In 1917, a group of seventeen Anglican clergymen who served as military chaplains during WWI published a volume, The Church in the Furnace. Who were these seventeen men? What were their stories, both before and after the war and their contributions to the volume? Why did they write this book anyway? What did they think about their faith and war—and why do the varied answers they propose still matter to us today? These are just some of the questions that Timothy Larsen sets out to answer in his new book, The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College and an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at Edinburgh University. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment; The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith; John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life, and The Oxford Handbook of Christmas.
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Nadya Williams: This is a group biography of seventeen Anglican clergymen during WWI—a concept that already makes your book somewhat unusual. What is the story behind this project? When did you realize that this is a book you wanted—and maybe even needed—to write?
Timothy Larsen: I have structured several of my books this way. John Wilson, who was the editor of Books & Culture, delightfully calls it the “Larsen template.” I am drawn to chapter-length biographies because it gives you enough room to experience human life in all its quirkiness and poignancy.
In my way of thinking, historical writing should be thoroughly grounded in the particular. I resist projects that are so focused on making generalizations that they have no room to include details that reflect who an individual was and how their life unfolded. To pluck a sentence pretty much at random from the book, of one of my military chaplains I remark: “A houseguest glimpsed him heading off to bed with a Greek Orthodox Prayer Book and an Agatha Christie novel.” That is the stuff of life.
I think of the chapters as sort of like short stories—at least I am striving towards something along those lines—and I adhere to the writerly advice to try to show rather than tell. I hope that when reading these biographical sketches, a reader might occasionally laugh out loud, but I tell my students (and myself) that I’m only interested in writing in a way that elicits a laugh if what we are really laughing at is the human condition and thus ourselves. People’s petty vanities make me laugh aloud because I am petty and vain; it is a laugh of recognition.
As to the actual subject matter of this book, I tend to do “faith and . . .” projects—the two most recent ones before this book were “faith and anthropology” and “faith and philosophy.” So I decided I wanted to do a “faith and war” project. Looking back, I see this had a lot to do with my parents dying. (Thankfully they both died in old age and from natural causes.) My father was a Korean War veteran whose hobby was military history. He is the reason I became a historian. I think, unconsciously, I was processing their deaths by finally turning to military history.
Nadya Williams: How did WWI affect these clergymen? To what extent would you consider their experience and reactions typical?
Timothy Larsen: The war was so big and so bewildering. Even these ordained clergymen by 1917, if not earlier, agreed with the widespread consensus, especially among the fighting men, that the war was meaningless. It must have been extraordinarily difficult to think of the defining event of your life as devoid of meaning. Their response was to decide that the tremendous losses of the war could be made retrospectively meaningful if they did worthy things with their lives after the war. They were filled with zeal to bring about beneficial changes in the post-war society. No doubt this desire was tinged with survivor’s guilt.
I think this desire was widespread, so in that sense they were pretty typical, but I do think that the Christian faith helps people to believe they are doing something meaningful with their lives. So in that sense, the clergymen who had served as chaplains had an advantage in that it was probably easier for them than for many others to convince themselves that they were doing something meaningful after the war.
Nadya Williams: What are some key takeaways you hope your readers will gain from this book?
Timothy Larsen: In terms of an original, scholarly contribution, I think the most important one is the section on prayer. There was widespread disillusionment, but what people were disillusioned with was very specifically the false assumption that fighting the war could bring about something good. Scholars tend to imagine that the soldiers and people in general became disillusioned with God and the Christian faith and, in particular, with prayer as a supposedly ineffectual and pointless activity. That is not at all what the primary resources reveal. There was actually a great revival of prayer during the war, both among the soldiers and on the home front. People were much more interested in the question of how to pray than whether praying was worthwhile. Even those who described the soldiers as “godless” admitted that they all prayed. What the soldiers often wanted from their chaplains was instruction on how to pray. Written prayers were very popular items. Soldiers often would put one under their hat or helmet for quick and easy access.
More generally, I wanted readers to grasp what this generation went through. Every Briton in uniform during the First World War had been raised and educated as a Victorian. The country had not fought a war with another major power since the mid-1850s. They found themselves in this modern, mechanized war that was so unlike how they had been taught to imagine war. Then, after the war, came the Great Depression. Then after the Great Depression came the Second World War.
