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Robert D Linder, The Long Tragedy: Australian Evangelical Christians and the Great War, 1914-1918. Adelaide: Openbook Publishers, 2000, 196 pp., pb, illus., index, RRP $19.95.

Reviewed by Malcolm Prentis

This book mounts a modest but compelling challenge to the mainstream of Australian historiography. It politely demands significant revision of the treatment of two key issues in Australian history, the Great War and Christianity, and a re-evaluation of the relationship between the two. Linder writes (p. 8) that this study is an attempt to add another dimension to the understanding of Australian participation in World War I through the lens of one of the more important but often neglected subcultures of Australian society. Sometimes called ''hot-Protestants' by their critics in time past, these earnest Christians have often been denied their antipodean heritage by ignoring their history...'.

This work is also, in part, an attempt to answer those critics among so-called mainstream historians who have charged the practitioners of Australian religious history with a failure to demonstrate how their subject bears on society at large.

It would be most unfortunate if Bob Linder's challenge were to be ignored simply because he is an American (how dare he!), or because his assault on historiographic orthodoxy is mild-mannered or because he takes evangelical Protestantism seriously and/or because Australian historians are narrow-minded. If the challenge is ignored, it will be a tragedy - part of a long tragedy at that. When the latest 'shist' of Australia devotes ten times as much space to Communism as it does Christianity, one wonders at the sense of proportion of Australian historians. If it takes a Yank to point out such egregious distortions of the Australian past, hooray for him.

Bob Linder is Professor of History at Kansas State University. He has published widely on the interrelationship between religion and politics. He has authored or edited twelve books, including Civil Religion and the Presidency and A Dictionary of Christianity in America. Since 1986 he has spent every winter in Australia doing research and writing in Australian religious history with a particular interest in the influence of evangelicals in the labor movement. His research into the spiritual life of John Curtin is set to overturn some assumptions about the wartime Prime Minister. He was the Fulbright Professor of History at the University of Wollongong NSW in 1987 and the Visiting Professor of History at the same university in 1990. In 1994 he was the Honorary Visiting Fellow in Modern History at Macquarie University. Since 1995 he has been the Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity at Robert Menzies College, Macquarie University. Pertinent to the present work, he is the son of a 'doughboy' and himself served in the US Army at the time of the Vietnam War. He also served two terms as mayor of Manhattan City Council in Kansas.

Despite the many works that have been written on Australia and Australian soldiers in the Great War and on the Anzac theme by Bean and many others, Linder is quite right to state, 'One searches the major works on the war in vain for a serious discussion of the religious beliefs of the Australian troops in World War 1' (p. 13). As a part of his redress of this, Linder confronts head-on the characterization of the diggers of the AIF as indifferent to religion and uninterested in politics and sex as well. If this were the case, he says, the diggers must have been the most unusual soldiers in history (p. 14). The digger's distrust of chaplains ('because he was an Australian', as Gammage says) is shown here to have been neither unique to the AIF nor as absolute as it seems. Their larrikinism is easily shown to have been exaggerated. Military historians know that undisciplined larrikins cannot do what the AIF did in 1918. Linder quite rightly points out that a significant proportion of the AIF maintained Christian virtues amidst the carnage. He may not have the hard data to prove it conclusively, but he is undoubtedly correct that a disproportionate enlistment rate amongst evangelical Protestants lead logically to the conclusion that as much as 40% of the diggers came from this sort of background.

He is justified in writing (p.162) that the contributions and losses of the evangelicals during the era far exceeded what has heretofore been estimated by historians. The evangelicals, clergy and laity, were a major presence in every aspect of the heartbreak and hell of history's most tragic war. They played a large role in the prosecution of the conflict, in the debate over conscription, in the opposition to the war on moral grounds, in the expenditure of large of amounts of energy and blood on the war and on social improvement during the period, and in the effort to alleviate the discomfort and pain involved as the returned soldiers tried to re-adjust to civilian life. They also participated on both sides in the industrial conflict of the period. Moreover, in at least two areas evangelical participation was decisive: the conscription votes and ministry to military personnel. Therefore, it seems fair to conclude that evangelicals, who constituted a large minority of the Australian population, served with energy and distinction in all phases of the Great War, with many of them seeing clearly at the time rather than in retrospect its destructiveness and fundamentally unChristian character.

A different perspective on the persecution of Australian Lutherans also emerges from Linder's research because of the tragedy inherent in evangelicals attacking other evangelicals. It is but one aspect of the bind they found themselves in as both good citizens of the Empire but also the conscience of the nation. The role of evangelicals in the conscription debates has scarcely been noticed before. The concentration of earlier historians on the 'Catholic vote' has obscured the fact that virtually the only people arguing against it for moral reasons (as opposed to Irish nationalist ones) were evangelical Christians. Many of the soldiers, farmers and workers who voted against conscription were also evangelicals. 'Evangelical clerical leaders were mainly pro-conscription, while the clergy-at-large and rank-and-file members were split over the question' (p. 86).

