Few institutions can incubate more instinctive orthodoxies than armies, those giant mobile universities in which questions of life and death are never very far away. The breaking and remaking of orthodoxy happens most readily under the pressure of a crisis, and armies are in the crisis business. This essay considers the religious life of soldiers in the British army from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The conventional view of contemporary observers and of most historians was that the ‘scum of the earth’ were a godless lot. The truth, this essay argues, is more interesting. Armies are transient, intensely concentrated communities whose age structures, gender profiles and lived experiences are radically different from the civilian world’s. It should be no surprise that those distinctive circumstances fostered a distinctive religious culture, at least as intense as that of civilians, but with distinct emphases. The long Protestant aversion to prayer for the dead crumbled under the pressure of the First World War. There was a wider flourishing of practices and mindsets which the church establishment called superstition and fatalism, but that establishment’s inability to control soldiers’ religious experience should not lead us to accept its dismissals uncritically. British soldiers’ religion may not have adhered to the civilian world’s norms, but their distinct history should in fact lead us to question quite how normative the civilian experience was.