Dr. Jerry Gaw: David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction
George’s devotion to democratic doctrines in the Church of Christ shaped his political perspectives and choices.
By Janel Shoun-Smith |
Jerry Gaw: David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction
The late Dr. Jerry Gaw (Lipscomb Retired Professor of History)
University of Tennessee Press, 2023
David Lloyd George is perhaps best known for his service as prime minister of the United Kingdom during the second half of World War I. While many biographies have chronicled his life and political endeavors, few, if any, have explored how his devotion to democratic doctrines in the Church of Christ shaped his political perspectives and choices both before and during the First World War. In David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction, Gaw bridges this gap in scholarship, showcasing George’s religious roots and their impact on his politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
With a comprehensive narrative that spans more than a century, Gaw’s book ranges beyond typical biography and examines how the work and theology of Alexander Campbell, a founder of the Stone-Campbell Movement in America, influenced a prominent world leader.
George’s twelve diaries and the more than three thousand letters he wrote to his brother between 1886 and 1943 provide the foundation for Gaw’s thorough analysis of George’s beliefs and politics. Taken together, these texts illuminate his lifelong adherence to the Church of Christ in Britain and how his faith, in turn, contributed to his proclivity for championing humanitarian, egalitarian and popular political policies beginning with the first of his 55 years in the British Parliament.
Other available books by Gaw include A Time to Heal: The Diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society).