Second World War

Religion did not start the Second World War, but every belligerent had to decide what to do with it. In Germany the National Socialist state promoted the German Christians, a movement that sought to purge Christianity of its Jewish inheritance, and was answered by the Confessing Church, whose Barmen Declaration of 1934 refused the state's claim over the gospel; its best remembered voice, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was executed at Flossenburg in the war's final weeks. The Vatican's wartime course under Pius XII, a diplomacy of neutrality, quiet rescue and public restraint, remains the most argued question in the church history of the century, with the documentary record still being weighed.

The Soviet Union, which had spent two decades attempting to extinguish religion, reversed course under invasion: in 1943 Stalin received the surviving Orthodox metropolitans and allowed the reopening of churches and the election of a patriarch, purchasing wartime loyalty with a controlled revival that outlasted the war. In Japan, State Shinto supplied the war's sacral frame, from shrine rites for victory to the cult of the war dead at Yasukuni, and the Allied occupation's Shinto Directive of 1945 disestablished it, separating shrine and state for the first time in the modern era.

Across occupied Europe, clergy of every confession filled the camps alongside the communities they served: Polish Catholic priests died at Dachau in the thousands, and Orthodox, Protestant and Jewish religious life in the occupied East was targeted for destruction outright.

Sources The Second World War: A Complete HistoryMartin Gilbert with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965Michael Phayer

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.