In February 1930, the British government banned the saying of special intercessory prayers at religious services in the armed forces. By orders sent from the Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry, Church of England and free church military chaplains were instructed to disregard recommendations for worship issued by the leaders of their churches. These orders provoked a public outcry, with protests not just by chaplains, clergy, bishops and denominational bodies, but also in national newspapers, by opposition political parties, and in both houses of Parliament. The Daily Telegraph declared that ‘by interfering with the religious freedom of clergymen to preach and pray in the manner their several denominations direct, the Government has raised a constitutional issue of the gravest import’.Footnote 1
This was a remarkable episode: it is the sole modern instance of a British government prohibition on special prayers appointed by church leaders.Footnote 2 It was, though, only a brief incident, and the consequences were limited. After angry exchanges, the scope of the orders was modified, and the controversy quickly subsided: there was, after all, no crisis between the state and the churches. The episode nonetheless raises matters of general significance. Several obvious questions arise. Why was the ban imposed? What does the incident reveal about relationships between the military command and military chaplains, and between government and the churches? Why did the controversy not become a crisis, and pass so quickly? The simple answers are that government ministers and civil servants mismanaged a diplomatic dilemma and political challenge; that they unwittingly breached an official boundary between the military and spiritual authorities; and that the disagreement was resolved by qualifications of the orders and by a clarification of the demarcation.
Yet the ban was still enforced: on the designated day, the prayers were not said in the armed forces. So why did church leaders let the matter subside? Deeper questions are involved here. The free churches, especially – including Baptists, Congregationalists, the various Methodist connexions, and Presbyterians – might have been expected to be highly sensitive towards state orders on religious matters, as an infringement of their principles of freedom of worship. One free church leader was particularly tenacious in securing a reaffirmation of the demarcation between the religious and military authorities. However, the episode did not produce scrutiny of a paradox in free church military chaplaincy: that the chief proponents of voluntary religion accepted the British state’s requirement of compulsory attendance of sailors, soldiers and airmen at religious services. Why was this so? Reflection on what did not happen can be as historically revealing as explanations of what did happen.
The Government Ban
The orders of February 1930 were issued after a decision by the cabinet of the second Labour government of 1929–31; the prohibition was on prayers of intercession for the victims of religious persecution in Soviet Russia, which were to be added to Church of England and English free church services on Sunday 16 March. Prayers for this purpose were not new: there had been protests and prayers by British churches in support of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1919 and 1922.Footnote 3 Now, however, a more intensive Soviet persecution was directed against members of all religions, including Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims. The British publication of reports of these ‘anti-god’ policies also coincided with the Labour government’s restoration of diplomatic relations with the Soviet government. The controversy over the 1930 prayers has been described in a number of historical studies,Footnote 4 and by the Durham state prayers project,Footnote 5 but the fullest commentaries so far, by Giles Udy, have muddied serious explanation of the issue of the orders.Footnote 6 This is not the place to detail Udy’s extraordinary misrepresentations of both Labour party politics in general, and the Labour government’s attitudes towards Soviet Russia in particular.Footnote 7 It is sufficient to state that, contrary to his assertions and tendentious selections of evidence, the Labour party was emphatically not a semi-Marxist party, but a broad progressive or ‘labourist’ coalition consisting of trade unionists and cooperators, of ethical, evolutionary, guild, Christian and Fabian socialists, of internationalists and pacifists, and of recent defectors from the Liberal and Conservative parties. Very few of its members were Marxists or uncritical sympathisers with Soviet policies.Footnote 8 Nor, as Udy also argues, was the Labour party hostile towards Christianity and the churches. Many of its MPs had much-valued personal experiences of Nonconformist religion, and the cabinet contained former local preachers and Sunday school teachers, four active Baptists and Congregationalists (William Adamson, A. V. Alexander, Margaret Bondfield and J. R. Clynes), a Wesleyan Methodist vice-president of the National Free Church Council (Arthur Henderson) and four Anglicans (Noel Buxton, George Lansbury, and lords Parmoor and Sankey).Footnote 9 The prayers were not banned because Labour ministers were clandestine communists or closet atheists. They restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet government – negotiated by the first Labour government in 1924, but severed by the Conservative government in 1927 – because they were committed to international peace and conciliation, wanted to stop subversive Russian and Comintern propaganda in Britain and the Indian empire, and sought trade agreements to assist the British economy and reduce unemployment.Footnote 10 Labour ministers abhorred the Soviet government’s fanaticism and brutality, but believed that its harshness could, in time, be mitigated by diplomatic and economic connections. As progressives or socialists, this belief was reinforced by a disposition to hope for the best from what claimed to be an egalitarian state, and to distrust the criticisms of its enemies. Hoping for the best from foreign despotisms has not been a sentiment restricted to Labour governments: Neville Chamberlain and Hitler’s Germany are other examples.
