A guest blogpost today, by my great friend, Tim Larsen, who teaches at Wheaton College and is the president of the American Society of Church History. Tim is a truly prolific scholar with a sizable range of quite excellent books on the history of religion. Because of my own interests in the history of the First World War, I was delighted to see his most recent publication, which is The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One (Oxford University Press, 2025). As this speaks to so many of my own scholarly concerns, I invited Tim to write a guest post, and he very kindly agreed.
And on a personal note, what a pleasure it was indeed to join in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at my own Episcopal Church this past Sunday.
Gentlemen Clergymen in the Mud and Blood of World War One
Timothy Larsen
It is a daunting task to try to do enough research to write about a great war, not least the Great War. When I told colleagues that I was working on a book about Church of England clergymen who served as military chaplains during World War One, I was often met with the skeptical query, “But aren’t you a Victorian scholar?”
Indeed I am, but the project made sense to me when I realized that every Englishmen who served in the Great War had been raised, formed, and educated as a Victorian. I came to think of World War One as a funny thing that happened to the Victorians when they tried to enter the twentieth century. My book, The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One is about a generation that went from the Victorian age to the atomic age—and endured two world wars and a Great Depression along the way.
Victorian Britain was class-ridden to an extent that it is difficult for us to grasp today. Anglican priests grasped it for the first time in the muddy trenches of France and Flanders, 1914-18.
In the nineteenth century, the professions were a class preserve. Someone literally became a military officer by buying their commission. In other words, rank in the army was not the result of merit, but of wealth. Even in World War One, it was assumed that if a university graduate volunteered to join the army he would begin as a lieutenant, while a factory worker would be a private. Likewise, Anglican ministry was reserved for “gentleman.” The war opened the padre’s eyes to how self-defeating such a policy was for the vitality and witness of the Church. One of the things they determined to make happen after the war was pathways to ordination for working-class men.
To come at the social gap another way, let’s take the case of a successful chaplain, Neville Talbot (1879-1943). Talbot’s birthright included being able to take for granted that he was part of the social elite. On his mother’s side, his grandfather was the 4th Baron Lyttelton; on his father’s, his great grandfathers were the 1st Baron Wharncliffe and the 2nd Earl Talbot. And one can occasionally glimpse a bit of snobbishness seeping through. Lionel Hitchens played a major part in the war effort by helping with munitions and supply and administrative problems, and would become one of Britain’s leading industrialists. When in 1919, however, he married Talbot’s cousin, the padre’s response was to observe of the name “Mrs Hichens” that it was “perhaps a little reminiscent of the cook—but we live in democratic days.” That comment is a reminder that such men literally mostly knew working-class people in the context of their being their servants.
Clergymen thought they knew what the working classes were like because they occasionally did pastoral visits to their homes. They did not grasp the degree to which such encounters were staged and scripted events rather than an authentic glimpse into people’s lives and thoughts. When trying to survive in a trench with artillery shells raining down, no one is bothering about keeping up appearances in front of the vicar. The men spewed out profanity, blasphemy, pornographic fantasies, and hatred of the ruling elite, in ways that profoundly rattled the padres. The priests realized that the Church had lost many working-class men more thoroughly than they had ever imagined. After the war, the Church had to prioritize regaining them even if it meant seeming like a traitor to one’s own class by sympathizing with trade unions, the Labour Party, and strikers.
Finally, the chaplains were taken aback to discover that their beloved Prayer Book services were literally incomprehensible to many people. They had a vague sense that the liturgies used language that was archaic, but they were shocked to discover how often the Tommies literally did not have the faintest idea what it meant.
Another padre was Eric Milner-White (1884-1963). His father was a wealthy knight. Milner-White was educated at Harrow and King’s College, Cambridge. He was a chaplain at King’s when the war broke out. His tastes were refined. He became an expert on medieval stained glass, leading to the Queen making him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Yet, to his great credit, in a time of war, Milner-White grasped clearly that his beloved Prayer Book services could not meet the spiritual needs of the men. As they said in an official report, the padres had learned at the front that what was needed were modern services that were “simple, real, and short.” Milner-White said that, when it came to ministering to soldiers, the Prayer Book services were “at best semi-used and semi-usable.” Only a fool would be a stickler for doing things by the book when ministering to the fearful and the dying: “rubrics paled in a redder world.”
When he returned to Cambridge, Milner-White made good on what he had learned by creating the most beloved of all modern Anglican services, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas Eve, at King’s College chapel.
My father, although an American, was certainly what the British call working class. He dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force. He fought in the Korean War. Throughout my childhood and until his retirement, he worked in a construction-supply warehouse in a “low skill” job. He was also a low church, evangelical Protestant. I don’t think I ever heard him use the word “liturgy” but, if he did, he would have said it like “the rosary” or “Ramadan” as something that belonged to someone else’s religion. Yet it was a delight of his holiday season to listen to the Nine Lessons and Carols service broadcast from King’s. Milner-White learned in the trenches of the Great War how to create a worship service that could connect even with modern, working-class veterans.
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