Our dangerous devotion to the Second World War

In 1947, the American radio network ABC began broadcasting a series called, modestly, The Greatest Story Ever Told. It ran for nearly 10 years, was aired in more than 50 countries, and spawned a novel and, eventually, an epic, star-studded movie. That teasing, irresistible title was an allusion to a poem called Tell Me the Old, Old Story, written by an Englishwoman in 1866, which had been set to music the following year and had become a popular hymn.

The story that both titles referenced, and which neither of them needed to name, was the story of Jesus Christ: still, up to the mid-20th century, the defining sacred story in British, American and western culture. It was a story that was told and retold not because it was unfamiliar, but because it was so deeply familiar. Earnest Christian believers were a minority in both Europe and America, but wholehearted believers, nominal adherents and assertive unbelievers alike recognised the story’s power. Whether or not they believed he was God incarnate, Jesus Christ was their culture’s most potent moral figure.

Yet even by the time the film was released in 1965, that was no longer exactly so. Its global box-office of $12.1m covered little more than half of its vast production costs; critics slated it as tedious, partly on account of its four-hour running time. It is now best remembered for John Wayne’s unintentionally comic cameo as the centurion at Calvary. Reverence was no longer the order of the day.

Since then there’s been a common