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David Bebbington, Defending the Faith: Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Todd H. Weir and Hugh McLeod, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1868–1870, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac255
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Extract
An international set of scholars has produced a collection of studies of twentieth-century religious (and anti-religious) polemic. Many of the papers were originally delivered at a conference in London in 2017, but others have been added to ensure a varied coverage. Although there are backward and forward glances, the contributions concentrate on the years between 1917 and 1990 when the state-sponsored secularism of the Soviet Union created the conditions for vigorous ideological debate. It was ‘an age of apologetics’ (p. 93). The context is broad, encompassing politics, domestic and international, and secularisation in many senses. The polemics are of different types, ranging from fierce combat to mild dialogue and from individual efforts to mass movements. Many papers deal with Christian campaigns. Devotion to Christ the King was employed by the Vatican to recruit support for the hierarchy in Catholic Action from 1925 to long after the Second World War (the author, John Pollard, recalls his own participation). A chapter by Benjamin Ziemann on Martin Niemöller suggests that the thread running through the German churchman’s diverse apologetics was Protestant nationalism, while Jennifer M. Miller and Udi Greenberg point out that earlier Protestant arguments against Roman Catholicism were echoed in anti-Communist literature. The American evangelist Billy Graham is shown by Uta Balbier to have deployed resounding Cold War rhetoric on his enormously popular visit to England in 1954. By contrast, Vlad Naumescu recounts how Paulos Mar Gregorios, a bishop of the Indian Orthodox Church, launched an initiative to co-ordinate Oriental Orthodox Christians as an alternative to Cold War global polarisation. In the last substantive chapter, Peter Itzen argues that the Church of England showed a significant degree of resilience in maintaining political influence between 1960 and 1990. Apologetics, originally a Christian term, was alive and well in ecclesiastical circles.
