The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade

Philip Jenkins's The Great and Holy War, How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, published by HarperOne in 2014, is a scholarly study arguing that the First World War was widely understood at the time by its participants, across multiple combatant nations, as a religious as much as a national conflict, examining the war's extensive apocalyptic and crusading rhetoric on both sides. Jenkins is a widely published historian of religion. Its strength is that it draws on a broad international range of wartime religious rhetoric, sermons, propaganda and popular literature, to make a case not always foregrounded in more conventional military histories of the war. Its limit is that Jenkins writes as a synthesiser working across many national contexts and languages in translation, so a claim about one specific country's wartime religious rhetoric should be checked against a source specialising in that country directly.