Reports of renewed Soviet oppression and violence towards Russian religious believers began to be published in British newspapers from November 1929. They were much amplified from early December by a ‘Christian Protest Movement’ which, created and promoted by The Morning Post, attracted considerable public support for protests against ‘the Soviet war on religion’, and for appeals to the British government to make ‘the strongest possible representations’ to the Soviet government on behalf of the Russian churches.Footnote 11 Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister, and other Labour cabinet ministers insisted that they were ‘fundamentally opposed to any form of religious persecution’, but they faced a problem common to all governments: conflicting objectives, uncertain knowledge and practical limitations. They wanted to preserve their larger diplomatic aims; the reports about Russian conditions were of questionable and contested quality; and they were conscious of the constraints and risks in diplomatic pressure. A fundamental principle of good international relations was non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations – at least, no public interference – and the Labour government, as a target of both Comintern subversion and anti-Bolshevik smears, had a particularly strong interest in persuading the Soviet government to respect this principle and to end its anti-British propaganda. Ministers knew that they could do nothing directly to halt the persecutions, but believed that something might be achieved quietly through diplomatic conversations. A formal protest or another break in diplomatic relations would, they thought, be counter-productive: Soviet attitudes would harden, making matters still worse for the Russian religious communities. Henderson, the foreign secretary, undertook to make representations about the religious persecution to the Soviet authorities, but only after obtaining better information from the new British ambassador in Moscow, and at a time and by ways that would not jeopardize progress in the government’s other aims and cause further peril for religious believers.Footnote 12
All British religious leaders were appalled by the persecution, but they were divided over what could be done. Three English bishops, six leading free churchmen and the chief rabbi became vice-presidents of the Christian Protest Movement (CPM).Footnote 13 But the two archbishops, most of the other bishops, and numerous free church leaders refused to be associated with the CPM, because they regarded it as more of a political than a religious campaign, because they understood the Labour government’s policy dilemma, and because they agreed that diplomatic persuasion might do more for Russian religious believers, and at less risk, than official protests.Footnote 14 J. H. Rushbrooke, secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, whose members were among the most publicized victims of the Soviet persecution, publicly supported the Labour cabinet as ‘religious men’ who had ‘not the faintest sympathy with religious repression’.Footnote 15 The archbishops of Canterbury and York, Cosmo Lang and William Temple, both warned that, in Temple’s words, ‘there is real danger lest we relieve our own feelings at the cost of the very people we wish to succour’.Footnote 16 After they had obtained better evidence of the Soviet persecutions, and once they had decided in early February 1930 that the Church of England itself should act, they proceeded with great care. The archbishops associated the church’s protest against the persecutions not with an appeal for action by the British government, but with a ‘united act of intercession’, and went to considerable lengths to dissociate these intercessory prayers from the CPM campaign and from any political purpose. Their call for prayers – subsequently joined, as was now common, by leaders of the various free churches,Footnote 17 and elevated by the archbishops into a special ‘day of prayer’ – was, Lang insisted, separate from ‘any movements which might be regarded as propaganda’ against the Soviet government and, as he also meant but did not say, from criticism of the Labour government.Footnote 18
