ABSTRACT
IN B O T H W O R L D W A R S , the huge growth in the number of commis-sioned army chaplains was paralleled by a massive expansion in civilian religious work among soldiers, an expansion which amounted to the mobilisation of what Callum Brown has described as the nation’s ‘salvation industry’. On both occasions, this mobilisation was driven by two convergent currents in British religious life. First, there was the ubiquity of the churches’ social and missionary work in civilian society, and particularly in working-class areas of Britain’s towns and cities. Many of the civilian religious organisations which soldiers encountered while in the army were organisations that were already familiar to them from civilian life – organisations such as the YMCA and YWCA, the Salvation Army, the Church Army and (in the Second World War) Toc H. The second of these convergent currents was the social and missionary work that civilian religious organisations had sponsored among the rank and file of the regular army and its reserve forces since the 1860s. Coming after more than half a century of heavily publicised religious work among soldiers, the outbreak of war in 1914 and the dramatic expansion of the British army thereafter prompted massive expansion in this existing field of church work, the hitherto distinct spheres of civilian and military religious work converging and fusing with the advent of a mass citizen army. The motives of civilian religious work among soldiers and civilians had always
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practitioners) a conflation of missionary, paternalistic, philanthropic, prudential and patriotic concerns. Driving and informing much of this religious work during the First World War was the general conviction that the conflict represented a unique opportunity to influence an entire generation of British men during a highly impressionable period of their lives. If this conviction was less in evidence during the Second World War, what is impressive about both World Wars was the sheer scale and diversity of civilian religious work among soldiers. In both conflicts, the British churches and British Jewry addressed the spiritual, physical and mental needs of millions of British soldiers through activities that ranged from the distribution of religious literature to the provision of convalescent homes and cinema shows. Although the extent and variety of this work precludes an exhaustive treatment of this subject, it is at least possible to address some of the main areas of civilian activity and to assess their impact upon the army as a whole.
