The Great and Holy War Quotes

“Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis is commonly regarded as one of the classics of cinema, and at the time it was probably the most expensive film ever made. Only in light of recent restoration work, though, can we see how explicitly it draws on apocalyptic themes in its prophetic depiction of modern society. Partly, Metropolis reflects the ideas of Oswald Spengler, whose sensationally popular book The Decline of the West appeared in 1918. Spengler presented nightmare forecasts of the vast megalopolis, ruled by the superrich, with politics reduced to demagoguery and Caesarism, and religion marked by strange oriental cults. Lang borrowed that model but added explicit references to the Bible, and particularly Revelation. In the future world of Metropolis, the ruling classes dwell in their own Tower of Babel, while the industrial working class is literally enslaved to Moloch.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade – Angels, Apocalypse, and the Spiritual Dimensions of Modern Violence

“the “politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade

“In practice, though, this commitment to suffering and sacrifice meant serving in uniform, taking up weapons, and inflicting death upon others. So constantly do such accounts portray soldiers undergoing sacrificial death that it is sometimes hard to tell who, if anyone, is actually attacking, rather than merely dying nobly. Somebody, surely, must be firing the shells and wielding the bayonets.24”
― Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade

“For liberal Protestants, the god presented in the Bible is only one limited perception of the deity, who became better understood through the progressive workings of history. The church likewise existed in history and had to be adapted and modernized for successive generations and cultures. Such an approach is liberal and its openness to changing ideas and standards, but the lack of any external absolutes allows the church to be swept along with contemporary political obsessions. In the German case, liberal Protestantism allowed itself to identify wholly with the emerging Wilhelmine Reich and came close to state worship, if not war worship.”
― Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade – Angels, Apocalypse, and the Spiritual Dimensions of Modern Violence