A Church Militant: Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War

This is a study of the relationship between Anglicans and the armed forces, of the military heritage and history of the Anglican Communion, and of the changing nature of this relationship between the mid-Victorian period and the 1970s. This era spanned a time of imperial expansion and colonial conflict around the turn of the twentieth century, the two World Wars, the Cold War, wars of decolonization, and the Vietnam War. In terms of armed conflict, it was the bloodiest period in the history of humanity and marked the advent of weaponry that had the capacity to extinguish human civilization. This book assesses the contribution of an expansive Anglican Communion to the armed forces of the English-speaking world, examines the ways in which this has been remembered, and explores its challenging legacy for the twenty-first-century Church of England.