One of my chaplains who gets a chapter-length biography in the book is Neville Talbot. His younger brother, Gilbert, was a lieutenant during the First World War, and as was so common with lieutenants, once he was deployed to France, he only survived for a matter of weeks. Gilbert was killed in one of those futile charges the war has become notorious for. Literally every single soldier who attempted it was either killed or wounded. Neville risked his life to recover Gilbert’s body from a no man’s land under artillery fire and rife with snipers. Neville married during the war. He and his wife had a daughter and then a son. Neville’s wife died from complications from their son’s birth. Neville named their son Gilbert in honor of his brother who died in the First World War. Neville’s son Gilbert was then killed in action during World War II. I came to think of these chaplains as a generation that went from the Victorian age to the atomic age.
Nadya Williams: History doesn't operate according to the scientific method of the lab sciences. Still, akin to researchers in the hard sciences, we usually begin a book project with a working hypothesis or argument in mind, then see where the rest of the research and primary sources take us. What was your working hypothesis when you first started this project? Were there any surprises along the way, or did the overall story you are telling end up being mostly what you expected?
Timothy Larsen: A lot my books have had a very strong revisionist thesis. I used to quip that my thesis was always “you have always thought this, but you were wrong.” I did not come to this project, however, with a revisionist agenda. Another theme of my work has been that there is more faith going on than the standard story usually sees or admits. I think I did bring that lens to this project—a suspicion that the view that a lot of people have that the war caused many people to lose their faith was probably wrong (and it is).
Another thing I tend to do is pick a project that I don’t know much about so I can learn something myself. So I learned a lot working on this book. It was a new subject for me. Here is one thing that surprised and struck me: I came at the project assuming that the war would cause people’s beliefs to change radically. They did change sometimes, and sometimes radically, but I had badly underestimated the degree to which people tend to double down on what they already believe in a time of crisis. There was a notable pattern of people “learning” from the war the lessons that they wanted to learn. Very high church people insisted that the war vindicated high church practices; very theological liberal people insisted that the war vindicated liberal beliefs; strident evangelicals asserted that the war illustrated the rightness of evangelical ways, and so on.
In general, I have a theory that historians have a bias in favor of seeing and discussing change and therefore tend to underestimate or largely ignore continuity. Continuity is essential to making history meaningful for us. It is because we can recognize ourselves in things that people in the past thought and did that their stories matter to us.
Nadya Williams: You are a prolific researcher and writer, as well as a teacher. I especially appreciate in your work a visible delight in intellectual labors—it really comes through in everything you do. What are some key habits for you in maintaining an active and joyful intellectual life?
Timothy Larsen: This is such a wonderful thing to say! The book is dedicated to David J. P. Hooker a friend of mine who is a ceramic artist and a colleague, a professor of art here at Wheaton College. I explain in the acknowledgments: “I need to hear him talk about the process, as opposed to the product, of our work over and over again.”
I realized that I needed to talk about process a lot more with my own students as well. I came to think of the way I used to teach as like the kind of cooking shows that were on TV when I was growing up in which you would see someone chopping a carrot for a few seconds and then you would see them pull this amazing, finished dish out of the oven. The real truth is, counting both the preparation work and the cooking time, that dish was probably a four to five hour project. Therefore, the relevant question is: do you want to go out and find and buy these ingredients, do the labor-intensive effort to prepare then, and wait the substantial time it will take for it to cook? The product is a moment—"here is this book I wrote”—but process is what we do with our lives, it is the eight years of work I put into the project of which this book is the tangible fruit.
When choosing a project, I am less and less focused on thoughts such as, “Will the resulting book be an important contribution to the field that critics will praise?” and more and more on “Will I enjoy reading these sources, thinking about these issues, and working on this project for the years of my life that it will take to get to the book?” The older I get the more the question, “Will I actually enjoy reading the primary sources?” has become more central and decisive.
Another thing I tell my students (and myself) a lot is: “You don’t control reception.” It is not a wise strategy to do a project primarily because of your hopes for how it will be received. You don’t control reception. Do a project because you think it is intrinsically worthwhile, because it is the way you want to occupy your time, because you will find joy and fulfillment in actually doing it—joy and fulfilment in the process. That is the part you can control. And then you will always have that sense that it was inherently worthwhile—and you will have the memory of that joyful, fulfilling process as time well spent, whatever the reception of the resulting product ends up being.