The Labour cabinet nevertheless decided that ‘in view of the political complexion which the question of alleged persecution in Russia has assumed, it would be undesirable that Intercessory Prayers should be read at religious Services of the Navy, Army and Air Force’.Footnote 19 Ministers knew that Russian newspapers were attacking the CPM for propagating anti-Soviet propaganda, and, despite the archbishops’ public assurances, expected the Soviet government to interpret the prayers as yet another instance of propaganda. Indeed, their chief concern was specifically with the archbishops’, rather than the free churches’, call for special prayers, because the Soviet authorities might assume that prayers in the established Church of England had some degree of government approval. This created a diplomatic problem. The Anglo-Soviet treaties specified that the signatories agreed:
scrupulously to respect the undoubted right of a State to order its own life within its own jurisdiction in its own way, to refrain and to restrain all persons and organisations under their direct or indirect control, … from any act overt or covert liable in any way whatsoever to endanger the tranquillity or prosperity of … the British Empire or the USSR.Footnote 20
If the cabinet ignored the call for special prayers altogether, the Soviet government’s suspicions of the British government’s approval of them might be reinforced, and it might retaliate – resuming its propaganda against Britain, withdrawing from the trade negotiations, and ending any opportunity to assist Russian religious communities by diplomatic persuasion. There was no question of trying to obstruct or criticize the call for prayers as such; for the Labour government, no less than for any other British government, this would have been an illegitimate infringement of religious freedom. Instead, they resorted to what might later have been termed ‘gesture politics’, deciding on a prohibition (in the terms of the treaties) for those ‘persons and organisations’ under the government’s most ‘direct … control’: the armed forces.Footnote 21
The ministers had a further perspective: the agitation against Soviet religious persecution was led by their political opponents, and they distrusted both the sources and the interpretations of its information about Russian conditions. The Morning Post was a hard-right newspaper, deeply hostile to the Anglo-Soviet agreement. Although the CPM had clerical members and insisted that it was not a political but a religious movement, its chairman, Prebendary A. W. Gough, was well known as a militantly Conservative, nationalistic and anti-socialist preacher.Footnote 22 Its two presidents were an ex-leader of the British Fascists, the eighth earl of Glasgow, and the former Conservative home secretary, Lord Brentford (William Joynson-Hicks), who had precipitated the break in Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations in 1927; its vice-presidents and council members included further right-wing Conservative peers and MPs. Together with The Morning Post, the CPM was providing political ammunition for Conservative politicians who added the reports of religious persecution to their relentless efforts to wreck the new Anglo-Soviet agreement and to defeat the Labour government. It was a parliamentary question from a Conservative MP and former naval officer, Carlyon Bellairs, about observance of the Church of England’s day of prayer in the Royal NavyFootnote 23 that provoked the cabinet decision to ban the special prayers in the armed forces as a whole. The first Labour government had suffered parliamentary and electoral defeats by Conservative exploitation of anti-Soviet opinion and by the distortions of right-wing newspapers, most notably by their publicizing the forged ‘Zinoviev letter’:Footnote 24 the second Labour government was determined to avoid a similar fate.
