Ray Hamilton Abrams has a lot to answer for. In 1933, his classic book Preachers Present Arms offered a scathing denunciation of U.S. churches in World War I for their hyper-patriotism and their willingness to spout official propaganda. He assembled a large and often harrowing corpus of illustrative texts, although his polemic left little room for nuance or balance. So powerfully did that Abrams stereotype shape popular views of churches in that era that even today it provides the background against which serious scholarship must operate.
American Churches and the First World War is a collection of eleven essays, all thoroughly researched and of uniformly solid quality, addressing an impressive range of topics. The book offers an excellent and readable survey of the era, which illustrates the undoubted patriotic zeal of clergy but also stresses the agonies and dilemmas they faced. Beyond the simple fact of intervention in the war, scarcely less thorny were debates over conscription and the total and constant commitment that the Wilsonian state demanded to the war effort. To take a seemingly minor point: should ordinary Christians buy Liberty bonds and thereby show public commitment to a war so often defined as a literal crusade? Active or vocal refusal to do so could result in beating or worse. Neutrality was not an option.
The collection does not offer a straightforward overview of the topic and makes no attempt to allocate space according to the strength or influence of particular churches at this time. The mainline churches receive sparse coverage, and neither Methodists nor Baptists are mentioned much. That is quite legitimate given the authors’ focus on particular key topics that deserve full emphasis in our approach to the war, but the question of balance should be mentioned. The closest the book comes to the mainstream is in Richard M. Gamble's insightful account of the stunningly broad coalition that in 1917 produced the pro-intervention manifesto No False Peace, which united voices as diverse as Lyman Abbott, Billy Sunday, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. So many evangelicals—extremely broadly defined—marched “Together For the Gospel of Americanism.”
Much of the book concerns churches that in different ways occupied a marginal status in the religious environment of the time and how they coped with those circumstances. One strong theme is how these bodies used the war to move from outsider status to be recognized as fully part of the American religious spectrum. Most famously, that was the story of the Roman Catholics, here studied by Patrick Carey, but also of the Lutherans (Mark Granquist) and Mormons (J. David Pulsipher). In each case, enthusiastic support contributed to acceptance by the Protestant mainstream and helped counteract sometimes fierce prewar prejudices. In the previous decade, the prolonged controversy over Reed Smoot's election to the U.S. Senate had raised fundamental questions about whether Mormons could ever be considered true or loyal Americans. The Catholic role was especially crucial, as by the 1920s they constituted almost a quarter of the national population. Of course, that process of integration had its limits, and the war's end coincided with a vicious upsurge of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant activism exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan. But when Catholics were assailed, it was very useful indeed for them to point to their heroic support for the wartime cause. Likewise, for Lutherans, wartime participation marked a decisive stage in their transition away from being mere “hyphenated Americans.”
The book devotes no fewer than four of its chapters to churches that were numerically tiny but that included sizable contingents opposed to this war or to war as such. These include the then-emerging Pentecostals (Zachary Michael Tackett), Mennonites (Perry Bush), Quakers (Robynne Rogers Healey), and Jehovah's Witnesses (M. James Penton). To nobody's surprise, Pentecostals were extremely divided on the war, with factions representing every possible response, while Quakers struggled to reconcile the “fighting” sympathies of some members with the grave conscientious concerns of others. For Mennonites, the war demonstrated the strict limits that existed to an already advanced process of integration and Americanization. That peace commitment would prove the stumbling block. Although believers of various kinds suffered for anti-war beliefs, few were as utterly stigmatized as the Bible Students, or Jehovah's Witnesses. They attracted the full and virulent attention of federal and state internal security agencies and were viewed as outright German agents. It is very useful to have Penton's account of the Russellite book The Finished Mystery, which appears so often in the files of multiple police and spy agencies as an unspeakable sedition.
Another theme running through the book is that issues of war and peace alone did not occupy the churches to the exclusion of all other concerns. Gamble here makes an important methodological point about the need to pay due regard to otherwise unrecognized preachers and clergy who did not draw notice for wild statements about the war, who did not indulge in patriotic excesses, but who just carried on preaching and ministering through all the alarums and expeditions. Might we call them the silent majority (my phrase not his)? The continuity of regular pastoral work emerges in Timothy J. Demy's chapter on military chaplains. Gordon Heath tackles the range of new humanitarian concerns arising from the war in his account of American responses to the Armenian Genocide, a real turning point in awareness of global human rights issues.
So yes, some preachers did indeed call to arms, but others resisted that call to the point of risking their lives and freedom. And many preachers, and ordinary believers, struggled to maintain their integrity through a desperately challenging time.
