Some find it hard to forgive people and institutions, not least the Church and its leaders, that fail to live up to idealized images of them. To the Christian, the Church is both more glorious and more scandalous than to those who see it only from outside.
—Alan Wilkinson
Humans run all institutions, and humans fail. It is in our nature. But some failures are greater and have longer lasting consequences. One such failure has hit Anglicanism, and the recovery has not begun. There are no excuses, and it needs reckoning. Anglicanism suffered its most serious crisis of institutional credibility in modern history. The scale of the betrayal is staggering - clergy systematically abandoned their most fundamental duties, choosing institutional bandwagoning over sacred obligation. Many, many faithful believers, and seekers turning to their church leaders during the most desperate circumstances imaginable, found themselves manipulated and deceived by the very people they trusted most.
It should be obvious that when someone approaches a priest, or goes to church, they know broadly what the deal is “If you walk through that door you are going to get spirituality and religion and God stuff.” They get it, and if they are entering, they want or are at least curious about the things the Church purports to offer. Like honesty, integrity, forgiveness, accountability, compassion, salvation, those things. It is the same with any other recognizable institution. You go to a library for books, you go to a car dealer for a vehicle, you go to baker for bread. You to a Church for the church. Religiously seeking is a vulnerable endeavor, when you get something else it is especially disheartening, especially in a crisis.
What makes this scandal particularly damaging was not just its scope, but its brazenness - church leaders did not attempt to hide their abandonment of core Christian principles. Instead, they celebrated it. The consequences of this institutional failure reverberate, altering the relationship between Anglican clergy and the communities they serve.
A review of the evidence shows the failure was not a conspiracy, it was failing of a bad ministerial culture, too separated from the real concerns of the common people.
The offense was enthusiastically done in open. The scandal unfolded in full view of entire congregations, week after week.
Throughout the First World War.
At the start of the Great War, the faithful filled churches across England seeking communion and spiritual guidance from the state church, the Church of England. This was the Church of the Crown, with the sacred duty to spiritually counsel and form the king’s subjects. Now with the empire joining a great and terrible war, the slaughter just started, they needed homilies of peace and assurance. Instead, from parish pulpits, clergy thundered about the sacred duty to defeat the barbarian enemy the Huns, meaning the Germans. The congregations had come expecting bread; they received the slings of war. They had come seeking the eternal; they were handed the temporal battle cry against the Kaiserreich. They had come for sanctuary; finding instead that many bishops and priests had become the war's most enthusiastic cheerleaders.
The trend of decline of religious belief and Church attendance in England after the First World War was not an inevitable consequence of modern warfare's horror. It was the direct result of clerical malpractice. The First World War was a propaganda war on an unprecedented scale. The government deployed modern techniques of advertising to persuade the population to enlist, put up with the draft and sacrifice everything for victory. But, that was outside, in what might be called the “world.” Again, people in the early 20th century were smart enough to know what to expect from a church. So when the faithful or locals seeking spiritual support came to church, which should be the one place that they could have found a break from the daily pounding of propaganda, they discovered their ministers had effectively become recruiting sergeants wearing vestments. You can imagine the working class thinking “They are all the same.”
Pre-War Vulnerability
The Church of England entered the Great War already wounded and unaware. By the war's outbreak, church attendance had been declining for a generation, particularly in the industrial cities where working-class men had grown alienated from an institution tied to the interests and attitudes of the governing class, the elite. The church did not plant and grow its infrastructure to meet the needs of Britain’s industrial urban population boom. They did not have serious program for recruiting working class men to the ministry, and this meant they did not understand of see the world like the people they were trying or should have been trying to reach. The modern world was a confounding one: Darwinism, industrial struggles, colonial policy, all these impacted the lives of the working class who in prior generations could have found clergy to speak to them, like the Wesley brothers. But in late Victorian England, with an absentee queen providing little moral leadership or example, the Church was failing as an institution. It was too like the elite culture outside it, rather than being the reforming light in the darkness. The faithful who remained came seeking something the secular world could not provide—transcendence, meaning beyond the immediate crises, spiritual sustenance for souls worn down by the anxieties of modern life. They were not satisfied.
The Great War did not cause this crisis, but the war revealed this alienation and the clergy’s inability or unwillingness to meet the challenge. This makes the Church's wartime failure more damning. Facing an institution already struggling for relevance, the clergy had one opportunity to demonstrate their unique value during the ultimate crisis. Instead, they chose to sound exactly like every other voice in British society. When people expect different give them different. But if you give them the same as the other spheres of society they reject, then expect the same treatment.