Even so, the cabinet’s decision was a miscalculation, worsened by poor civil service advice and heavy-handed communication. It originated in an over-reaction of the Admiralty Board to the political trap laid by Bellairs, and in its officials persuading the other service ministries to issue similar orders.Footnote 25 The Admiralty’s parliamentary answer and its order to naval commanders in all British fleets and stations during mid-February were at least carefully stated: they read like administrative instructions, and attracted little attention.Footnote 26 But the War Office’s order a week later to army forces in Britain and across the empire, copied verbatim by the Air Ministry for RAF stations, was a blunt version of the cabinet minute, explicitly presented as a government decision taken because of ‘the political character’ of the ‘controversy’ about the Soviet persecution.Footnote 27 This text, when leaked to the Conservative Daily Telegraph, was easily sensationalized.Footnote 28 The cabinet decision and the orders also overlooked distinctions between the churches. In the Church of Scotland (and consequently in Scottish military units), prayers had already been said for persecuted Russians two months earlier, and the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly had no intention of repeating them now.Footnote 29 Pope Pius XI had summoned Roman Catholics throughout the world to special masses three days after the date selected by Archbishop Lang, on a Wednesday rather than a Sunday, which appeared to leave Catholic chaplains and servicemen outside the remit of the orders. Still more ineptly, the army and RAF orders ignored the lines of authority for chaplaincy services, and the different types of chaplaincy provision. The chaplain of the Fleet, Walter Knight-Adkin, gave his approval to the Admiralty order.Footnote 30 But Alfred Jarvis, the chaplain-general of the army, warned the War Office that its order would cause trouble with the churches; and to emphasize its imprudence, he sarcastically asked whether the government would also want to restrict the choice of lessons and content of sermons, and to exclude hymns referring to martyrdom for the faith. Jarvis refused to issue or approve the order himself, and when unable to prevent its communication to army commanders, he insisted that it should be explicitly worded as a matter of government policy.Footnote 31 The chaplain-in-chief of the RAF, Vernon Hanson, was simply not consulted by the Air Ministry.Footnote 32 The outcome was that orders affecting divine worship in the army and the RAF were sent not by their accredited religious authorities, but by two civil servants, Herbert Creedy and Walter Nicholson, the permanent under-secretaries of the War Office and the Air Ministry.
The orders provoked widespread protests, reaching well beyond the Conservative newspapers which first published them. Withdrawal of the orders was demanded by M. E. Aubrey, general secretary of the Baptist Union and joint secretary of the United Navy, Army and Air Force Board of the Baptist, Congregational and Primitive and United Methodist churches (United Board); by the National Free Church Council; by the Wesleyan Methodist Committee of Privileges; by Sidney Berry, secretary of the Congregational Union; and by the chief rabbi.Footnote 33 Similar protests appeared in the editorials of denominational newspapers. A statement by J. C. Carlile, a former chairman of the Baptist Union, that he would defy the orders and say special prayers for Russian Christians even if he lost his position as an officiating chaplain for the RAF – that is, as a minister conducting services at a local place of worship attended by servicemen, rather than a commissioned chaplain responsible for services within military bases – was widely publicized.Footnote 34 Temple privately thought the orders ‘offensive’, and that a ‘formal protest’ from the Church of England was needed to demonstrate that it was ‘not a department of state’. More circumspectly, Lang complained privately by telephone to MacDonald, and after a Conservative peer made the orders an issue for debate in the House of Lords, he publicly repeated these complaints and forcefully restated that the special prayers had no political motivations.Footnote 35 After criticisms from both the Conservative and the Liberal leaders in the House of Commons, MacDonald – as leader of a minority government – was obliged to arrange a conference of the party leaders and the armed forces ministers in order to avert a hostile parliamentary vote.Footnote 36
During early March, these protests extracted two successive government clarifications, contained in further sets of instructions to the armed forces and reported in Parliament or released to newspapers. The first, issued ‘in order to remove any possibility of misunderstanding’, stated that the ban on the prayers was confined to compulsory religious services, and did not apply to services in parish churches and local chapels which servicemen attended of their own accord.Footnote 37 The second set of orders, sent a week later, included the more precise instruction that on the day of prayer, individual soldiers and airmen could, if they wished, be exempted from compulsory parades to churches and chapels outside military bases, where the congregations included civilians and where the prayers would be said.Footnote 38 This narrowing of the wide scope of the original orders – to exclude services in parish churches and local chapels, and to take some account of the personal preferences of servicemen – also meant that they did not affect officiating chaplains, including Carlile. The clarifications were sufficient to end the complaints of the archbishops, Jarvis, most free church leaders, Conservative and Liberal politicians, and the newspapers. Nonetheless, a government ban remained, as articulated in the now finely honed army order of 11 March: ‘At services conducted by Army Chaplains in Barracks or Garrison Churches provided for the special use of troops out of public funds, for which troops are compulsorily paraded, no intercessory prayers for Russian subjects are to be used’.Footnote 39 Commissioned military chaplains were not to say the prayers to men under military orders in official services conducted on government property, whether army base, RAF airfield or naval ship, but servicemen were free to join in the prayers said at services elsewhere which they attended voluntarily.
