Mittlere und Neuere Kirchengeschichte

CRC 437: War Experiences

Project Area G: Religion and the Experience of War

Time Frame: 2004–2008

In modern Western societies, the question of experiences of war is inextricably related to questions of the experience of the transcendental. Experiences of war were often formulated as religious experiences. The project area “religion and the experience of war” contributed to a cross-confessional and interreligious model tracing the development of relationships of war and religion from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This model contests a purely secularized understanding of war. Our central concepts and principles:

On the Term “Religion” and Religious Experiences in War:

War creates extreme social and political situations that increase the need for religious explanations. Significant elements of the monotheist traditions are based on religious explanations of war experiences and are evident in a variety of mutations in the modern era. Divine assistance in victory, war and guilt, the “history of God with his people,” war as the apocalypse, the battle of good against evil—these all played a role, even where they were reinterpreted as “secular transcendental,” explicitly denied, or implicitly dismissed.

Scholars—including us—have primarily defined the functional relationship of religion and war in the modern era in terms of “legitimation” or “consolation.” But religion has yet another function, even in the twentieth century, as a means of communication for models of meaning embedded within experience but also constitutive of it. The relationship of religious and secular models for interpreting war are thus a central object of study in project area G and its central axis.

Key Analytical Approaches

  1. A first key approach questions the role of religion or confession as a direct motivation for waging war.
  2. A second approach addresses the role of religion in instigating or coping with war in cases where it is not an immediate “topic” or cause of the conflict. Religious practices and meanings filled a function at the individual and at the social-political level simultaneously.
  3. The third approach examines the influence of religion in shaping experience in cases where it competes with secular patterns in the typology of war. The conception of war as it was experienced—e.g., as a war of religion or confession as opposed to a war of state-building, revolution, or independence, or as a national or world war—largely depended upon the religious or secular dispositions at the individual and societal level.
  4. A fourth approach deals with the conflicts that emerged around 1800 in which the aggressors directed their revolutionary meaning—which they held to be an “ultimate value”—against the religion of those involved.