Along the way, Linder challenges widespread misunderstandings of the evangelical role in Australian society. It has been a common assumption that they wanted to impose wowserism on a reluctant community to make them conform to Christian respectability 'as a precondition for salvation' (p10). As a matter of theology, it is easy to show this to be false, as Linder does, but he also explores the complexity of the evangelical social reform agenda during and after the war, showing it cannot be explained in this way. Pre-war Australia shared to a greater extent than many historians today can conceive a wide range of Christian values. In a democracy in such circumstances, persuasion rather than coercion was very feasible. And similarly, while many diggers and their relatives turned their backs on the Church during the war (as Linder acknowledges), many also developed or maintained their commitment. One example is John Ridley, who won the Military Cross at Bullecourt, and became a well-known evangelistic preacher after the war. Even those who walked away often kept a belief in Providence and Christian moral values (p. 161, some of which recalls the case of Bert Facey).

The role of chaplains is discussed in Linder's eighth chapter. This is a challenge to Bean who barely mentions them despite being the son of a rectory. What emerges is a much more complex picture than hitherto portrayed, though Linder acknowledges McKernan's 'valuable exploratory work' on the subject (p. 13). Several evangelical padres clearly deserve the appellation 'war hero' as did several of the clergy who served in the ranks. It is equally clear that many diggers appreciated their ministrations, despite their problematic status as officers. The most popular was Salvation Army padre William 'Fighting Mac' McKenzie, MC, who enlisted at 44. He organised church parades, prayer meetings, community singing plus sporting events, and he was very handy with his fists. McKenzie won many men to faith in Christ through his keen sense of humour and demonstration of practical Christianity. He was with the troops in the front-line trenches. Presbyterian padre Andrew Gillison and Methodist minister/infantry Corporal Robert Pittendrigh lost their lives on Gallipoli trying to save a wounded man. The experiences of, and reactions to, the padres varied enormously, as Linder shows.

The 'bitter fruits of victory' and the 'evangelical vacant pew' are reflected in the titles of the last two chapters and the book ends, inevitably and rightly, on a doleful note. Not only was the war a long tragedy for the soldiers, the nation and the world, but also for Australian Christians. While it could be argued that the war dealt a fatal blow to the supremacy of an optimistic liberal theology in European Protestantism, this was not the case in Australia. For one thing, in Australia, liberalism had not yet made much impression and evangelicalism had remained strong and Protestantism identified itself with the Empire; accordingly, it was the prevailing evangelicalism which suffered. For one thing, many bereaved parents could not bear the thought that death on the battlefield might not by itself guarantee salvation for their dead sons, as evangelical theology emphasised the need for conversion. Although Linder does not mention it, this is no doubt one reason for the positive reception given to Presbyterian theologian Ronald McIntyre's The Other Side of Death: a Study in Christian Eschatology (1921), a book which canvassed a doctrine of 'conditional immortality' - more reassuring to the bereaved but hardly orthodox evangelical theology. The evangelicals lost friends at both ends of the social spectrum. Some of the more prophetic amongst them had denounced war or chauvinism or hatred of Germans or the notion of war as somehow 'cleansing and purifying'. Many in the élite did not want to hear these messages, either.

The sheer quantity and range of secondary sources used - and thoroughly used at that - by Linder is impressive. He engages with the literature and his end-notes are informative and interesting additions to the text. The primary sources are also extensive, especially the secular and religious press all over Australia, including the provinces. As Bruce Mansfield notes in the blurb, 'Linder knows Australian scholarship but also brings to the subject an outsider's eye'. His intention was not 'to explore the evangelical contribution to Australia's participation in World War I in an exhaustive fashion but rather to open up the topic for further considerations' (p. 13). Any one of the themes he explores could be turned into a book in its own right. For instance, a reworking of the material used in The Broken Years would be a good test of Linder's conclusions; he has certainly done enough to puncture Gammage's confident conclusion that the diggers were universally indifferent to Christianity.

Linder writes simply and understandably and occasionally very movingly. The book has a an arresting cover featuring a 1918 chaplain's uniform and medals, with a battlefield New Testament stuck in the belt. It is illustrated with several appropriate photos and cartoons. Anyone interested in the impact of 'history's most tragic war' on Australia ought to read this book. Linder has aimed (p. 8) to 'combine religious and military history in a meaningful way, a conjunction which is often highly controversial among historians'. He also hopes 'that the insights provided herein will be useful to students of religious, military and social history alike'. This reviewer thinks he has succeeded in these modestly stated aims and hopes others in the field of Australian history will at least listen to what the author is saying.

Malcolm D. Prentis
Associate Professor of History and BA & BA/BBus Co-ordinator
Australian Catholic University
Mount St Mary Campus 25A Barker Road [Locked Bag 2002]
Strathfield N.S.W. 2135 Australia
TELEPHONE (61 + 2) 9739 2207
FACSIMILE (61 + 2) 9739 2263

Published: 11-04-2000 http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/reviews/linder .htm