On 16 March, special prayers were said at Church of England and free church services, except for those in military garrisons and naval ships. Attendance at many churches and chapels was high, but soon afterwards public agitation over Soviet religious persecution faded. This was partly because the day of prayer had provided an outlet for the spiritual outrage, but it was also because new reports from Russia suggested a decline in the worst of the violence and discrimination. Labour ministers could convince themselves that diplomatic efforts were working; the CPM and The Morning Post could claim that their public campaign had influenced the Soviet government; and many British Christians could believe that their prayers had had some effect.Footnote 40 All accepted that the Soviet campaign against religious belief would continue, if in less harsh forms, but few now thought that much more could be done. In February 1931, the Church of England bishops rejected a proposal for a second day of prayer for Russian Christians, while agreeing to ask the clergy and congregations to remember the Russian church ‘constantly in their prayers’.Footnote 41
State and Church in the Armed Forces
What, though, of the basic issue of government intervention in matters of worship?
Lang had considered the orders ‘stupid’, but ultimately, from the establishment perspective of the Church of England, did not think ‘it is possible to question the right of the naval and military authorities to decide what forms of service are or are not used within their jurisdiction’.Footnote 42 Conservative and Liberal politicians and newspaper editors evidently had a similar attitude. Some free church leaders, while criticizing the clumsiness of the original order, had publicly accepted that the government had a case for the ban. Rushbrooke defended its ‘rightness’, declaring both that it would be paradoxical if prayers for religious freedom were required at compulsory military services, and that such prayers would be open to propagandist misrepresentation.Footnote 43 Even Aubrey, who on behalf of the United Board became the most persistent critic of the orders, observed that the government was rightly concerned that ‘hostile and scrupulous propagandists’ might represent the prayers as an attempt to inflame anti-Soviet feeling in the armed forces, and even as a ‘subtle preparation’ for a future war. Chaplains, he wrote, would have understood and accepted a request from the government to omit references to Russia in their prayers, if this had been communicated and explained to them by the senior chaplains for each of the armed forces.Footnote 44
Aubrey’s main objection was procedural, though founded in the free church principle of freedom of worship. He did not go so far as the National Free Church Council in spelling out that the free churches ‘do not … receive instructions from any outside body as to what we should pray for, or refrain from praying for’.Footnote 45 But on behalf of the United Board he protested that the order was ‘a very serious infringement of the liberty of our Chaplains in their spiritual ministrations’, as officially defined in The Army List: that in religious matters, chaplains worked under the oversight not of the military authorities, but of their denominational representatives accredited by the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department. A particular concern was that government ‘interference’ would make it ‘difficult, if not impossible, for the Churches to induce their finest young men’ to become military chaplains.Footnote 46 Aubrey demanded special meetings of the Interdenominational Advisory Committee on Army Chaplaincy Services (IACACS) and the RAF Advisory Board for Chaplaincy Services, which gathered representatives of the various churches and the Jewish community with army and air force officials and officers, in order to clarify the lines of authority. But the War Office and Air Ministry refused on the grounds that it would be inappropriate for bodies containing civil servants to enter into discussion of a political decision taken by their ministerial superiors.Footnote 47 On Creedy’s advice and at the request of the United Board, Aubrey next appealed to MacDonald for a meeting between the IACACS and government ministers, though he made it ‘perfectly clear’ that he had no political purpose: his complaint was not now about the specific prayers for Russia, but about any ban on prayers, whatever their purposes.Footnote 48 Eventually, he obtained a meeting with Tom Shaw, the secretary of state for war, who introduced a further – and remarkably contrived – distinction, which he had agreed with MacDonald. ‘Whatever the impression created, it was not the intention of the Government to dictate to Chaplains the lines of their spiritual ministrations’, but the government ‘insists upon the right to decide whether attendance at services should be compulsory or not’. This