of Alexander’s case for his subjects’ significance rests on the assumption that they could reliably reach a substantial national audience amid the myriad trials, distractions and tribulations of total war. Yet, corroborative evidence (e.g., from book sales and circulation figures, from newsreels or from the BBC’s extensive listener research) is lacking. Similarly, the findings of social survey organisations such as Mass-Observation and the British Institute of Public Opinion are ignored – even though, for example, Mass-Observation investigated the public resonance of the term ‘Crusade’ as early as 1940. Another striking lacuna is the work of the Religions Division of the Ministry of Information, and especially its weekly bulletin Spiritual Issues of the War (1940–45), whose raison d’être – proclaimed in its strapline – was ‘To provide for readers at home and abroad information concerning the life and thought of the British churches in wartime.’ Lastly, and apart from the contents of the secular regional and tabloid press (only three of Britain’s dailies are cited in the book’s bibliography, all of which are national broadsheets), the Church of England published a huge quantity of periodical literature of its own which was aimed at a much broader readership than active churchgoers, perhaps most notably the humble parish magazine. Despite their status as channels for public theology, these periodicals are ignored altogether – even though in 1946, and despite severe and continuing paper rationing, 11,000 parish magazines were being published with an estimated circulation of 2.75 million. (K.D.M. Snell, ‘Parish Pond to Lake Nyasa: Parish Magazines and Senses of Community’, Family and Community History, 13, 2010, 45–69, p. 46).

As Jeremy Morris has pointed out, ‘what the Church “thinks” on any one issue often has to be worked out in a dizzyingly complex vortex of relationships’ (Jeremy Morris, A People’s Church, 2022, Profile Books, p. 376) – and this was no less true of the 1940s than it is in the 2020s. If, therefore, one can reasonably question the book’s expansive title on the basis that its narrow cast cannot stand as proxies for dozens of bishops, thousands of clergy and millions of lay men and women in Great Britain and across the world, and also on the grounds that their influence cannot be simply taken as read, one may also question the character and achievements ascribed to them. For instance, in his portrayal of Bishop Ernest Barnes of Birmingham (‘the Church of England’s first pacifist bishop’, p. 15), Alexander fails to mention that Barnes’s pacifism was heavily influenced by an enthusiasm for eugenics and by his desire to conserve, at least as Barnes saw it, the nation’s best racial stock. Such unpleasant convictions later translated into Barnes’s opposition to post-war immigration from the British Commonwealth. Unsurprisingly, and as Stephen Parker has pointed out, given the bishop’s record, he has usually been treated as an ‘embarrassment’ in the history of British pacifism (Stephen G. Parker, ‘“Blessed Are the Pacifists”: E.W. Barnes of Birmingham and Pacifism, 1914–1945’, Midland History, 34, 2009, 204–219, p. 219).

Besides the book’s persistent selectivity, Alexander evinces a tendency to overstrain his claims by missing precedents and downplaying other, seemingly less important concerns and calculations. For example, he argues that William Temple and other ‘Anglican participants in the British peace aims debate’ anticipated by six decades the jus post bellum thinking that arose among just war theorists in the early twenty-first century (pp. 10–11, 287).’ Missing from this picture, however, is the urgent objective of re-evangelising post-war Germany, a mission which had begun among German prisoners of war and in which the British Council of Churches was heavily invested. Significantly, Britain was the only one of the four victorious Allied powers to create a Religious Affairs Branch for its zone of occupation (see Peter Howson’s Britain and the German Churches, 1945–1950, Boydell, 2021). Likewise, and because of their interventions on behalf of the persecuted Jews of Europe, Alexander credits William Temple and George Bell with ‘articulating an incipient version of what has since [2001] become known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the context of a rudimentary theological ethic of rescue’ (p. 338). But the imperative of humanitarian intervention was one with which the Victorians were entirely familiar: it was, for instance, a driving feature of Britain’s long-running campaign against the slave trade, it was invoked repeatedly when justifying nineteenth-century colonial conflicts, and it reached a national, anti-government crescendo in enraged responses to the infamous, Ottoman-inspired ‘Bulgarian Massacres’ of 1876.

