The Great War and the Church of England in Oxfordshire

Assessments of the state of British religion during the First World War have tracked closely more general accounts of religious developments in the twentieth century. Histories written between the end of the Second World War and the turn of the millennium tended to give a largely negative account of the fortunes of the British churches during this period and to see the events of 1914–1918 and the churches’ response to them as an important stage on a long road to secularisation. More recent writing has tended to revise this view. The notion of long-term secularisation has come under challenge both from a theoretical and practical point of view, with a significant body of opinion proposing that serious declines in the social significance of religion should be dated to the 1960s rather than regarded as an early effect of modernisation as previously proposed. This in turn has led to a positive re-evaluation of the strength of the churches in the first half of the twentieth century and even of their role in the First World War. This, as the contribution by Alistair Beecher in this volume demonstrates, remains an area of lively debate. The material in this essay focuses on the county of Oxfordshire between 1914 and 1918. It will show that while must of its activity continued as usual, the Church of England was confronted by novel and significant challenges during the war years and that it sought creatively to engage with them though not always with the results it anticipated or hoped for. It will also show that more was going on in the church between 1914 and 1918 than simply adaptation to wartime.