was not what the orders had stated: the ban had been on the saying of prayers by chaplains, not on attendance by servicemen. But if Aubrey noticed this evasion, he let it pass, because he had now obtained what he considered to be a satisfactory ‘reciprocal understanding’ with the government. When ‘services of a special kind’ were contemplated, the senior chaplains would ‘communicate’ with the secretary of state, and when in the opinion of the military authorities such services ‘were for political reasons undesirable’, they would make ‘representations’ to the senior chaplains.Footnote 49 Aubrey interpreted this agreement to mean that any military orders relating to religious services would be issued only after consultation with the representatives of the various churches on the IACACS, and that these orders would be communicated to chaplains by the chaplain-general, explicitly on behalf of the committee.Footnote 50
Aubrey’s efforts had secured reaffirmations of a consultative procedure in religious matters and a religious line of authority for chaplains, which he evidently expected to apply to the navy and air force as well as the army. But he and the other senior denominational representatives in the chaplaincy services pressed no further. They did not reject the underlying principles of the agreement: that governments and military authorities might intervene in worship in the armed forces for political reasons, and determine the attendance of servicemen at religious services, albeit now after consultation with representatives of the churches. Nor, more fundamentally, did they challenge the basis of the government’s ability to prohibit the special prayers in February and March 1930: the requirement in the King’s Regulations for compulsory attendance of members of the army, royal navy and air force at religious services and in church parades.
Compulsory Church Services
Some Labour MPs argued that the most obvious solution to the controversy over the prayers for Russian Christians – more obvious than clarifications of the orders – would be to cancel compulsory church parades on the day of prayer.Footnote 51 This solution was not proposed by Aubrey or other free church leaders. Members of the Society of Socialist Christians went further and revived a common theme among some radical and particularly pacifist Christians, calling for abolition of the whole system of compulsory religious services as ‘contrary to the spirit of Christianity’, a call also made by several Labour MPs in an amendment to the annual army estimates later in March.Footnote 52 MacDonald had hinted that if the controversy was not quickly settled, this pressure for abolition might gain traction.Footnote 53 Yet most church leaders – in the free churches as well as the Church of England – avoided or were silent on the issue. Lang was especially concerned that the government should not begin to consider the matter, and warned Aubrey that his persistence over the orders might provoke a general debate about abolition.Footnote 54 As a good free churchmen, Aubrey wrote in public that he ‘dislike[d] compulsory religion and compulsory parades’. Yet privately he reassured Lang that he was alert to the risk, and to the need for caution: for this reason he asked only for a definition of the government’s competence in determining a chaplain’s religious duties, and had ‘not made any more vigorous demand’.Footnote 55 The government had no difficulty in resisting the critics of compulsory religious services, with Jarvis as chaplain-general preparing a robust defence for Shaw’s use in the House of Commons, even arguing that they were consistent with freedom of worship: recruits knew that they were required, provision was made for servicemen to attend services of their own faith, and no one was forced to act against their conscience.Footnote 56 When the War Office, anticipating further parliamentary criticisms, took the precaution later in 1930 of canvassing the opinion of the IACACS, its free church, as well as Anglican, Scottish Presbyterian and Roman Catholic members all accepted the continuation of compulsory attendance.Footnote 57
Compulsory church parades in the armed forces were eventually abolished after the Second World War, by the next Labour government in 1946. As Jeremy Crang has shown, the change was made at the insistence of Jack Lawson, the secretary of state for war, prompted by a parliamentary motion that was eventually supported by over 200 MPs of various parties. Abolition (except for servicemen under seventeen and a half years of age, and with special provisions in naval ships) was achieved despite divided opinions in the Army Council, and despite very strongly expressed objections by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, Geoffrey Fisher and Cyril Garbett. It was also opposed by almost all members of the IACACS, including most of its free church representatives, with the Methodist