Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 32, Number 1 (Spring 2026)
Review of Patrick J. Houlihan, Religious Humanitarianism during the World Wars, 1914-1945. Cambridge Elements: Elements in Modern Wars. (Cambridge, 2024).
By Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College at Southwestern Seminary
Wars do not consist entirely of death and destruction, but sometimes it may appear that histories written about wars do. Patrick Houlihan provides an unexpected contribution to the Cambridge Elements’ series of modern war studies which emphasizes humanitarian action rather than the era’s immense violence. Houlihan serves as Associate Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin. He is likely familiar to most CCHQ readers because of his 2015 book Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge, 2015). His latest work, Religious Humanitarianism during the World Wars, 1914-1945, explores the reconstructive side of the human experience of war. This book is concerned with the preservation of lives and the rebuilding of societies rather than the destruction of modern warfare. Houlihan engages with the growing scholarship on humanitarianism, human rights, and transnational aid organizations. He challenges sweeping claims of twentieth-century secularization with an emphasis on the religious impulses of twentieth-century humanitarianism.
This book – or booklet – is the third of five publications thus far in Cambridge’s series “Elements in Modern War.” These Cambridge Elements volumes may be unfamiliar to some readers. Cambridge describes the Elements line as a combination of “the best features of books and journals to create a quick, concise publishing solution for researchers and readers in the fields of academic publishing and scholarly communication.” Houlihan’s contribution to the Elements in Modern War stands out as the volume that most explicitly deals with the religious aspects of the world wars era (although Jay Winter’s The Cultural History of War in the Twentieth Century and After engages aspects of religious life as well). Works in this series are intentionally short with a goal to “provide comprehensive coverage of the key topics” in various subfields. This book most certainly accomplishes this goal. Houlihan introduces his readers to religious humanitarianism during the era of the two world wars with an impressive engagement of the historical literature. This book is a mere 69 pages of content followed by an eight-page bibliography that provides a superb introduction to the field. Graduate students interested in further exploring twentieth century humanitarianism will find a concise and compact collection of major works across diverse subfields.
Houlihan’s work transcends the confines of European geography. He strives to tie together transnational and global threads to challenge Eurocentric readings of the World Wars and their impacts upon various populations. Not only does he focus on the European experiences of World War I and World War II, but he also explores the Russian Civil War, decolonization movements, and religious humanitarianism in the Global South to paint a broader portrait of twentieth-century developments that challenge simple sacred vs. secular dichotomies.
Houlihan demonstrates an impressive familiarity with diverse historiographies, and he writes this sweeping introduction with the sort of intellectual humility that any reasonable person must embrace when facing such a mountainous endeavor: “On a fundamental level, no one historian can tell the grand narrative of humanitarianism that binds the global with the local, simply because of the limits of the human person” (9-10). Rather than offer the definitive history of religious humanitarianism from 1914 to 1945, Houlihan strives to “outline ways of reconceptualizing the global ideological dimensions of humanitarianism during the world wars” (10). He writes as one who takes the impact of religious belief seriously and argues well for the inclusion of religion in serious attempts to explain societal, cultural, and intellectual developments in the twentieth century.
After a thoughtful Introduction in which he establishes the impossibility and the necessity of the task before him, Houlihan turns his attention to World War I. He traces the development of humanitarian intervention from an initial focus on prisoners of war to a focus on civilians. He next discusses the Russian Civil War and the religious dynamics in the interplay between the “faith-based messianism of the USA and the state-sponsored atheism of the (eventual) USSR” in famine relief and the leading role of the American Relief Administration (15). Next, he turns to Euro-American interventions in the Middle East. He particularly examines the relation of religious identity and the nature of citizenship as understood in the Middle East, concluding, “Religious identity became a marker of difference that became increasingly ethno-nationalized” (23). Then, Houlihan explores the various “Civilizing Missions” of the interwar periods, ranging from Pope Benedict XV’s 1917 Peace Note to Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to implement the Fourteen Points to John Mott and the interwar missionary movement. He then turns his attention to the emergence of the United States as a leading global humanitarian power. He traces the impact of this in the postwar years in which “the USA made a more interventionist assertion of its projection of democratic values”, and he argues that “Religion was a key part of this” (45). While the title implies that this book covers merely the era of the world wars, Houlihan extends his analysis to the development of postwar humanitarian efforts. He demonstrates a through-line of humanitarian intervention in the First World War and its aftermath to attempts to rebuild a more humane world in the aftermath of World War Two. He posits a helpful ideal-type contrast, in the vein of Michael Barnett’s work on humanitarianism, writing, “Humanitarianism aims to improve the world as it is, whereas the idea of human rights aims to improve the world as it should be” (68).
Houlihan argues effectively that the history of humanitarianism and human rights advocacy in the wake of the global conflicts in the twentieth century cannot be properly understood without taking account of religion. One might say that swords turning into plowshares cannot be explained by secularization. He gives an impressively thorough introduction to a field of study for such a short volume. He provides a myriad of potential further lines of study. For example, Houlihan calls for further study of the relationship of humanitarianism and human rights in the world wars era. He also challenges scholars to reconsider conceptions of how wars end in light of the pursuit of ius post bellum (justice after war). This work is a great place to start for anyone interesting in studying humanitarianism and human rights (in a global context) in the twentieth century.
