The Cross and the Trenches Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers

Subjects:

• Military Studies » Military History
• Religious Studies » History of Religion
• History » World War I

Reviews:

• Recommended. General collections.
  —Choice January 2004
• [A] genuinely polyvocal book, at once a robust addition to the unending history of the war and a refreshing and persuasive challenge to the modernist myth.
  —American Historical Review April 2005
• In his fascinating, at times moving, new book Richard Schweitzer has mined his sources deeply to produce a comparative study of British and American great War soldiers' religious beliefs. He has convincingly challenged the "bipolarity" of historical analysis of wartime religion: that faith either dramatically revived or proved farcical in light of wartime experience....[S]chweitzer concentrates on the troops, providing a gold mine of information for future reference. Scholars owe a Schweitzer a great debt for his meticuluos foray into the recorded private thoughts of so many soldiers.
  —Albion Fall 2004
• The Cross and the Trenches is well researched and solidly grounded in the growing secondary literature on the cultural history of the Great War....Religion has largely been absent from discussions of soldiers and their lives. Schweitzer has provided a corrective to this view and has thus enhanced our understanding of the Great War and the men who endured it.
  —Journal of Social History Winter 2004
• [P]articularly welcome....The Cross and the Trenches contains some important insights into soldiers' attitudes to Christianity. Schweitzer provides a nicely nuanced picture that enriches our understanding of the culture of the ordinary British and American soldier on the Western Front.
  —The Journal of Military History January 2005
• It is a book to be read for the detail--so many stories of tragedy and heroism, so many cameos of good and evil and the perversity of human nature.
  —The English Historical September 2004
• The spiritual history of the First World War is still being written. Richard Schweitzer's The Cross and the Trenches, an analysis of the religious journeys of British and American Soldiers, is a painstaking and insightful contribution....Schweitzer's portrait is a nuanced study of a tumultuous period in which religion was diversifying in its expressions, and personal faiths were fluctuating. It is a valuable addition to two historiographies - both the history of war cultures, and the history of the discursive power of religion.
  —War in History 2004
• This book cautions against redaction, reading our own current options back on a cultural situation very different from our own. This is a finely wrought work, full of thought-provoking questions....Schweitzer's book joins the work of Jay Winter, who deals extensively with occult spiritualism, and that of Annette Becker as a must-read on the questions of faith and the Great War....One looks forward to further research on the role of religion in all the armed forces of the Great War. Schweitzer has provided an excellent introduction to this long-neglected area.
  —Relevance Winter 2004

• Endorsement From Keith Grieves
  Kingston University: The fluent and nuanced interplay of religious and military history is confidently accomplished.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Faith
• The British and American Churches and the War
• The Spectrum of Religious Faith
• Chaplains
• Religion by Rank
• Soldiers' Religious Responses within the Narrative Structure of Battle
• Religion on the Homefront
• Doubt
• The Costs of Clerical Nationalism, the Church of England's Chaplains, the Roman Catholic Converts, and the American YMCA
• The Revival that Never Came, a Conjecture
• The Spectrum of Religious Doubt
• Coda
• Woodrow Wilson and the Prince of Peace Motif
• Conclusion