Sally Butterfield said it was hard to decide how to approach the topic of the Great War for an online exhibit she was creating as a summer student with the Presbyterian Church’s Archives. Yet as she dug into the various Presbyterian publications of the time, she “started coming across really interesting articles that dealt with how Presbyterians were dealing with the ideas and realities of war,” she said. “It ended up being a really exciting and interesting and engrossing topic.”
The online exhibit focuses on how the Great War was presented in the three major periodicals being produced by groups in the church: the Presbyterian Record, the Presbyterian and Westminster and the Missionary Messenger.
Butterfield, who is studying for a master’s degree in information management at the University of Toronto, said she was interested in how editorials tried to reconcile seemingly impossible things, like the idea of a faith that centred on love and the idea of war and the violence it entailed. Some used “religious rhetoric to talk about war and war rhetoric to talk about faith,” she said, noting that both faith and war were presented as the duties of a Christian man.
The Missionary Messenger, a newsletter of the Women’s Missionary Society, dealt with the war from a different perspective. It included articles about aboriginal soldiers and aboriginal communities and residential schools’ contributions to the war effort. The “focus on aboriginal soldiers was fascinating,” she told the Record. “It’s something that is unfortunately often left out in discussions of World War I.”
Butterfield said she wanted the exhibit, which helps mark the centennial of the war, “to draw from personal stories, but also how the Presbyterian community as a whole dealt with that kind of an event and how that trauma was mediated by these publications.”
