A Church Militant Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War

This is a study of the relationship between Anglicans and the armed forces, of the military heritage and history of the Anglican Communion, and the changing nature of this relationship between the mid-Victorian period and the 1970s. This era spanned a period of imperial expansion and colonial conflict round the turn of the twentieth century, the two World Wars, the Cold War, wars of decolonisation, and Vietnam. In terms of armed conflict, it was the bloodiest period in the history of humanity and marked the advent of weaponry that had the capacity to extinguish human civilization. This book assesses the contribution of an expansive Anglican Communion to the armed forces of the English-speaking world, examines the ways in which this has been remembered, and explores its challenging legacy for the twenty-first century Church of England.

1 - 'Marching as to War': The Nineteenth-Century Inheritance
2 - 'Faithful, True, and Bold': The First World War
3 - ''Gainst all Disaster': The Second World War
4 - 'Aflame with Faith, and Free': The Cold War
5 - 'The Great Surrender Made': Remembrance and Memorialisation

Michael Snape was appointed Lecturer in Church History at Westhill College of Higher Education in 1994. From 1999 to 2015 he was Lecturer in Church History and then Reader in Religion, War and Society at the University of Birmingham, and is currently the inaugural Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University. This is his sixth academic monograph and is based on his 2020 Hensley Henson Lectures at the University of Oxford.