How WWI sowed seeds for future
international conflicts
World
War I -- the "war to end all wars" -- in fact sowed seeds for future
international conflicts in a way that has been largely overlooked: through
religion, says a Baylor University historian and author.
As
the 100th anniversary of the war's beginning approaches, Philip Jenkins, Ph.D.,
Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor, says that attitudes prevalent
then have influenced how global powers see each other today, often viewing
themselves as favored by God.
During
World War I, which began on July 28, 1914, Germany saw itself as a religious
force on a "messianic mission," while Russia saw itself not just as
"a" Christian state, but as "the" Christian state, Jenkins
said in a recent interview with Interfaith Voices, a public radio religion news
magazine.
Those
seeing the war as a religious crusade were "not just elite thinkers or a
few crazy bishops and pastors . . . Religion dominated propaganda messages and
the way people thought about the war, wrote about the war, made films about the
war," Jenkins said. "Religion was part of the air they breathed . . .
The enemy was an evil satanic foe."
He
noted that angels and the Virgin Mary were reported as appearing regularly on
battlefields, and the apocalypse was on the minds of many during the war, in
which more than 9 million soldiers were killed.
"If
you don't see this, and if you don't treat it seriously the way people of the
time did, you're not going to get a sense of what people really were fighting
about" and why they stayed in a "long, horrendous war" that
initially was expected to last only a few months, Jenkins said in the
interview.
Widespread
belief in the supernatural was a driving force during the war and helped mold
all three of the major religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- paving
the way for modern views of religion and violence, he said.
"Jihads
and holy wars broke out after the war across the world, and most of that
movement came out of World War I," Jenkins said.
The
notion of being part of a holy war "cast a very long shadow" into the
1920s, the 1930s and even into the 1940s, when popular secular movements such
Nazism, fascism and communism used similar rhetoric, he said.
But
if Germany saw itself as fighting a holy war in World War I, they had to ask
themselves why they lost, Jenkins said.
"Their
answer was that the devil's agents were among them. That goes a long way to
explaining the vicious and homicidal anti-Semitism."
Jenkins
is co-director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in Baylor's
Institute for Studies of Religion. He also is the author of "Laying Down
the Sword" and "Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens and Two
Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years."
Story Source:
The
above story is based on materials provided by Baylor University. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
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Baylor University. "Favored by God in warfare? How WWI
sowed seeds for future international conflicts." Science Daily, 15 May 2014.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140515153811.htm>.