Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 4 (Winter 2025)
Article Note: Ilari Taskinen, Risto Turunen, Lauri Uusitalo, and Ville Kivimäki, “Religion, Patriotism and War Experience in Digitized Wartime Letters in Finland, 1939–44,” Journal of Contemporary History 57 (2022): 577–96, doi: 10.1177/00220094211066006.
By Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna
In 2022, four Finnish scholars, Ilari Taskinen, Risto Turunen, Lauri Uusitalo, and Ville Kivimäki, published a truly fascinating and a forward-looking paper featuring a particularly pioneering methodological approach to analyzing historical sources in the Journal of Contemporary History 57. For their contribution, they analyzed letters written by Finnish soldiers during Finland’s three wars between 1939 and 1944, which at first glance may not sound spectacular or particularly innovative. The question of “religion, patriotism, and war experience” is equally unspectacular, to be honest. The study of religious elements in letters from and to soldiers during wartime is a common theme in academic work. Nevertheless, Taskinen and his colleagues have produced a truly promising and, above all, forward-looking contribution.
Research in historical or religious studies often quotes from individual letters, which—depending on the research question—can be methodologically questionable. The question of representativeness is usually not asked, and the selection of sources is often based on random individual findings. This is especially true since such letters are usually found in the estates of more or less important personalities whose descendants have handed over such collections to archives. The collections are then systematically cataloged by the archives and made available to users. Thus, multiple pre-selections already take place at different levels before the historian sees them, but this is not always taken into account when that historian evaluates that source.
The vast majority of soldiers in a war are neither important figures nor professional soldiers: they are ordinary men (and in rare cases women) who are mobilized as a result of a military conflict and, after the end of the war—if they have survived it—return to the lives they led before the war.
To this point, the four authors have drawn on an extensive collection of sources that is at least far more representative than individual archival finds and thus also provides a better cross-section of soldiers’ views: “The data we analyze in this article consists of 7,000 letters written by ordinary Finnish people during the Second World War. These letters are part of the War Letter Collection of the Tampere University Folklife Archives, which since the 1970s has gathered Finnish letters from 1939 to 1945 via public calls, amounting to date to over 60,000 wartime letters and postcards. […] Most of the letters, around 60 percent, are from men serving in the army. […] The 7,000 letters that we use are the first 7,000 letters that the archive received as donations during the 1970s” (579).
These letters have already been digitized in such a way that computer programs can read the handwriting. This in turn allows a large volume of documents to be analyzed quickly and accurately based on, for example, searching for specific terms, with the help of computers. With the help of such an analysis of terms, the four authors also wanted to pursue their main question, whether there “is the supposed change in patriotic-religious language during the Second World War in Finland” (580). For the definition of religious and patriotic language, they selected five key words for each: fatherland, freedom, duty, hero, and sacrifice for patriotic language; God, Jesus, prayer, pray, and blessing for religious language. Of course, one can discuss whether such words are suitable to identify religious language. At least the selection criteria sound reasonable: “We selected these words from a list that included the most frequently occurring words in our letter data, which indicates that these were the core concepts in which people expressed their patriotic and religious feelings in letters” (580–581). However, the question of whether such a selection is ultimately effective is not the focus here; rather, it is the method used.
Through quantitative analysis of the letters, the authors confirm an earlier thesis within Finnish historical research. Religion played a particularly important role for Finnish soldiers during the Winter War, the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (583). Similar sharp increases to those seen at the end of 1939 can be observed again in mid-1941—after the peace of 1940, Finland launched an offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941 as part of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa—and again in 1944, when the Red Army began its renewed offensive against Finland. The authors are able to graphically illustrate the connection between the increase in religious language in soldiers’ letters and the simultaneous rise in the number of casualties during the respective phases of the war: “The meaning of religious talk in letters is thus primarily in coping with the emotionally devastating environment of the war and, in particular, the possibility of death” (591).
The changes as to when religious and when patriotic language can be found in the letters, and why these changes occurred, will not be discussed here. Rather, I would like to point out once again the potential that the paper reveals: quantitative evaluations offer a methodological expansion for contemporary church history, in order to, among other things, better verify certain assumptions. In a few years, especially through the use of artificial intelligence, it should be possible to evaluate source material systematically and quantitatively using specific questions. Many archives are already digitizing their holdings gradually, which will automatically give quantitative evaluation greater importance—especially since it will also be possible to better network and evaluate catalog databases in archives and museums.
What Taskinen, Turunen, Uusitalo, and Kivimäki have done with wartime text could, in all likelihood, be done just as easily in a few years with the sources used in contemporary church history and religious studies. This is by no means to suggest that traditional, empirical, and manual archival work will be replaced by (digitized) quantitative evaluation methods. For, as the authors note—and we wholeheartedly agree—it is not a question of replacement, but of expansion: “[We] argue that the digital analysis of wartime texts can shed valuable new light on a field traditionally dominated by qualitative approaches. Computational methods offer no simple answers to complex research questions, but they can guide our attention toward dominant patterns and trends in the sources” (595).
