HALLOWE’EN comes round again, bringing to timid householders a sense of battle between good and evil. Masked gangs roam the streets, beating upon doors and demanding money with menaces. Like the hosts of Midian, “they prowl and prowl around”, as the old hymn has it. “Christian, up and smite them!” Newer hymn books have gone quiet on the matter of smiting, however. Warlike imagery is falling out of favour. If I were compiling a hymn book I would reverse this trend.

Despite (because of?) being married to a clergyman, I enjoy a good scrap. One Christmas Eve I turned up in church with a black eye. Everyone jokingly asked if I had been in a fight, and I replied: “Yes”. I generally get into at least 20 fights a week. I have been doing judo for five years now. Perhaps this is what gives me a taste for fighting talk in hymns.

My enthusiasm is not shared by everyone. Back in the mid-1990s, the editors of Hymns Old & New decided that “militarism and triumphalism were not appropriate”. Worshippers will look in vain for the old favourite Onward, Christian Soldiers. It has become Onward, Christian Pilgrims. The hosts of Midian hymn has vanished altogether, as it has from Common Praise, the current version of Hymns Ancient & Modern.

In the case of Hymns Old & New, the reason is given in the foreword. The editors’ anxiety focused on a possible hijacking of military imagery from the Bible, imagery that ought to be understood in terms of spiritual warfare, “to justify the self-serving ambitions behind temporal conflicts”. To me this smacks of hymnological nannying. Can we hymn singers not be trusted to interpret imagery appropriately for ourselves?

The Rev Dr David Wilkinson, principal of St John’s College, Durham, which incorporates Cranmer Hall Theological College, says that even as a child he understood “that to sing Onward Christian Soldiers was not an invitation to pulverise those at school who did not attend church, but a reminder of just how hard it is to be a Christian at school”.

However, Dr Wilkinson also points out the danger inherent in warfare imagery, that it may be used “to baptise nationalism and violence”; and this is closer to what Kevin Mayhew, editor of Hymns Old & New, has in mind. When I approached him, he explained his view that “it is increasingly urgent that all people of religious faith specifically distance ourselves from any association with militarism — and especially from any triumphalism and the notions of superiority of one culture and faith over another which it implies”.

In fact, this editorial approach has been quietly at work for decades. Bishop Heber’s From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, No 358 in Hymns Ancient and Modern, (“Can we, whose souls are lighted/With wisdom from on high/Can we to men benighted/The lamp of light deny?”) was dropped from the 1950 new standard edition.

Despite the dangers of sanctified jingoism inherent in martial hymns, are there not occasions when only this kind of imagery will do? When we feel ourselves to be under attack it may be the old hymns of spiritual warfare which resonate with our experience.

My husband has a vocation to minister in demanding urban areas. There have been dark nights when I have been in the vicarage alone with two small children when missiles have come through the windows and gangs of youths have been rampaging round the garden. The hymn Oft in Danger, Oft in Woe, made a fresh kind of sense to me then: “Onward then in battle move/More than conquerors ye shall prove/Though opposed by many a foe/Christian soldiers onward go.” The version in Hymns Old & New: “Though the raging waters flow/Christian pilgrims onward go,” was, frankly, just too nice.

Is the matter reducible to personal taste? Mayhew finds military imagery abhorrent, while I find it rather useful (when vandals are rampaging round my garden, when I’m up against some psycho teenager at a judo grading). Ought martial hymns to be confined to the sphere of private devotion, rather than in public worship? Mayhew wonders: “If the use of such imagery is really essential to a rich worship experience, then perhaps we need to ask what it is within us that needs it.”

There is also the concern that hymns such as Soldiers of Christ arise (which, confusingly, has found its way unbowdlerised into Hymns Old & New) comes into the category of that harmful theology in the headlines recently, after the publication of the Anglican Guidelines — Responding to Domestic Abuse. The guidelines highlighted the “uncritical use of masculine imagery”, as potentially legitimising “overbearing and ultimately violent patterns of behaviour in intimate relationships”. This was translated gleefully into: singing Onward Christian Soldiers turns you into a wife-basher.

Of course imagery may be misappropriated and abused, but to censor these images completely robs us of one important form of expression, as the Rev Canon Anne Dyer, Warden of Cranmer Hall Theological College, points out: “Taking the sense of battle or fight out of hymns means that what we are left with does not do proper justice to or represent the emotions related to fighting for a cause.” She notes that the singing of battle hymns was crucial in the early days of the Women’ s Rights Movement, where acts of civil disobedience were accompanied by song. Blake’s Jerusalem — about which many clergy are squeamish today — was used at the turn of the last century not as a vehicle for patriotism, but as a suffragette battle hymn, sung each time hunger strikers were released from prison. When it was adopted as the official hymn of the Women’s Institute in the 1920s, the stereotype was more “Votes and Jerusalem” than “Jam and Jerusalem”.

Battle hymns are the protest songs of the Church, the most famous of which is Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As He lived to make us holy/Let us die to make men free.” Context is crucial. Battle songs allied to great causes — abolition, suffrage, temperance — are different from imperialistic anthems, even if the words are similar.

The war cry “Soldiers of Christ, arise!” is one thing on the lips of a powerful oppressor, and quite another on the lips of the oppressed and marginalised, or those engaging on their behalf. Furthermore, it could be that as the tides of secularism rise higher and our numbers fall lower, the Church in the West may find itself increasingly, and appropriately, nourished by songs of war.