For centuries, Anglicanism had offered a distinctive voice in British life—not merely patriotic, but prophetic; not simply supportive of temporal power but anchored in transcendent truth. The Book of Common Prayer spoke of peace, mercy, and the God brings peace to man. Anglican theology had long grappled with the tension between Christian duty and worldly obligation, between rendering unto Caesar and serving the Prince of Peace. And it had found balance in the mid-19th century. They could honorably claim to have waged a crusade on the slave trade when slavery was still profitable. Anglicans were even known for questioning the war against the Boers of what is now South Africa, and for condemning Belgian atrocities in Congo.
All this vanished when the war began.
Anglican leadership blessed the war effort, the empire became sacrosanct, and Belgians became holy martyrs. The Church that had once challenged the conscience was now prostrate before the war machine. It is one thing to preach duty, honor and fidelity, it is quite another to turn your sermon into a sanctification of a war whose politics and morality were gray at best, and which was conducted by politicians whose actions had the potential to alienate voters, and consequently it would have been wiser for the Church to avoid too close an association to particular policies. General patriotism is one thing and jingoism is another. Simply put the Church should preach the Gospel because not only is it its job but it is what the people expect from the Church. You expect a preacher to preach. You expect the member of Parliament to sell you on their war policy. Let each tend his own garden.
How do you preach "love your enemies" while encouraging young men to bayonet Germans? The rhetoric of the clergy could be distinguished from the other voices in society by their invocation of holy war, but this if anything made the clergy an exaggerated caricature of the world. But they tried double-mindedness and it did not serve them. While they preached a crusade against Germany, many preached that the British were guilty of similar sins. Why not then a holy war against themselves? The dissonance was not lost of the people in the pews. The Church’s engagement was both directed toward the war effort and confused overall. Seeking to use the war to make Britain more Christian, but doing so in a way that alienated soldiers serving at the front. They wanted fierce war, and repentance, and should have left the former to the army and concentrated on the latter. It is was a confounding message when while preaching holy war, many Anglican ministers also framed the war as divine punishment on the West: because of what specifically was the punishment which was the cause of the war? How were the laity to know?
The organizational and reforming movements during the war led to a change in relations with Catholics and other religions and even the role of women. But it did not reverse the decline of the Church despite brief situational rebounding in the 1920s and the 1950s after the Second World War. Rather the issue remained the same: not meeting the British people where they were. The other issues were not the concerns that led to the decline of the Church, it was more straightforward: they lost and never got back the working class in the cities. In 1916 the Church launched the National Mission of Repentance and Hope and while it had some success with the middle class and the Church maintained its connections with political elite during the war, that identification with the war effort and the elite hurt them with urban population skeptical of the war and elite.
If the Church is for everyone it needs to be equidistant from them all.
When the Church became indistinguishable from any other recruiting station, it forfeited its claim to unique authority. If church leaders offered nothing different from newspaper editors, politicians, or military officers, why listen to church leaders at all? If Sunday sermons contained the same content as Monday's propaganda, why attend Sunday services? The position of the vicar in the parish as moral leader was terribly compromised. Once that happened the other messages of the Church were viewed with suspicion or ignored. The English in the pews, dealing with heartache, and questioning the war, were practical about how to deal with a church that would not church them. They gradually stopped coming.
What makes this betrayal particularly damning is that it was uniquely Anglican. The Church of England's crusading fervor was self-chosen. Other Christian institutions faced the same war, the same jingoism, the same social pressures, yet maintained better theological balance. Catholics and Protestant non-conformists avoided losing their heads too much. The Anglicans were too close to the class of the politicians and not close enough to the society they needed to witness to.
After preaching a crusade, many bishops pushed for a harsh peace and tough terms on Germany. But then, after the popular disillusionment with the war became apparent the clergy appear to have become milquetoast parodies, preaching vague comforting platitudes and policing social appearances. That too failed to reverse the decline in the urban centers and eventually the Church fell in the esteem of the elite and middle classes.
When folks walk through your door looking for something distinct, give them what they are looking for when they sit in the pew. Today Anglicanism is benefiting from a liturgical turn and rediscovery among North American Protestants, and is experiencing growth in the Global South. It is happening in places where people are met with what makes Anglicanism authentically distinct—something the First World War Church of England should have remembered.
(updated with minor edits Aug 16, 2025, l'esprit de l'escalier)