An online WWI exhibit that carries a vital lesson

Across the span of human history, religion has caused wars, shaped the course of wars, worked to prevent wars and helped people to heal after wars.

The interconnectedness between religion and war is almost endless. And sometimes those connections help to reveal the ways in which governments sometimes seek to exploit religions for the purposes of whatever war they are waging at the moment.

All this is demonstrated by a fascinating new online exhibit called "Fighting with Faith" from the National World War I Museum in Kansas City. Here is a Religion News Service story about that exhibit.

Because of the museum's purpose, this exhibit naturally tells a story that happened as part of the first world war. I encourage you to click on the link to the exhibit and spend some time hearing and seeing the story of the Halbmondlager, or “Half Moon Camp,” a Muslim prisoner-of-war camp in Wünsdorf, Germany.

In the RNS story to which I've linked you, Patricia Cecil, specialist curator of faith, religion and World War I at the museum, is quoted this way: “We conceive of it as this very European war. But it wasn’t. It was a global war. And this camp is evidence of that, and the photographs we have are evidence of that.”

Germany and the failing Ottoman Empire, in fact, were doing their best to draw Muslim soldiers to fight on behalf of the Ottomans, an ally of the Germans. One way the Germans did that was to build a mosque -- the first ever on German soil -- at the prison and to give Muslim prisoners special treatment. (The drawings above, taken from the exhibit's website, show aspects of that mosque.)

As part of the online exhibit explains, "German leadership viewed promotion of religious practice as a cornerstone of propaganda. The Ottoman Empire also advocated for Muslim prisoners of war to have a place for worship."

Cecil explained it to RNS this way: “From the outset, using religion as a tool of propaganda was the goal. They wanted to have the benefit of millions of Muslim soldiers. If you can get all these people currently under the rule of the British, French and Russian empires, and can get them to side with a religious ideology that also aligns with your military ideology, you have a recipe for revolution across the world.”

And how did that recruitment campaign go? Here's what you will find about that at the online exhibit:

The campaign by most measures was a failure.

• • Some POWs did join the alliance: about 800 prisoners from the Half Moon Camp registered for the Ottoman army and went to Turkey.
  • Most Muslim POWs, about 4,200, or 84%, did not join the German-Ottoman alliance.
  • A Muslim revolution to overthrow English, French and Russian empires never materialized.

"Prisoners were not convinced they should join the cause of the German-Ottoman alliance," the exhibit notes say. "Germany and the Ottoman Empire were counting on pan-Islamism to have a major influence on the prisoners’ attitudes, but the soldiers’ own views of religion and their ties to home regions proved stronger."

Besides learning some not-well-known history, this exhibit should remind us of the ways in which political powers sometimes seek to coerce faith communities into supporting their goals -- often in conflict with the teachings of those religions. As we've seen over and over, it's easy for people of faith to get seduced by political power and to wind up supporting politicians whose entire lives and careers are in conflict with the teachings of the religion their supporters preach. (And if the Trump era popped into mind, I'm not surprised.)

By the way, seeing this online exhibit is a fine way to get introduced to the World War I museum here in Kansas City. But if you've never been in person to see this national gem, please go. It offers lots of changing exhibits and related programming that can teach us how important it is to understand our own history.

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WHY 'WALKING HUMBLY WITH GOD' MATTERS

One of the most famous verses from the Hebrew Bible is Micah 6:8, which in the Revised English Bible translation says this: "The Lord has told you mortals what is good, and what it is that the Lord requires of you: only to act justly, to love loyalty, to walk humbly with your God." Many other translations don't use "loyalty," but "kindness" or "mercy."

But I want to focus on the idea of walking humbly with God because that's what the author of this article from GoodFaithMedia says is needed in interfaith dialogue. Colin Harris writes that "humility has its roots deep in the intellect, and it has theological implications as well. Intellectually, humility is the recognition of the partiality of our understanding of anything. There will always be more to things and people than we know of them at any given time. The more complex the reality, the more partial our understanding of that reality will always be."

His conclusion is that without humility, efforts to engage in deep interfaith conversation and understanding are doomed. And he's right. The idea of such dialogue is to know and to be known, not to convert someone to your ideas about religion. It's not that conversion can't happen as a result of such conversation, but that's not to goal. The goal is simply to understand another way of considering the eternal questions.

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P.S.: I almost never see a news story about religion with a dateline out of my hometown, Woodstock, Ill. But here is one. And it has to do with the spiritual -- maybe even Buddhist -- nature of the famous movie "Groundhog Day," which was filmed in Woodstock as it pretended, for the movie, to be Punxsutawney, Pa., where a groundhog named Phil predicts each Feb. 2 when winter will end. Some year maybe some of us can watch the film together and I can tell you about the various places in Woodstock shown in the film -- unless, of course, that would be TMI.