member, Joseph Firth, as the sole dissentient.Footnote 58 It was left to Lawson to make the strongest case for voluntary religion: the free churches had a ‘healthy spiritual life without compulsion’; as a Primitive Methodist local preacher, his own experience of compulsory attendance had been ‘very discouraging’; and it was ‘in the interest of religion that he wished to see compulsion abolished’.Footnote 59 Only after the decision for abolition had been taken did Aubrey remark that ‘the more I think of it the more I feel that as a Free Churchman I cannot possibly press for compulsion’ in military church parades.Footnote 60 After senior army officers re-opened the issue with the War Office in 1950, most members of the United Board and the IACACS supported their desire for the reinstatement of compulsory attendance at religious services. Aubrey blandly commented that the free churches ‘rather shrink from any element that looks like “compulsion” in matters of religion’, yet favoured compulsory parades as an acknowledgement of the place that ‘religion should have in the thoughts of men serving their country’. A reintroduction of ‘communal worship’ should be presented as ‘an opportunity being offered rather than a compulsion being imposed’.Footnote 61
William Temple had felt an ‘intense repugnance’ towards the compulsory church parades he had witnessed in France during the First World War, and remarked during the controversy in 1930 that he thought their continuation should in time be questioned.Footnote 62 But Lang, and later Fisher and Garbett, with their more ‘establishment’ minds, and the Anglican chaplains-general with their vocational and professional interests, accepted compulsory attendance at religious services as a natural part of the moral and martial discipline required for men who volunteered or were conscripted to serve and, if necessary, fight for the nation, and also as a desirable means to inculcate and sustain regular religious observance. It is less obvious why, despite their otherwise deep-seated commitment to freedom of worship, compulsory religious services in the armed forces were accepted and defended by free church leaders.
Free Church Conformity
The establishment of commissioned free church military chaplains has been well-explained in a number of studies.Footnote 63 Once free church leaders had decided to support the war against Germany in 1914 and to encourage members of their congregations to join the armed forces, they understandably wanted to ensure that free church servicemen received religious ministry by chaplains from their own denominations, and not to have them obliged under military regulations to attend, by default, services led by Church of England, Methodist or Scottish Presbyterian chaplains. They also wanted, through the United Board formed in 1915 and representation on the IACACS created in 1916, to have influence on, and equal status in, the further development of chaplaincy services and religious provision in the armed forces. This was achieved after the end of the war, when free church chaplains secured permanent commissions and senior positions in the chaplaincy departments, and when the United Board and the IACACS became permanent bodies, with similar interdenominational advisory arrangements created for the air force and navy. Acceptance of the existing regulations for compulsory religious services was part of the means to preserve these gains, to the extent that in 1930 the free church representatives on the IACACS did not demur from Jarvis’s paradoxical argument that ‘there was no other method by which freedom of worship for the soldier could be ensured’.Footnote 64 After the Second World War, in conditions of continuing military conscription, the free church members of the IACACS joined again with the Anglican chaplain-general, now F. L. Hughes, in arguing that in the armed forces, as corporate bodies, many activities ‘were necessarily made matters of organised duty’; that young men ‘could not be left entirely to follow their own inclinations off duty’, needed help to overcome a diffidence about religion and susceptibility to the opinions of others, and required ‘general training towards a right way of living’; and that parents of recruits from religious homes would be upset by the ending of official compulsory attendance. It would also be ‘a grave action on the part of an avowed Christian community’ to depart from the tradition of corporate worship, especially after ‘a long and successful war fought in defence of Christian principle’, and it would cause considerable harm in overseas communities, particularly in eastern (meaning non-Christian) countries.Footnote 65 Compulsory religious worship in the armed forces, the free churches had learned, was a type of mission, acting in loco parentis for young servicemen and checking an erosion of religious observance at home, while setting an example to the world, or rather the empire.
