The religious aftermath of the Second World War was as large as the war. The Holocaust, perpetrated under its cover, forced a reckoning in Jewish theology with covenant and divine presence that is still under way, and pressed Christian churches toward the repudiation of the anti Judaism in their own teaching, a movement that reached a landmark in the Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate in 1965. The founding of the State of Israel in 1948, three years after the liberation of the camps, reshaped Jewish religious life and forced every Christian theology of exile and return to reconsider itself.
The war also built institutions. The World Council of Churches, planned before the war, was constituted in Amsterdam in 1948 by churches that had just been shooting at one another, and the new United Nations wrote freedom of religion into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the same year. Japan's postwar constitution guaranteed religious liberty and left Shinto a voluntary faith among others, while the destruction of European Jewry shifted the demographic centre of the Jewish world decisively to America and Israel.
Harder inheritances remain. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened a moral argument within every tradition about war itself that has not closed; the war dead at Yasukuni remain a live religious and political controversy in Japan; and the wartime conduct of churches, popes and patriarchs is still being judged as archives open, a reminder that the war's religious history is not yet finished being written.