In a similar vein, too much weight is attached to the ‘implicit’ or ‘tacit’ influence of jus in bello aspects of the just war tradition. While Alexander acknowledges the ‘temptation to distort the historical material to fit a paradigm’ (p. xiii), he still maintains that – consciously or unconsciously – his protagonists were actuated by ‘overarching traditions’ (p. xiii) and ‘ethical frameworks’ (p. 193) inherent in Western Christianity. But this is a tricky case either to prove or disprove, especially if (in the absence of clear evidence of transmission) that influence is perceived as percolating down, unmediated and unadulterated, from the ecclesiastical ether. We have noted already how eugenics infused Barnes’s outlook on the war, but quotidian factors such as simple historical awareness or the strength of the sportsman’s ethic (especially among bishops reared on the values of muscular Christianity) also guided moral calculations. That these were inflected by more prosaic considerations is, for example, shown by Temple’s cogent if rudimentary reflection on the place of area bombing in the history of European warfare: ‘How does bombardment for military purposes differ in principle from an old-fashioned siege which reduced women and children to starvation. Is one legitimate in war and the other not? The whole thing is a beastly business.’ (Robert Beaken (ed.), Faithful Witness, SPCK, 2020, p. 421). Furthermore, and with respect to the encroachment of jus in bello principles on the Church of England’s consciousness, Alexander refers to the debate on the just war tradition which occurred between C.S. Lewis and the Anglo-Catholic Eric Mascall in 1939. On the threshold of war, and in the journal Theology, Lewis challenged the standing of Mascall’s seemingly novel jus in bello arguments in light of the Church of England’s traditional, jus ad bellum-centred teaching on war, the state, and the duties of ‘Christian men’– a view classically enunciated in the English rendition of the Thirty-seventh Article, ‘Of the Civil Magistrates’ (pp. 131–134). Two years later, this prevailing, conservative mindset was expressed with more asperity in the Preface of Crockford’s, which decried the perplexities of ‘some of the clergy’ over the discrepancy between the Latin and English renditions of the Thirty-seventh Article (which spoke, respectively, of justa bella as opposed to merely ‘wars’) as a symptom of clerical ignorance. Here it was pointed out that ‘Closer acquaintance with the Latin language would have told them that the adjective Iustus does not mean just or righteous when applied to things, but regular, authorized, or legal… It may be possible to question the view of war taken by the framers of the Articles, but there can be no doubt as what they meant to say. It would probably never have occurred to them that a time would come when a considerable number of the clergy, including some Convocation men, would be unable to interpret a simple Latin phrase.’ (Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1941, p. x). On this same point, and while Alexander cites Vera Brittain as one of his four case studies in his chapter on ‘The Pacifist Witness in the Church of England’ (no attempt, incidentally, is made to consider the overall number of the Church of England’s conscientious objectors), it is worthy of note that Brittain’s daughter, Shirley Williams (1930–2021), maintained that it was her Catholic father, not her Anglican mother, who introduced her to ‘the Catholic just war theory where war has to be morally justifiable with a series of guidelines’ (see Tony Padman, ‘Shirely Williams: My Family Values’, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/15/shirley-williams-my-family-values, accessed 1 May 2026).

Ultimately, it is regrettable that this otherwise thought-provoking book comes across more as an exercise in boosting the stature of Temple, Bell and others than as a balanced and thorough investigation of the views and agendas harboured within a large and diverse national Church. Nor does it convincingly illustrate the range and reach of its ‘public theology’. Indeed, whether such boosterism is needed is itself a moot point. In 2019, Clive Field’s British Religion and the World Wars: A Subject Bibliography of Modern Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), an instructive source not cited by Alexander, listed twice as many publications on William Temple alone as on the entirety of British religious life during the war years. Mindful of Morris’s caution and conscious of a huge hinterland of potential source material, it would perhaps be more revealing to attend to that wider, beleaguered wartime Church – in all its travails, diversity and complexity – than to hear once again from a cast of more familiar actors already stamped with the approval of posterity.