Anglicans and Aviators: The First World War and the Forgotten Origins of Royal Air Force Chaplaincy

Abstract

Nineteen-eighteen saw the formation of the world’s first independent air force, and the inauguration of the first independent chaplaincy organisation devoted to military aviation. However, the neglected creation of the Chaplains’ Branch of the Royal Air Force towards the end of the First World War represents far more than just a minor footnote in the institutional history of Britain’s armed forces. The circumstances of its creation, which occurred just as the German sociologist Max Weber was identifying scientific progress as driving the ineluctable ‘disenchantment of the world’, not only belied this famous sociological maxim in the highly technological and supremely modern context of aerial warfare but also demonstrated the competence of Anglican chaplaincy methods and the resilience of British ‘Christendom’ in the context of a war which is widely perceived as having exposed and exacerbated the weaknesses of both.