The God of war
by Fred Skulthorpe, The Critic:
The rise of religiosity and mysticism among those fighting on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine.
[…] Since the dawn of modern war, there have been clumsy attempts to define this almost mystical relationship between religion, faith and war. “There are no atheists in foxholes,” is a maxim that may have emerged from the outpouring of spiritualism and superstition in the First World War’s trenches, going on to work itself into US army sermons during the war in the Pacific.
Faced with the horror of modern war, men do strange things. Some see fairies and angels. Others find themselves praying. They make promises to God. Some lose faith in everything forever. Faith, as one chaplain told me dryly, “offers one way of making sense of it all”.
Academics, historians and psychologists have sought to make sense of this paradox. How have the horrors of modern warfare come to re-enchant the world? In one study, an analysis of WW2 veterans who faced some of the fiercest fighting found an increase in religiosity compared to those with no, or less combat experience. A 2019 Harvard study has purported to show that a majority of those involved in conflicts not driven by religious or ethnic tensions experienced a similar resurgence of faith that can persist for a lifetime.
Of course, each response is unique, determined by both the individual and the conflict. Recent historical scholarship of faith and the First World War, working against the popular reappraisal that the war helped kill God, has focused on the idiosyncratic “trench religions” that bled out of the war into the twentieth century religions of new age spiritualism, psychology and psychiatry.
The desire to transcend, to move beyond the horrors of modern warfare found a crucible in the mud and blood of the trenches. Confronted with modernity’s most rational and efficient killing machines, man finds himself returning to his most base faith and superstitions. War demands its own personal theology.
The war in Ukraine, like all wars, has also elicited a unique spiritual response. Young men eviscerated by kamikaze drones are martyred as heroes through digital shrines on social media channels. Death and sacrifice becomes part of the national consciousness, a mediator to the new idea of Ukraine emerging from the nightmare of war crimes and its own trench warfare.
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