1914–18—Keeping the Spiritual Home Fires Burning

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-174
Author(s):  
Clive D. Field
Keyword(s):  
Birth Rate ◽  
First World War ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
World War ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
Novel Agent ◽  
Jewish Populations

The First World War has traditionally been thought to have had a catastrophic and long-standing impact on organized religion in Britain, but this bleak picture has been qualified in recent historiography. By seriously disrupting the Churches’ work and Sunday observance, and broadening the range and affordability of secular leisure opportunities, the war proved an ‘accelerant’ rather than a novel agent of secularization. Religious allegiance held fairly steady, although the Free Churches continued to lose ground, there was (speculatively) some increase in religious ‘nones’, and growth in Spiritualism. One million Sunday scholars were permanently lost during the war, partly as a consequence of the falling birth rate. In Protestant Churches, there was a short-lived surge in attendance at the start of the war, fuelling hopes of religious revival, but it quickly gave way to ongoing decline, which was not reversed after the conflict. There were modest rises in Catholic and Jewish populations.

scholarly journals British Catholicism and the British Army in the First World War

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Snape
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-35
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
World War ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
First World

This chapter suggests that the consequences of the First World War for patterns of Christian belief and the life of the churches were indeed great, but that they stimulated, not an immediate loss of faith, but rather the emergence and increasingly distinct self-definition of some of the most characteristic themes and divergent styles of Christianity in the modern world. It then identifies the main implications of the war for Christianity on a world stage. First, the war came close to destroying the spirit of Protestant internationalism that had been so powerfully symbolized and fostered by the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in June of 1910. A second consequence of the war was the gradual erosion of credibility of the European ideal of “Christian civilization,” and consequent softening of the antithesis between “Christian West” and “Non-Christian East.” Third, the war led some theological interpreters to question the more facile expressions of Christian liberalism and social optimism to which sections of the Protestant churches had succumbed since the dawn of the twentieth century. A fourth spiritual consequence of the war was the stimulus it imparted to forms of religion that emphasized the suprarational, and hence the limits of rational human capacity to change the world.

scholarly journals Seasonal Dynamics of Marriage and Fertility of Population of Tambov Province in 1915—1916: Experience of Modernization

2021 ◽  
pp. 450-467
Author(s):  
K. V. Samokhin
Keyword(s):  
Seasonal Dynamics ◽  
Birth Rate ◽  
First World War ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Demographic Behavior ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

The monthly marriage and birth rate of the population of the Tambov province in 1915—1916 is considered in the article. The methodological basis of the work was the theory of modernization, which is considered by the author in the context of the history of Russia in the 19th — first half of the 20th centuries in the classical interpretation of the transition from traditional society to modern. The novelty of the article lies in the introduction into the scientific circulation of data on the seasonal dynamics of marriage and fertility of the Tambovites during the First World War. A comparative analysis of the corresponding numerical indicators among the townspeople and villagers in 1915—1916 with the pre-war period is carried out. The author comes to the conclusion that the seasonal dynamics of marriage and fertility can be used as a quantitative substantiation of such directions of spiritual modernization as the level of secularization and the propensity to innovate. The analysis shows that the general model of the demographic behavior of Tambov residents is generally correlated with the previous periods. The author comes to the conclusion that the revealed differences between the townspeople and villagers of the Tambov province in the studied plan indicate a greater inclination of the former to innovations and their higher level of secularization, and this confirms the position that the Tambov society was only at the initial stage of spiritual modernization.

scholarly journals Social, economic and population processes in Transylvania in the hundred years after Trianon

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Elekes Tibor
Keyword(s):  
Birth Rate ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Right ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

Of all losers of the first World War Hungary had been the most penalized. That included the losing of over two third of its territory and nearly as much of its population. Albeit paying lip service to the right of self-determination, the victors delegated 5,5 million people into a minority position (whilst for some this meant no change, yet brought difficulties). It was only 5,2 million about whom it could be claimed on ethnic grounds – in part with reservations – that their fate as that of a community improved. In the areas annexed by Romania, the socio-economic processes of the wider region prevailed in the studied period. The greatest change took place during Communism’s four decades. The main objective of the centrally managed economy was industrialization, and soon the national-communist leadership aimed at creating a „homogenized society”. Population growth of four decades after the second World War came to a halt due to mass emigration and decline in birth rate in the early 1990s; the number of population falling by nearly 4 million to date. In proportional terms the loss of the 16,8 million strong Romanians (2011) and the 1,2 million strong Hungarians was near identical during the 2002–2011 period. By 2011, the number of Transylvanian Germans counting 600 000 prior to the second World War had been reduced to 36 000. The number of the half a million strong in 1930 Jews had fallen to a few hundred. At the same time, the number of Romani increased to 621 000. The Hungarian indigenous minority in Transylvania see the survival of their community in the realization of autonomy in Székelyland, and in Northwestern Transylvania.

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