What the Bishop said (or, the truth about the Bishop of London…)

Report from Michael Snape:

The looming centenary was bound to prove an opportunity to dredge up some tired and discredited cliches about the First World War. How tedious, therefore, to hear Jeremy Paxman indulge in some traditional bishop-bashing on a recent edition of ‘The Big Questions’ (BBC1, Sunday 18 May 2014).

The cause of our altercation was his interruption of a statement made about the centrality of the theme of sacrifice in the preaching of the British churches on the war. The exchange ran as follows:

Paxman: ‘That’s absurd! The Bishop of London was saying that you were doing God’s duty killing Germans.’

Snape: ‘This is a nonsense. That is a parable. That is a myth, in actual fact.’

Paxman: ‘I can point you to the text, actually.’

Snape: ‘I can point you to the scholarship which demonstrates quite conclusively that that is a myth that has inhered…’

Paxman: ‘I’ll tell you what, if you were a German here. I would be really interested to know [indistinct]…’

Irrespective of whether there were any Germans present (and however irrelevant their opinion would have been to the point in question) the Bishop of London did not say what he is alleged to have said in a sermon preached on 28 November 1915, namely exhorting his hearers ‘to kill Germans’.

In a published and comprehensive demolition of this charge, Stuart Bell, a Methodist minister and doctoral student at the University of Birmingham, has shown that the source of the sentiments wrongly ascribed to Bishop Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram is a heavily doctored version of the sermon that was published in 1934 by the Secular Society, a date and provenance that would set alarm bells ringing for any discerning historian. Significantly, Roland Bainton, who fed this anticlerical libel into the academic mainstream through his book Christian Attitudes to War and Peace (1960), duly reconsidered his evidence and wrote an unequivocal retraction for the journal Theology, stating that Winnington Ingram ‘regretfully but candidly’ pointed out the terrible implications of the war, i.e. that Britons were now being called upon to kill good and bad Germans alike. Significantly, the editor of Theology stated that ‘We are glad to print this letter, because a man’s posthumous reputation ought not be impugned on no better evidence than an unverified and incomplete quotation’.

Nevertheless, and despite the well-advised caution of some subsequent scholars, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle, the original tale being recycled -and even embellished- by a host of historians who seemed determined not to let the truth stand in the way of a good story (especially, it would seem, one that took a good swipe at the Anglican clergy). Hence, and with a confidence that was wholly misplaced, Jeremy Paxman loudly held forth on the notorious bloodthirstiness of Winnington Ingram, thus demonstrating that ignorance is no bar to opinion and that, if you chuck enough mud, at least some of it will stick.

A copy of Stuart Bell’s article has been sent to Mr. Paxman. He has yet to reply.