There was another, more deep-rooted, aspect to the free church participation in military chaplaincy and its corollary, acceptance of compulsory church parades. This was part of an extensive change in the attitudes of many free church leaders, a change that is often obscured by historical presuppositions about the ‘decline of nonconformity’. From the 1780s to the 1880s, Dissenters or Nonconformists had sought religious equality in the sense of political and civil rights. Once the disabilities and exclusions imposed by the establishment of the Church of England had been removed – and with the collective membership of the now self-proclaimed free churches reaching similar numbers to those of the Church of England’s regular worshippers – they sought religious equality in a different sense, that of ecclesiastical parity. For Wales, this meant legislation to disestablish the church. In England, where enforced disestablishment was politically impossible, free church leaders wanted ecclesiastical equality in the forms of recognition, status, influence, partnership – a full part in national life – in what David Thompson has described as ‘the Free Church search for legitimation and social power’.Footnote 66 Gradually yet surely, these were being achieved, in representation at great national and royal religious services, and at the annual Cenotaph service of remembrance; in membership of government committees; in receipt of royal honours; and in consultations and joint statements with the Church of England’s archbishops. A new status was also obtained from the discussions on church reunion between representatives of the free churches and the Church of England after the Lambeth appeal for church unity in 1920, during which the bishops publicly recognized free church ministries as ‘effective ministries of grace’, and free church leaders stated their willingness to accept some form of episcopacy.Footnote 67
Conclusion
The controversy over the Labour government’s ban on special prayers in the armed forces is a revealing episode. In itself, it was a fleeting matter. Its only direct consequence was reaffirmation of the established lines of spiritual authority in the military chaplaincies, though it perhaps deterred later governments from similar interventions. Its historical significance is that it provides further instances of a momentous change in free church relations with the state.
John Thompson noted of the creation of the IACACS that it must have given free church leaders ‘a sense … that they had now joined the Establishment’.Footnote 68 Although they would not have used this terminology, in practice this was what these leaders collectively sought to achieve for their denominations. In 1953, the Free Church Federal Council would declare that while continuing their churches’ historic rejection of ‘state control of religion’, it ‘welcomed state recognition of religion’ and wanted to preserve ‘the existing valuable cooperation between Church and State, in which the free churches had come increasingly to share’.Footnote 69 This attitude had obvious consequences. From the 1900s, free church leaders became better disposed towards the roles of the state and national institutions in religious matters, and more prepared to accept that they had benign effects for religious observance. Once the free churches became participants in the military discipline and practices of the armed forces, they could appreciate their benefits in sustaining religious adherence among young men, and more particularly among members of their own churches. So integrated into the armed forces had the free churches become, that during the controversy over the special prayers for Soviet victims of persecution, their leaders criticized a failure of consultation, but not, ultimately, a government right to limit the attendance of servicemen at divine worship on particular occasions, and still less the regular practice of compulsory religious services. What free church leaders had not anticipated was that the achievement of a new ecclesiastical status – a junior partnership of their churches with the established church and with the state – would result in a process of social and cultural assimilation which contributed to the decline in membership of their churches. Only after 1945 did this decline begin to seem inexorable. It is even probable that in 1950 Aubrey hoped that the reinstatement of compulsory church parades would help to check this loss of free church worshippers.
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