William Temple Foundation

Today is Remembrance Day. Each year people gather at the cenotaph, wreathes are laid, silence falls, and the last post heralds as respects are paid to the dead and their memory. Poppies are used to symbolise the day. It is estimated that 50-56 million died in WWII with a further 19-28 million dying due to war related famine. This is an increase from WWI where an estimated 40 million people were either killed or wounded. As veterans of the Great War and WWII pass away, how we mark the sacrifice of others has been questioned and reframed. For example, this year the Royal British Legion are remembering specifically those who died in WWII and are paying tribute to those who served in the decisive battles of 1944, from the Normandy landings and the subsequent campaign, to Monte Cassino and Kohima and Imphal in the Asian theatre. 

My contribution to Remembrance Day is to briefly engage with lessons we might learn from those who lived through and experienced WWII and point to how we might apply them today? In order to take this question on I will turn to Christianity and World Order, written by Bishop of Chichester George Bell and published by Penguin in 1940. This book was a precursor to Christianity and Social Order written by Archbishop William Temple and took a global perspective on the challenges of the day, which set the stage for Temple’s contribution in 1942 which made reference to global events but was focussed more on the social order in the UK and the contributions citizens might make. 

For Remembrance Day I will focus on the observations Bishop Bell made about the period of war he was living through. It is important to be attentive to the details of what is going on around us and to maintain a critical eye on what is shaping our lives and our experiences. Of this, Bishop Bell painted a vivid picture. His account noted that after the first World War lessons had not been learned, wounds were not healed, silos were deepened, injustices and frustrations remained and even grew. Bishop George noted that as time went on, principles and traditions which held together a sense of common life ‘melted away’ (Bell, 1940, p11). 

Freedoms were limited and inequalities grew. This experience was compounded and intensified by ‘the abolition of distance’ (a phrase credited to H G Wells) where global events are fed into people’s lives and people’s homes on a daily basis so that the narratives and propaganda of ‘the big men endlessly persuading the public’ as Bishop Bell put it, prevailed (Bell, 1940 p12). These narratives stymied the capacity and imagination of people to make the world they wanted to live in. Bishop Bell’s characterisation of this was that “The world was made for people and it was made wrong” (Bell, 1940, p13). In the second stanza of the opening section of the book entitled The Search there are two significant observations, 

“The world in which the new generation have been growing up is a profoundly changed world …

… we have, in spite of all our differences, what is, for many purposes, a spatially united world” (Bell, 1940 p13) 

The terminology used by Bishop Bell is illuminating. The search being set out was one of hope in response to the narratives and propaganda destabilising the world and the experiences of a generation in a changed world. Existential threats were immanent and affecting the very spaces that made up peoples day to day lives. This was 84 years ago. 

It is all too easy to either ignore what has happened in the past, or indeed to rush to judgment on it. There are a great many details that are different between then and now of course. In 1940 spatial unity came in part via the invention of planes, ‘the cheap press’ radio and TV (Bell, 1940, p13), contrast with blogs, social media, podcasts and livestreams today. Notwithstanding this, I think Bishop George offers us some creative guidance to follow. 

Today we have the spectre of war manifest in Ukraine and Israel, with skirmishes spreading across boarders into other countries. Last week we’ve heard about the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, who in spite of his unprecedented controversy, including the fact he is the first US President in history to have criminal convictions, secured an emphatic victory for the Republican Party. Trump appears to have appealed to a great many people who felt oppressed and disaffected under previous administrations. However, immediately following Trumps win pronouncements were being made by Trump about deportations of migrants at any price, and the need for wars to end through oppressed peoples accepting the loss of territory and freedoms in way that appeals to populist regimes around the world. In the UK, we were encouraged to look for the ‘Sunshine in Hope’ in the days following the election of a non-populist Labour party in July, but their victory only took the form of a contingent landslide. Which raises the question, how might we realise something of the hope that Bishop George was searching for, or indeed the hope that Sir Kier Starmer invoked in July? The answer I argue, might be found in a process of just decision making, which I set out on the blog two weeks ago. My hope is that this might encourage the spatially united world that we live to be a more hope filled one.

At the William Temple Foundation we are exploring this idea and process through what we are calling Radical Hope. In April 2024, we considered Radical Hope in a time of election, hosted by Liverpool Hope University. In July 2024 we began to work with Virginia Theological Seminary to explore this theme further on both sides of the Atlantic. This will take the form of the Radical Hope podcast released this autumn, hosted by Vice President for Communications at VTS Nicky Burridge, and myself as Communications Officer and Fellow of William Temple Foundation. In April 2025, in partnership with Virginia Theological Seminary, and Notre Dame Law Centre in London, we will develop this agenda further, by offering a conference at the Inner Temple which will explore how we share our stories, how we harness our spatial unity and emancipate the lived experiences of new generations in the way Bishop George sought to. 

Dr Matthew Barber-Rowell FRSA completed his PhD while a Temple Scholar at Goldsmiths University of London, is a Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation, an Honorary Research Fellow at Liverpool Hope University and is a Dean’s Scholar at Virginia Theological Seminary in the USA.

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